Skip to main content

Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript.

  • Perspective
  • Published:

Joint reasoning about social affiliation and emotion

Nature Reviews Psychology volume 2, pages 374–383 (2023)Cite this article

Subjects

Abstract

Social relationships powerfully influence human emotions. Understanding how relationships influence emotions enables people to make important social inferences, such as what will delight or upset someone and which people are allies or enemies. In this Perspective, we bring together research that has separately addressed reasoning about emotion and reasoning about affiliation. People expect others’ emotions to reflect their appraisals of a situation relative to what they value. People also expect others to value the welfare of friends, family and group members. This common connection to value can support joint reasoning across these two domains. An intuitive theory representing the connection between affiliation and emotion can enable people to use relationships to better predict others’ emotions, including empathy and counter-empathy, and to infer relationships from observed emotional responses. We also review evidence that human infants can make inferences about emotion and affiliation separately, and we propose future work to explore the development of joint reasoning across these domains.

This is a preview of subscription content, access via your institution

Access options

Buy this article

  • Purchase on Springer Link
  • Instant access to full article PDF
Buy now

Prices may be subject to local taxes which are calculated during checkout

Fig. 1: Representing social affiliation.
Fig. 2: A model for joint reasoning about emotion and affiliation.
Fig. 3: Development of affiliation reasoning and emotion understanding.

Similar content being viewed by others

References

  1. Carey, S. The Origin of Concepts (Oxford Univ. Press, 2009).

  2. Gerstenberg, T. & Tenenbaum, J. B. in The Oxford Handbook of Causal Reasoning (ed. Waldmann, M. R.) 515–547 (Oxford Univ. Press, 2017).

  3. Gopnik, A. & Wellman, H. M. Why the child’s theory of mind really is a theory. Mind Lang. 7, 145–171 (1992).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  4. Wellman, H. M., Phillips, A. T. & Rodriguez, T. Young children’s understanding of perception, desire, and emotion. Child Dev. 71, 895–912 (2000).

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  5. Ullman, T. D. & Tenenbaum, J. B. Bayesian models of conceptual development: learning as building models of the world. Annu. Rev. Dev. Psychol. 2, 533–558 (2020).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  6. Dennett, D. C. The Intentional Stance (MIT Press, 1987).

  7. Saxe, R. & Houlihan, S. D. Formalizing emotion concepts within a Bayesian model of theory of mind. Curr. Opin. Psychol. 17, 15–21 (2017).

    Article  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  8. Baker, C. L., Jara-Ettinger, J., Saxe, R. & Tenenbaum, J. B. Rational quantitative attribution of beliefs, desires and percepts in human mentalizing. Nat. Hum. Behav. 1, 1–10 (2017).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  9. Smaldino, P. E. in Computational Social Psychology (eds Vallacher, R. R., Read, S. J. & Nowak, A.) 311–331 (Routledge, 2017).

  10. Guest, O. & Martin, A. E. How computational modeling can force theory building in psychological science. Perspect. Psychol. Sci. 16, 789–802 (2021).

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  11. Chater, N., Tenenbaum, J. B. & Yuille, A. Probabilistic models of cognition: conceptual foundations. Trends Cogn. Sci. 10, 287–291 (2006).

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  12. Moors, A. On the causal role of appraisal in emotion. Emot. Rev. 5, 132–140 (2013).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  13. Scherer, K. R. in Handbook of Cognition and Emotion (eds Dalgleish, T. & Power, M. J.) 637–663 (John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 1999).

  14. Oatley, K. & Johnson-Laird, P. N. Cognitive approaches to emotions. Trends Cogn. Sci. 18, 134–140 (2014).

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  15. Siemer, M., Mauss, I. & Gross, J. J. Same situation–different emotions: how appraisals shape our emotions. Emotion 7, 592–600 (2007).

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  16. Wellman, H. M. & Woolley, J. D. From simple desires to ordinary beliefs: the early development of everyday psychology. Cognition 35, 245–275 (1990).

