Thinking about the Past: Early Knowledge about Links between Prior Experience, Thinking, and Emotion

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/66219/1/1467-8624.00267.pd

The development of young children's understanding of the causes of emotions: Experimental and natural language studies.

Humans are a social species; spending the majority of our lives talking with, interacting with, and thinking about other people. This social enterprise is predicated upon two central pieces of knowledge: knowledge about emotions, and an awareness of people's inner mental lives, their minds. This dissertation investigates the development of these social understandings by examining young children's knowledge about the influence of the mind on emotions in both experimental tasks and everyday conversation. Two experimental studies investigated the situations where 3- to 7-year-olds and adults will connect a person's current feelings to the past, especially to thinking about a prior experience. Study 1 presented stories featuring a character who felt sad, mad, or happy after a particular event, and who many days later felt that same emotion upon seeing a cue related to that prior incident. For some story endings, the character's emotion upon seeing the cue was congruent with the current situation, whereas for others, the emotion mismatched the present circumstances. Participants were asked to explain the cause of the character's current feelings. Study 2 extended these methods by examining the influence of person-person fit (whether two people's emotions were the same or different), and access to past history information. Results showed several significant achievements with increasing age. Yet, children as young as 3 produced strikingly cogent explanations about historical and mental influences on current negative emotions. These findings reveal important features of children's early understanding of mind, emotion, and life history, including a prominent focus on negative rather than positive emotions. The significance of negative emotion to children's early understanding of mind, emotion, and life history was corroborated by a third, natural language study. Longitudinal analyses of everyday parent-child conversations between the ages of 2 and 5 revealed that the frequency of talk about past emotional experiences, causal explanations for emotions, and connections between emotions and mental states was significantly higher when children and parents were talking about negative in comparison to positive feelings. Combining experimental with conversational approaches across these studies proves especially informative for illuminating the early development of young children's social knowledge.Ph.D.Developmental psychologyPsychologyUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/131698/2/9929871.pd

Try to Look on the Bright Side: Children and Adults Can (Sometimes) Override Their Tendency to Prioritize Negative Faces

We used eye tracking to examine 4- to 10-year-olds' and adults' (N = 173) visual attention to negative (anger, fear, sadness, disgust) and neutral faces when paired with happy faces in 2 experimental conditions: free-viewing ("look at the faces") and directed ("look only at the happy faces"). Regardless of instruction, all age groups more often looked first to negative versus positive faces (no age differences), suggesting that initial orienting is driven by bottom-up processes. In contrast, biases in more sustained attention-last looks and looking duration-varied by age and could be modified by top-down instruction. On the free-viewing task, all age groups exhibited a negativity bias which attenuated with age and remained stable across trials. When told to look only at happy faces (directed task), all age groups shifted to a positivity bias, with linear age-related improvements. This ability to implement the "look only at the happy faces" instruction, however, fatigued over time, with the decrement stronger for children. Controlling for age, individual differences in executive function (working memory and inhibitory control) had no relation to the free-viewing task; however, these variables explained substantial variance on the directed task, with children and adults higher in executive function showing better skill at looking last and looking longer at happy faces. Greater anxiety predicted more first looks to angry faces on the directed task. These findings advance theory and research on normative development and individual differences in the bias to prioritize negative information, including contributions of bottom-up salience and top-down control. (PsycINFO Database Recor

How do thoughts, emotions, and decisions align? A new way to examine theory of mind during middle childhood and beyond

The current study examined 4- to 10-year-olds' and adults' (N=280) tendency to connect people's thoughts, emotions, and decisions into valence-matched mental state triads (thought valence=emotion valence=decision valence; e.g., anticipate something bad+feel worried+avoid) and valence-matched mental state dyads (thought-emotion, thought-decision, and emotion-decision). Participants heard vignettes about focal characters who re-encountered individuals who had previously harmed them twice, helped them twice, or both harmed and helped them. Baseline trials involved no past experience. Children and adults predicted the focal characters' thoughts (anticipate something good or bad), emotions (feel happy or worried), and decisions (go near or stay away). Results showed significant increases between 4 and 10years of age in the formation of valence-matched mental state triads and dyads, with thoughts and emotions most often aligned by valence. We also documented age-related improvement in awareness that uncertain situations elicit less valence-consistent mental states than more certain situations, with females expecting weaker coherence among characters' thoughts, emotions, and decisions than males. Controlling for age and sex, individuals with stronger executive function (working memory and inhibitory control) predicted more valence-aligned mental states. These findings add to the emerging literature on development and individual differences in children's reasoning about mental states and emotions during middle childhood and beyond

This Is Not What I Expected: The Impact of Prior Expectations on Children’s and Adults’ Preferences and Emotions

We examined the influence of prior expectations on 4- to 10-year-olds' and adults' preferences and emotions following an undesirable outcome (N = 205; 49% female, 51% male; 6% Asian, 1% Black, 13% Hispanic/Latino [non-White], 57% White, 18% multiracial, and 5% another race/ethnicity; 75% with a college-educated parent). Participants attempted to win a chance game with multiple prizes; the worst prize being a pencil. The game was rigged so that half of the participants lost, and the other half won. Regardless of the game outcome, everyone received a pencil. For winning participants (high-expectation condition), the pencil was worse than the prize they expected; whereas for losing participants (low-expectation condition), the pencil was better than the "nothing" they expected. Participants rated how much they liked and felt about the pencil preoutcome, postoutcome, when imagining having held an alternative prior expectation, and after learning that everyone received a pencil. Results showed that 6- to 10-year-olds and adults with low (vs. high) expectations liked the pencil more, with emotion ratings trending in the same direction. Prior expectations did not influence younger children's affective experiences. More participants with low (vs. high) expectations also expressed a positive outlook about the pencil, which increased with age and correlated with higher postoutcome emotions. More adults than children explained emotions as caused by thoughts, and only adults consistently reasoned that their preferences and emotions would have differed had they held alternative prior expectations. Once knowing that everyone received a pencil, 6- to 10-year-olds and adults liked the pencil more and felt better. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved)

Is There a Downside to Anticipating the Upside? Children's and Adults’ Reasoning About How Prior Expectations Shape Future Emotions

Four- to 10-year-olds and adults (N = 205) responded to vignettes involving three individuals with different expectations (high, low, and no) for a future event. Participants judged characters' pre-outcome emotions, as well as predicted and explained their feelings following three events (positive, attenuated, and negative). Although adults rated high-expectation characters more negatively than low-expectation characters after all outcomes, children shared this intuition starting at 6-7 years for negative outcomes, 8-10 years for attenuated, and never for positive. Comparison to baseline (no expectation) indicated that understanding the costs of high expectations emerges first and remains more robust across age than recognition that low expectations carry benefits. Explanation analyses further clarified this developing awareness about the relation between thoughts and emotions over time

“These Pretzels Are Making Me Thirsty”: Older Children and Adults Struggle With Induced‐State Episodic Foresight

We explored children's and adults' ability to disengage from current physiological states when forecasting future desires. In Study 1, 8- to 13-year-olds and adults (N = 104) ate pretzels (to induce thirst) and then predicted and explained what they would want tomorrow, pretzels or water. Demonstrating life-span continuity, approximately 70% of participants, regardless of age, chose water and referenced current thirst as their rationale. Individual differences in working memory and undergraduate grade point average were positively related to performance on the pretzel task. In Study 2, we obtained baseline preferences from adults (N = 35) and confirmed that, prior to consuming pretzels, people do not anticipate wanting water more than pretzels the next day. Together, these findings indicate that both children and adults are tethered to the present when forecasting their future desires