Children's developing understanding of the normativity of emotions

Abstract

Research on children’s developing norm understanding has mainly focused on practical norms (e.g., game or moral rules), with few recent extensions, such as to the normativity of epistemic states. However, normativity is not confined to practical or epistemic norms. Affective states have a social-normative dimension, too, in that we can apply normative criteria to them. For instance, we seem to be entitled to express certain emotions under certain circumstances, evaluate the expression of emotions in different contexts as morally good or reprehensible, or predict others’ expression of emotions based on unspoken commitments. Research on children’s emotion understanding has centered around the descriptive comprehension of affective states and the regulation of emotion expressions through display rules. However, it is not known whether children understand affective normativity. The objective of the present dissertation was to investigate children’s developing understanding of the normativity of emotions. Study 1 investigated whether 3- and 5-year-olds would understand and defend the entitlement of others to express an emotion (against invalid critique) if they have good (collectively accepted) justification to do so. The findings suggest that already young children understand affective entitlements and that this understanding matures during preschool years. Study 2 investigated 5- to 6-year-olds’ moral evaluations of others’ expressions of happiness about a third person’s failure to achieve various goals in different contexts. The findings suggest that preschoolers show a distinct understanding of the moral dimension of schadenfreude and consider reasons which may justify the expression of schadenfreude in some contexts. Finally, Study 3 focused on the prediction of emotions in morally relevant resource sharing contexts. We investigated 3- and 5-year-olds’ and adults’ predictions of a potential beneficiary’s emotional state (happy vs. sad) in two contexts in which an individual obtains all resources, either after successfully collaborating with the potential beneficiary or after solving a task competitively. The findings suggest that older preschoolers use their understanding of implicit commitments and entitlements arising in situations of interdependence when predicting others’ emotions. Taken together, the three studies of the present dissertation suggest that the normative understanding of emotions develops during preschool years. The present dissertation opens a new avenue for investigating the ontogeny of normativity and builds a bridge to the research literature on children's emotion understanding. However, it is the first systematic investigation of children's understanding of the normative dimension of emotions. Thus, further research is needed to provide a more comprehensive picture of children’s developing understanding of the normativity of emotions.