The development of relief

More specifically, this thesis explored children's ability to understand the two types of relief in others. This was important given that previous developmental research has primarily focused on children's ability to experience counterfactual relief. Overall, this thesis provides the first positive evidence in the literature as to when children can begin to attribute counterfactual and temporal relief to others.

Consistent with previous research into children’s understanding of emotions, the results suggest that children’s understanding of relief does not emerge all at once but rather develops gradually and interacts with the cognitive demands of the task. Taken together, there was little evidence in this thesis to suggest that children’s understanding of temporal and counterfactual relief have separate developmental trajectories.

Although future work is needed to compare children’s ability to experience the two types of relief, this thesis has made important first steps in examining the development of relief.