ArticleOpen mind : discoveries in cognitive science2023
Calculated Feelings: How Children Use Probability to Infer Emotions.
Article in Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 2 papers.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
2 citing papers in PubMed.
- The Predictive Utility of Past Success: Skill and Chance in Children's Theory of Performance.Developmental science · 2026Article
- Human Mentalizing as Rational Probabilistic Inference.Computational brain & behavior · 2025Article
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
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Abstract
Developing the ability to accurately infer others' emotions is crucial for children's cognitive development. Here, we offer a new theoretical perspective on how children develop this ability. We first review recent work showing that with age, children increasingly use probability to infer emotions. We discuss how these findings do not fit with prominent accounts of how children understand emotions, namely the script account and the theory of mind account. We then outline a theory of how probability allows children to infer others' emotions. Specifically, we suggest that probability provides children with information about how much weight to put on alternative outcomes, allowing them to infer emotions by comparing outcomes to counterfactual alternatives.
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