Young Children’s Understanding of Affective Implications of Insight

Insight includes a sudden understanding often followed by a characteristic set of epistemic feelings, including positive affect. As the first study of children’s understanding of insight, we investigate whether young children understand that having an insight for a solution in a problem-solving scenario leads to positive affect. Children aged 4-8 years old (N = 123) were presented with problem-solving scenarios and asked how the character in the story was feeling at different timepoints throughout the scenarios. We found that children aged 4-8 expected the story character to feel happy both when they had an insight and when a problem was successfully solved. However, after a failed solution attempt, the 4-year-olds expected the story character to feel less sad compared to the 5-8-year-olds. As a first study of children’s understanding of insight, we demonstrate that children understand that insight leads to positive affect already at a young age.