Transfer of Social Learning Across Contexts: Exploring Infants' Attribution of Trait-Like Emotions to Adults
Corresponding Author
Betty M. Repacholi
Department of Psychology and Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences (I-LABS), University of Washington
Correspondence should be sent to Betty M. Repacholi, Department of Psychology, University of Washington, UW Box 351525, Seattle, WA 98195-7988. E-mail: [email protected]Search for more papers by this authorAndrew N. Meltzoff
Department of Psychology and Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences (I-LABS), University of Washington
Search for more papers by this authorTheresa M. Hennings
Department of Psychology and Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences (I-LABS), University of Washington
Search for more papers by this authorAshley L. Ruba
Department of Psychology and Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences (I-LABS), University of Washington
Search for more papers by this authorCorresponding Author
Betty M. Repacholi
Department of Psychology and Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences (I-LABS), University of Washington
Correspondence should be sent to Betty M. Repacholi, Department of Psychology, University of Washington, UW Box 351525, Seattle, WA 98195-7988. E-mail: [email protected]Search for more papers by this authorAndrew N. Meltzoff
Department of Psychology and Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences (I-LABS), University of Washington
Search for more papers by this authorTheresa M. Hennings
Department of Psychology and Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences (I-LABS), University of Washington
Search for more papers by this authorAshley L. Ruba
Department of Psychology and Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences (I-LABS), University of Washington
Search for more papers by this authorAbstract
We explored whether 15-month-olds expect another person's emotional disposition to be stable across social situations. In three observation trials, infants watched two adults interact. Half the infants saw one of the adults (“Emoter”) respond negatively to the other adult's actions (Anger group); half saw the Emoter respond neutrally to the same actions (Neutral group). After a change in social context, infants participated in novel tasks with the (now-neutral) Emoter. Infants in the Anger group were significantly more likely to relinquish desirable toys to the Emoter. We hypothesize that, in the initial observation trials, infants learned that the Emoter was “anger-prone” and expected her to get angry again in a new social situation. Consequently, infants readily gave the Emoter what she wanted. These findings reveal three key features of infants' affective cognition: (1) infants track adults' emotional history across encounters; (2) infants learn from observing how people interact with others and use this to form expectations about how these people will treat them; and (3) more speculatively, infants use appeasement to cope with social threat. We hypothesize that infants form “trait-like” attributions about people's emotional dispositions and use this to formulate adaptive responses to adults in novel social contexts.
Supporting Information
| Filename | Description |
|---|---|
| infa12136-sup-0001-DataS1.docxWord document, 13.4 KB | Data. S1. Exploratory correlational analyses. |
Please note: The publisher is not responsible for the content or functionality of any supporting information supplied by the authors. Any queries (other than missing content) should be directed to the corresponding author for the article.
References
- Ambady, N., & Rosenthal, R. (1992). Thin slices of expressive behavior as predictors of interpersonal consequences: A meta-analysis. Psychological Bulletin, 111, 256–274.
- Caplan, M., Vespo, J., Pederson, J., & Hay, D. F. (1991). Conflict and its resolution in small groups of one- and two-year-olds. Child Development, 62, 1513–1524.
- Carlson, S. M., & Moses, L. J. (2001). Individual differences in inhibitory control and children's theory of mind. Child Development, 72, 1032–1053.
- Chow, V., Poulin-Dubois, D., & Lewis, J. (2008). To see or not to see: Infants prefer to follow the gaze of a reliable looker. Developmental Science, 11, 761–770.
- Dahl, A., Schuck, R. K., & Campos, J. J. (2013). Do young toddlers act on their social preferences? Developmental Psychology, 49, 1964–1970.
- Dodge, K. A. (2006). Translational science in action: Hostile attributional style and the development of aggressive behavior problems. Development and Psychopathology, 18, 791–814.
- Dunfield, K., Kuhlmeier, V. A., O'Connell, L., & Kelley, E. (2011). Examining the diversity of prosocial behavior: Helping, sharing, and comforting in infancy. Infancy, 16, 227–247.
- Ekman, P., & Friesen, W. V. (1975). Unmasking the face: A guide to recognizing emotions from facial clues. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.
- Fenson, L., Dale, P. S., Reznick, J. S., Thal, D., Bates, E., Hartung, J. P., …, Reilly, J. S. (1993). The Macarthur communicative development inventories: user's guide and technical manual. Baltimore, MD: Paul H. Brookes Publishing Co.
- Floor, P., & Akhtar, N. (2006). Can 18-month-old infants learn words by listening in on conversations? Infancy, 9, 327–339.
- Gampe, A., Liebal, K., & Tomasello, M. (2012). Eighteen-month-olds learn novel words through overhearing. First Language, 32, 385–397.
- Grossman, T. (2010). The development of emotion perception in face and voice during infancy. Restorative Neurology and Neuroscience, 28, 219–236.
- Hamlin, J. K., Wynn, K., & Bloom, P. (2007). Social evaluation by preverbal infants. Nature, 450, 557–559.
- Hamlin, J. K., Wynn, K., Bloom, P., & Mahajan, N. (2011). How infants and toddlers react to antisocial others. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 108, 19931–19936.
- Hanna, E., & Meltzoff, A. N. (1993). Peer imitation in toddlers in laboratory, home and day-care contexts: Implications for social learning and memory. Developmental Psychology, 29, 701–710.
