Preschoolers and toddlers use ownership to predict basic emotions.

Abstract

People's emotions often depend on ownership. We report 3 experiments showing that preschoolers and toddlers consider ownership in predicting basic emotions. In Experiment 1, 3-year-olds were sensitive to ownership when predicting how a character would feel when objects went missing. Experiment 2 found that 3- to 5-year-olds consider ownership when predicting emotional reactions to harmless violations of ownership rights, and Experiment 3 showed 2-year-olds also do this. For instance, preschoolers and toddlers predicted a girl would be upset when a boy played with her teddy bear without permission, but not when he played with his own. These findings show that preschoolers and toddlers understand basic causal relations between ownership and emotions, and are also the first to show that 2-year-olds are sensitive to other people's ownership rights.

Young children infer feelings of ownership from habitual use.

“…Some aspects of children's understanding of ownership are unlikely to reflect social norms. For example, children predict that owners will be upset if their property is lost (Pesowski & Friedman, 2015), even though it is doubtful that a social norm dictates how owners should react in this situation. In general, the social norms account does not readily explain children's awareness of the psychological consequences of ownership, including their abilities to use it to predict actions and knowledge (e.g., Banerjee, Kominsky, Fernando, & Keil, 2015;Pesowski & Friedman, 2018;Pietraszewski & Shaw, 2015).…”

Give and take: Ownership affects how 2- and 3-year-olds allocate resources

“…Toddlers succeed in acknowledging that other people own objects (e.g., Blake, Ganea, & Harris, 2012;Blake & Harris, 2009;Brownell, Iesue, Nichols, & Svetlova, 2013;Fasig, 2000;Friedman & Neary, 2008;Ross et al, 2015). But previous findings suggest they are unaware of others' ownership rights (Rossano et al, 2011) or only provide ambiguous evidence for this awareness (e.g., Pesowski & Friedman, 2015;Ross et al, 2015). Such previous findings are in line with the view that children first recognize their own ownership rights, and only later appreciate these rights in others (Goddard & Wierzbicka, 2016;Miller, 2017;Rochat, 2011).…”

“…Some further findings suggest toddlers may recognize others' ownership rights, but these findings are inconclusive. First, 2-year-olds show empathy to owners whose property is destroyed (Vaish, Carpenter, & Tomasello, 2009), and they predict owners will be upset if their property is used without permission (Pesowski & Friedman, 2015). However, these findings could result from children grasping the emotional consequences of aggression without an awareness of ownership rights.…”

Using versus liking: Young children use ownership to predict actions but not to infer preferences

“…Here we investigate whether preschoolers consider these two facts of ownership when making judgments about other people-we investigate whether they use ownership to predict actions and to infer preferences. We already know that children use information about ownership to judge whether actions are acceptable (Kim & Kalish, 2009;Neary & Friedman, 2014;Rossano, Rakoczy, & Tomasello, 2011), to predict people's emotions (Pesowski & Friedman, 2015), and to infer history and seek historical traces (Gelman, Manczak, Was, & Noles, 2016;Nancekivell & Friedman, 2014b). If preschoolers also use ownership to predict actions and to infer desires, this will reveal further ways they use information about ownership.…”