Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Emotional expressions are typically transient; while we mayreact emotionally to a new event, we are unlikely to respondwith the same emotion once the event becomes familiar. Herewe look at whether toddlers understand the relationshipbetween people’s epistemic states and their emotionalresponses. Younger (12-17-month) and older (18-24-month)toddlers were familiarized with a movie in which an observerwas knowledgeable or ignorant about a recurring event. On thetest trial, the observer saw the event and either remained neutralor changed to a valenced emotional reaction (positive ornegative). We predicted that the change from a neutral to avalenced expression would be more surprising if the event wasfamiliar to the observer than if the event was novel. We foundan interaction between epistemic state and emotion for olderbut not younger toddlers. These results suggest that before agetwo, children begin to understand the transient nature ofemotional reactions and their dependence on people’sepistemic states.