Problem: How can I make notes with bullet points in this paragraph? In another study of children's ability to understand mixed emotions, researchers showed 5- to 12-year-olds an excerpt from the animated film The Little Mermaid, culminating with King Triton and daughter Ariel's bittersweet separation and farewell (Larsen et al., 2007). When the children were interviewed about what they had seen, the older ones (8 years or older) were more likely than the younger ones to report that King Triton experienced mixed emotions in the emotionally complex situation- and that they too had experienced mixed emotions as they watched the film clip. In a study of children 3 to 11 years of age, researchers identified three periods in children's thinking about emotions (Pons et al., 2004). In the first period children began to understand important external aspects of emotions. In this period, the majority of 3-year-olds were able to recognize primary emotions such as happiness, sadness, fear, and anger on the basis of external (facial) expressions, and the majority of 5-year-olds were able to identify external causes of emotions. Children of this age could anticipate the sadness a child feels at the loss of a favorite toy or the happiness when receiving a gift, and they understood that two characters in the same situation could feel different emotions because they had different desires. In the second period children began to understand the psychological nature of emotions. Need Assignment Help?