Emotion as Information in Early Social Learning. (December 2021)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Wu, Yang; Schulz, Laura E.; Frank, Michael C.; Gweon, Hyowon
• Is Part Of: Current directions in psychological science. Volume 30:Number 6(2021)
• Page Start: 468
• Page End: 475
• Publication Date: 2021-12
• Subjects: social cognition -- affective cognition -- emotional expressions -- theory of mind -- Bayesian models; Psychology -- Periodicals; 150
• DOI: 10.1177/09637214211040779
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0963-7214

Abstract

The majority of research on infants' and children's understanding of emotional expressions has focused on their abilities to use emotional expressions to infer how other people feel. However, an emerging body of work suggests that emotional expressions support rich, powerful inferences not just about emotional states but also about other unobserved states, such as hidden events in the physical world and mental states of other people (e.g., beliefs and desires). Here we argue that infants and children harness others' emotional expressions as a source of information for learning about the physical and social world broadly. This "emotion as information" framework integrates affective, developmental, and computational cognitive sciences, extending the scope of signals that count as "information" in early learning.