Didn't you see Mom (Dad) getting angry? "- This question with a sense of grievance or anger is a familiar scene in many families. Parents are often confused: why is the emotion of "not understanding" written on the face of parents when their children are clearly looking at them? The research team of Researcher Jie Wanze from the School of Psychology and Cognitive Sciences at Peking University recently published an important achievement in the international academic journal Nature Communications, providing a scientific answer: children may "see" their parents' expressions, but truly "understand" their meanings requires a long cognitive upgrade from "seeing differences" to "understanding meanings". The key to driving this upgrade is not just seeing with clearer eyes, but also the increasing emotional understanding and knowledge accumulation in the mind. Through a series of carefully designed experiments, the research team systematically explored the development pattern of emotional understanding ability in children aged 5 to 10, and for the first time clearly depicted the two key elements of perceptual processing of "looking at expressions" and conceptual knowledge of "understanding emotions" in the brain, how they interact with each other as children grow older, and jointly support their ability to interpret others' emotions. The research team first solved a fundamental question: can children really "see" different expressions from adults? The answer is affirmative. With the help of highly sensitive EEG frequency labeling technology, researchers have accurately captured the rapid and automatic responses of children's brains to four typical facial expressions: happiness, anger, fear, and sadness. Surprisingly, even preschool children as young as 5 years old can spontaneously distinguish the structural differences of these different emotional faces in their occipital temporal lobe regions. More importantly, this basic ability to 'see expressions' has remained stable throughout the age range of 5 to 10 years old and has not significantly improved with age. This indicates that children have a physiological basis for' observing words and colors' at an early age, "Jie Wanze told reporters. However, does understanding the structure of facial expressions mean comprehending the meaning of emotions? The in-depth study revealed a huge gap within it. To investigate the precision of the "conceptual map" of emotions in children's minds, researchers designed an emotional word similarity scoring task. Children need to evaluate the degree of association between words like "crying" and "running" with the four basic emotions of happiness, anger, fear, and sadness. The results show that as children age, their emotional conceptual networks in their minds become increasingly sophisticated and their structures tend to approach those of adults. Young children often can only make superficial distinctions - such as simply dividing emotions into "happy" and "unhappy". However, older children (around 7 to 10 years old) have made significant progress: they are not only better able to distinguish different negative emotions, but also understand that these emotions are often intertwined and complex states - for example, they gradually realize that behind the behavior of "crying", there may be multiple emotional components associated with sadness, anger, or fear. So, does the growth of conceptual knowledge enhance children's ability to judge emotions in practice? Jie Wanze gave a clear answer: "As children grow older, their accuracy in distinguishing complex negative emotions significantly improves. This directly confirms that their actual performance in 'understanding' other people's emotions in daily life is indeed improving." The accompanying question is whether the core driving force that supports children's continuous improvement in emotional understanding ability is stable and precocious' seeing '(perceptual processing), or increasingly sophisticated' understanding '(conceptual knowledge)? This is precisely the most crucial and groundbreaking discovery in research. Xie Wanze stated that although the brain's ability to automatically distinguish expressions has matured and remained stable for a long time, its predictive role in making accurate emotional judgments in children gradually weakens with age. On the contrary, the constantly enriching emotional concept knowledge possessed by children themselves has a sustained and significant predictive effect on the accuracy of their emotional judgments. It can be said that as children age, they increasingly rely on the conceptual knowledge accumulated in their minds to understand the emotions of others, rather than solely relying on visual signals. This study provides a new scientific perspective for us to understand the cognitive development of children's emotions. ”Jie Wanze said, "The core driving force for the improvement of children's emotional understanding ability is not just to 'see' more clearly, but to 'understand' more deeply. This means that when children seem to 'not understand' when their parents are angry, the problem may be that they have not fully understood the specific differences between emotions such as' anger 'and' disappointment ', or they do not understand why the current situation triggers such emotional reactions. Therefore, instead of questioning' Didn't you see it? 'with blame, it is better to explain the reason in language that children can understand:' Mom (Dad) is very angry now because you just climbed to such a high place, and Mom (Dad) is worried that you will fall and get hurt. '“ From a broader perspective, this study not only reveals the scientific laws of children's emotional cognitive development, but also provides important insights for parents and teachers' educational practices, as well as a reference for exploring support pathways for children's emotions and mental health in the future. ”Jie Wanze summarized. (New Society)