Abstract: It is known that perspective taking abilities play a significant role in the development of affective decision making in young children. However, till now no research did make an explicit explanation for the mechanism that how perspective taking effect on affective decision making. So the purpose of this study was to examine the influence of developmental level of desire taking on affective decision taking of Chinese young children. Ac-cording to the analysis of the delay gratification task in our research, desire taking was the principal premise in making an advantaged decision for others in delay gratification task. Two hypotheses were made in this study, that is, (1) others’ desire cues should improve young children’s performance of making decision for others in delay gratification task, but not for themselves; (2) how young children use others’ desire-cuing information depended on their developmental level of desire taking ability.
The sample in this study comprised 148 4-year-old children. Participants were recruited from families with different SES in Sichuan and Zhejiang, China. In experiment 1, two adapted desire taking tasks were used, one was single desire taking task, another was conflicting desire task. According to performances in experiment 1, participants were divided into two groups with different developmental level of desire taking (high level and low level). In experiment 2, each level group was divided into three subgroups, in which three types of other’s desire cues were manipulated. These desire-cuing conditions were called as single desire, conflicting desire and no desire cuing respectively. No other’s desire cues were given to the participants in the no desire condition. A sin-gle desire cue of other was given in the single desire condition, and a conflicting desire cue of other was given in the conflicting desire condition. In each delay gratification task, the participants were asked to make a decision for others and for themselves. Once making a delay gratification decision one score was given.
It was shown from the results of experiment 1 that almost all participants passed the single desire taking task, but the participants passing the conflicting desire taking task fall to short of half. It was indicated that children aged 4 could take others’ single desire very well, but not others’ conflicted desire. In experiment 2, results indicated that young children’s performance of making the delay gratification decision for other in the single and conflicting desire-cuing conditions was significantly better than that in the no desire-cuing condition. And in the conflicting desire-cuing condition, high level group’s performance of making the delay gratification decision for other was significantly better than performance of children of low level group. However, there was no significant difference between children’s performance of making the delay gratification decision for other and for self in the no desire-cuing condition. These findings indicate that the developmental level of desire taking make a significant impact on affective decision making of young children. Existing adequate others desire in-formation in certain instance, children would select others’ desire as a clue to make a decision for them; and how young children use others’ desire information depended on their developmental level of desire taking ability.

Key words: desire taking, young children, affective decision making