Emotion Understanding Across Development: Implications for Interpersonal and Educational Contexts

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Abstract

Appreciating the complexity and richness of human emotions is a daunting task—even adults experience difficulty reasoning about emotions. Paper 1 demonstrates that infants, children, and adults direct their attention differently depending on the emotional context, focusing more on the emoter in anger and sadness scenes, but focusing more on the cause of the emotion in fear and disgust scenes. Paper 2 examines children’s and adults’ reasoning about how emotions influence attentional performance in school. Findings suggest a developmental shift in children’s understanding of the downsides of positive emotions in learning contexts. Paper 3 investigates how different factors influence whether children and adults expect a group of people (diverse in gender, race, SES) to share the same emotional reaction to events or vary in their affective responses. Results reveal age-related changes in emotion predictions and explanations. Paper 4 explores how implicit biases influence teachers’ perceptions of anger in students. Findings show that teachers more readily presume anger in boys than girls and that implicit biases predict racialized anger misperceptions of boys. These papers reveal important developments in reasoning about emotions over time and across different contexts. These developments, however, may not necessarily improve accuracy in understanding others’ emotions or in recognizing connections between mind and emotion: attentional biases shape the emotional information we attend to, emotions can disrupt cognitive processing, and beliefs about social groups influence how we predict and explain emotions. These results have important implications for interpersonal and educational contexts. Presenters will integrate across talks as they proceed.

Sub Unit

• Social Cognition

Chairs

• Luis De la Viña, University of Toronto

• Samuel Ronfard, University of Toronto

Individual Presentations

• Parents, Children, and Infants Differentially Attend to Discrete Emotion Contexts - Presenting Author: Eric A Walle, University of California - Merced; Jennifer M Knothe, Children’s Oncology Group; Lukas D Lopez, University of Utah

• Children’s and Adults’ Beliefs About the Influence of Emotional States on Attention - Presenting Author: Luis De la Viña, University of Toronto; Brandon Wade Goulding, University of Winnipeg; Samuel Ronfard, University of Toronto

• Reasoning about Emotions in a Group of Minds - Presenting Author: Kristin Hansen Lagattuta, University of California - Davis; Hannah Jean Kramer, Queen’s University Belfast; Karen Hjortsvang Lara, Southwestern University

• Teachers’ Imposition of Anger Bias by Gender and Race, and the Role of Implicit Bias - Alison N Cooke, Duke University; Presenting Author: Amy Halberstadt, North Carolina State University; Pamela Watkins Garner, George Mason University; Kamilah Legette, University of Denver