Exploring Emotion and Their Antecedents in Indonesian Young Children

Emotional development begins early in life. From birth, children rapidly develop their abilities to experience and express different emotions. The foundations of social competence that are developed in the first five years impact the children's later ability to functionally adapt in school and to form successful relationships throughout life. Yet, emotional development often receives relatively less recognition as a core emerging capacity in early childhood, including in Indonesia. However, if we can develop an understanding of emotional development in early childhood life, this study will be able to support parents and providers of early care and education to deal with common age-appropriate behavioral challenges. This study focused on the antecedents of the primary and self-conscious emotions in early childhood (0-6 years old). The survey was conducted using 120 samples from Bandung, Jakarta, and Medan, 60 participants of 0-2 years children old and 60 participants of 3-6 years old children. The result of the research is the basic emotion such as happy, sad, angry, fear, disgust, interested and surprised have emerged from 0-2 years old and continue to emerge for the next years. While self-conscious emotion that includes empathy, jealous, shame, and proud emerge more in children above 2 years old. It's the moment when the children have a sense of self, and an ability to compare his/her self to social situation around them. Almost all antecedents for each basic emotion and self-conscious emotion are from external stimulus, either nonsocial (e.g., loud noise) or social (e.g., separation from a loved one). Further, research can be continued by correlating the children's answers and parents' responses. It can also be enriched with the data about cultural background and socioeconomic status to explain the differences between the antecedents of each emotion in Indonesia and former research. The number of participant for each age category also has to be considered.