Reasoning about Emotions in a Group of Minds

• In Event: Emotion Understanding Across Development: Implications for Interpersonal and Educational Contexts

Abstract

Research examining the development of theory of mind, or reasoning about one’s own and others’ mental states (Wellman, 2014), has primarily focused on how children and adults think about an individual (e.g., what does she think?). For example, between the ages of 3 and 10 and between childhood and adulthood, children increasingly recognize that people can vary in their emotions based on differences in their beliefs, thoughts, past experiences, and expectations for the future (for reviews, see Lagattuta & Kramer, 2021; Kramer & Lagattuta, 2021). In our everyday social world, however, we interact with groups of people—not just with individuals. In the current research, we investigated how children and adults attribute emotions to a group of minds. Do they expect a diverse group of people to share the same emotional reactions to an event or differ in their affective responses? Does it depend on the type of event? We further examined how children and adults’ explained the causes of these emotions.

Four- to 10-year-olds and adults (N = 200) predicted and explained how five individuals, four characters and themselves, would feel when experiencing several events: Two positive events (e.g., getting a present) two negative events (e.g., getting lost in the woods at night), and two ambiguous events (situations without a clear-cut emotion valence; e.g., going to a new summer camp). To do this, participants selected from a set of five emotions (illustrated emotion faces), of which they could select the same or a different emotion for each person. The four characters varied in gender, race, house size (as a proxy to wealth), hobbies, and pets. Trials were scored for number of unique emotions the participant predicted for the group of five (scores ranged from 1-5). Independent raters coded emotion explanations for references to external events (e.g., “it’s dark in the woods”), (2) internal states (e.g., beliefs, desires, intentions; e.g., “she likes meeting friends at camp”), and (3) social identity (e.g., gender, wealth; e.g., “he lives in a small house so presents are exciting”). Interrater reliability was high (M kappa = .92).

As shown in Figure 1, children anticipated a greater variety of emotions within a group of five people than did adults (ps < .022), with all age groups predicting that there would be more varied emotions during ambiguous situations than during events commonly associated with a negative or positive emotion valence (ps < .024). As seen in Figure 2, participants of all ages more frequently explained emotions as caused by events and internal states than by social identity (ps < .001). Across events, adults provided more internal state and social identity emotion explanations than did child age groups (ps < .008), with 4- to 7-year-olds less often referring to social identity as an emotion cause than 8- to 10-year-olds, and 8- to 10-year-olds doing so less often than adults (ps < .002).

Results will be discussed in relation to the need to expand theory of mind and emotion understanding research to consider peoples’ intuitive theories about multiple minds.

Authors

• Kristin Hansen Lagattuta, University of California - Davis
  Presenting Author

• Hannah Jean Kramer, Queen’s University Belfast

• Karen Hjortsvang Lara, Southwestern University