Children's understanding of counterfactual emotions: Age differences, individual differences, and the effects of counterfactual-information salience

The present study investigated developmental trends in the effects of the salience of counterfactual alternatives on judgments of others' counterfactual-thinking-based emotions. We also examined possible correlates of individual differences in the understanding of these emotions. Thirty-four adults and 102 children, 5-8 years of age, were presented scenarios in which characters would be expected to experience regret. In one version of each scenario, the regret-relevant counterfactual alternative was made more salient than was the case with the other version. Adults consistently judged that a character for whom a counterfactual course of events would have resulted in a better outcome would feel worse than a character for whom an alternative course of events would not have resulted in a more positive outcome. The majority of the children's judgments were not affected by the counterfactual alternatives. However, the judgments of the oldest children (the 8-year-olds) were significantly more adult-like in the high-salience than in the low-salience condition. Although the three predictors examined in the present study (verbal ability, working memory capacity, second-order false belief task performance) together accounted for significant variance in performance on the emotions judgment task, no single predictor alone accounted for significant unique variance in performance. The importance of different social cognitive abilities for understanding people's affective responses is discussed. © 2009 The British Psychological Society