Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Reasoning about others’ emotions is a crucial component in so-cial cognition. Here, we tested the ability of preschool childrento reason about an agent’s emotions following an unexpectedoutcome. Importantly, we controlled for the actual payoff ofthe outcome, while varying the prior expectation of the agents.Five-year-olds, but not four-year-olds, were able to correctlyjudge an agent’s emotions following an unexpected outcome(Experiment 1). When explicitly provided with the agent’s ex-pectations, 4-year-olds were then also able to correctly judgethe agent’s feelings (Experiment 2). Our results suggest thatthe ability to reason about emotions given outcomes and priorexpectations develops by 4 years of age, while the ability tospontaneously infer such prior expectations develops soon af-ter. We discuss our results in light of the developmental litera-ture on emotion understanding and counterfactual reasoning.