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  17. Wu, Y., Muentener, P. & Schulz, L. E. One- to four-year-olds connect diverse positive emotional vocalizations to their probable causes. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 114, 11896–11901 (2017).

    Article  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  18. Gendron, M., Roberson, D., van der Vyver, J. M. & Barrett, L. F. Perceptions of emotion from facial expressions are not culturally universal: evidence from a remote culture. Emotion 14, 251–262 (2014).

    Article  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  19. Mesquita, B. & Frijda, N. H. Cultural variations in emotions: a review. Psychol. Bull. 112, 179–204 (1992).

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  20. Barrett, L. F., Mesquita, B., Ochsner, K. N. & Gross, J. J. The experience of emotion. Annu. Rev. Psychol. 58, 373–403 (2007).

    Article  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  21. Kuppens, P., Van Mechelen, I., Smits, D. J. M., De Boeck, P. & Ceulemans, E. Individual differences in patterns of appraisal and anger experience. Cogn. Emot. 21, 689–713 (2007).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  22. van Dijk, W. W. Not having what you want versus having what you do not want: the impact of type of negative outcome on the experience of disappointment and related emotions. Cogn. Emot. 13, 129–148 (1999).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  23. Smith, C. A. & Kirby, L. D. Putting appraisal in context: toward a relational model of appraisal and emotion. Cogn. Emot. 23, 1352–1372 (2009).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  24. Wellman, H. M. & Banerjee, M. Mind and emotion: children’s understanding of the emotional consequences of beliefs and desires. Br. J. Dev. Psychol. 9, 191–214 (1991).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  25. Wu, Y., Haque, J. A. & Schulz, L. E. in Proc. 40th Annu. Meeting Cognitive Science Society 1193–1198 https://cognitivesciencesociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/cogsci18_proceedings.pdf (2018).

  26. Barrett, L. F. The theory of constructed emotion: an active inference account of interoception and categorization. Soc. Cogn. Affect. Neurosci. 12, 1–23 (2017).

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  27. Peelen, M. V., Atkinson, A. P. & Vuilleumier, P. Supramodal representations of perceived emotions in the human brain. J. Neurosci. 30, 10127–10134 (2010).

    Article  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  28. Skerry, A. E. & Saxe, R. Neural representations of emotion are organized around abstract event features. Curr. Biol. 25, 1945–1954 (2015).

    Article  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  29. Skerry, A. E. & Saxe, R. A common neural code for perceived and inferred emotion. J. Neurosci. 34, 15997–16008 (2014).

    Article  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  30. Ong, D. C., Zaki, J. & Goodman, N. D. Computational models of emotion inference in theory of mind: a review and roadmap. Top. Cogn. Sci. 11, 338–357 (2019).

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  31. Anzellotti, S., Houlihan, S. D., Liburd, S. Jr & Saxe, R. Leveraging facial expressions and contextual information to investigate opaque representations of emotions. Emotion 21, 96–107 (2021).

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  32. Wu, Y., Baker, C. L., Tenenbaum, J. B. & Schulz, L. E. Rational inference of beliefs and desires from emotional expressions. Cogn. Sci. 42, 850–884 (2018).

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  33. Ong, D. C., Zaki, J. & Goodman, N. D. Affective cognition: exploring lay theories of emotion. Cognition 143, 141–162 (2015).

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  34. Houlihan, S. D., Ong, D., Cusimano, M. & Saxe, R. in Proc. Annu. Meeting Cognitive Science Society 854–861 https://cognitivesciencesociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/CogSci2022Proceedings-1.pdf (2022).

  35. Teo, D. W. H., Ang, Z. Y. & Ong, D. in Proc. Annu. Meeting Cognitive Science Society 2200–2206 https://cognitivesciencesociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/CogSci2022Proceedings-1.pdf (2022).

  36. Jara-Ettinger, J., Gweon, H., Schulz, L. E. & Tenenbaum, J. B. The naïve utility calculus: computational principles underlying commonsense psychology. Trends Cogn. Sci. 20, 589–604 (2016).

