2-005 - How Cognitive Science Can Inform a New Perspective for Understanding Emotional Development

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Integrative Statement

In the past, debate about the development of emotions in infants and children focused on the extent to which emotion representations are innate or socialized. But almost no developmental psychologist working in the field today endorses extreme views as productive. Rather, contemporary thinking grapples with how learning occurs. Current theories interrogate the potential mechanisms through which children come to perceive, represent, and respond to emotions. Three papers will present novel approaches to exploring mechanisms that may play a role in emotional development, with implications for both basic science and applications for children experiencing emotion-related difficulties. A renown senior scholar with expertise in learning mechanisms underlying children’s cognitive development will lead a discussion about bridging advances in cognitive science to bear upon emotional development.
Paper 1 investigates the role of explicit learning mechanisms, in particular language and labels, in infant emotion perception and categorization. Paper 2 demonstrates how emotion categorization flexibly updates based on statistical distributions in the environment in early childhood. Paper 3 explores how toddlers connect epistemic states and emotion, specifically testing an inferential pathway from prior knowledge to predicting an emotion expresser’s behavior.
Together, this research is situated at the nexus of cognitive, affective, social, and developmental psychology, highlighting ways in which new perspectives on children’s learning can lead to better understanding and application of interventions in the socio-emotional domain.

Sub Unit

• Social, Emotional, Personality

Chair

• Rista C Plate, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Discussant

• Fei Xu, University of California-Berkeley

Individual Presentations

• Perceptual Similarity and Labels Impact Facial Expression Categorization in Infancy - Presenting Author: Ashley Ruba, University of Washington; Non-Presenting Author: Andrew Meltzoff, University of Washington; Non-Presenting Author: Betty Repacholi, University of Washington

• Statistical Learning and Emotion Category Representations - Presenting Author: Rista C Plate, University of Wisconsin-Madison; Non-Presenting Author: Adrienne Wood, University of Wisconsin-Madison; Non-Presenting Author: Kristina Woodard, University of Wisconsin-Madison; Non-Presenting Author: Seth D Pollak, University of Wisconsin-Madison

• Toddlers Connect Emotional Responses to Epistemic States - Presenting Author: Yang Wu, MIT; Non-Presenting Author: Laura E Schulz, Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, MIT; Non-Presenting Author: Rebecca Saxe, Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, MIT