How young children use manifest emotions and dominance cues to understand social rules: a registered report

Given the complexity of human social life, it is astonishing to observe how quickly children adapt to their social environment. To be accepted by the other members, it is crucial to understand and follow the rules and norms shared by the group. How and from whom do young children learn these social rules? In the experiments, based on the crucial role of affective social learning and dominance hierarchies in simple rule understanding, we showed 15-to-23-month-olds and 3-to-5-year-old children videos where the agents' body size and affective cues were manipulated. In the dominant rule-maker condition, when a smaller protagonist puts an object in one location, a bigger agent reacts with a positive reaction; on the contrary, when the smaller protagonist puts an object in another location, the bigger agent displays a negative reaction. In the subordinate rule-maker condition, the roles are shifted but the agents differ. Toddlers expect the protagonist to follow the rules (based on anticipatory looks), independent of the dominant status of the rule-making agent. Three-to-five-year-old pre-schoolers overall perform at the chance level but expect the protagonist to disobey a rule in the first trial, and obey the rule in the second trial if the rule-maker is dominant.

Emotional Invalidation and Relationship Quality: A Mediational Model Through a Social Learning Lens

While we know childhood experiences are influential on a child's later socioemotional awareness and behavior, we are still searching for specific mechanisms that influence the transferability of childhood experiences and adult relationship functioning. In this study, we seek to further this area of investigation by examining the interpretation of ambiguous social interactions and perceptions of emotional invalidation as potential mediators of the relationship between perceptions of childhood emotional invalidation and current relationship quality. Participants completed online measures of hostile intent attributions, perceptions of childhood emotional invalidation, and current relationship quality with a significant other. They read emotionally provocative interpersonal scenarios and then reported likely emotionally invalidating reactions from their significant other to measure current perceptions of emotional invalidation. Results supported our hypotheses that perceptions of current emotional invalidation in a close, personal relationship would mediate the relationship between perceptions of childhood maternal emotional invalidation and both current relationship support and relationship conflict. Furthermore, the strength of this mediational pathway outweighed the influence of a more general hostile attribution bias. These findings have implications for prevention and intervention strategies designed to enhance interpersonal functioning.

Social threat processing in adults and children: Faster orienting to, but shorter dwell time on, angry faces during visual search

Attention to emotional signals conveyed by others is critical for gleaning information about potential social partners and the larger social context. Children appear to detect social threats (e.g., angry faces) faster than non-threatening social signals (e.g., neutral faces). However, methods that rely on behavioral responses alone are limited in identifying different attentional processes involved in threat detection or responding. To address this question, we used a visual search paradigm to assess behavioral (i.e., reaction time to select a target image) and attentional (i.e., eye-tracking fixations, saccadic shifts, and dwell time) responses in children (ages 7-10 years old, N = 42) and adults (ages 18-23 years old, N = 46). In doing so, we compared behavioral responding and attentional detection and engagement with threatening (i.e., angry and fearful faces) and non-threatening (i.e., happy faces) social signals. Overall, children and adults were faster to detect social threats (i.e., angry faces), but spent a smaller proportion of time dwelling on them and had slower behavioral responses. Findings underscore the importance of combining different measures to parse differences between processing versus responding to social signals across development. RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS: Children and adults are slower to select angry faces when measured by time to mouse-click but faster to detect angry faces when measured by time to first eye fixation. The use of eye-tracking addresses some limitations of prior visual search tasks with children that rely on behavioral responses alone. Results suggest shorter time to first fixation, but subsequently, shorter duration of dwell on social threat in children and adults.

Expecting the Unexpected: Infants Use Others' Surprise to Revise Their Own Expectations

Human infants show systematic responses to events that violate their expectations. Can they also revise these expectations based on others' expressions of surprise? Here we ask whether infants (N = 156, mean = 15.2 months, range: 12.0-18.0 months) can use an experimenter's expression of surprise to revise their own expectations about statistically probable vs. improbable events. An experimenter sampled a ball from a box of red and white balls and briefly displayed either a surprised or an unsurprised expression at the outcome before revealing it to the infant. Following an unsurprised expression, the results were consistent with prior work; infants looked longer at a statistically improbable outcome than a probable outcome. Following a surprised expression, however, this standard pattern disappeared or was even reversed. These results suggest that even before infants can observe the unexpected events themselves, they can use others' surprise to expect the unexpected. Starting early in life, human learners can leverage social information that signals others' prediction error to update their own predictions.

