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Abstract

In three experiments, we examined whether young children use emotional reactions to infer relations, focusing on their inferences of ownership relations. In Experiment 1, children aged three to five years (N = 108) inferred ownership from emotional reactions to a positive event, in which a broken object became fixed. In Experiment 2, children aged three to six years (N = 138) inferred ownership from emotional reactions to a negative event in which an object became broken. Finally, in Experiment 3, children aged four and five (N = 68) again used sad emotional reactions to a negative event to infer ownership, but they did not use these reactions to infer who likes an object. These findings reveal that children use emotional reactions to infer one kind of relation between people and objects.

6. Developmental findings

In all experiments, children at all ages showed sensitivity to emotional reactions—they responded differently depending on whether the character reacted with happiness or sadness. Nonetheless, we also observed development: Whereas children aged three often chose between the characters at chance, this never happened by the time children were aged five. What might explain this age-related improvement in children’s ability to infer ownership from emotional reactions? One possible explanation is that younger children do not understand the causal connections between ownership and emotions. For instance, if 3-year-olds were unaware that breaking a person’s property will make them sad, then they would lack the knowledge necessary to infer that a person who becomes sad when an object breaks is likely to be the owner. However, this cannot explain younger children’s performance because even toddlers grasp such causal relations between ownership and emotions (Pesowski & Friedman, 2015). A more plausible explanation is that younger children’s difficulty might arise because they are especially prone to viewing emotional reactions as stemming from the fulfillment and frustration of desires (Wellman & Banerjee, 1991; Wellman & Woolley, 1990). When younger children see that a girl becomes sad when an object breaks, they may quickly conclude that she wanted to play with it, and is upset because this desire can no longer be fulfilled. Drawing this conclusion could prevent children from considering other possible explanations for emotional reactions, and might therefore prevent them from realizing that these reactions could also stem from ownership. Older children, in contrast, may consider multiple causes when trying to understand emotional reactions, and this could make the connection between ownership and emotional reactions more apparent for them.