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Manuscript No
...
12
...
of pages: 19

CE: Shanthi
ME: Senthil

Child Development, January/February 2009, Volume 80, Number 1, Pages 115 – 133

Young Children’s Reasoning About the Effects of Emotional and
Physiological States on Academic Performance
Jennifer Amsterlaw

Kristin Hansen Lagattuta

University of Washington

University of California – Davis

Andrew N
...
Five, 6-, 7-year-olds, and adults (N 5 96) predicted and explained how children
experiencing a variety of physiological and emotional states would perform on academic tasks
...
All age groups understood the impairing effects of negative emotions and physiological states
...
These results shed
light on theory-of-mind development and also have significance for children’s everyday school success
...
g
...
In
preparation for these tests, teachers and parents often
advise children to make sure they ‘‘get a lot of rest’’
and ‘‘eat a good breakfast’’ to optimize their performance on test day
...
Adults and children who get
adequate rest score higher on tests measuring attention, memory, executive control, and concentration
than those who have had poor sleep (Alapin et al
...
Moreover, studies show that hunger and nutritional deprivation can significantly impair cognitive
performance (Alaimo, Olson, & Frongillo, 2001;
Murphy et al
...

Physiological conditions are not the only type of
internal state that affects cognitive performance
...
Any opinions,
findings, and conclusions expressed in the article are those of the
authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of NSF
...
We also thank
Erika J
...

Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to
Jennifer Amsterlaw, Department of Psychology, Institute for
Learning & Brain Sciences, Box 357988, University of Washington,
Seattle, WA 98195
...

washington
...


moods on their ability to attend, think, learn, remember, and problem solve (Clore, Schwarz, & Conway,
1994; Damasio, 2003; Dolan, 2002; Isen, 1999)
...
Studies show that 2
adults induced into negative emotional states perform significantly worse on tasks measuring creativity, flexible thinking, problem solving, and memory
than those induced into positive emotional states
(Ashby, Isen, & Turken, 1999; Davis, Kirby, & Curtis,
2007; Fredrickson, 2001; Isen, 1999; Saavendra &
Earley, 1991, but see Bless & Fiedler, 1995; George &
Zhou, 2002)
...

In the current research, we examine 5- to 7-year-old
children’s reasoning about the effects of emotional
and physiological states on cognition
...
Given evidence that internal
states do exert such effects, children’s understanding
of these phenomena is an important aspect of
their metacognitive development
...

All rights reserved
...
For example, if one is unaware
that studying in a noisy room interferes with learning,
one may not take steps to ensure that the room is
quiet
...

Thus, children’s emerging theories of mind have
consequences for their learning when they enter
school (Astington & Pelletier, 1996; Lalonde &
Chandler, 1995; Wellman & Lagattuta, 2004)
...

Between 3 and 8 years of age, children develop an
understanding of the mental processes involved in
attention, thinking, and problem solving (Amsterlaw,
2006; Flavell, Green, & Flavell, 1995a; Kuhn, 2000)
...
, 1995a, 1995b; Pillow,
1989)
...

Miller and Zalenski (1982) found that most 4-yearolds reported that a person (doll) could listen to his or
her mother better if noisy objects were removed from
the room or if he or she went into a quiet room
...
Thus, by at least 5 – 6 years of age,
children understand that attention and cognitive
performance are affected by both internal (interest
and effort) and external factors (environmental noise)
...
By the age of 4 – 5
years, children know that people’s feelings can be
influenced by their beliefs as well as their desires
(Hadwin & Perner, 1991; Harris, Johnson, Hutton,
Andrews, & Cooke, 1989; Rieffe, Terwogt, & Cowan,
2005; Wellman & Banerjee, 1991)
...
g
...
They can start to

feel worried just by thinking about a negative event
that might happen in the future (Lagattuta, 2007)
...
, 1997)
...
One exception is a study
by Bennett and Galpert (1992) who examined 5- and 8year-old children’s predictions about whether a story
protagonist would perform worse, the same, or better
on a math test if he or she was feeling sad
...