Interparental Positivity Spillover Theory: How Parents' Positive Relational Interactions Influence Children

Interparental interactions have an important influence on child well-being and development. Yet prior theory and research have primarily focused on interparental conflict as contributing to child maladjustment, which leaves out the critical question of how interparental positive interactions-such as expressed gratitude, capitalization, and shared laughter-may benefit child growth and development. In this article, we integrate theory and research in family, relationship, and affective science to propose a new framework for understanding how the heretofore underexamined positive interparental interactions influence children: interparental positivity spillover theory (IPST). IPST proposes that, distinct from the influence of conflict, interparental positive interactions spill over into children's experiences in the form of their (a) experience of positive emotions, (b) beneficially altered perceptions of their parents, and (c) emulation of their parents' positive interpersonal behaviors. This spillover is theorized to promote beneficial cognitive, behavioral, social, and physiological outcomes in children in the short term (i.e., immediately after a specific episode of interparental positivity, or on a given day) as well as cumulatively across time. As a framework, IPST generates a host of novel and testable predictions to guide future research, all of which have important implications for the mental health, well-being, and positive development of children and families.

How cues to social categorization impact children's inferences about social categories

Social categorization involves two crucial processes: First, children seek properties on which they can categorize individuals, i.e., they learn to form social categories; then children make inferences based on social category membership and might develop affective responses toward social categories. Over the last decade, a growing number of research in developmental psychology started to use novel social categories to investigate how children learn and reason about social categories. To date, three types of cues have been put forward as means to form social categories, namely linguistic, visual, and behavioral cues. Based on social category membership, children draw inferences about the shared properties of social category members and about how social category members ought to behave and interact with each other. With additional input, children might apply essentialist beliefs to social categories and develop affective responses toward social categories. This article aims to provide key insights on the development of stereotypes and intergroup biases by reviewing recent works that investigated how children learn to form novel social categories and the kind of inferences they make about these novel social categories.

Emotional Faces Facilitate Statistical Learning

Detecting regularities and extracting patterns is a vital skill to organize complex information in our environments. Statistical learning, a process where we detect regularities by attending to relationships between cues in our environment, contributes to knowledge acquisition across myriad domains. However, less is known about how emotional cues-specifically facial configurations of emotion-influence statistical learning. Here, we tested two pre-registered aims to advance knowledge about emotional signals and statistical learning: (1) we examined statistical learning in the context of emotional compared to non-emotional information, and (2) we assessed how emotional congruency (i.e., whether facial stimuli conveyed the same, or different emotions) influenced regularity extraction. We demonstrated statistical learning in the context of emotional signals. Further, we showed that statistical learning occurs more efficiently in the context of emotional faces. We also established that congruent cues benefited an online measure of statistical learning, but had varied effects when statistical learning was assessed via post-exposure recognition test. The results shed light on how affective signals influence well-studied cognitive skills and address a knowledge gap about how cue congruency impacts statistical learning, including how emotional cues might guide predictions in our social world.

Supplementary Information

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s42761-022-00130-9.

The Relationship between Crawling and Emotion Discrimination in 9- to 10-Month-Old Infants

The present study examined whether infants’ crawling experience is related to their sensitivity to fearful emotional expressions. Twenty-nine 9- to 10-month-old infants were tested in a preferential looking task, in which they were presented with different pairs of animated faces on a screen displaying a 100% happy facial expression and morphed facial expressions containing varying degrees of fear and happiness. Regardless of their crawling experiences, all infants looked longer at more fearful faces. Additionally, infants with at least 6 weeks of crawling experience needed lower levels of fearfulness in the morphs in order to detect a change from a happy to a fearful face compared to those with less crawling experience. Thus, the crawling experience seems to increase infants’ sensitivity to fearfulness in faces.

