Young children show sensitivity to others’ emotions, discriminating between facial expressions and using them to help guide their behavior. Beyond providing information about how others are feeling, emotional expressions also can support inferences about the non-social world. Here, in four experiments, we investigated 18- to 28-month-olds’ ability to reason about physical objects using others’ emotional responses. We found that 24- to 26-month-old children successfully used an agent’s incongruent emotional responses (“Yay! Yuck!”) to infer that multiple hidden objects must be hidden in a box (Experiment 1). When two different agents produced these incongruent emotional responses, children did not infer the presence of multiple objects (Experiment 2), implicating early recognition that different people can have different emotions towards the same entity. Younger, 20-month-old children failed to use incongruent emotional responses to make inferences about hidden objects (Experiment 3), although they succeeded at using contrasting words (“A blick! A fep!”) in an otherwise identical task (Experiment 4). These results show that by 2 years of age, children can use the emotional responses produced by others around them to reason about hidden objects.

dcterms:identifier language:enIdentifier

https://osf.io/zm6p7

https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/zm6p7

dcterms:modified language:enDate Modified language:enDate modified

2022-05-03

dcterms:rightsHolder language:enRights Holder language:enLicense holder

Alexis S. Smith and Lisa Feigenson

dcterms:title language:enTitle

“Yay! Yuck!” Toddlers use incongruent emotions to reason about hidden objects

osf:keyword language:enTag

Infancy

Cognition

Developmental Psychology

Emotion

Toddlers

Individuation

Objects

Reasoning

dcterms:creator language:enCreator

://osf.io/uwr56

dcterms:Agent foaf:Person

Alexis S. Smith-Flores

more details...

dcterms:identifier language:enIdentifier: http://asmithflores.com
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6755-4986
https://osf.io/uwr56
foaf:name language:enName name: Alexis S. Smith-Flores
owl:sameAs sameAs: ://orcid.org/0000-0002-6755-4986

://osf.io/kzqu9

dcterms:Agent foaf:Person

Lisa Feigenson

more details...

dcterms:identifier language:enIdentifier: https://osf.io/kzqu9
foaf:name name language:enName: Lisa Feigenson

dcterms:publisher language:enProvider language:enPublisher

://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv

dcterms:Agent foaf:Organization

PsyArXiv

more details...

dcterms:identifier language:enIdentifier: https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv
https://psyarxiv.com/
foaf:name name language:enName: PsyArXiv

dcterms:rights language:enLicense language:enRights

://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode

CC-By Attribution 4.0 International

more details...

dcterms:identifier language:enIdentifier: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode
foaf:name language:enName name: CC-By Attribution 4.0 International

dcterms:subject language:enSubject

://api.osf.io/v2/subjects/5b4e7427c6983001430b6c7c