Although this study provides an important initial
step, several questions remain
...
Moreover, it is not known how children’s
reasoning about the impact of negative and positive
emotions on thinking compares to their reasoning
about other internal states and external factors
that can affect attention, thinking, and problem
solving including noise level, motivation, sleep, and
nutrition
...
Scenarios included: (a) two types
of negative emotions (sad and angry), (b) two types
of positive emotions (happy and proud), (c) two
types of negative physiological conditions (hungry
and tired), and (d) two types of positive physiological
conditions (satiated and wide awake)
...
quiet
room) and unlikely (change in rug, clothes, and
hairstyle) to affect thinking performance, as well as
a no-change control
...
In addition to eliciting participants’ predictions of performance, we also characterize children’s causal understandings about the
mechanisms responsible for these effects by eliciting
their explanations about why and how these factors
affect thinking
...
We include
adults to compare their reasoning to that of young
children
...
7 years; SD 5 0
...
3; SD 5 0
...
2, SD 5
0
...
Children were recruited
from two elementary schools in a large metropolitan
area and from a university-maintained database of
research volunteers
...
Parents provided information about
their educational attainment: 86% of children came
from homes where both parents had completed
college and 64% of children had at least one parent
with a graduate or professional degree
...
9 years, SD 5 0
...
The
adult sample was 46% Caucasian, 42% Asian, 8%
Hispanic, and 12% other backgrounds
...
We created a story
task to test children’s and adults’ knowledge about
the effects of different kinds of internal states and
external conditions on cognitive performance
...
All stories had a similar structure and used
language appropriate for young children
...

The eight focal stories featured characters who had
to complete challenging cognitive tasks after experiencing an event that produced a negative or positive
change in their physiological or emotional state
...
We selected these particular
emotions because even 4-year-olds show a basic
understanding of all these emotions, can categorize
them as negative or positive in valence, and can
identify their expression (Harris, Olthof, Terwogt, &
Hardman, 1987; Russell & Paris, 1994; Tracy, Robins,
& Lagattuta, 2005)
...
g
...

To compare children’s understanding of internal
states versus other relevant external factors, two
noisy – quiet stories described protagonists working
in either very noisy or very quiet work environments
...
For these
story types, it would be most appropriate to expect no
change in story characters’ task performance
...
Neutral-change control stories described
changes (e
...
, wearing blue clothing, having a new
rug in the classroom) that were neutral in valence and
should have no impact on characters’ task performance
...
nice) but still should not affect task performance
...
g
...
Changes to hair were useful for this purpose
because these had positive or negative valence but
were not directly visible to the story protagonist,
thereby reducing the potential for cognitive effects
such as distraction
...
Here, a girl loses
her favorite teddy bear on the way to school and feels

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118

Amsterlaw, Lagattuta, and Meltzoff

Figure 1
...


sad
...
We wanted to know whether children
would predict changes to the story character’s school
performance in such cases
...
Picture
sets were carefully constructed to control for several
factors
...
Emotional state stories
(see Figure 1) accomplished this with a close-up of the
character’s face showing an unambiguous emotional
expression (sad 5 down-turned mouth, mad 5
slanted eyebrows and straight mouth; happy and
proud 5 upturned mouth)
...
For example,
‘‘feeling hungry’’ used a cropped image of the character’s torso with his hands clutching his belly
...
The last image for
each story (shown during the target question) always
depicted the child from behind, seated at a school
desk, so that no facial expression could be discerned
...

Across the 15 stories, seven different tasks were
described
...
To
control for the fact that children might view some
tasks as easier than others (and, therefore, less likely
to be affected by changes in the character’s internal
states—see Flavell & Flavell, 2004), the teacher in the
story always described tasks as ‘‘pretty hard
...
5, SD 5 0
...
The
average rating across all school tasks was 1
...
9 to 1
...
For
each item, 70% – 100% of children rated the task as
‘‘kind of hard’’ or ‘‘very hard
...

Task presentation
...
Sessions lasted approximately 25 min
and were videotaped
...
Children made their predictions of performance on a pictorial rating scale
...
5 Â 3
...
At the start of the
session, the researcher instructed children to ‘‘use the
stars to say how well the people in the stories are
doing on things’’ and explained that the center star

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Internal States and Academic Performance

was for when people do about the same as they usually
do, the two small stars were for when people do worse
than they usually do, and the two big stars were for
when people do better than they usually do
...
To reinforce this visually
and to anchor the scale around the midpoint, the
center star was presented with a pale blue background and the other stars had a white background
...