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  37. Gergely, G. & Csibra, G. Teleological reasoning in infancy: the naϊve theory of rational action. Trends Cogn. Sci. 7, 287–292 (2003).

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  38. Luo, Y. & Baillargeon, R. Do 12.5-month-old infants consider what objects others can see when interpreting their actions? Cognition 105, 489–512 (2007).

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  39. Ullman, T. D. et al. in Proc. 22nd Int. Conf. Neural Information Processing Systems (eds Bengio, Y., Schuurmans, D., Lafferty, J., Williams, C. & Culotta, A.) 1874–1882 (Curran Associates, Inc., 2009).

  40. Hamlin, J. K., Ullman, T., Tenenbaum, J., Goodman, N. & Baker, C. The mentalistic basis of core social cognition: experiments in preverbal infants and a computational model. Dev. Sci. 16, 209–226 (2013).

    Article  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  41. Powell, L. J. Adopted utility calculus: origins of a concept of social affiliation. Perspect. Psychol. Sci. 17, 1215–1233 (2022).

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  42. Cosmides, L. & Tooby, J. Evolutionary psychology: new perspectives on cognition and motivation. Annu. Rev. Psychol. 64, 201–229 (2013).

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  43. Tooby, J. & Cosmides, L. in Handbook of Emotions 3rd edn (eds Lewis, M., Haviland-Jones, J. M. & Barrett, L. F.) 114–137 (Guilford Press, 2008).

  44. Delton, A. W. A Psychological Calculus for Welfare Tradeoffs (Univ. California, 2010).

  45. Howard, R. M., Spokes, A. C., Mehr, S. & Krasnow, M. Welfare tradeoff psychology is present in children and adults. Preprint in PsyArXiv https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/6daeg (2018).

  46. Lemerise, E. A., Thorn, A. & Maulden Costello, J. Affective ties and social information processing. Soc. Dev. 26, 475–488 (2017).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  47. Peets, K., Hodges, E. V. E., Kikas, E. & Salmivalli, C. Hostile attributions and behavioral strategies in children: does relationship type matter? Dev. Psychol. 43, 889–900 (2007).

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  48. Peets, K., Hodges, E. V. E. & Salmivalli, C. Affect-congruent social-cognitive evaluations and behaviors. Child Dev. 79, 170–185 (2008).

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  49. Afshordi, N. & Liberman, Z. Keeping friends in mind: development of friendship concepts in early childhood. Soc. Dev. 30, 331–342 (2021).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  50. Qi, W. & Vul, E. The evolution of theory of mind on welfare tradeoff ratios. Evol. Hum. Behav. 43, 381–393 (2022).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  51. Quillien, T. Rational information search in welfare tradeoff cognition. Cognition 231, 105317 (2023).

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  52. Rhodes, M. Naïve theories of social groups. Child Dev. 83, 1900–1916 (2012).

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  53. DeScioli, P. & Kurzban, R. The alliance hypothesis for human friendship. PLoS ONE 4, e5802 (2009).

    Article  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  54. Pietraszewski, D. Towards a computational theory of social groups: a finite set of cognitive primitives for representing any and all social groups in the context of conflict. Behav. Brain Sci. 45, e97 (2021).

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  55. Earp, B. D., McLoughlin, K. L., Monrad, J. T., Clark, M. S. & Crockett, M. J. How social relationships shape moral wrongness judgments. Nat. Commun. 12, 5776 (2021).

    Article  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  56. Jara-Ettinger, J., Schulz, L. E. & Tenenbaum, J. B. The naïve utility calculus as a unified, quantitative framework for action understanding. Cogn. Psychol. 123, 101334 (2020).

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  57. Charness, G. & Rabin, M. Understanding social preferences with simple tests. Q. J. Econ. 117, 817–869 (2002).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  58. Fehr, E. & Fischbacher, U. Why social preferences matter – the impact of non‐selfish motives on competition, cooperation and incentives. Econ. J. 112, C1–C33 (2002).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  59. Kleiman-Weiner, M., Saxe, R. & Tenenbaum, J. B. Learning a commonsense moral theory. Cognition 167, 107–123 (2017).

