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Understanding Social Display Rules: Using One Person’s Emotional Expressions to Infer the Desires of Another
Author(s) -
Wu Yang,
Schulz Laura E.
Publication year - 2019
Publication title -
child development
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 3.103
H-Index - 257
eISSN - 1467-8624
pISSN - 0009-3920
DOI - 10.1111/cdev.13346
Subject(s) - psychology , emotional expression , feeling , expression (computer science) , social psychology , social relation , facial expression , developmental psychology , communication , computer science , programming language
In social contexts, people’s emotional expressions may disguise their true feelings but still be revealing about the probable desires of their intended audience. This study investigates whether children can use emotional expressions in social contexts to recover the desires of the person observing, rather than displaying the emotion. Children (7.0–10.9 years, N = 211 across five experiments) saw a protagonist express one emotional expression in front of her social partner, and a different expression behind her partner’s back. Although the protagonist expressed contradictory emotions (and the partner expressed none), even 7‐year‐olds inferred both the protagonist’s and social partner’s desires. These results suggest that children can recover not only the desire of the person displaying emotion but also of the person observing it.