Is It Better Not to Know?: Adults' and Children's Understanding of How Uncertainty Affects Emotion Over Time
Abstract
How would you predict someone's feelings over time while awaiting an important decision? Would they feel better not knowing compared to receiving unfavourable news? Here we investigated adults' and 5–8-year-olds' (n = 35 / age group) ability to infer how others' emotions change over time in certain and uncertain contexts. Participants saw stories about protagonists receiving positive, negative, or uncertain news and rated their feelings immediately, and after one, two, and four weeks. Following certain outcomes, adults judged strong initial reactions that attenuated over time, whereas following uncertain outcomes, they judged reactions as initially mild but increasingly negative over time. Children showed a developmental progression toward this pattern, with 5.5-year-olds beginning to exhibit adult-like responses for certain outcomes and 6-year-olds for uncertain outcomes. These findings suggest that adults and children construe emotions as dynamic states shaped by what is known and unknown, with this capacity emerging around ages 5–6.