The first warm-up task required children make judgments using all points of the scale, including the ‘‘nochange’’ response
...
The first
drawing depicted Janet’s typical performance (‘‘Usually Janet can jump this high
...
Three additional drawings
showed Janet jumping: (a) higher than she usually
does, (b) lower than she usually does, and (c) the
same as she usually does
...
) Children’s responses to the three questions
were recorded and errors corrected as necessary
...
Children were shown a drawing of
a boy (‘‘Casey’’) sitting at a school desk and were
asked to predict his school performance based on his
level of effort and attention
...
Then, they predicted Casey’s
performance when ‘‘Casey is really trying extra hard
to do a good job on his school work’’ and looks and
listens carefully to his teacher
...

Finally, before proceeding to the experimental task,
the researcher listed each response option and asked
children to point to the corresponding star (e
...
,
‘‘Which star is for when people do about the same
as they usually do?’’) in the order: about the same (no
change), a little bit better, a lot better, a little bit worse, a lot

119

worse
...
If children made two or more
errors on any of the five warm-up task questions, or
could not learn the points of the scale even after
correction by the researcher, they were not included in
the final sample
...
After each prediction,
children were also asked to explain their responses
(e
...
, ‘‘Why do you think she will do worse this
time?’’)
...
If children said ‘‘I don’t
know’’ or failed to respond, requests were repeated
...
g
...
g
...
When it was clear that children had no further
explanations, the experimenter proceeded to the next
trial
...

Adult participants received the task as a written
questionnaire
...
They also
provided written explanations for their responses
...

Story order and counterbalancing
...
This was because we did
not want to prime children to attend to characters’
emotions or internal states
...
Two
different groupings, determined by randomly assigning stories to blocks, were used (Half of the participants received proud, sad, wide awake, hungry, different
clothes, messy hair, and quiet room as one block, and
happy, mad, full/healthy, tired, new rug, and noisy room as
the other
...
To control for order effects,
presentation order for each task block (first vs
...
School
tasks (e
...
, reading, math) were varied across stories
so that each participant received one example of each
school task per block of seven stories
...
e
...

Explanation coding
...
From careful reading of
the complete transcripts, we identified 10 categories
of explanations, including references to: character’s
general ability level; the difficulty of the school task;
motivations or desires; perceptions; emotions; physiological states; cognitive functioning; past, present,
or future events; and social or moral rules
...
Descriptions of the codes and examples are given in Table 1
...
For example, the explanation, ‘‘She’ll do
much better because she’s feeling happy and that
makes her concentrate even harder’’ would be coded
as both an emotion and a cognition explanation
...

Explanations were coded by two independent
raters using transcripts that concealed participants’
age, race, and sex
...

Values were then summed by story type to yield the
number of scenarios for which participants gave each
explanation
...
Kappas ranged
from
...
94 (M 5
...


Results
Warm-Up Task Performance and Rating Scale Use
Only one child, a 5 year old, was disqualified from
the study because he failed to show adequate understanding of the scale during the warm-up task
...
All children in the final sample
demonstrated competence with the scale by correctly
answering at least four of the five warm-up questions
and successfully matching all points of the scale with
the appropriate verbal labels
...
Errors were not more common among younger
children: Of the 12 children who missed a warm-up
question, three were 5-year-olds, two were 6-yearolds, and seven were 7-year-olds
...
Five children
(three 5-year-olds and two 7-year-olds) made initial
errors but were successful after feedback from the
researcher
...
80, p
...
Means
for 5-year-olds, 6-year-olds, 7-year-olds, and adults,
respectively, were: 4
...
9), 4
...
7), 4
...
7), and 4
...
8)
...
’’
‘‘Because she’s feeling happy
...
’’
‘‘Because he won’t be able to concentrate
...
’’
‘‘Because he’s old enough to read stories
...
’’
‘‘Because he might not be able to hear very well
...
’’
‘‘I don’t know
...
Mean ratings of story characters’ performance by age and story type
...
Error bars are standard errors of the means
...
Participants’ responses were converted to a À2
(a lot worse) to +2 (a lot better) scale, with 0 (same as
3 usual) as the midpoint
...

