How would you feel? Children's inferences regarding their own and others' affective reactions

Kindergarten children listened to stories about emotion-eliciting events and were asked to make inferences about either their own or the story target's affective reactions to these events. They were also asked to justify their responses. Subjects in the self-affect condition made fewer negative affective inferences, offered more coping responses for transforming negative situations into more positive ones, and justified their affective inferences by citing consequences of the story events more frequently than did subjects in the target-affect condition. These data are inconsistent with the two dominant views of how such inferences are drawn, the role-taking and the accruing-knowledge views, but are predictable from a self-as-distinct framework.