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

How children understand aha-experiences in problem solving

Two studies explore how 4-8-year-old children develop an understanding of aha-experiences. Study 1 used a scenario approach to investigate children's understanding of the impact that having an insight has on affect. Children (N = 125) rated affect of a story character at different timepoints in problem-solving scenarios with and without aha-moments. Study 2 presented children (N = 167) with a story character displaying an aha response and two different stories of problem solving that may have led to the response. Results show that from age 4, children associate aha-experiences with positive affect. However, age differences were observed for triggers of aha-experiences. While 4-5-year-olds attributed aha-experiences to external triggers (the solution), 7-8-year-olds attributed them to mental triggers (a new insight). These findings indicate that children's understanding of aha-experiences develops over time, which aligns with theories of emotional development and theory of mind.

Computational modeling approaches to emotional development

Computational models of development have the potential to address a key challenge in emotional development research: investigating not only what changes across development but also how these changes come about. Drawing on connectionist and Bayesian methods, this review considers how computational modeling could augment the processes of theorizing and behavioral research to investigate causal processes underlying emotional development. As an illustrative example, we consider how different modeling approaches could help researchers evaluate different ideas about how children come to reason about others' emotions in increasingly sophisticated ways across development. This example is just a starting point; we propose that computational modeling could be an invaluable tool for exploring a variety of yet unresolved "how" questions in emotional development. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

This too shall pass, but when? Children's and adults' beliefs about the time duration of emotions, desires, and preferences

This research investigated children's and adults' understanding of the mind by assessing beliefs about the temporal features of mental states. English-speaking North American participants, varying in socioeconomic status (Study 1: N = 50 adults; Study 2: N = 112, 8- to 10-year-olds and adults; and Study 3: N = 116, 5- to 7-year-olds and adults; tested 2017-2022), estimated the duration (seconds to a lifetime) of emotions, desires (wanting), preferences (liking), and control trials (e.g., napping and having eyes). Participants were 56% female and 44% male; 32% Asian, 1% Black, 13% Hispanic/Latino, 38% White (non-Hispanic/Latino), and 16% multiracial or another race/ethnicity. Children and adults judged that preferences last longer than emotions and desires, with age differences in distinguishing specific emotions by duration (η p 2 s > .03 ). By 5 to 7 years, ideas about the mind include consideration of time.

Expecting the Unexpected: Infants Use Others' Surprise to Revise Their Own Expectations

Human infants show systematic responses to events that violate their expectations. Can they also revise these expectations based on others' expressions of surprise? Here we ask whether infants (N = 156, mean = 15.2 months, range: 12.0-18.0 months) can use an experimenter's expression of surprise to revise their own expectations about statistically probable vs. improbable events. An experimenter sampled a ball from a box of red and white balls and briefly displayed either a surprised or an unsurprised expression at the outcome before revealing it to the infant. Following an unsurprised expression, the results were consistent with prior work; infants looked longer at a statistically improbable outcome than a probable outcome. Following a surprised expression, however, this standard pattern disappeared or was even reversed. These results suggest that even before infants can observe the unexpected events themselves, they can use others' surprise to expect the unexpected. Starting early in life, human learners can leverage social information that signals others' prediction error to update their own predictions.

Calculated Feelings: How Children Use Probability to Infer Emotions

Developing the ability to accurately infer others' emotions is crucial for children's cognitive development. Here, we offer a new theoretical perspective on how children develop this ability. We first review recent work showing that with age, children increasingly use probability to infer emotions. We discuss how these findings do not fit with prominent accounts of how children understand emotions, namely the script account and the theory of mind account. We then outline a theory of how probability allows children to infer others' emotions. Specifically, we suggest that probability provides children with information about how much weight to put on alternative outcomes, allowing them to infer emotions by comparing outcomes to counterfactual alternatives.

