Table 1.
Questions Generated by a Predictive Processing Account of Emotional Development
| The Role of Parents and Caregivers |
| 1) Do parents and caregivers consistently create emotional instances for infants and young children by labeling according to when they (the parents) perceive emotion, and if so, when does this begin? |
| 2) Do parents and caregivers label only the most stereotypic instances of an emotion category at first, or do they label the highly variable instances that exist in everyday life? |
| Emotions vs. Other Types of Categories |
| 3) How well can young learners use emotion labels to acquire emotion categories, whose instances are temporally dynamic and require event segmentation when compared with objects? |
| 4) Do infants learn abstract emotion categories much like how they learn superordinate categories? |
| Timelines for Development |
| 5) Do infants perceive emotional events as multimodal to begin with? If so, do emotion words help infants detect or discriminate the modal features of an emotional event, such as an expressive facial movement or vocalization? Or do words help bind multimodal features together? |
| 6) When do inferences about goals and intentions become part of emotional events? Do words facilitate this? |
| Cultural Relativity |
| 7) Are emotion concepts that are not labeled with a single, commonly-accepted word transmitted from generation to generation with as high of fidelity as labeled emotion concepts? |
| 8) Are goals and intentions important for emotion concepts around the world, or is there cultural variation in this regard (given that people who live in non-western cultural contexts may be more likely to assume that other peoples’ minds are not accessible to them, and therefore may be less likely to engage in mental inference, a phenomenon called opacity of mind; Danziger, 2006; Robbins & Rumsey, 2008)? |
| Building the Internal Model |
| 9) Is word-guided emotion learning driven by statistical learning or reinforcement learning? |
| 10) Do emotion concepts allow infants and young children to perceive emotions in others and experience emotion themselves? |
| New Methods of Investigation |
| 11) Can ERP studies be used to investigate the role of words in pre-verbal emotion concept development, for example by comparing infant responses to variable, multimodal stimuli that are either labeled with the same emotion word or not? |
| 12) Can computational models successfully predict the development and probabilistic construction of emotion concepts in infants and young children, and what is the relative role that language, social bonding, and other factors play? |