Yang Wu

University of Toronto | U of T · Department of Psychology at Scarborough

We investigated people's ability to infer others’ mental states from their emotional reactions, manipulating whether agents wanted, expected, and caused an outcome. Participants recovered agents’ desires throughout. When the agent observed, but did not cause the outcome, participants’ ability to recover the agent's beliefs depended on the evidence...

Significance We find that very young children make fine-grained distinctions among positive emotional expressions and connect diverse emotional vocalizations to their probable eliciting causes. Moreover, when infants see emotional reactions that are improbable, given observed causes, they actively search for hidden causes. The results suggest that...

Emotional expressions are abundant in children’s lives. What role do they play in children’s causal inference and exploration? This study investigates whether preschool‐aged children use others’ emotional expressions to infer the presence of unknown causal functions and guide their exploration accordingly. Children (age: 3.0–4.9; N = 112, the Unite...

The majority of research on infants’ and children’s understanding of emotional expressions has focused on their abilities to use emotional expressions to infer how other people feel. However, an emerging body of work suggests that emotional expressions support rich, powerful inferences not just about emotional states but also about other unobserved...

The acquisition of emotion words is critical to children’s socio-emotional development. Previous studies report that children acquire emotion words gradually during ages 3–5 and beyond. The majority of this work, however, has used demanding tasks for young children (e.g., asking children to label emotion-related facial configurations) and has predo...

Evaluating whether someone's behavior is praiseworthy or blameworthy is a fundamental human trait. A seminal study by Hamlin and colleagues in 2007 suggested that the ability to form social evaluations based on third-party interactions emerges within the first year of life: infants preferred a character who helped, over hindered, another who tried...

In recent years, psychological researchers have been heavily criticizedfor generalizing broadly from narrow samples, a concern that inter-sects with questions about the validity, reproducibility, replicability,and generalizability of the psychological literature. One issue is thelimited reporting of participants’ identities, backgrounds, and livede...

Evaluating whether someone's behavior is praiseworthy or blameworthy is a fundamental human trait. A seminal study by Hamlin and colleagues in 2007 suggested that the ability to form social evaluations based on third-party interactions emerges within the first year of life: infants preferred a character who helped, over hindered, another who tried...

Emotion understanding goes beyond recognizing emotional displays—it also involves reasoning about how people’s emotions are affected by their subjective evaluations of what they experienced. Inspired by work in adults on cognitive appraisal theories of emotion, we propose a framework that can guide systematic investigations of how an adult-like, so...

In recent years, psychological researchers have been heavily criticized for generalizing broadly from narrow samples, a concern that intersects with questions about the validity, reproducibility, replicability, and generalizability of the psychological literature. One issue is the limited reporting of participants’ identities, backgrounds, and live...

Human infants show systematic responses to events that violate their expectations. Can they also revise these expectations based on others’ expressions of surprise? Here we ask whether infants (N = 156, mean = 15.2 months, range: 12.0–18.0 months) can use an experimenter’s expression of surprise to revise their own expectations about statistically...

Culture is a key determinant of children’s development both in its own right and as a measure of generalizability of developmental phenomena. Studying the role of culture in development requires information about participants’ demographic backgrounds. However, both reporting and treatment of demographic data are limited and inconsistent in child de...

Emotion understanding goes beyond recognizing emotional displays—it also involves reasoning about how people’s emotions are affected by their subjective evaluations of what they experienced. Inspired by work in adults on cognitive appraisal theories of emotion, we propose a framework that can guide systematic investigations of how an adult-like, so...

In many cultures, adults use simple, slow, and dynamic speech when talking to infants ("parentese," or infant-directed speech) and make expansive, repetitive movements when demonstrating object properties to infants ("motionese," or infant-directed actions). These modifications enhance infants' attention to and learning about language and goal-dire...

Culture is a key determinant of children’s development both in its own right and for understanding the generalizability of developmental phenomena. Studying the role of culture in development requires information about participants’ demographic backgrounds. However, both reporting and treatment of demographic data are limited and inconsistent in ch...