What non-Humans Can Teach us about the Role of Emotions in Cultural Evolution

The role emotions play in the dynamics of cultural phenomena has long been neglected. The collection of articles recently published in Emotion Review provides an important first step into this necessary endeavor. In this commentary, we discuss this contribution by emphasizing the role epistemological parsimony should play in the future of this research agenda. The cultural behavior and emotions of chimpanzees is taken as reference.

Pathways from maternal shyness to adolescent social anxiety

BACKGROUND

Social anxiety is amongst the most prevalent adolescent mental health problems; however, it is often unrecognized due to its comorbidity with other anxiety problems such as generalized anxiety. Thus, understanding the unique developmental pathways to social anxiety is critical for improving its prevention. We examined the pathway from maternal shyness, when children were 4 years old, to adolescents' social anxiety at age 15 through social wariness at age 7. We hypothesized that childhood social wariness would mediate the association between maternal shyness and social anxiety in adolescence.

METHODS

Participants (N = 291; 54% female) were followed from early childhood to adolescence. Mothers reported on their own shyness when children were 4 years old. Social wariness toward unfamiliar peers was observed in the laboratory at ages 4 and 7. Adolescent social anxiety and generalized anxiety were assessed via self-report, parent-report, and clinical diagnoses at age 15.

RESULTS

Maternal shyness was positively associated with adolescent social anxiety but not generalized anxiety at age 15. Higher levels of maternal shyness at age 4 predicted greater social wariness at age 7, which in turn predicted greater social anxiety but not generalized anxiety at age 15. Social wariness at age 7 partially mediated the association between maternal shyness and adolescent social anxiety.

CONCLUSIONS

This study identifies a unique developmental pathway from maternal shyness to adolescent social anxiety. Findings suggest that childhood social wariness connects maternal shyness to adolescent social anxiety.

The role of epistemic emotions in learning from others

Phillips et al. discuss whether knowledge or beliefs are more basic representations of others' minds, focusing on the primary function of knowledge representation: learning from others. We discuss links between emotion and "knowledge versus belief," and particularly the role of emotions in learning from others in mechanisms such as "social epistemic emotions" and "affective social learning."

Emotion as Information in Early Social Learning

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.

Carry-over effects of tool functionality and previous unsuccessfulness increase overimitation in children

Children 'overimitate' causally irrelevant actions in experiments where both irrelevant and relevant actions involve a single common tool. This study design may make it harder for children to recognize the irrelevant actions, as the perceived functionality of the tool during the demonstration of the relevant action may be carried over to the irrelevant action, potentially increasing overimitation. Moreover, little is known how overimitation is affected by the demonstrator's expressed emotions and the child's prior success with the task. Here, 131 nine- to ten-year-old French and German children first engaged in a tool-based task, being successful or unsuccessful, and then watched an adult demonstrating the solution involving one irrelevant and one relevant action before smiling or remaining neutral. These actions were performed with the same tool or with two separate tools, testing potential carry-over effects of the functionality of the relevant action on the irrelevant action. We show that overimitation was higher when the same tool was used for both actions and when children were previously unsuccessful, but was not affected by the demonstrator's displayed emotion. Our results suggest that future overimitation research should account for the number of tools used in a demonstration and participants' previous task experience.

