Accurate emotion prediction in dyads and groups and its potential social benefits.

Zhao, Zidong; Thornton, Mark Allen; Tamir, Diana

doi:10.1037/emo0000890

Cited by 14 publications

(15 citation statements)

References 60 publications

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“…Solitude did not alter neural activity while considering an unfamiliar other, the self, or a nonsocial target. People rely on more specific information when making inferences about a close other and on more generic social knowledge when making inferences about a more distal other (Ames, 2004; Tamir & Mitchell, 2013; Zhao et al, 2020). This process is associated with activity in the medial prefrontal cortex, a core hub in the mentalizing network, which responds more strongly to close others than strangers (Krienen et al, 2010; Welborn & Lieberman, 2015).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The people around you are inside your head: Social context shapes spontaneous thought.

Mildner¹,

Tamir²

2021

Journal of Experimental Psychology: General

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Humans are highly social. We spend most of our time interacting with the social world and we spend most of our thoughts thinking about the social world. Are we social beings by default, or is our sociality a response to the social world? On the one hand, fundamental social needs may drive social behavior. According to this account, social thoughts fulfill social needs when the environment is insufficiently social. On the other hand, spontaneous thoughts may process incoming information. According to this account, social thoughts reflect the social information in the environment. To arbitrate between these possibilities, we assessed the content of spontaneous thought during mind wandering in three social contexts: solitude (Study 1), social presence (Study 2), and social interaction (Study 3). Additionally, in Study 1, we used functional neuroimaging to measure neural activity while participants considered social and non-social targets. Results consistently showed that spontaneous thought reflects the sociality of the world around us: Solitude decreased spontaneous social thought and decreased neural activity in the mentalizing network when thinking about a close friend. Social presence did not change spontaneous social thought. Social interaction increased spontaneous social thought. Finally, individual differences analyses (Study 4) showed that people in more social environments have more social thoughts. Together, the results show a pattern of increasing social thought in increasingly social environments. The predominance of social content in spontaneous thought can thus be explained by the predominance of social content in the world around us, rather than our innate, fundamental social needs.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The people around you are inside your head: Social context shapes spontaneous thought.

Mildner¹,

Tamir²

2021

Journal of Experimental Psychology: General

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“…Adults leverage these regularities to predict how someone is likely to feel next (e.g., whether they would feel happy or angry) based on their current state (e.g., if they are currently feeling sad; Thornton & Tamir, 2017), and they appear to do so automatically (Thornton et al, 2019). This ability to predict others' emotions is associated with greater social success (Barrick et al, 2023;Zhao & Tamir, 2020). How do infants develop this detailed knowledge of which emotions are likely to precede and follow each other?…”

Section: Infants Track the Statistics Of Emotion Transitions In The Homementioning

confidence: 99%

Infants track the statistics of emotion transitions in the home

Nencheva,

Peng,

Tamir

et al. 2024

Preprint

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Predicting others' feelings is a superpower that enables efficient social interactions. How do infants learn which emotions precede and follow each other? We propose that infants develop this ability by tuning into the dynamics of their socio-emotional environment. If so, we expect that the way in which infants process emotion transitions will reflect both general patterns seen in adults as well as local statistics of observed emotion transitions. We measured 4-10-month-old U.S. infants' (N=70) pupillary responses to emotion transitions and surveyed primary caregivers on the frequency of their own emotion transitions. As expected, infants were attuned to adult patterns of emotion transitions, showing greater pupillary synchrony for frequent transitions. They were also sensitive to their caregiver’s specific transition frequencies, exhibiting similar pupillary responses to infants whose caregivers show similar patterns. These findings suggest that infants learn about emotion dynamics by observing statistical patterns in the people around them.

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“…Note that the aim of this work is to build a formal scientific model of people's intuitive theory of emotion, not to test whether the intuitive theory is accurate. That is, although people are able to sensitively infer and accurately predict others' emotions in some contexts [31][32][33], people make systematic errors in other contexts [3,34,35]. Because we are interested in capturing and characterizing people's intuitive theory of emotion, we do not here attempt to test the ground truth accuracy of either the observers' or the model's predictions, only their similarity to each other.…”

Section: Relation To Prior Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Emotion prediction as computation over a generative theory of mind

Houlihan

Kleiman-Weiner

Hewitt

et al. 2023

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. A.

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From sparse descriptions of events, observers can make systematic and nuanced predictions of what emotions the people involved will experience. We propose a formal model of emotion prediction in the context of a public high-stakes social dilemma. This model uses inverse planning to infer a person’s beliefs and preferences, including social preferences for equity and for maintaining a good reputation. The model then combines these inferred mental contents with the event to compute ‘appraisals’: whether the situation conformed to the expectations and fulfilled the preferences. We learn functions mapping computed appraisals to emotion labels, allowing the model to match human observers’ quantitative predictions of 20 emotions, including joy, relief, guilt and envy. Model comparison indicates that inferred monetary preferences are not sufficient to explain observers’ emotion predictions; inferred social preferences are factored into predictions for nearly every emotion. Human observers and the model both use minimal individualizing information to adjust predictions of how different people will respond to the same event. Thus, our framework integrates inverse planning, event appraisals and emotion concepts in a single computational model to reverse-engineer people’s intuitive theory of emotions. This article is part of a discussion meeting issue ‘Cognitive artificial intelligence’.

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Accurate emotion prediction in dyads and groups and its potential social benefits.

Cited by 14 publications

References 60 publications

The people around you are inside your head: Social context shapes spontaneous thought.

The people around you are inside your head: Social context shapes spontaneous thought.

Infants track the statistics of emotion transitions in the home

Emotion prediction as computation over a generative theory of mind

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