Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Humans use rich intuitive theories to explain other people’sbehavior. Previous work in lay psychology of behavior havetended to treat emotion as causing primarily unintentional be-havior (e.g., being sad causes one to cry), neglecting how peo-ple incorporate emotions into explanations of rational, inten-tional actions. Here, we provide preliminary explorations intointegrating emotions into a theory of folk psychology. Specif-ically, we show that in the lay theory, people are willing toendorse emotions as causes of intentional actions. Moreover,people readily attribute beliefs and desires as explanations foremotional expressions. This work provides a first step in elabo-rating people’s rich understanding of emotions as an importantcomponent of intuitive social cognition.