1-022 - Affective Cognition: Bidirectional Influences of Emotion and Social Cognition

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Integrative Statement

As human beings, we recognize affective cues such as a smile, an irritated tone, and a freeze response, and can use such cues to draw rich inferences about others and their mental states. However, children’s ability to make emotional inferences is often neglected in the cognitive sciences. Here we present evidence of the bidirectional influence of emotion processing and social cognition and argue that these abilities are developmentally interconnected. Three studies systematically examined the role of emotional cues in three areas of social cognition: false-belief understanding (Study 1), language processing (Study 2), and prosocial behavior (Study 3). Study 1 demonstrates that at least by age six, children can use someone’s emotional facial expression to recover her epistemic access and predict her actions in a classic false-belief task. Study 2 shows that 5-year-old children vary their use of emotional prosodic cues in online language processing as a function of whether the speaker previously showed conventional or unconventional emotional evaluations. Study 3 uses a longitudinal design to demonstrate that children’s prosocial behaviors toward a distressed individual at 24 months of age is positively associated with individual differences in mental state understanding at 9 months. A rising star in the field of children’s emotion understanding will discuss these studies and their implications for cognitive, social, and emotional development more broadly.

Sub Unit

• Social Cognition

Chair

• Yang Wu, MIT

Discussant

• Peter J Reschke, Brigham Young University

Individual Presentations

• Children use Others’ Emotional Expressions to Predict Their Behaviors in Classic False Belief Tasks - Presenting Author: Yang Wu, MIT; Non-Presenting Author: Anya Keomurjian, Wellesley College; Non-Presenting Author: Jennah Haque, MIT; Non-Presenting Author: Laura E Schulz, Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, MIT

• Preschoolers’ Speaker-specific Interpretations of Emotional Prosody During Online Language Processing - Presenting Author: Justine Thacker, University of Calgary; Non-Presenting Author: Craig G Chambers, University of Toronto; Non-Presenting Author: Susan Graham, University of Calgary

• Links Between Early Mental State Understanding and Toddlers’ Empathic Responding to Another’s Distress - Presenting Author: Wyntre Stout, Lehigh University; Non-Presenting Author: Erin Karahuta, Lehigh University; Non-Presenting Author: Amanda C Brandone, Lehigh University; Non-Presenting Author: Deborah June Laible, Lehigh University