Integrating Expectations and Outcomes: Preschoolers' Developing Ability to Reason About Others' Emotions
Integrating Expectations and Outcomes: Preschoolers' Developing Ability to Reason About Others' Emotions
复制标题
DOI：
10.1037/dev0000749
复制
发表时间：
2019-08-01
影响因子：
4
通讯作者：
Gweon, Hyowon
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Asaba, Mika;Ong, Desmond C.;Gweon, Hyowon
人们的情感体验不仅取决于实际发生的事情，还取决于他们认为会发生的事情。然而，这些对未来结果的预期并不总是明确地传达出来。因此，在语境中推断他人的期望并理解这些期望如何影响他人情绪的能力是我们社交智力的一个重要方面。先前的工作表明，对预期如何调节情绪反应的抽象理解可能要到7到8岁才会出现。使用一种新的范式，利用直觉物理学来产生上下文中可信的期望，我们提出了学龄前儿童基于期望的情绪推理的证据。假设两个保龄球手经历了相同的最终结果(6个球中的3个)，我们改变了他们的球的轨迹，使得一个人最初预计会击中所有的球(高期望)，而另一个人则预计不会击中(低期望)。在实验一中，4岁和5岁儿童都适当地调整了角色相对于初始情绪的幸福感评分，无论是向上(低期望)还是向下(高期望)；然而，只有5岁的儿童做出了足够稳健的调整，表现为低期望角色的最终评分高于高期望角色。在实验2-3中，我们复制了这些结果，并表明5岁的儿童能够可靠地区分角色的情绪，即使他们的期望必须从上下文中推断出来。一项内部荟萃分析显示，这三个实验的效果是稳健和一致的。总之，这些发现为基于期望的情绪推理提供了最早的证据，并表明自发产生和考虑他人期望的能力在学龄前几年继续发展。
People's emotional experiences depend not only on what actually happened, but also on what they thought would happen. However, these expectations about future outcomes are not always communicated explicitly. Thus, the ability to infer others' expectations in context and understand how these expectations influence others' emotions is an important aspect of our social intelligence. Prior work suggests that an abstract understanding of how expectations modulate emotional responses may not emerge until 7 to 8 years of age. Using a novel paradigm that capitalizes on intuitive physics to generate contextually plausible expectations, we present evidence for expectation-based emotion inference in preschool-aged children. Given two bowlers who experienced identical final outcomes (hitting 3 of 6 pins), we varied the trajectory of their balls such that one would initially expect to hit all pins (high-expectation), while the other would expect to hit none (low-expectation). In Experiment 1, both 4- and 5-year-olds appropriately adjusted characters' happiness ratings upward (low-expectation) or downward (high-expectation) relative to their initial emotions; however, only 5-year-olds made adjustments robust enough to manifest as higher final ratings for the low-expectation than the high-expectation character. In Experiments 2-3, we replicate these results and show that 5-year-olds reliably differentiate the characters' emotions even when their expectations must be inferred from context. An internal meta-analysis revealed a robust and consistent effect across the three experiments. Together, these findings provide the earliest evidence for expectation-based emotion reasoning and suggest that the ability to spontaneously generate and consider others' expectations continues to develop during preschool years.