Abstract (may include machine translation)
For a long time, researchers of infant cognition were concerned only with the person-centred interpretation of emotions towards objects. This approach represents emotion as a person's unique, person-specific relationship with an object. We hypothesize, however, that for referential expressions of emotion in communicative situations, an object-centered interpretation prevails, which relates the valence content of the expressed emotion to the object and treats it as a property of the object itself. In our series of experiments, we investigated 1) whether the object-centered approach works at the age of one and a half years and 2) what governs the selective use of object-centered and person-centered interpretation. We sought to answer our questions by operationalizing the Universality Hypothesis of Natural Pedagogical Theory (Gergely and Csibra, 2006; Csibra and Gergely, 2007a) Support was found for the hypothesis that at 18 months of age, the presence of ostensive-communicative traits elicits an object-oriented interpretation of referential emotion expressions, while their absence is accompanied by a person-oriented interpretation, which represents the emotion expression as a specific relation of the person to the object. Our series of experiments highlights the important developmental finding that at 18 months of age both object-centred and person-centred interpretation are operational, and that the two interpretive systems are used flexibly and selectively, depending on the presence of ostensive-communicative traits, in accordance with the ideas of Natural Pedagogy.
Translated title of the contribution | Learning from and about others |
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Original language | Hungarian |
Pages (from-to) | 237-254 |
Number of pages | 18 |
Journal | PSZICHOLÓGIA (MTA PSZICHOLÓGIAI INTÉZET) |
Volume | 29 |
Issue number | 3 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - 2009 |