Engaging English Language Learners as Cultural Informants in the Design of a Social Robot for Education

Background: There are 4.9 million English Language Learners (ELLs) in the United States. Only 2% of educators are trained to support these vulnerable students. Social robots show promise for language acquisition and may provide valuable support for students, especially as we return to needing smaller classes due to COVID-19. While cultural responsiveness increases gains for ELLs, little is known about the design of culturally responsive child–robot interactions. Method: Therefore, using a participatory design approach, we conducted an exploratory study with 24 Spanish-speaking ELLs at a Pacific Northwest elementary school. As cultural informants, students participated in a 15-min, robot-led, small group story discussion followed by a post-interaction feedback session. We then conducted reflexive critiques with six ELL teachers who reviewed the group interactions to provide further interpretation on design feature possibilities and potential interactions with the robot. Results: Students found the social robot engaging, but many were hesitant to converse with the robot. During post-interaction dialogue students articulated the specific ways in which the social robot appearance and behavior could be modified to help them feel more comfortable. Teachers postulated that the social robot could be designed to engage students in peer-to-peer conversations. Teachers also recognized the ELLs verbosity when discussing their experiences with the robot and suggested such interactions could stimulate responsiveness from students. Conclusion: Cultural responsiveness is a key component to successful education in ELLs. However, integrating appropriate, cultural responsiveness into robot interactions may require participants as cultural informants to ensure the robot behaviors and interactions are situated in that educational community. Utilizing a participatory approach to engage ELLs in design decisions for social robots is a promising way to gather culturally responsive requirements to inform successful child–robot interactions.

Preschool-Aged Children Jointly Consider Others' Emotional Expressions and Prior Knowledge to Decide When to Explore

Emotional expressions are abundant in children's lives. What role do they play in children's causal inference and exploration? This study investigates whether preschool-aged children use others' emotional expressions to infer the presence of unknown causal functions and guide their exploration accordingly. Children (age: 3.0-4.9; N = 112, the United States) learned about one salient causal function of a novel toy and then saw an adult play with it. Children explored the toy more when the adult expressed surprise than when she expressed happiness (Experiment 1), but only when the adult already knew about the toy's salient function (Experiment 2). These results suggest that children consider others' knowledge and selectively interpret others' surprise as vicarious prediction error to guide their own exploration.

Heart to Heart: A Relation-Alignment Approach to Emotion’s Social Effects

This article integrates arguments and evidence from my 2019 monograph Heart to Heart: How Your Emotions Affect Other People. The central claim is that emotions operate as processes of relation alignment that produce convergence, complementarity, or conflict between two or more people’s orientations to objects. In some cases, relation alignment involves strategic presentation of emotional information for the purpose of regulating other people’s behaviour. In other cases, emotions consolidate from socially distributed reciprocal adjustments of cues, signals, and emerging actions without any explicit registration or communication of emotional meaning by parties to the exchange. The relation-alignment approach provides a fresh perspective on issues relating to emotion’s interpersonal, intragroup, and organizational functions and clarifies how emotions are regulated for social purposes.

Affective Social Learning serves as a quick and flexible complement to TTOM

Although we applaud the general aims of the target article, we argue that Affective Social Learning completes TTOM by pointing out how emotions can provide another route to acquiring culture, a route which may be quicker, more flexible, and even closer to an axiological definition of culture (less about what is, and more about what should be) than TTOM itself.

Digital Emotion Contagion

People spend considerable time on digital media, and are thus often exposed to expressions of emotion by other people. This exposure can lead their own emotion expressions becoming more similar to those of others, a process we refer to as 'digital emotion contagion'. This article reviews the growing literature on digital emotion contagion. After defining emotion contagion, we suggest that one unique feature of digital emotion contagion is that it is mediated by digital media platforms that are motivated to upregulate user emotions. We then turn to measurement, and consider the challenges of demonstrating that digital emotion contagion has occurred, and how these challenges have been addressed. Finally, we call for a greater focus on understanding when emotion contagion effects are likely to be strong versus weak or nonexistent.

Intragroup Emotion Convergence: Beyond Contagion and Social Appraisal

Mimicry-based emotion contagion and social appraisal currently provide the most popular explanations for interpersonal emotional convergence. However, neither process fully accounts for intragroup effects involving dynamic calibration of people’s orientations during communal activities. When group members are engaged in shared tasks, they simultaneously attend to the same unfolding events and arrive at mutually entrained movement patterns that facilitate emotional coordination. Entrainment may be further cultivated by interaction rituals involving rhythmic music that sets the pace for collective singing, dancing, or marching. These rituals also provide an emotionally meaningful focus for group activities and sometimes specifically encourage the experience of intense embodied states. Intragroup emotion convergence thus depends on interlocking processes of reciprocated and context-attuned orientational calibration and group-based social appraisal.