Online data collection methods are expanding the ease and access of developmental research for researchers and participants alike. While its popularity among developmental scientists has soared during the COVID-19 pandemic, its potential goes beyond just a means for safe, socially distanced data collection. In particular, advances in video conferen...

In this study, we investigate whether emotional expressions provide cues to knowledge sufficient for predicting others’ behavior based on their true and false beliefs. We adapted the classic Sally-Anne task (Baron-Cohen, Leslie, & Frith, 1985) such that children (N = 62, mean: 5.58 years, range: 4.05-6.98 years) were not told whether Sally saw Anne...

How do we learn about who is good at what? Others’ competence is unobservable and often must be inferred from observable evidence, such as failures and successes. However, even the same performance can indicate different levels of competence depending on the context, and objective evaluation metrics are not always available. Building on recent adva...

The majority of research on infants’ and children’s understanding of emotional expressions has focused on their abilities to use emotional expressions to infer how other people feel. However, an emerging body of work suggests that emotional expressions support rich, powerful inferences not just about emotional states but also about other unobserved...

How do we learn about who is good at what? Others' competence is unobservable and often must be inferred from observable evidence, such as failures and successes. However, even the same performance can indicate different levels of competence depending on the context, and objective evaluation metrics are not always available. Building on recent adva...

The materials used in Wu & Schulz (2019, Child Development): Understanding social display rules: Using one person's emotional expressions to infer the desires of another.

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–...

Emotional expressions are typically transient; while we may react emotionally to a new event, we are unlikely to respond with the same emotion once the event becomes familiar. Here we look at whether toddlers understand the relationship between people's epistemic states and their emotional responses. Younger (12-17-month) and older (18-24-month) to...

In this study, we investigate whether emotional expressions provide cues to knowledge sufficient for predicting others' behavior based on their true and false beliefs. We adapted the classic Sally-Anne task (Baron-Cohen, Leslie, & Frith, 1985) such that children (N = 62, mean: 5.58 years, range: 4.05-6.98 years) were not told whether Sally saw Anne...

Fig. S1. Prototypical facial expressions of the six basic emotions. Fig. S2. The structure of the tasks. Fig. S3. The likelihood of the movie stimuli, people's mental state inferences and model predictions in Experiment 3 Supplemental. Table S1. The creation and assessment of the photograph stimuli. (See Supporting Information Text 2.1.1 for det...

We investigate children's ability to use social display rules to infer agents' otherwise under-determined desires. In Experiment 1, seven-to-ten-year-olds saw a protagonist express one emotional reaction to an event in front of her social partner (the Social Context), and a different expression behind her social partner's back (the Nonsocial Contex...

Researchers have long been interested in the relation between emotion understanding and theory of mind. This study investigates a cue to mental states that has rarely been investigated: the dynamics of valenced emotional expressions. When the valence of a character's facial expression was stable between an expected and observed outcome, children (N...

Children posit unobserved causes when events appear to occur spontaneously (e.g., Gelman & Gottfried, 1996). What about when events appear to occur probabilistically? Here toddlers (M = 20.1 months) saw arbitrary causal relationships (Cause A generated Effect A; Cause B generated Effect B) in a fixed, alternating order. The relationships were then...

Previous research suggests that the ability to make fine-grained distinctions among emotions emerges gradually over development. However, such studies have looked primarily at children's first-person responses to emotional expressions or at whether children can match emotion labels to emotional expressions. Relatively little work has looked at chil...

Theory of mind research has looked at how learners infer an agent's unobservable mental states from observable actions. However, such research has tended to neglect another observable source of data: the agent's reactions to events. In particular, the agent's facial reactions might provide important information about her mental states that are othe...

This study looked at whether toddlers posit the existence of unobserved causes when events occur probabilistically. Older (18-24 months) and younger (12-17 months) children were introduced to novel events. An experimenter pressed a red handle and a lollipop emerged from a box; she then pressed a green handle and a cake emerged. These events were re...