Kindergarten, third-, and sixth-grade children were given vignettes describing experiences that were likely to produce emotional states, and their consensus about the probable affective reaction was determined. A sample of eight social and personal (private) experiences was utilized in the vignettes: success, failure, dishonesty (caught or not caught), experiencing nurturance or aggression, and experiencing justified or unjustified punishment. The potential affective reactions that children were asked to choose among included happiness, sadness, anger, fear, and neutral affect. There were no sex differences. Children of all ages agreed that relatively simple experiences such as success and nurturance would elicit a happy reaction. For other categories of experience, multiple consensuses appeared for more than one affective reaction. There were developmental differences in the affective reactions anticipated to five of the eight experience categories. Results are discussed in terms of cognitive and social learning determinants of knowledge about the experimental antecedents of emotion for oneself and others.

Two experiments with children are presented that illustrate the effects of emotional states on learning and validate experimental affect-induction procedures in which individuals dwell upon thoughts of affect-provoking experiences. Positive affective states enhanced learning, and negative states retarded it dramatically. Ratings of children's facial expressions confirmed that positive affectinduction procedures elicited happy expressions, and negative inductions elicited sad ones. Additionally, positive affect inductions enhanced children's apparent interest, involvement, and arousal, and negative inductions decreased them. These measures were related to learning but proved not to be the sole mediators of the impact of affective states on learning. The thoughts children generated for affect induction illustrated their recognition of naturalistic experiences that induce affective states. These results indicate that young children possess the potential for the cognitive self-control of their own affective states, and the effects on learning indicate that even transient mood states may produce lasting changes in behavior.Preliminary versions of this experiment constituted an undergraduate summa cum laude honors thesis by the second-named author. The able assistance of Craig Binger is gratefully acknowledged.

Four experiments examined how the length of anticipated temporal delay periods preceding the occurrence of rewards and punishments affects their subjective value for both children and adults. Subjects were confronted with a series of rewards or of punishments which were presented as occurring immediately or after specified delay periods up to several weeks in duration. In each set, subjects indicated their preferences for outcomes of objectively equal value that differed only in the amount of expected time delay before their occurrence. As predicted, as the anticipated delay interval for attainment of a reward increased, the subjective value of the reward decreased for both children and adults. In contrast, the length of anticipated delay time did not affect the subjective value of punishments. Any anticipated delay, however, regardless of duration, consistently did affect the aversiveness of punishments for adults, but not for children. Adults preferred immediate punishments to more delayed ones, regardless of specific time intervals; children's evaluations of punishments were not influenced systematically by any future temporal considerations. The overall results help clarify how future time may come to guide behavior.

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