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  60. Heider, F. in The Psychology of Interpersonal Relations 79–124 (Wiley, 1958).

  61. Wondra, J. D. & Ellsworth, P. C. An appraisal theory of empathy and other vicarious emotional experiences. Psychol. Rev. 122, 411–428 (2015).

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  62. Manstead, A. S. R. & Fischer, A. H. in Appraisal Processes in Emotion (eds Scherer, K. R., Schorr, A. & Johnstone, T.) 221–232 (Oxford Univ. Press, 2001).

  63. Martin, A., Lin, K. & Olson, K. R. What you want versus what’s good for you: paternalistic motivation in children’s helping behavior. Child Dev. 87, 1739–1746 (2016).

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  64. Jacobsson, F., Johannesson, M. & Borgquist, L. Is altruism paternalistic? Econ. J. 117, 761–781 (2007).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  65. Sibicky, M. E., Schroeder, D. A. & Dovidio, J. F. Empathy and helping: considering the consequences of intervention. Basic Appl. Soc. Psychol. 16, 435–453 (1995).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  66. Barrett, L. F. Variety is the spice of life: a psychological construction approach to understanding variability in emotion. Cogn. Emot. 23, 1284–1306 (2009).

    Article  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  67. Jackson, J. C. et al. Emotion semantics show both cultural variation and universal structure. Science 366, 1517–1522 (2019).

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  68. Zhao, Z., Thornton, M. A. & Tamir, D. I. Accurate emotion prediction in dyads and groups and its potential social benefits. Emotion 22, 1030–1043 (2022).

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  69. Smith, R. H. & van Dijk, W. W. Schadenfreude and gluckschmerz. Emot. Rev. 10, 293–304 (2018).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  70. Batson, C. D. Altruism in Humans (Oxford Univ. Press, 2011).

  71. Zaki, J. Empathy: a motivated account. Psychol. Bull. 140, 1608–1647 (2014).

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  72. Peters, B. J., Reis, H. T. & Gable, S. L. Making the good even better: a review and theoretical model of interpersonal capitalization. Soc. Personal. Psychol. Compass 12, e12407 (2018).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  73. Reis, H. T., Lemay, E. P. Jr & Finkenauer, C. Toward understanding understanding: the importance of feeling understood in relationships. Soc. Personal. Psychol. Compass 11, e12308 (2017).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  74. Hareli, S. & Hess, U. What emotional reactions can tell us about the nature of others: an appraisal perspective on person perception. Cogn. Emot. 24, 128–140 (2010).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  75. Hareli, S., Shomrat, N. & Hess, U. Emotional versus neutral expressions and perceptions of social dominance and submissiveness. Emotion 9, 378–384 (2009).

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  76. Hess, U., Adams, R. & Kleck, R. Who may frown and who should smile? Dominance, affiliation, and the display of happiness and anger. Cogn. Emot. 19, 515–536 (2005).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  77. Knutson, B. Facial expressions of emotion influence interpersonal trait inferences. J. Nonverbal Behav. 20, 165–182 (1996).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  78. Weiner, B. An attributional theory of achievement motivation and emotion. Psychol. Rev. 92, 548–573 (1985).

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  79. Trommsdorff, G., Friedlmeier, W. & Mayer, B. Sympathy, distress, and prosocial behavior of preschool children in four cultures. Int. J. Behav. Dev. 31, 284–293 (2007).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  80. Chung, W., Chan, S. & Cassels, T. G. The role of culture in affective empathy: cultural and bicultural differences. J. Cogn. Cult. 10, 309–326 (2010).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  81. Wang, Y. A. & Todd, A. R. Evaluations of empathizers depend on the target of empathy. J. Personal. Soc. Psychol. 121, 1005–1028 (2021).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  82. Bryant, G. A. et al. Detecting affiliation in colaughter across 24 societies. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 113, 4682–4687 (2016).

