One- to four-year-olds connect diverse positive emotional vocalizations to their probable causes
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Author(s)
Muentener, Paul
Schulz, Laura E
Wu, Yang
Date Issued
October 2017
Journal
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Publisher
National Academy of Sciences (U.S.)
Citation
Wu, Yang et al. “One- to Four-Year-Olds Connect Diverse Positive Emotional Vocalizations to Their Probable Causes.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 114, 45 (October 2017): 11896–11901 © 2017 The Author(s)
Version
Final published version
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 developing theory of mind, social cognition, and early relationships. Keywords: emotion understanding; emotional vocalizations; causal knowledge; infants preschoolers
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences
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Article is made available in accordance with the publisher's policy and may be subject to US copyright law. Please refer to the publisher's site for terms of use.
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1073/PNAS.1707715114
