2-082 - The Development of Anticipating Others’ Emotions Across Infancy and Childhood

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Integrative Statement

Individuals routinely use observed events and previous experience to anticipate and interpret others’ emotions. However, less is known about the developmental origins of such emotion understanding and how prior experience impacts its ontogeny. This symposium presents cutting edge research investigating the development of emotion understanding in infancy and childhood using verbal and nonverbal measures. This work extends current understandings of infant emotional development, indicating that infants demonstrate implicit understanding of emotions in the first year of life and this understanding is influenced by emotional experiences throughout childhood.

The first talk will present findings indicating that 12-month-old infants have expectations regarding discrete emotions (i.e., joy, sadness, anger) that are likely to follow specific events. The second presentation extends these findings, showing that 18-month-old infants demonstrate expectations of events likely to elicit discrete negative emotions, including fear, anger, and disgust. Talk 3 further examines the development of emotion understanding in 4- to 10-year-olds and adults, examining how individuals integrate the frequency and timing of prior negative and positive events to infer others’ emotions in future contexts. The final presentation provides compelling evidence supporting an intervention designed to increase emotion understanding and emotion recognition in a sample of preschool children from low SES backgrounds.

Together, the above studies shed light on the developmental origins and trajectories of emotion understanding from infancy through childhood, and how such skills can be cultivated in at-risk children.

Sub Unit

• Social, Emotional, Personality

Chair

• Peter Reschke, University of California, Merced

Individual Presentations

• Twelve-month-old infants’ expectations of what elicits others’ emotions - Presenting Author: Peter Reschke, University of California, Merced; Eric A Walle, University of California, Merced; Ross Flom, Brigham Young University; Darren Guenther, Brigham Young University

• Discrete or dimensional? Examining how infants understand negative emotions - Presenting Author: Ashley Ruba, University of Washington; Andrew N. Meltzoff, University of Washington; Betty Repacholi, University of Washington

• How children and adults infer others’ anticipatory emotions based on their prior experiences - Presenting Author: Kristin Lagattuta, Univ of California, Davis; Hannah Jean Kramer, University of California, Davis; Karen Hjortsvang, University of California, Davis; Katie Kennedy, University of California, Davis

• Increasing low-income preschoolers’ emotional intelligence: The preschool RULER social and emotional learning intervention - Presenting Author: Sherri Widen, Stanford University; Shauna Tominey, Yale University; Svea Gordon Olsen, Oregon State University; Susan Rivers, Yale University