    Article  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  83. Morelli, S. A., Lieberman, M. D. & Zaki, J. The emerging study of positive empathy. Soc. Personal. Psychol. Compass 9, 57–68 (2015).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  84. Godwin, L. J., Groves, M. M. & Horm-Wingerd, D. M. “Don’t leave me”: separation distress in infants, toddlers, and parents. Early Child. Educ. J. 20, 13–17 (1993).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  85. Laird, J. D. & Strout, S. in Handbook of Emotion Elicitation and Assessment (eds Coan, J. A. & Allen, J. J. B.) 54–64 (Oxford Univ. Press, 2007).

  86. Baumeister, R. F. & Leary, M. R. The need to belong: desire for interpersonal attachments as a fundamental human motivation. Psychol. Bull. 117, 33 (1995).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  87. Russell, D., Cutrona, C. E., Rose, J. & Yurko, K. Social and emotional loneliness: an examination of Weiss’s typology of loneliness. J. Personal. Soc. Psychol. 46, 1313–1321 (1984).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  88. MCullough, M. E., Kilpatrick, S. D., Emmons, R. A., & Larson, D. B. Is gratitude a moral affect? Psychol. Bull. 127, 49–266 (2001).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  89. Sznycer, D. & Lukaszewski, A. W. The emotion-valuation constellation: multiple emotions are governed by a common grammar of social valuation. Evol. Hum. Behav. 40, 395–404 (2019).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  90. Gopnik, A. The Gardener and the Carpenter: What the New Science of Child Development Tells Us About the Relationship Between Parents and Children (Macmillan, 2016).

  91. Clark, M. S. & Reis, H. T. Interpersonal processes in close relationships. Annu. Rev. Psychol. 39, 609–672 (1988).

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  92. Liberman, Z., Kinzler, K. D. & Woodward, A. L. Friends or foes: infants use shared evaluations to infer others’ social relationships. J. Exp. Psychol. Gen. 143, 966–971 (2014).

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  93. Lundqvist, L.-O. & Dimberg, U. Facial expressions are contagious. J. Psychophysiol. 9, 203–211 (1995).

    Google Scholar 

  94. Fischer, A. H. & Manstead, A. S. R. In Handbook of Emotions 3rd edn (eds Lewis, M., Haviland-Jones, J. M. & Barrett, L. F.) 456–468 (Guilford Press, 2008).

  95. Van Kleef, G. A., De Dreu, C. K. W. & Manstead, A. S. R. The interpersonal effects of emotions in negotiations: a motivated information processing approach. J. Personal. Soc. Psychol. 87, 510–528 (2004).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  96. van Kleef, G. A., De Dreu, C. K. W. & Manstead, A. S. R. The interpersonal effects of anger and happiness in negotiations. J. Personal. Soc. Psychol. 86, 57–76 (2004).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  97. Reschke, P. J., Walle, E. A., Flom, R. & Guenther, D. Twelve-month-old infants’ sensitivity to others’ emotions following positive and negative events. Infancy 22, 874–881 (2017).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  98. Skerry, A. E. & Spelke, E. S. Preverbal infants identify emotional reactions that are incongruent with goal outcomes. Cognition 130, 204–216 (2014).

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  99. Phillips, A. T., Wellman, H. M. & Spelke, E. S. Infants’ ability to connect gaze and emotional expression to intentional action. Cognition 85, 53–78 (2002).

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  100. Wu, Y. & Schulz, L. E. Inferring beliefs and desires from emotional reactions to anticipated and observed events. Child Dev. 89, 649–662 (2018).

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  101. Clément, F. & Dukes, D. Social appraisal and social referencing: two components of affective social learning. Emot. Rev. 9, 253–261 (2017).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  102. Wu, Y., Schulz, L. E., Frank, M. C. & Gweon, H. Emotion as information in early social learning. Curr. Dir. Psychol. Sci. 30, 468–475 (2021).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  103. Boccia, M. & Campos, J. J. Maternal emotional signals, social referencing, and infants’ reactions to strangers. New Dir. Child Dev. 44, 25–49 (1989).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  104. Walden, T. A. & Ogan, T. A. The development of social referencing. Child Dev. 59, 1230–1240 (1988).