What do I want to feel? Emotion goals in childhood, adolescence, and adulthood

Beliefs about emotion utility can influence context-sensitive emotion goals (i.e., desired emotional responses). Although key for emotion regulation, emotion goals have been overlooked in children and adolescents. In 2018-2019 results of Studies 1 and 2 showed that children (N = 192, M_age  = 8.65, 47% girls, 96% White) were less motivated by and found anger less useful in confrontation than adolescents (N = 192, M_age  = 12.96, 50% girls, 93% White) and adults (N = 195, M_age  = 29.82, 51% women, 96% White). The link between emotion goals and beliefs about emotion utility was weaker in children. In 2021, Study 3 (N = 60, 8-year-olds, 47% girls, 90% White) ruled out expectations as a possible explanation for the previous findings. Context-sensitive utility of emotions may be acquired during development.

Consistency among social groups in judging emotions across time

We measured judgments about emotions across time. In Study 1 (N = 254) and Study 2 (N = 162), LGBTQ-Latinx, straight-Latinx, LGBTQ-White, and straight-White emerging adults rated how they would feel if a perpetrator acted positively (P) or negatively (N) toward them in single, isolated events. In Study 2, participants also responded to a new emotions across time task where they judged how they would feel interacting with a hypothetical perpetrator across three timepoints: (1) an initial past event, (2) a recent past event, and (3) an uncertain future-oriented event (e.g., seeing the perpetrator again). Participants further predicted their thoughts and decisions in the uncertain future-oriented event. The past emotional events appeared in various sequences (PP, NN, NP, PN). Results indicated that participants judged events as emotionally unambiguous when occurring first in a sequence or in isolation (positive events feel better than negative events). In contrast, initial events shaped emotional reactions to subsequent events: Participants responded more intensely to episodes that were preceded by events of the same valence. In addition to this augmenting effect, initial negative events were especially sticky: Participants rated a positive event following a negative event as feeling less good than when a positive event appeared first or in isolation, but they judged negative events to feel equivalently bad regardless of order. When evaluating future-oriented affective states, participants drew from the prior experiences and prioritized the recent past (more positive emotions, thoughts, and decisions for PP > NP > PN > NN). Effects replicated across all social groups. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Dichotomous thinking about social groups: Learning about one group can activate opposite beliefs about another group

Across three studies (N = 607), we examined people's use of a dichotomizing heuristic-the inference that characteristics belonging to one group do not apply to another group-when making judgments about novel social groups. Participants learned information about one group (e.g., "Zuttles like apples"), and then made inferences about another group (e.g., "Do Twiggums like apples or hate apples?"). Study 1 acted as a proof of concept: Eight-year-olds and adults (but not 5-year-olds) assumed that the two groups would have opposite characteristics. Learning about the group as a generic whole versus as specific individuals boosted the use of the heuristic. Study 2 and Study 3 (sample sizes, methods, and analyses pre-registered), examined whether the presence or absence of several factors affected the activation and scope of the dichotomizing heuristic in adults. Whereas learning about or treating the groups as separate was necessary for activating dichotomous thinking, intergroup conflict and featuring only two (versus many) groups was not required. Moreover, the heuristic occurred when participants made both binary and scaled decisions. Once triggered, adults applied this cognitive shortcut widely-not only to benign (e.g., liking apples) and novel characteristics (e.g., liking modies), but also to evaluative traits signaling the morals or virtues of a social group (e.g., meanness or intelligence). Adults did not, however, extend the heuristic to the edges of improbability: They failed to dichotomize when doing so would attribute highly unusual preferences (e.g., disliking having fun). Taken together, these studies indicate the presence of a dichotomizing heuristic with broad implications for how people make social group inferences.

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).

Children's and Adults' Beliefs about the Stability of Traits from Infancy to Adulthood: Contributions of Age and Executive Function

We examined developmental differences and sources of variability in trait reasoning. Four- to 10-year-olds and adults (N=198) rated how mean or nice "medium-mean" and "medium-nice" babies, kids, and teenagers were earlier in their lifetime and would be at older ages. Participants expected nice-labeled characters to be nice throughout their lives (participant age effects were null). In contrast, we documented age-related differences in judgments about meanness. With increasing participant age, individuals expected that meanness present in infancy, childhood, and adolescence would persist into adulthood. We discovered a curvilinear pattern in assessments of whether meanness originates during infancy: Four- to 5-year-olds and adults expected mean-labeled kids and teenagers to have been nicer as babies than did 6- to 10-year-olds. Controlling for age and working memory, participants with better inhibitory control more frequently expected mean-labeled individuals to remain mean across the lifespan, but inhibitory control was unrelated to judgments about nice-labeled individuals.

