Advanced emotion understanding: Children’s and adults’ knowledge that minds generalize from prior emotional events.

Abstract

We examined an advanced form of emotion understanding in 4- to 10-year-olds and adults (N = 264): Awareness that people’s minds generalize from past emotional episodes to bias how they feel, think, and make decisions in new situations. Participants viewed scenarios on an eye tracker, each featuring an initial perpetrator who caused a character to feel positively (P) and/or negatively (N) in 2-event sequences (NN, PP, NP, PN). Later, the character encountered a new agent who was highly similar to the initial perpetrator. Participants predicted the character’s affective reactions (emotions, thoughts, decisions) to the unknown agent while we recorded their eye movements to past episodes. Participants also judged characters’ emotions upon seeing additional agents, who differed in degree of similarity to the initial perpetrator. Four- to 5-year-olds discounted pasts with initial perpetrators—believing instead that characters would feel happy, anticipate good, and approach new agents. In contrast, adults exhibited robust beliefs that people generalize from past emotional experiences: They attributed more positive responses to new agents following PP > NP > PN > NN pasts, and they expected characters to have biased emotional reactions to even somewhat dissimilar new agents. Between 6 and 10 years, children increasingly assumed that the past would have a biasing impact; however, they drew stricter boundaries than did adults. Eye-tracking analyses revealed that all age groups attended to characters’ emotional past histories when reasoning about reactions to new agents (especially negative events), adults prioritized recent negative events in PN pasts, and participants’ attention biases to past event information correlated with their reasoning about emotion generalization.

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).…”

Emotion Differentiation and Youth Mental Health: Current Understanding and Open Questions

“…This is a major gap in understanding, especially considering that childhood and adolescence are active windows of change in several social and emotional processes (Guyer et al, 2016;Somerville and McLaughlin, 2018;Nook and Somerville, 2019). Across childhood, people gradually learn how to define emotion words, to accurately label emotional facial expressions, to predict specific emotional responses from contextual settings, and to manage their emotional responses (Baron- Cohen et al, 2010;Widen, 2013;Silvers et al, 2017;Lagattuta and Kramer, 2019;Nook et al, 2020). In fact, the abilities to conceptualize one's own and others' emotions show protracted development, continuing to mature into adolescence (Dumontheil et al, 2010;Sebastian et al, 2012;Nook et al, 2017Nook et al, , 2020, and adolescence is a period of the lifespan where neural, hormonal, and social changes bring about increased stress and negative emotion compared to childhood (Larson and Ham, 1993;Larson et al, 2002;Romeo and McEwen, 2006;Steinberg, 2015).…”

Deep Graph Fusion Based Multimodal Evoked Expressions From Large-Scale Videos

“…In the past decade, though artificial intelligence (AI) is unleashing a wave of digital disruption, the ability of AI to understand human emotion is still a challenge [1]- [3]. Researchers have explored several topics related to emotion recognition such as facial expression [4]- [6], speech emotion recognition [7], [8], affective expression [9], [10], emotion in conservation [11], [12], and emotion reasoning [13], [14], etc. However, most of studies have tried to develop models to measure human emotions based on direct inputs of characters such as their faces [15], voices, and utterances.…”