Toddlers Connect Emotional Responses to Epistemic States

• In Event: 2-005 - How Cognitive Science Can Inform a New Perspective for Understanding Emotional Development

Integrative Statement

Although considerable research has looked at how we might recognize others’ emotions from overt emotional displays, including facial expressions, vocalizations, body posture, and gait (e.g., Ekman & Friesen, 1971; Bachorowski & Owren, 2003; Meeren, van Heijnsbergen, & de Gelder, 2005; Dael, Mortillaro, & Scherer, 2012), an increasing body of work suggests that adults have a rich, abstract intuitive understanding of the conditions that tend to elicit different emotions (Skerry & Saxe, 2015; Ong, Zaki, & Goodman, 2015; Wu, Baker, Tenenbaum, & Schulz, 2018; Fontaine, Scherer, Roesch, & Ellsworth, 2007; Houlihan & Saxe 2017). This intuitive theory allows us to connect others’ probable emotional response to an event to their appraisal that the event was goal congruent, expected, familiar, fair, controllable, etc. (e.g., Fontaine, Scherer, Roesch, & Ellsworth, 2007; Scherer & Meuleman, 2013; Ortony, Clore, & Collins, 1990).
How do children learn this rich intuitive theory of others' emotions? Prior research suggests that even toddlers recognize the importance of goal congruence for predicting others' emotions in response to events (Chiarella & Poulin-Dubois, 2013, 2018; DeLoache & LoBue, 2009; Repacholi & Gopnik, 1997; Reschke, Walle, Flom, & Guenther, 2017; Skerry & Spelke, 2014; Wu, Muentener, & Schulz, 2017). It is less clear whether toddlers can incorporate inferences about others' appraisals of event expectedness, fairness, or controllability into emotion predictions. As a first step, here we ask whether and when toddlers incorporate inferences about the subjective novelty or expectedness of an event into their expectations of others' emotional reactions.
In our study, younger (12-17-month) and older (18-24-month) toddlers were familiarized with a movie in which an observer was knowledgeable or ignorant about a recurring event. On the test trial, the observer saw the event and either remained neutral or changed to a valenced emotional reaction (positive or negative). We predicted that the change from a neutral to a valenced expression would be more surprising if the event was familiar to the observer than if the event was novel. We found an interaction between epistemic state and emotion for older (raw looking time: F(1, 46) = 4.05, p = .050; proportional looking time normalized by a child’s total looking time: F(1, 46) = 6.38, p = .015) but not younger (raw: F(1, 46) = .16, p = .693; proportional: F(1, 46) = .00, p = .982) toddlers.
These results suggest that at least by the second half of the second year, toddlers have some understanding of the emotional consequences of an agent’s epistemic state. They understand that emotional reactions are more likely to novel than familiar events even when they cannot specifically predict anything about the content of the emotion.

Authors

• Yang Wu, MIT
  Presenting Author

• Laura E Schulz, Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, MIT
  Non-Presenting Author

• Rebecca Saxe, Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, MIT
  Non-Presenting Author