Understanding Social Display Rules: Using One Person’s Emotional Expressions to Infer the Desires of Another
Name
cdev.13346.pdf
Description
Published version
Size
649.01 KB
Format
Unknown
Checksum (MD5)
a34f2102f73b8f69296870a11bde157e
Author(s)
Wu, Yang
Schulz, Laura E
Date Issued
2019
Journal
Child Development
Publisher
Wiley
Version
Final published version
Abstract
© 2019 The Authors Child Development published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc. on behalf of Society for Research in Child Development In social contexts, people’s emotional expressions may disguise their true feelings but still be revealing about the probable desires of their intended audience. This study investigates whether children can use emotional expressions in social contexts to recover the desires of the person observing, rather than displaying the emotion. Children (7.0–10.9 years, N = 211 across five experiments) saw a protagonist express one emotional expression in front of her social partner, and a different expression behind her partner’s back. Although the protagonist expressed contradictory emotions (and the partner expressed none), even 7-year-olds inferred both the protagonist’s and social partner’s desires. These results suggest that children can recover not only the desire of the person displaying emotion but also of the person observing it.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences
Center for Brains, Minds, and Machines
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1111/CDEV.13346