- Hareli, S., & Hess, U. (2010). What emotional reactions can tell us about the nature of others: An appraisal perspective on person perception. Cognition and Emotion, 24, 128–140.
- Hareli, S., Shomrat, N., & Hess, U. (2009). Emotional versus neutral expressions and perceptions of social dominance and submissiveness. Emotion, 9, 378–384.
- Hertenstein, M. J., & Campos, J. J. (2004). The retention effects of an adult's emotional displays on infant behavior. Child Development, 75, 595–613.
- Hirshberg, L. M., & Svejda, M. (1990). When infants look to their parents: I. Infants’ social referencing of mothers compared to fathers. Child Development, 61, 1175–1186.
- Izard, C. E. (1979). The maximally discriminative facial movement coding system (MAX). Newark. DE: University of Delaware, Instructional Resources Center.
- Jones, E. E., & Harris, V. A. (1967). The attribution of attitudes. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 3, 1–24.
- Keltner, D., Young, R. C., & Buswell, B. N. (1997). Appeasement in human emotion, social practice, and personality. Aggressive Behavior, 23, 359–374.
- Klein, P. J., & Meltzoff, A. N. (1999). Long-term memory, forgetting, and deferred imitation in 12-month-old infants. Developmental Science, 2, 102–113.
- Klinnert, M. D., Emde, R. N., Butterfield, P., & Campos, J. J. (1986). Social referencing: The infant's use of emotional signals from a friendly adult with mother present. Developmental Psychology, 22, 427–432.
- Knutson, B. (1996). Facial expressions of emotion influence interpersonal trait inferences. Journal of Nonverbal Behavior, 20, 165–182.
- Learmonth, A. E., Lamberth, R., & Rovee-Collier, C. (2004). Generalization of deferred imitation during the first year of life. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 88, 297–318.
- Liu, D., Gelman, S. A., & Wellman, H. M. (2007). Components of young children's trait understanding: Behavior-to-trait inferences and trait-to-behavior predictions. Child Development, 78, 1543–1558.
- Mascaro, O., & Csibra, G. (2012). Representation of stable social dominance relations by human infants. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 109, 6862–6867.
- Meltzoff, A. N. (1985). Immediate and deferred imitation in fourteen- and twenty-four-month-old infants. Child Development, 56, 62–72.
- Meltzoff, A. N. (1988). Infant imitation after a 1-week delay: Long-term memory for novel acts and multiple stimuli. Developmental Psychology, 24, 470–476.
- Mumme, D. L., & Fernald, A. (2003). The infant as onlooker: Learning from emotional reactions observed in a television scenario. Child Development, 74, 221–237.
- Quinn, P. C., Anzures, G., Izard, C. E., Lee, K., Pascalis, O., Slater, A. M., & Tanaka, J. W. (2011). Looking across domains to understand infant representation of emotion. Emotion Review, 3, 197–206.
- Repacholi, B. M., & Meltzoff, A. N. (2007). Emotional eavesdropping: Infants selectively respond to indirect emotional signals. Child Development, 78, 503–521.
- Repacholi, B. M., Meltzoff, A. N., & Olsen, B. (2008). Infants’ understanding of the link between visual perception and emotion: “If she can't see me doing it, she won't get angry”. Developmental Psychology, 44, 561–574.
- Repacholi, B. M., Meltzoff, A. N., Rowe, H., & Toub, T. S. (2014). Infant, control thyself: Infants’ integration of multiple social cues to regulate their imitative behavior. Cognitive Development, 32, 46–57.
- Repacholi, B. M., Meltzoff, A. N., Toub, T. S., & Ruba, A. L. (2016). Infants’ generalizations about other people's emotions: Foundations for trait-like attributions. Developmental Psychology, Advance online publication doi: 10.1037/dev0000097.
- de Rosnay, M., Cooper, P. J., Tsigaras, N., & Murray, L. (2006). Transmission of social anxiety from mother to infant: An experimental study using a social referencing paradigm. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 44, 1165–1175.
- Ross, L., & Nisbett, R. E. (1991). The person and the situation: Perspectives of social psychology. New York, NY: Mcgraw-Hill.
- Seiver, E., Gopnik, A., & Goodman, N. D. (2013). Did she jump because she was the big sister or because the trampoline was safe? Causal inference and the development of social attribution. Child Development, 84, 443–454.
- Sommerville, J. A., & Crane, C. C. (2009). Ten-month-old infants use prior information to identify an actor's goal. Developmental Science, 12, 314–325.
- Sommerville, J. A., Schmidt, M. F. H., Yun, J.-e., & Burns, M. (2013). The development of fairness expectations and prosocial behavior in the second year of life. Infancy, 18, 40–66.
- Sullivan, M. W., & Lewis, M. (2003). Emotional expressions of young infants and children: A practitioner's primer. Infants and Young Children, 16, 120–142.
- Thomsen, L., Frankenhuis, W. E., Ingold-Smith, M., & Carey, S. (2011). Big and mighty: Preverbal infants mentally represent social dominance. Science, 331, 477–480.
- de Waal, F. B. M. (1982). Chimpanzee politics: Power and sex among apes. New York, NY: Harper & Row.
- Warneken, F., & Tomasello, M. (2007). Helping and cooperation at 14 months of age. Infancy, 11, 271–294.