Additionally, one-sample t tests were used to assess
whether the absolute amount of impairment or improvement participants predicted was significantly
different from 0, the scale midpoint
...
Sex and order effects
were tested by including each of these variables,

along with age, as independent variables in repeated
measures ANOVAs for each story type
...
62, p
...
To test for school task
effects, separate 4 (age) Â 7(school task) ANOVAs
were conducted on each scenario, treating school task
as a random factor
...
67, p
...

Emotional and physiological state stories
...
These scenarios were the primary focus of our study
...
7, p ,
...
83
...
Analyses confirmed
that the valence effect was significant for both
emotional, F(1, 95) 5 190
...
001, g2 5
...
22, p ,
...
82
...
86, p ,

...
23, indicated that valence effects were
p
stronger for physiological states than for emotional
states
...
1 vs
...
6, of a maximum possible
rating of +2), F(1, 95) 5 18
...
001, g2 5
...
4 vs
...
2
of a maximum possible rating of À2), F(1, 95) 5 11
...
01, g2 5
...
There was also an Age  Valence
p
interaction, F(3, 92) 5 3
...
05, g2 5
...
74, p ,
...
08, rather
p
than negative, F(3, 92) 5 1
...
05, internal states
...
05 (Tukey’s HSD)
...
In contrast, all age
groups’ ratings for positive physiological state, negative physiological state, and negative emotional state
stories differed significantly from 0, t(23)
...
31, p ,

...
Indeed, as shown in Table 2, even individuallevel data revealed that 75% – 96% of 5-year-olds
successfully predicted impairment of performance
in negative state cases—performance comparable to
that of 7-year-olds and adults
...
Three of
the four story types showed no item differences at any
age
...
17, p ,
...


Several different patterns of individual responding
could have produced nonsignificant group means for
younger children in positive emotion cases: (a) frequent predictions of ‘‘no change’’; (b) equal numbers
of children predicting impairment, improvement,
and no change; or (c) a bimodal response pattern with
some children predicting improvement and others
impairment
...
7
...
05,
and individual-level data were more consistent with
a bimodal pattern
...
Although adults
did not always predict performance improvements
due to positive internal states, they rarely predicted
impaired performance in these cases, instead predicting no change
...

Noisy – quiet stories
...

A 4 (age) Â 2 (story version: noisy or quiet) ANOVA
showed a significant effect of story version, F(1, 92) 5
235
...
001, g2 5
...
T tests
p
showed that all ages predicted significant improvement of performance for quiet and significant impairment of performance for noise, p ,
...

No-change control story
...
Results of a one-way
ANOVA revealed significant age differences in participants’ performance ratings, F(3, 92) 5 3
...
05,
g2 5
...
One-sample t tests showed that both 5- and
p
6-year-olds predicted significant improvement in
the character’s performance, even though the experimenter mentioned no change in internal states or
external factors, p ,
...

Neutral-change control stories
...
g
...
For
these cases, no significant age effects were found for
mean performance ratings, F(3, 92) 5 0
...
05,
g2 5
...
05
...
20, and improvement in the clothes story,
v2(6, N 5 96) 5 21
...
01
...
Changes in outward
appearance (nice vs
...
A 4 (age) Â 2 (valence: positive or negative)
ANOVA, however, revealed a main effect of valence,
F(1, 92) 5 30
...
001, g2 5
...
One-sample t tests
showed that all three child age groups reported
significant impairment in characters’ performance in
the messy hair story, p ,
...
Means for adults
(improvement or impairment) were nonsignificant
...
The no-code, moral/social rules, perception,
ability, task, and motivation explanations appeared
too infrequently to support analyses (M , 1
...
Thus, analyses were restricted to situation, emotion, physiological, and cognitive explanation types
...
2, SD 5 2
...
5,
SD 5 1
...
9, SD 5 1
...
8, SD 5 3
...
Mean scores by age
and story type are given in Figure 3 (Recall that there
were two trials for each story type; thus, the maximum score for each explanation category is 2
...

Emotional and physiological state stories
...

Two separate 4 (age) Â 2 (state: emotional or physiological) Â 2 (valence: positive or negative) repeated
measures ANOVAs on emotion and physiological
explanations confirmed main effects of state: Emotion
explanations were more frequent for emotional state
stories, F(1, 92) 5 721
...
001, g2 5
...
73, p ,
...
85
...
27, p ,

...
19
...
10, p ,
...
20, but rates of
p
physiological explanations were similarly low for
both positive and negative emotion stories
...

