In our everyday lives, what we think and what we feel are intertwined in complex ways. Despite remarkable progress on our understanding of what children know and how they learn about the objects and forces, number and space, and agents and goals, we still understand relatively little about children’s early representations of emotions. Recently however, researchers across multiple disciplines have used diverse approaches to advance our scientific understanding of how the ability to reason about emotion develops from infancy into adulthood. The goal of this workshop is to provide a forum for sharing the latest findings, discussing the promises and limitations of these advances, and thinking about how these findings not only inform cognitive development but also advance our understanding of the human mind as a whole. This interdisciplinary preconference brings together scientists from developmental, cognitive, and affective sciences at different stages of their careers. In particular, we are inviting those who have adopted diverse theoretical frameworks in investigating emotion understanding using developmental, neural, computational, and machine learning approaches. The preconference aims to foster lively discussions and stimulate interest among attendees in this growing area, and to encourage new empirical and theoretical collaborations across disciplines.
Organizers: Yang Wu, Hyowon Gweon, Laura Schulz
Registration: https://cogdevsoc.org/registration/
Date: October 17th, 2019
Location: Nunn Room at the Galt House Hotel (Level 2) in Louisville, KY
8:30 – 8:40 Opening remarks: Hyowon Gweon
8:40 – 10:10 Development of Emotion Understanding 1:
8:40 – 9:10 Ori Friedman: Children Use Probability to Infer Emotions
9:10 – 9:40 Kristin Lagattuta: Are we the more the same or different? Children’s and adults’ beliefs about emotion diversity
9:40 – 10:10 Henry Wellman: Villainy, and how it feels
10:10 – 10:25 Morning coffee break
10:25 – 12:25 Development of Emotion Understanding 2:
10:25 – 10:55 Peter Reschke: Emotion understanding and psychological reasoning in infancy: Is there a connection?
10:55 – 11:25 Amrisha Vaish: Children’s social-cognitive inferences from others’ referential emotions
11: 25 – 11:55 Yang Wu: Emotion as information
11:55 – 12:25 Regina Ebo: Children use causal reasoning to regulate others’ emotions
12:25 – 12:40 Morning Panel Discussion
12:40 – 1:40 Lunch break
1:40 – 3:10 Big data, Neuroscience, and Computational Approaches
1:40 – 2:10 Lindsey Powell: Neural responses to positively valenced speech predict infants’ social preferences
2:10 – 2:40 Dae Houlihan: A generative model of context-based emotion reasoning
2:40 – 3:10 Alan Cowen: Quantifying emotion-related behavior: Improved taxonomies and machine learning
3:10 – 3:25 Afternoon coffee break
3:25 – 4:55 Acquiring Emotion Knowledge: Theories & Mechanisms
3:25 – 3:55 Erik Nook: Language and emotion concept development
3:55 – 4:25 Seth Pollak: Emotion Learning and Social Experience
4:25 – 4:55 Rebecca Saxe: (TBA)
4:55 – 5:10 Afternoon Panel Discussion
5:10 – 5:20 Closing Remarks: Laura Schulz