One- to four-year-olds connect diverse positive emotional vocalizations to their probable causes

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
Yang WuLaura E Schulz

Abstract

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 d...Continue Reading

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Citations

Jul 18, 2019·Psychological Science in the Public Interest : a Journal of the American Psychological Society·Alan CowenDacher Keltner
Jan 8, 2020·Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America·Alan S CowenDacher Keltner
Aug 2, 2018·Topics in Cognitive Science·Desmond C OngNoah D Goodman
Sep 29, 2020·Journal of Cognition and Development : Official Journal of the Cognitive Development Society·Marjorie RhodesJohn Daryl Ocampo
Sep 16, 2021·Infancy : the Official Journal of the International Society on Infant Studies·Alexis S Smith-FloresLisa Feigenson
Nov 23, 2021·Frontiers in Psychology·Aaron ChueyHyowon Gweon

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