In contrast, results for cognitive explanations
showed significant main effects for age, F(3, 92) 5
4
...
05, g2 5
...
62, p ,
p

...
12, both qualified by a significant Age Â
p
Valence interaction, F(3, 92) 5 6
...
01, g2 5
...

p

Although adults made more references to the cognitive consequences of emotional and physiological
state changes than 5-, 6-, and 7-year-olds (Tukey’s
HSD), this age effect was restricted to negative, F(3,
92) 5 7
...
001, g2 5
...
51, p
...
Separate analyses by valence
further demonstrated an Age  State interaction for
positive stories, F(3, 92) 5 3
...
05, g2 5
...
As
p
Figure 3 shows, there were no observable age differences in cognitive explanations for positive emotion
stories, F(3, 92) 5 0
...
05, but rates of cognitive
explanation increased with age for positive physiological state stories, F(3, 92) 5 2
...
05, g2 5
...

p
Parallel analyses for situation explanations also
showed age effects, F(3, 92) 5 2
...
05, g2 5
...
05)
...
48, p ,
...
16, that
p
appeared to reflect higher levels of situation explanations in negative emotion and positive physiological
state cases and lower levels in positive emotion and
negative physiological state cases
...
Over the full set of emotional and physiological state stories, children cited the character’s
internal state as the cause of their task performance
for nearly six of the eight trials (M 5 5
...
7)
...
2,
SD 5 1
...
Of particular interest was the extent to
which participants explained connections between
internal states and academic performance by citing

Figure 3
...
The figure shows the mean number of story trials (of a maximum of 2)
for which participants gave each type of explanation
...


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Internal States and Academic Performance

underlying cognitive mechanisms
...
For all age
groups, the majority of cognitive explanations
focused on the impact of the internal state on the
character’s attention to the task at hand (e
...
,
‘‘Because she’s sad, so she won’t concentrate on the
book
...
Such
responses constituted 83% of 5-year-olds’, 73% of 6and 7-year-olds’, and 82% of adults’ cognitive explanations
...
g
...
g
...
On
average, these constituted 16% and 6% of participants’ responses, respectively
...
Across all three child groups, the high majority (70%) of children explained this prediction by
stating that the character would have difficulty concentrating or paying attention as the result of the
positive emotion (e
...
, ‘‘Because he feels so proud of
himself, so he’s distracted with how proud he is’’)
...

Noisy – quiet stories
...
Cognitive
explanations increased with age, F(3, 92) 5 5
...
001, g2 5
...
Post hoc tests with Tukey’s HSD
p
revealed that 5- and 6-year-olds gave fewer cognitive
explanations than 7-year-olds and adults, p ,
...

No-change control story
...
Results showed that
emotion explanations increased with age, v2(3, N 5
96), p ,
...
Ability explanations
were the most frequently given explanation type for
both children and adults; 47% of children and 67% of
adults referenced the characters’ ability level in responding to the baseline case
...

Situation, emotion, and cognitive explanation types
were the most frequent explanation categories for
neutral change and valence control stories at all ages
...
Interestingly, emotion explanations

125

for the valence control stories (e
...
, ‘‘Maybe she’s a
little embarrassed because her hair is all messy
...
In 40 of 55 cases of predicted impairment
(73%) and 12 of 36 cases of predicted improvement
(33%) in the valence control scenarios, children cited
a change in the characters’ emotion as causing a change
in task performance
...
In four of five cases of
predicted impairment (80%) and all six cases of predicted improvement (100%), adults cited emotional
effects
...
The preceding analyses included all explanations participants provided to account for story
characters’ school performance, regardless of
whether they were predicting impairment, improvement, or no change in performance
...
Of central interest
were effects for cognitive explanations, as these explanations index robust knowledge about mind-body and
emotion-thought connections and also showed the
clearest increases with age
...
e
...
Data for all
15 trials were included for each participant
...
0, p ,
...
33, and a significant Age Â
p
Prediction Type interaction, F(6, 168) 5 4
...
001,
g2 5
...
Simple effects analyses indicated that
p
participants were more likely to cite cognitive mechanisms when predicting change (M proportion of
trials 5 0
...
26) versus no change (M 5
0
...
28) in story characters’ performance, F(1,
85) 5 86
...
001, g2 5
...
They were also more
p
likely to cite cognitive mechanisms when predicting
impairment (M 5 0
...
30) versus improvement (M 5 0
...
31), F(1, 94) 5 10
...
01, g2
p
5
...
Analyses by age group indicated that the
general pattern of providing more cognitive explanations for change versus no-change predictions was
upheld at all ages, all ps ,
...