Pain in the Past and Pleasure in the Future: The Development of Past-Future Preferences for Hedonic Goods

It seems self-evident that people prefer painful experiences to be in the past and pleasurable experiences to lie in the future. Indeed, it has been claimed that, for hedonic goods, this preference is absolute (Sullivan, 2018). Yet very little is known about the extent to which people demonstrate explicit preferences regarding the temporal location of hedonic experiences, about the developmental trajectory of such preferences, and about whether such preferences are impervious to differences in the quantity of envisaged past and future pain or pleasure. We find consistent evidence that, all else being equal, adults and children aged 7 and over prefer pleasure to lie in the future and pain in the past and believe that other people will, too. They also predict that other people will be happier when pleasure is in the future rather than the past but sadder when pain is in the future rather than the past. Younger children have the same temporal preferences as adults for their own painful experiences, but they prefer their pleasure to lie in the past and do not predict that others' levels of happiness or sadness vary dependent on whether experiences lie in the past or the future. However, from the age of 7, temporal preferences were typically abandoned at the earliest opportunity when the quantity of past pain or pleasure was greater than the quantity located in the future. Past-future preferences for hedonic goods emerge early developmentally but are surprisingly flexible.

Young Children Use Probability to Infer Happiness and the Quality of Outcomes

Happiness with an outcome often depends on whether better or worse outcomes were initially more likely. In five experiments, we found that young children ( N = 620, Experiments 1–4) and adults ( N = 254, Experiment 5) used probability to infer emotions and assess outcome quality. In Experiments 1 and 2, 5- and 6-year-olds (but not 4-year-olds) inferred that an agent would be less happy with an outcome if a better outcome were initially more likely. In Experiment 3, 4- to 6-year-olds used probability to assess quality. These findings suggest a developmental lag between 4-year-olds’ assessments of quality and happiness. We replicated this lag in Experiment 4. In Experiment 5, adults used probability to assess both quality and happiness. We suggest that children and adults may use probability to establish a standard against which actual outcomes are compared. Doing so might allow them to make probability-based inferences of happiness without drawing on counterfactual reasoning.

Optimism and Wishful Thinking: Consistency Across Populations in Children's Expectations for the Future

Two studies investigated 5- to 10-year-olds' (N = 194) positivity bias when forecasting the future. Children from two geographic locations (mostly Caucasian, higher income college town; mostly African American, lower income urban community) completed a future expectations task (FET). For multiple scenarios, children predicted whether a positive versus negative (optimism items) or a positive versus extraordinary positive (wishful thinking items) outcome would occur, including its likelihood. In both samples, optimism and wishful thinking decreased with age, optimism was higher than wishful thinking, children did not show a comparative self-optimism bias, and individual differences in the FET optimism score correlated with self-reported dispositional optimism and hope. Exploratory comparisons revealed between-sample equivalence in responses to all measures, except for less tempered wishful thinking in the urban community.

Does the Past Shape Anticipation for the Future?

Abstract. A positive association between executive function (a set of higher order, self-regulatory cognitive skills) and theory of mind (beliefs about mental states) has been well documented during early childhood. As investigations extend beyond false belief understanding (that the mind can misrepresent reality), there is growing interest in examining contributions of executive function to more advanced aspects of theory of mind in older age groups. To add to this literature, we showed 4- to 10-year-olds and adults (N = 274) scenarios in which a perpetrator acted positively (P) and/or negatively (N) toward a focal character on two separate days (PP, NN, NP, and PN). Participants inferred focal characters’ future-oriented mental states upon seeing perpetrators for the third time. Children and adults also completed executive function measures (working memory and inhibitory control). Both age and executive function independently predicted higher life history theory of mind: Recognition that prior life experiences influence how individuals think, feel, and make decisions about the future.