child may be thinking in a different way and give the response that is considered most appropriate, "sad." In the mind of the child, however, these two seemingly different answers may mean exactly the same emotion. The variability in logic and verbal expression of young children can thus greatly effect the responses given on a questionnaire. In the present study, it was interesting to examine the children's understanding of affective versus cognitive empathy. Participants consistently demonstrated a better understanding of what another child's emotion would be than what their own would be in response to the other child's situation. The question "how does this child feel?" leaves much less room for interpretation that the question, "how do you feel about that?" It is possible that the latter could be interpreted as, "how do you feel about being in that situation?" or "how do you feel about the child's involvement in that situation?" If interpreted the first way, the child must simply put him or herself in a situation which he or she has most likely experienced, which is much more concrete, and easier to do at this young age. The question becomes more difficult when interpret the second way, which requires the child to relate to an imaginary child in an imaginary situation. Another interesting trend was which emotions appeared to be best understood. Children consistently mistook anger for sadness, in response to the vignette, "a child really wants to go out but is not allowed." The change in means from the baseline to the story was significant, but mean scores were generally lower for anger than for sadness, fear, and happiness. This indicates that young children are less aware of anger than other basic emotions, that it is more difficult for them to articulate, or possibly that they equate it with sadness. Children were most likely to correctly identify sadness and happiness consistently, which possibly indicates that they are more aware...