Five-year-olds provided cognitive explanations significantly more often for performance impairment
(M 5 0
...
24) compared to improvement

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126

Amsterlaw, Lagattuta, and Meltzoff

(M 5 0
...
29) or no change (M 5 0
...
32), F
...
65, p ,
...
53, p
...


Discussion
The goal of this research was to assess young children’s understanding of the effects of emotional and
physiological states on cognitive performance and
thereby to shed light on children’s theory-of-mind
development and their practical know-how about
thinking and learning
...

At the same time, however, there are clear developmental changes in children’s ability to predict and
explain these effects
...
g
...
These are
important conceptual achievements that reflect children’s mastery of basic theory-of-mind concepts—for
example, the link between people’s goals and their
actions and the significance of perceptual access for
knowledge acquisition (e
...
, Flavell, 2004; Wellman &
Lagattuta, 2000)
...
In our warm-up task, children
reliably predicted that listening and trying hard
would lead to better performance on school work
and that not listening and not trying would lead to
poorer performance
...

We also present new data on young children’s
reasoning about the cognitive effects of a wider
variety of internal and external states
...
g
...
Specifically, we
found evidence of three important developmental
changes in children’s reasoning about the influence

of internal states on cognitive performance: (a) Children understand impairment of cognitive performance due to negative internal states earlier than
they understand enhancement due to positive internal states; (b) With age, children increasingly reference cognitive mechanisms such as distraction to
explain the impact of internal state changes on task
performance, especially in situations involving
impaired performance; and (c) With age, children
improve in their ability to differentiate factors that do
and do not impact cognitive performance
...
Predicting positive effects of
positive internal states increased from 5 to 7 years,
with this age effect most pronounced for positive
emotions
...

It is worth noting that even adults were not unanimous in their judgments about the effects of positive
internal states; they treated the connection between
positive states and improvement as weaker than the
connection between negative states and impairment
...
Here, the adult folk theory reflects findings
from behavioral studies: The impairing effects of
negative emotions typically are more robust than the
enhancing effects of positive emotions
...
g
...
Another possible reason for weaker effects for positive state
changes has to do with how people understand the
baseline against which state changes are calibrated:
Both children and adults may assume that positive
states (i
...
, being rested, happy, satiated) are more
normative in people’s everyday lives compared to
negative states, leading to smaller perceived effects
for further positive changes
...
g
...
Paradoxically, we found that young

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Internal States and Academic Performance

children tended to predict performance decrements
even due to positive internal states
...
Children’s tendency to predict impairment for a wide range of cases also demonstrates that
their success on the task was not simply accomplished
via a valence-matching heuristic—that is, predicting
positive outcomes for positive events and negative
outcomes for negative events (see Amsterlaw, 2006;
Piaget, 1932)
...
In general,
people are far more likely to seek reasons for their
failures than for their successes (see Roese, 1997;
Roese & Hur, 1997; Weiner, 1985)
...
Lagattuta
and Wellman (2002) found that 2- to 5-year-old
children talk more frequently with their parents
about causes of emotions during everyday conversations about negative as opposed to positive emotions
...


127

that feeling tired would cause a child to do more
poorly because she would close her eyes and not see
the teacher
...
04, p ,

...
A transition from a perceptual to a cognitive
understanding of performance is consistent with
theory-of-mind research demonstrating that children
understand perception – knowledge links prior to
mastering more complex understandings of cognitive
processes (Wellman & Liu, 2004)
...
This again demonstrates
that children show earlier, more sophisticated understandings of impairment versus enhancement and
that adults also show a clearer understanding of
cognitive mechanisms underlying impairment
...
This is likely
the result of a heavy focus on children’s knowledge
about strategies that improve rather than degrade
cognitive processes; for example, their understanding
of rehearsal, chunking, and elaboration strategies to
increase memory (see Siegler & Alibali, 2005)
...
This is
consistent with previous reports indicating that children’s metacognitive knowledge about attentional
focus and control improves considerably between
the ages of 4 and 8 years (see Flavell, 2004)
...

