Probabilistic Emotion Signals Guide Inference and Behavior

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Abstract

Emotion signals provide information about people’s mental states, their past behaviors, and their potential future actions. Effective use of these signals can guide children’s learning and behaviors, informing adaptive (or maladaptive) interactions in the social world. However, emotion signals contain noise; they vary across individuals and contexts, and signals and outcomes are not deterministic. This symposium presents four papers (N=419; spanning ages 3 to adults) from international laboratories, examining novel approaches to understanding how children make emotionally-relevant inferences by attending to probabilistic inputs. In doing so, the research has implications for basic science and applications for understanding children’s social competence.
Paper 1 investigates preschoolers’ use of deterministic and probabilistic evidence to infer people’s surprise. Paper 2 examines children’s inferences of the most likely behavioral consequences of emotion-eliciting events, which diverges from their emotion labeling abilities. Paper 3 examines how individual differences in physiology (i.e., resting parasympathetic activity) interacts with children’s emotional state to affect their approach and avoidance behaviors of learned reward associations. Paper 4 explores how individuals learn and generalize reward associations that are predictable based on emotional signals.
Together, this research brings together cognitive, affective, and social science to understand how learners use deterministic and probabilistic emotion signals to make rich inferences and guide behavior. By engaging cognitive processing mechanisms well-suited to noisy and varied signals, children build social knowledge and flexibly adapt to the complex social world.

Sub Unit

• Social Cognition

Chairs

• Rista Plate, University of Pennsylvania

• Tiffany Doan, University of Toronto

Individual Presentations

• Preschoolers Consider Probability Information When Inferring People’s Surprise - Tiffany Doan, University of Toronto; Ori Friedman, University of Waterloo; Presenting Author: Stephanie Denison, University of Waterloo

• Children’s Understanding of the Behavioral Consequences of Discrete Emotions - Presenting Author: Zeynep B Ozden, University of California - Merced; Eric A Walle, University of California - Merced

• Perceptions of Stress, Resting Parasympathetic Activity, and Variability in Children’s Value-Based Decision Making - Presenting Author: Karen E Smith, Rutgers University - Newark; Seth David Pollak, University of Wisconsin - Madison

• Learning and Generalizing the Structure of Emotion-Based Reward Associations - Presenting Author: Rista Plate, University of Pennsylvania; Martin Zettersten, Princeton University