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  105. Sorce, J. F., Emde, R. N., Campos, J. & Klinnert, M. D. Maternal emotional signaling: its effect on the visual cliff behavior of I-year-olds. Dev. Psychol. 21, 195–200 (1985).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  106. Smith-Flores, A. S. & Feigenson, L. “Yay! Yuck!” toddlers use others’ emotional responses to reason about hidden objects. J. Exp. Child Psychol. 221, 105464 (2022).

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  107. Smith-Flores, A. S., Perez, J., Zhang, M. H. & Feigenson, L. Online measures of looking and learning in infancy. Infancy 27, 4–24 (2022).

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  108. Moll, H., Koring, C., Carpenter, M. & Tomasello, M. Infants determine others’ focus of attention by pragmatics and exclusion. J. Cogn. Dev. 7, 411–430 (2006).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  109. Asaba, M., Wu, Y., Carrillo, B. & Gweon, H. in Proc. Annu. Meeting Cognitive Science Society 2650–2656 (2020).

  110. Pesowski, M. L. & Friedman, O. Preschoolers and toddlers use ownership to predict basic emotions. Emotion 15, 104–108 (2015).

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  111. Jin, K., Houston, J. L., Baillargeon, R., Groh, A. M. & Roisman, G. I. Young infants expect an unfamiliar adult to comfort a crying baby: evidence from a standard violation-of-expectation task and a novel infant-triggered-video task. Cogn. Psychol. 102, 1–20 (2018).

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  112. Jin, K. & Baillargeon, R. Infants possess an abstract expectation of ingroup support. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 114, 8199–8204 (2017).

    Article  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  113. Johnson, S. C., Dweck, C. S. & Chen, F. S. Evidence for infants’ internal working models of attachment. Psychol. Sci. 18, 501–502 (2007).

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  114. Pun, A., Birch, S. A. J. & Baron, A. S. The power of allies: Infants’ expectations of social obligations during intergroup conflict. Cognition 211, 104630 (2021).

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  115. Olson, K. R. & Spelke, E. S. Foundations of cooperation in young children. Cognition 108, 222–231 (2008).

    Article  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  116. DeJesus, J. M., Rhodes, M. & Kinzler, K. D. Evaluations versus expectations: children’s divergent beliefs about resource distribution. Cogn. Sci. 38, 178–193 (2014).

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  117. Liberman, Z. & Shaw, A. Children use partial resource sharing as a cue to friendship. J. Exp. Child. Psychol. 159, 96–109 (2017).

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  118. Liberman, Z. & Shaw, A. Secret to friendship: children make inferences about friendship based on secret sharing. Dev. Psychol. 54, 2139–2151 (2018).

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  119. Fawcett, C. & Liszkowski, U. Infants anticipate others’ social preferences. Infant Child Dev. 21, 239–249 (2012).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  120. Kuhlmeier, V., Wynn, K. & Bloom, P. Attribution of dispositional states by 12-month-olds. Psychol. Sci. 14, 402–408 (2003).

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  121. Hamlin, J. K., Wynn, K. & Bloom, P. Social evaluation by preverbal infants. Nature 450, 557–559 (2007).

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  122. Thomas, A. J., Saxe, R. & Spelke, E. S. Infants infer potential social partners by observing the interactions of their parent with unknown others. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 119, e2121390119 (2022).

    Article  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  123. Powell, L. J. & Spelke, E. S. Human infants’ understanding of social imitation: Inferences of affiliation from third party observations. Cognition 170, 31–48 (2018).

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  124. Liberman, Z., Kinzler, K. D. & Woodward, A. L. Origins of homophily: Infants expect people with shared preferences to affiliate. Cognition 212, 104695 (2021).

