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Deaf Children's Understanding of Emotions: Desires Take Precedence
Author(s) -
Rieffe Carolien,
Terwogt Mark Meerum
Publication year - 2000
Publication title -
journal of child psychology and psychiatry
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 3.652
H-Index - 211
eISSN - 1469-7610
pISSN - 0021-9630
DOI - 10.1111/1469-7610.00647
Subject(s) - psychology , developmental psychology , theory of mind , expression (computer science) , cognition , neuroscience , computer science , programming language
Deaf children frequently have trouble understanding other people's emotions. It has been suggested that an impaired theory of mind can account for this. This research focused on the spontaneous use of mental states in explaining other people's emotions by 6‐ and 10‐year‐old deaf children as compared to their hearing peers. Within both age‐groups deaf children referred to others' beliefs as often as their hearing peers and their references to desires even exceeded those of hearing children. This relative priority for the expression of desires is discussed in terms of possible communicative patterns of deaf children. The specific problems that deaf children meet in their daily communication might explain their abundance of desire‐references: plausibly, they give a high priority to stress their own desires and needs unambiguously.