Inferring Beliefs and Desires From Emotional Reactions to Anticipated and Observed Events
Name
Wu_et_al-2017-Child_Development.pdf
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883.1 KB
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Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
82831fda79726c537e16338a2f0c313d
Author(s)
Wu, Yang
Schulz, Laura E
Date Issued
March 2017
Journal
Child Development
Publisher
Wiley Blackwell
Citation
Wu, Yang, and Laura E. Schulz. “Inferring Beliefs and Desires From Emotional Reactions to Anticipated and Observed Events.” Child Development, Mar. 2017.
Version
Final published version
Abstract
Researchers have long been interested in the relation between emotion understanding and theory of mind. This study investigates a cue to mental states that has rarely been investigated: the dynamics of valenced emotional expressions. When the valence of a character's facial expression was stable between an expected and observed outcome, children (N = 122; M = 5.0 years) recovered the character's desires but did not consistently recover her beliefs. When the valence changed, older but not younger children recovered both the characters' beliefs and desires. In contrast, adults jointly recovered agents' beliefs and desires in all conditions. These results suggest that the ability to infer mental states from the dynamics of emotional expressions develops gradually through early and middle childhood.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1111/cdev.12759