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  125. Liberman, Z., Woodward, A. L. & Kinzler, K. D. Preverbal infants infer third-party social relationships based on language. Cogn. Sci. 41, 622–634 (2017).

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  126. Denham, S. A. et al. Preschool emotional competence: pathway to social competence? Child Dev. 74, 238–256 (2003).

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  127. Hare, M. & Parent, J. Child emotional competence: a unified framework and assessment review of emotion reasoning, emotion stability, emotion regulation, and empathy. Preprint at PsyArXiv https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/582wg (2022).

  128. Shutts, K. & Kalish, C. W. in Advances in Child Development and Behavior vol. 61 (ed. Lockman, J. J.) 335–374 (JAI, 2021).

  129. Spelke, E. S. & Kinzler, K. D. Core knowledge. Developmental Sci. 10, 89–96 (2007).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  130. Smith, C. A. & Ellsworth, P. C. Patterns of cognitive appraisal in emotion. J. Personal. Soc. Psychol. 48, 813–838 (1985).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  131. Sznycer, D., Sell, A. & Lieberman, D. Forms and functions of the social emotions. Curr. Dir. Psychol. Sci. 30, 292–299 (2021).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  132. Repacholi, B. M. & Gopnik, A. Early reasoning about desires: evidence from 14- and 18-month-olds. Dev. Psychol. 33, 12–21 (1997).

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  133. Chiarella, S. S. & Poulin-Dubois, D. Cry babies and pollyannas: infants can detect unjustified emotional reactions. Infancy 18, E81–E96 (2013).

    Article  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  134. Carpenter, M., Akhtar, N. & Tomasello, M. Fourteen- through 18-month-old infants differentially imitate intentional and accidental actions. Infant Behav. Dev. 21, 315–330 (1998).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  135. Cameron, C. D., Scheffer, J. A., Hadjiandreou, E. & Anderson, S. Motivated empathic choices. Adv. Exp. Soc. Psychol. 66, 191–279 (2022).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  136. Davis, M. H. in Handbook of the Sociology of Emotions (eds Stets, J. E. & Turner, J. H.) 443–466 (Springer, 2006).

  137. Decety, J. & Jackson, P. L. A social-neuroscience perspective on empathy. Curr. Dir. Psychol. Sci. 15, 54–58 (2006).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  138. Hudson, S. T. J., Cikara, M. & Sidanius, J. Preference for hierarchy is associated with reduced empathy and increased counter-empathy towards others, especially out-group targets. J. Exp. Soc. Psychol. 85, 103871 (2019).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  139. Hatfield, E., Cacioppo, J. T. & Rapson, R. L. Emotional Contagion. vii, 240 (Cambridge Univ. Press; Editions de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, 1994).

  140. Preston, S. D. & de Waal, F. B. M. Empathy: its ultimate and proximate bases. Behav. Brain Sci. 25, 1–20 (2002).

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgements

The authors thank D. Barner, C. Oveis, B. Pepe, M. Pesowski and L. Smith for their helpful comments on previous versions of this article.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, University of California San Diego, La Jolla, CA, USA

    Alexis S. Smith-Flores & Lindsey J. Powell

Authors
  1. Alexis S. Smith-Flores
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Lindsey J. Powell
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Contributions

The authors contributed equally to all aspects of the article.

Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Alexis S. Smith-Flores or Lindsey J. Powell.

Ethics declarations

Competing interests

The authors declare no competing interests.

Peer review

Peer review information

Nature Reviews Psychology thanks Desmond Ong and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

Additional information

Publisher’s note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Rights and permissions

Springer Nature or its licensor (e.g. a society or other partner) holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Smith-Flores, A.S., Powell, L.J. Joint reasoning about social affiliation and emotion. Nat Rev Psychol 2, 374–383 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s44159-023-00181-0

Download citation

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s44159-023-00181-0

Search

Advanced search

Quick links

Nature Briefing

Sign up for the Nature Briefing newsletter — what matters in science, free to your inbox daily.

Get the most important science stories of the day, free in your inbox. Sign up for Nature Briefing