Abstract: The expression of human emotions is innate and accompanies the whole life. As we grow older, we may find that the emotions expressed by individuals are not necessarily the emotions of real experience, and the emotions of real experience are not necessarily willing to be expressed. This phenomenon can be explained by emotional expression/display rules. Emotional display rules guide individuals to regulate emotions and express appropriate emotions for a certain purpose under certain circumstances . Children with better cognitive ability in emotional display rules have better interpersonal communication ability, better social adaptability and higher social status. Many researchers have adopted a cross-sectional research to explore the cognitive development of children's emotional display rules, but have yet to yield consistent result. There may be two main reasons: first, the single-point feature of the cross-sectional research in the time dimension makes it inborn insufficiency in effectively inferring the causal relationship between the two phenomena and grasping the law of development and change of things, and it is prone to different results. And the longitudinal study can just make up for these two deficiencies. Second, existing studies have paid more attention to positive and negative emotional situations and less attention to specific situations. Therefore, this study explored the development of 60 children's cognition ability of emotion display rules in happy, amazing and fear situations for two years using a longitudinal study method, and examined the effects of emotional situation, gender and interpersonal background on their development. The results of the study found that: (1) children’s knowledge of emotional display rules, emotional expression goals, and emotional expression strategies all increase significantly with age; (2) young children often use masking strategy for self-protection in fear emotional situation, use masking and exaggeration strategies in amazing situation, and comprehensively use masking, weakening and exaggeration strategies in happy emotional situation; (3) Girls’ emotional display rules knowledge level, emotional expression goal level, especially social orientation goal, emotional expression strategy level, especially exaggeration strategy level are significantly higher than those of boys; (4) When the parents are present, the child has a higher level of knowledge of emotional display rules and the goal of emotional expression is more in line with social expectations; when a good friend is present, the child has a higher level of knowledge of emotional display rules in the fear situation, the emotional expression goals are more in line with social expectations and more calming strategies in happy and fear emotional situations; (5) The goal of emotional expression of 4~5 year old children is mainly for self-protection. The most used emotional expression strategy is the masking strategy, followed by the weakening and exaggeration strategy, and the calming strategy is the least used. Therefore, parents and teachers should teach young children to accept their own emotions, and on this basis, they should gradually learn to adjust and express their emotions in appropriate ways; parents and teachers should pay more attention to the emotional expression of boys, and encourage and guide boys to use appropriate ways to express their emotions; Parents should accompany their children with high quality, encourage them to interact more with their peers, and comprehensively use a variety of methods to promote the development of the cognitive ability of emotional display rules.

Key words: children, emotional expression/display rules, emotional situations, development, a longitudinal study

摘要： 用追踪研究方法，对60名幼儿在高兴、惊讶与害怕情境中的情绪表达规则认知两年的发展进行探讨，并考察情绪情境、性别和人际背景对其发展的影响。结果表明：(1)幼儿的情绪表达规则知识、目标和策略水平均随年龄增长显著提升；(2)幼儿在害怕情境中为自我保护而较多使用掩饰策略，在惊讶情境中较多使用掩饰和夸大策略，在高兴情境中综合运用掩饰、弱化和夸大策略；(3)性别和人际背景均对幼儿情绪表达规则认知发展有显著影响。

关键词: 幼儿, 情绪表达规则, 情绪情境, 发展, 追踪研究