Integrating expectations and outcomes: Preschoolers’ developing ability to reason about others’ emotions

Abstract

People's emotional experiences depend not only on what actually happened, but also on what they thought would happen. Inferring others' expectations and how these expectations influence others' emotions is an important aspect of human social intelligence, allowing us to understand how others feel even when outcomes are uninformative and expectations are not explicitly communicated. Prior work suggests an abstract understanding of how expectations modulate emotional responses may not emerge until 7 to 8 years of age. Using a novel paradigm that capitalizes on intuitive physics to generate contextually plausible expectations, we sought to find earlier evidence for expectation-based emotion inference. Given two bowlers who experienced identical outcomes (hitting 3 out of 6 pins), we varied the physical trajectory of their balls such that one would initially expect to hit all pins (High-Expectation), while the other would expect to hit nothing (Low-Expectation). In Experiment 1, while both 4- and 5-year-olds appropriately adjusted the characters' happiness ratings upward (Low-Expectation) or downward (High-Expectation) with respect to their initial emotions, only 5-year-olds made adjustments robust enough to manifest as higher happiness ratings for the Low-Expectation than High-Expectation character. We replicate these results in Experiments 2-3 and show that 5-year-olds reliably differentiate the characters' emotions even when explicit information about their expectations is unavailable and must be inferred from the physical context (i.e., ball trajectories). Together, these results provide the earliest evidence for expectation-based emotion reasoning and suggest that the ability to spontaneously generate and consider others' expectations continues to develop during preschool years.

Attributing motives to others: Children's and adults' explanations of interpersonal events

“…In other words, participants often explained that actors engaged in positive action to cause an emotional response in a recipient, but that actors engaged in negative actions toward others to cause a positive emotional response in themselves. Likewise, theory of mind research indicates that by 6 years of age, children have begun to develop understanding of the connections among the mind, behaviour, and emotions (Asaba, Ong, & Gweon, 2019; Lagattuta & Kramer, 2019; Wu & Schulz, 2018). For example, children recognize that a person's current situation, thoughts about past emotional experiences, or anticipation of future events all can cause current emotional responses (see Lagattuta, 2014 for a review).…”

Preschool‐Aged Children Jointly Consider Others’ Emotional Expressions and Prior Knowledge to Decide When to Explore

“…Infants also expect the valence of another agent’s emotional expressions to be congruent with the agent’s goal outcomes (Phillips, Wellman, & Spelke, 2002; Skerry & Spelke, 2014). By late preschool and early school years, children flexibly draw both forward inferences (i.e., using others’ mental states and event outcomes to predict how others might feel; e.g., Asaba, Ong, & Gweon, 2019; Doan, Friedman, & Denison, 2018, 2020; Lagattuta, Wellman, & Flavell, 1997; Lara, Lagattuta, & Kramer, 2019; Pons, Harris, & de Rosnay, 2004) and inverse inferences (i.e., using others’ emotional expressions to recover their underlying mental states or event outcomes; Repacholi & Gopnik, 1997; Wu, Haque, & Schulz, 2018; Wu & Schulz, 2018, 2020) in ways that are consistent with formal models of emotion understanding (Ong, Zaki, & Goodman, 2015; Saxe & Houlihan, 2017; Wu, Baker, Tenenbaum, & Schulz, 2018). Collectively, these results suggest that an abstract, theory‐like understanding of emotion develops throughout early childhood, allowing children to use others’ mental states to predict how others might feel and infer the latent causes of others’ emotional expressions.…”

Inferring competence from others' expressions of surprise

“…First, we can predict others' emotions based on their mental states and observed outcomes (forward inference). Much developmental work has focused on forward inferences (e.g., Harris et al, 1989;Lagattuta, 2014;Doan, Friedman, & Denison, 2018;Wellman & Liu, 2004); for instance, recent work suggests that 5 year-old children can integrate others' expectations with event outcomes to infer their emotions (e.g., given identical outcomes, someone with low expectations might feel better than an agent with high expectations; Asaba, Ong, & Gweon, 2019;Lara, Lagattuta, & Kramer, 2019).…”