Infants are attuned to emotional facial and vocal expressions, reacting most prominently when they are exposed to negative expressions. However, it remains unknown if infants can detect whether a person’s emotions are justifiable given a particular context. The focus of the current paper was to examine whether infants react the same way to unjustified (e.g., distress following a positive experience) and justified (e.g., distress following a negative experience) emotional reactions. Infants aged 15 and 18 months were shown an actor experiencing negative and positive experiences, with one group exposed to an actor whose emotional reactions were consistently unjustified (i.e., did not match the event), while the other saw an actor whose emotional reactions were justified (i.e., always matched the event). Infants’ looking times and empathic reactions were examined. Only 18-month-olds detected the mismatching facial expressions: those in the unjustified group showed more hypothesis testing (i.e., checking) across events than the justified group. Older infants in the justified group also showed more concerned reactions to negative expressions than those in the unjustified group. The present findings indicate that infants implicitly understand how the emotional valence of experiences is linked to subsequent emotional expressions.

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We examined whether 18‐month‐olds understand how the emotional valence of people's experiences predicts their subsequent emotional reactions, as well as how their behaviors are influenced by the reliability of the emoter. Infants watched a person express sadness after receiving an object that was either inappropriate (conventional emoter) or appropriate (unconventional emoter) to perform an action. Then, infants’ imitation, social referencing, and prosocial behaviors (helping) were examined when interacting with the person. Results showed that during the exposure phase, the unconventional group showed visual search patterns suggesting hypothesis testing and expressed less concern toward the person than the conventional group. In the social referencing task, the conventional group preferred to search for the target of a positive expression as opposed to the disgust object. In contrast, the unconventional group was more likely to trust the person's negative expression. As expected, no differences were found between the groups on the instrumental helping tasks. However, during the empathic helping tasks, the conventional group needed fewer prompts to help than the unconventional group. These findings provide the first evidence that the congruence between a person's emotional responses and her experiences impacts 18‐month‐olds’ subsequent behaviors toward that person.

The current study examined how 18-month-old infants react to a “stoic” person, that is, someone who displays a neutral facial expression following negative experiences. Infants first watched a series of events during which an actor had an object stolen from her. In one condition, infants then saw the actor display sadness, while she remained neutral in the other condition. Then, all infants interacted with the actor in emotional referencing, instrumental helping, empathic helping, and imitation tasks. Results revealed that during the exposure phase, infants in both groups looked an equal amount of time at the scene and engaged in similar levels of hypothesis testing. However, infants in the sad group expressed more concern towards the actor than those in the neutral group. No differences were found between the two groups on the interactive tasks. This conservative test of selective learning and altruism shows that, at 18 months, infants are sensitive to the valence of emotional expressions following negative events but also consider an actor’s neutral expression just as appropriate as a sad expression following a negative experience. These findings represent an important contribution to research on the emergence of selective trust during infancy.