The keys to learning for university students with disabilities: Motivation, emotion and faculty-student relationships

The affective-emotional dimension may constitute a key element in teaching and learning processes. It is linked to relationship between faculty and students and may help foster students with disabilities’ motivation to learn and remain at university. This is the approach adopted in this article, which aims to fill a gap detected in the literature, since very little attention has hitherto been paid to motivation, emotion and the importance of faculty-student relationships in the learning processes of students with disabilities. In this study, 119 faculty members from 10 Spanish universities who engage in inclusive practices in all areas of knowledge recounted, in response to questions asked during a semi-structured interview, how they motivated and related to their students. The conclusion reached is that students with disabilities are more motivated than their fellow classmates, meaning that very few extra actions need to be taken to engage them in the learning process. Nevertheless, participants reported having a knowledge of strategies based on motivation and emotion and using them to develop a sense of belonging among students, thus fostering their learning.

Comment: Respecifying Emotional Influence

To what extent does the level of overlap between social appraisal and social referencing depend upon the particular definitions adopted when following different research agendas? I argue that processes of both kinds fall under the more inclusive heading of relation alignment. Relation alignment also covers emotional influence that is not mediated by the communication of appraisal. Similarities, interdependences, and distinctions between these various relation-alignment processes warrant further investigation.

Author Reply: Clarifying the Importance of Ostensive Communication in Life-Long, Affective Social Learning

In our attempt to distinguish two types of social appraisal, we (a) clarify the “knower–learner” relationship in affective social learning, (b) underline the important role that affective observation may have in acculturation processes, and (c) highlight some potential consequences for the recent debate on the benefits of child-directed (ostensive) learning.

Social Referencing and Social Appraisal: Commentary on the Clément and Dukes (2016) and Walle et al. (2016) articles

We comment on two articles on social referencing and social appraisal. We agree with Walle, Reschke, and Knothe’s (2017) argument that at one level of analysis, social referencing and social appraisal are functionally equivalent: In both cases, another person’s emotional expression is observed and this expression informs the observer’s own emotional reactions and behavior. However, we also agree with Clément and Dukes’s (2017) view that (at another level of analysis), there is an important difference between social referencing and social appraisal. We also argue that they are likely to occur at different stages of emotion process.

Putting Social Referencing and Social Appraisal Back Together Again

We are encouraged by the attention paid to fundamental aspects relating to the interpersonal functions of emotion. In continuing this discussion, we consider two arguments used to distinguish social referencing and social appraisal, namely the role of ostension and the absence of prior appraisals of the individual. We contend that neither element is essential to social referencing.

Social Referencing: Defining and Delineating a Basic Process of Emotion

Social referencing informs and regulates one’s relation with the environment as a function of the perceived appraisals of social partners. Increased emphasis on relational and social contexts in the study of emotion makes this interpersonal process particularly relevant to the field. However, theoretical conceptualizations and empirical operationalizations of social referencing are disjointed across domains and populations of study. This article seeks to unite and refine the study of this construct by providing a clear and comprehensive definition of social referencing. Our perspective presents social referencing and social appraisal as coterminous processes and emphasizes the importance of a relational and interpersonal approach to the study of emotion. We conclude by outlining possible lines of research on this construct.

Comment: Reframing the Conceptual Diversity of Social Appraisal and Social Referencing

The comment discusses the common ground and differences of the contribution of Walle, Reschke, and Knothe (2017), as well as that of Clément and Dukes (2017) in their efforts to conceptually connect an important concept from infancy research, namely that of social referencing, with an important one from emotion research on adults, that of social appraisal. The distinction between social referencing and affective observation under the generic concept of social appraisal could be worthwhile for differentiating implicit and explicit impacts of a model’s behavior on a child’s emotional development.