An attempt was made to document the beginning of children's ability to make cognitive-emotional discriminations between skill-dependent outcomes and chance-dependent outcomes of performance on tasks. Children between the ages of 2 and 5 years were administered structurally similar achievement games and effect games. It was thought that as soon as success and failure became more to children than just interesting effects with no relevance for self-evaluation, children would discriminate in their emotional reactions between similar physical signals representing either a skill-independent effect, or success or failure in an achievement task. Data were gathered by assessing children's emotional reactions in the two tasks and older children's understanding of the tasks. Subjects of Study I were 40 preschool children. Findings suggested that preschool children differentiated behaviorally--but apparently not conceptually--between events dependent on skill and events dependent on chance. Children manifested as much of a true smile (Darwin, 1872) in failure situations as in success situations; but zygomaticus reactions, or partial smiles, in success trials were somewhat more intense than in failure trials. In Study II children between 2 and 3 years of age were observed while they played the same two games. Findings indicated that children's looking behaviors discriminated between child and experimenter trials. A four-page reference list is included. (RH)