Young children may have a more limited causal
understanding about why these phenomena occur
...
Compared to older children and
adults, 5- and 6-year-olds more often described
changes in characters’ performance as caused by
changes in their ability to see or hear the teacher,
rather than changes in their ability to think, attend, or
concentrate
...
On the no-change scenario, 5- and 6year-olds (but not 7-year-olds and adults) predicted
that even in the absence of any stated precipitating
factor, protagonists would generally do better than
they have in the past on academic tasks
...
e
...
Moreover,
our warm-up questions included training on nochange predictions to ensure that children understood this was an acceptable answer
...
First,
4- to 6-year-olds often elaborate on story scenarios
even when not prompted by an experimenter (see
Lagattuta et al
...
Second, because young children
may be more vulnerable to demand characteristics of

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128

Amsterlaw, Lagattuta, and Meltzoff

tasks or questions when trying to please interviewers
(e
...
, Bruck & Ceci, 1999), they may have assumed
that the experimenter expected a ‘‘something has
changed’’ response or else she would not have
asked the question (although this does not explain
why children’s change predictions favored improvement and were not at chance)
...
Specifically, consistent with findings from
Heyman and Giles (2004), young children tend to
expect positive traits, such as intelligence, to increase
over both the short (tomorrow) and the long term
(when a grown-up), leading them to overgeneralize
expectations of improved performance
...
g
...

Children were also more likely than adults to
predict that negative changes in a person’s hairstyle
would impair their academic performance
...
g
...
Thus, even
though the experimenter did not explicitly state that
the messy hair made the character feel bad, children
(reasonably) inferred an emotional change took place
and reasoned about its ultimate cognitive consequences, just as they did for emotion scenarios
...
This suggests that even young
children can appropriately refrain from predicting
effects for some types of changes
...
g
...
Nevertheless, individual-level data (see
Table 2) indicated that although children’s predictions of no change were more frequent for neutralchange control stories than for positive or negative
internal-state stories, many children still predicted
positive or negative effects for these cases
...


A straightforward possibility is that younger children
may actually experience more intense emotional
reactions, interest, or attention to these everyday
events compared to older children and adults, and
they project their own experiences onto the story
characters
...
First, we chose
to focus on cases where negative internal states would
likely impair performance and positive internal states
enhance performance
...
We know
from experimental studies, however, that scientific
findings are not always in line with folk beliefs
...

Second, we purposely limited our scenarios to
cases where individuals’ current internal states were
caused by prior life events not the school task itself
...

Educational research has shown that such emotions
significantly predict children’s academic performance (see Meyer & Turner, 2002; Zambo & Brem,
2004)
...

Third, our scenarios included a school tasks familiar to children (all of which were explicitly described
in the scenarios as ‘‘pretty hard’’), and our study
results showed that school task did not significantly
factor into children’s performance predictions
...

Fourth, our procedure involved asking children to
make performance predictions case by case
...
Future research could examine children’s direct comparisons of the effects of different
kinds of internal states and external factors
...
It will be
important, both for practice and theory, to validate
these findings in other relevant populations
...
The current study offers
new insights by identifying basic developmental
patterns in children’s reasoning about how internal
states influence cognitive functioning: Young children understand impairment of thinking performance due to negative internal states earlier than
they understand enhancement due to positive internal states, and their knowledge of emotional effects on
cognition lags behind their awareness of other important internal (hunger, fatigue, interest, and effort) and
external factors (environmental noise)
...
Helping
young students acquire the knowledge and skills
necessary to monitor and regulate them is critical
for their success
...
, Fichten, C
...
, Libman, E
...
, Bailes, S
...
(2000)
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(2006)
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A neuropsychological theory of positive affect and its influence on
cognition
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Its role in teaching and learning
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Damasio, A
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feeling brain
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Davis, M
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Flavell, J
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Amsterlaw, Lagattuta, and Meltzoff

Harris, P
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Cooke, T
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emotion
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, Olthof, T
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Children’s knowledge of the situations that provoke emotion
...

