Making inferences and individual differences in emotion understanding

During the last decade several studies focused on the role of language in mental state comprehension. These works proved that different linguistic skills in particular lexicon, syntax and semantics are closely related to emotion understanding (Harris & de Rosnay, 2002; Pons et al., 2003). At present, we know little about the influence of pragmatic abilities on children s emotion understanding. We hypothesize that pragmatic skills, particularly the ability of making inferences, can be considered as good indicators of children s emotion