Journal
CHILD DEVELOPMENT
Volume 89, Issue 2, Pages 649-662Publisher
WILEY
DOI: 10.1111/cdev.12759
Keywords
-
Categories
Funding
- Center for Brains, Minds and Machines (CBMM)
- NSF STC Award [CCF-1231216]
Ask authors/readers for more resources
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=5.0years) 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.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available