The Effect of Emotional Understanding on Children's Selective Trust

Yuxia Luo

doi:10.70088/n7yh2d91

Authors

Yuxia Luo Department of Psychology, Zhejiang University of Technology, Hangzhou, China Author

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.70088/n7yh2d91

Keywords:

selective trust, emotional cues, facial expressions, emotional valence, child development

Abstract

During early childhood, children rely heavily on information provided by others to construct their understanding of the world. Emotion serves as a critical basis for children when they evaluate the credibility of informants and decide whom to trust selectively. The present study investigated the effects of different emotional cues, varying in emotional valence, on children's selective trust through two experiments. In Experiment 1, facial expression cues of information providers displaying different emotional valences were presented to examine whether the presence or absence of such cues influenced children's trust decisions. In Experiment 2, external situational story cues were introduced alongside facial expressions to explore how combined emotional signals affected children's selective trust. A total of 91 children from a kindergarten in a city in southeastern China were recruited as participants. Data were analyzed using single-sample t-tests. The results of Experiment 1 revealed no significant difference in children's trust toward relatively positive emotional information providers between conditions with and without facial expression cues. Experiment 2 demonstrated that when facial expressions were present, children tended to preferentially select information providers exhibiting relatively positive emotional states across different situational contexts. These findings lead to two principal conclusions: first, when only external emotional cues are provided without facial expressions, different emotional valences do not significantly influence children's selective trust; second, when emotional facial cues are available, children demonstrate a measurable preference for information providers who display relatively positive emotions, suggesting that facial expressions play a facilitative role in guiding selective trust during early development.

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