One- to four-year-olds connect diverse positive emotional vocalizations to their probable causes
| Autor: | Yang Wu, Laura Schulz, Paul Muentener |
|---|---|
| Rok vydání: | 2017 |
| Předmět: |
Emotion classification
Emotions Social Sciences 050109 social psychology 050105 experimental psychology Developmental psychology Interpersonal relationship Causal knowledge Social cognition Theory of mind preschoolers Humans Speech 0501 psychology and cognitive sciences Early childhood Multidisciplinary Verbal Behavior infants 05 social sciences Infant Preferential looking Causality Facial Expression Child Preschool Psychological and Cognitive Sciences emotional vocalizations Cues causal knowledge Psychology emotion understanding |
| Zdroj: | Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America |
| ISSN: | 1091-6490 0027-8424 |
| DOI: | 10.1073/pnas.1707715114 |
| Popis: | Significance We find that very young children make fine-grained distinctions among positive emotional expressions and connect diverse emotional vocalizations to their probable eliciting causes. Moreover, when infants see emotional reactions that are improbable, given observed causes, they actively search for hidden causes. The results suggest that early emotion understanding is not limited to discriminating a few basic emotions or contrasts across valence; rather, young children’s understanding of others’ emotional reactions is nuanced and causal. The findings have implications for research on the neural and cognitive bases of emotion reasoning, as well as investigations of early social relationships. The ability to understand why others feel the way they do is critical to human relationships. Here, we show that emotion understanding in early childhood is more sophisticated than previously believed, extending well beyond the ability to distinguish basic emotions or draw different inferences from positively and negatively valenced emotions. In a forced-choice task, 2- to 4-year-olds successfully identified probable causes of five distinct positive emotional vocalizations elicited by what adults would consider funny, delicious, exciting, sympathetic, and adorable stimuli (Experiment 1). Similar results were obtained in a preferential looking paradigm with 12- to 23-month-olds, a direct replication with 18- to 23-month-olds (Experiment 2), and a simplified design with 12- to 17-month-olds (Experiment 3; preregistered). Moreover, 12- to 17-month-olds selectively explored, given improbable causes of different positive emotional reactions (Experiments 4 and 5; preregistered). The results suggest that by the second year of life, children make sophisticated and subtle distinctions among a wide range of positive emotions and reason about the probable causes of others’ emotional reactions. These abilities may play a critical role in developing theory of mind, social cognition, and early relationships. |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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