Although it has been known for a long time that symbolic stimuli can be elicitors of emotions, the attention of researchers of social cognition (ie. theory of mind) so far has been focused almost exclusively on physical elicitors. Inspired by that, we decided to ask respondents at different ages what causes four basic (happiness, fear, anger, sadness) emotions, considering that the relative frequency of symbolic elicitors (symbols that cause emotions) will indicate the importance of such elicitors for participants in understanding the causation of their emotions. This study involved 20 participants per each age: 5 (M = 5.6; SD = 0.34), 9 (M = 9.48; SD = 0.3), 12-13 (M = 12.9; SD = 0.27), and 16-17 (M = 16.67; SD = 0.54) years, as well as students of psychology (M = 23.84; SD = 1.72) and other students (M = 24.06; SD = 1.56). Both genders were equally represented; all participants were from Belgrade. Responses were categorized by two independent coders; inter-rater reliability was 96%. The main finding was that symbolic stimuli were mentioned as elicitors of emotions by respondents at all ages (on average 63.13% of the total number of elicitors). Apparently, such elicitors are very important in understanding the causation of emotions, so a serious omission has been made in previous research in social cognition by neglecting them. Symbolic elicitors had the lowest relative frequency at the youngest (5 years) age - 46.4%, which is significantly (χ² (1, N = 1565) = 31.126; p <.001) less than at older ages (65.9% on average). We interpreted that due to the fact that children between the ages of 5 and 9 begin to participate more often in social institutions and become more exposed to symbolic stimuli; also, only 5-y-olds are prelogic in their thought while all other respondents are logic, which could also have affected their responses. On the other hand, the absence of other age differences is probably because we asked the respondents only about the elicitors of basic emotions. The analysis by subcategories showed that children from the age of 5 mentioned symbolic media that imitate reality (picture books, movies, etc.) more often than older respondents (χ² (1, N = 1565) = 48,971; p <.001), which is in line with the importance of such media at the preschool age. Inversely, normative-symbolic elicitors were more frequent among older respondents (χ² (1, N = 1565) = 87.854; p <.001), which was interpreted in the same way as the main finding
Vojin Simunović (Fri,) studied this question.