The purpose of this study is to investigate whether there are any differences appeared in the episodes in understandings of the real emotions, emotional display rules according to the types of emotions and subjects for expressing emotions and to see the existence of dissimilarities in the types of intention reasoning in accordance with the episode. In addition, the interaction effects of episodes, gender and age on children''s understandings of the real emotions and emotional display rules are set to be explored as well. Also, the interaction effects of intention reasoning types, gender, and age on children’s understandings of the real emotions and emotional display rules are explored. To accomplish these objectives, the experimental interviews were conducted targeting 144 children in the age of 4-5 who are attending the kindergarten located in Cheongju-city by presenting pictures including the four types of episodes.

The primary findings are summarized as in the followings.

First, children’s understandings of real emotions and emotional display rules appeared different according to the subject to whom children express their emotions. It seemed that they comprehended the real emotions and emotional display rules more clearly in a relationship with peers than adults. In terms of a type of emotion, it was the negative emotions rather than positives ones that those children understood better for real emotions and emotional display rules.
The intention reasoning types of children’s emotional display rules showed up differently for each episode. For a positive emotion-adult episode, most of the children had hard time in reasoning intentions, inferring intentions as ‘miscellaneous’ or ‘direct expression’. For a positive emotion-peer episode, the pro-social intentions were presented most frequently, proving that the intention reasoning considering others occurs under the positive circumstances. For a negative emotion-adult episode, the children evenly used all five types of intention reasoning ? prosocial intention, norm-maintenance intention, self-protective intention, direct expression, and miscellaneous. For a negative emotion ? peer episode, the children inferred four intentions of norm-maintenance intention, self-protective intention, direct expression, and miscellaneous while showing less of prosocial intention.
Second, on the understanding of real emotion, the main and interaction effects of the episode and gender were significant. That is, children''s understanding of real emotion differs according to the episode as well as gender. Only main effects of the episode were found to be significant on understanding emotional display rules, which means children''s understanding of the emotional display rules shows different according to episode.
Third, the main effects of the intention reasoning types on the children’s understanding of the real emotions were found significant in the positive emotion-adult episode, negative emotion-adult episode, and negative emotion-peer episode. As for the main effect of the intention reasoning types on children’s understanding of the emotional display rules appeared significant in all episodes. Especially, for a negative emotion-peer episode, the interaction effect of the intention reasoning type and gender on the emotional display rules were found to be significant. That is, in negative emotion-peer episode, children with different types of intention reasoning showed different level of understanding emotional display rules depending on gender of children.
It confirmed that understanding of real emotion and emotional display rules were different depending on type of emotion and subject to express emotion. Further verifications include children aged 4-5 years can do intention reasoning which differs according to episode situations, and types of intention reasoning varies depending on episodes and children’s age, and gender. These results were significant to identify the emotional development and the development process of emotional recognition ability of Korean children. In addition, it is significant to figure out which situation children can better understand emotion in childhood education field and offer assistance to teacher taking care of children.