Harter, S
...
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Developmental
changes in children’s understanding of single, multiple,
and blended emotion concepts
...
Saarni & P
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Appendix: Examples of Task Stories
Positive Emotion Stories
Happy—memory task
...
It is blue and gold and shiny
...
Later that day in school, Judy is still
feeling happy because of her cool rock
...
I’m going to show you lots of different pictures
in this book, and at the end I want to see how many
things you can remember
...
’’ Judy
usually does okay remembering hard things like
these
...
One morning
Max’s friend Joey gives him a very nice card
...

From Joey
...
Later that day in school,
Max is still feeling proud because of Joey’s nice card
...
You have to follow a lot
of directions to do it just right
...
’’ Max

131

usually does okay following hard directions like
these
...
One day Lisa is walking to
school when her favorite teddy bear falls out of her
backpack and gets lost forever
...
Later
that day in school, Lisa is still feeling sad because of
her lost teddy bear
...
I want to
see how many different words you can think of
that start with X, Y, or Z
...
’’ Lisa
usually does okay on hard word games like these
...
One morning Sam is playing
outside in the sandbox before school
...
Then some mean kids come up to
him and jump all over his sandcastle until it is all
ruined
...
Later that day in school,
Sam is still feeling mad because of his ruined
sandcastle
...
We are going to read a story in
our new reading books
...
’’ Sam
usually does okay reading hard stories like these
...
One night Becky goes
to bed extra early, before her regular bedtime
...
In the
morning when Becky gets up, she feels wide awake
...
Her teacher says,
‘‘OK, everyone, now it’s time for a spelling test
...
They’re pretty hard
...
How do you
think she will do right now, when she is feeling
wide awake?
Full and Healthy—spatial problem-solving task
...
After breakfast, Robert
feels full and healthy
...
His teacher says, ‘‘OK, everyone, now it’s time to make special paper airplanes
...
It’s pretty hard
...
How do you
think he will do right now, when he is feeling full
and healthy?
Negative Physiological State Stories
Tired—language task
...
She goes to bed
way past her regular bedtime and she only gets to
sleep a very short time
...
Later that day in
school, Hannah is still feeling tired because of
staying up late
...
I want to see
how many different words you can think of that
start with X, Y, or Z
...
’’ Hannah
usually does okay on hard word games like these
...
One morning before school
John doesn’t have any time to eat breakfast—he
doesn’t even drink any milk or juice before he goes
out the door
...
Later that day in school, John is still feeling
hungry because of not eating breakfast
...
We are going to learn lots of new things
about the solar system
...
’’ John
usually does okay learning hard stuff like this
...
One day when Kevin
gets to school, there are some workers up on top of
the school, fixing the roof
...

Later that day in school, it is still noisy in Kevin’s
classroom because of the workers banging on the roof
...
I’ll say the words and you write down
how they are spelled
...
’’ Kevin
usually does okay on hard spelling tests like these
...
One day when Ryan
gets to school, they are having an ‘‘extra-quiet day’’
in Ryan’s classroom
...
It is quiet in Ryan’s classroom
...
’’ His teacher
says, ‘‘OK, everyone, now it’s time for a remembering game
...
It’s
pretty hard
...
How do you think he
will do right now, when it’s extra quiet in his
classroom?
Valence-Change Control Stories
Nice hair—math task
...
She sees her blue hair bows sitting
on her dresser and she decides to wear them to
school
...
Her hair
looks nice
...
Her
teacher says, ‘‘OK, everyone, now it’s time to do
some math problems
...
They’re pretty hard
...
How
do you think she will do right now, when her hair
is looking nice?
Messy hair—reading task
...
It is very windy outside, and the wind blows
Susan’s hair all around
...
Later that day in school, Susan’s
hair is still looking messy because of the wind
blowing it
...
We are going to read a story in
our new reading books
...
’’ Susan
usually does okay reading hard stories like these
...
One day when Allie
gets to school, there is a new rug in her classroom
...
It covers the whole floor of the
classroom
...
Later that day in
school, the floor is still looking gray because of the
new rug
...
We are going to learn lots of
new things about the solar system
...
’’
Allie usually does okay learning hard stuff like this
...
One day, David is
getting ready for school
...
He gets dressed
...
Later that
day in school, David is still looking all blue because of
his blue clothes
...
You have to add,
subtract, and multiply
...
’’ David
usually does okay on hard math problems like these
...
One day when Tim is at
school, his teacher says, ‘‘OK, everyone, now it’s time for
a remembering game
...
It’s pretty
hard
...
How do you think he will do right now?

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