ABSTRACT
When do children begin to understand the feelings and wishes of other people in their world? It is a crucially important development for an individual born into a complex social world. Yet we know relatively little about the beginning of this understanding. Answers to the question have been sought in two ways: first, by giving children experimental tasks that require them to take perspective of another, to report on the feelings of a story-book character, or to identify an emotional state from a picture or drawing; second-and much less frequently-by attempting to make inferences about children’s understanding of another person’s feelings from their naturally-occurring responses to others’ behaviour or actions, and from their spontaneous conversations. Both these research strategies present major problems of interpretation, and leave the answer to our question still clouded. The difficulties presented by the second strategy are obvious. It is a hazardous business attempting to establish the nature of children’s understanding simply from observing their behaviour, especially as with very young children this is frequently non-verbal behaviour.
