Development of Children's Inferences of the Emotions of Others

According to Weiner's attribution-emotion model, the development of children's inferences of emotion in others may be affected by an increasing ability to consider causal attributions and situational outcomes together, rather than outcomes alone, when making emotional judgments. This formulation was tested in the present study of developmental changes in emotional inferences and children's justifications for them. Second graders, fifth graders, and college students heard 12 stories that varied systematically by situational domain (achievement or moral), outcome (positive or negative), and causal attribution (personal effort, another's intervention, or luck) and were asked to infer the story character's subsequent emotion and explain the reasons for it. Analyses of their responses revealed significant differences by age, with second graders offering more outcome-dependent inferences (e.g., happy, sad) and justifications focusing on the story outcome alone and fifth graders and adults providing more causal attribution-dependent inferences (e.g., pride, anger) with justifications entailing causal considerations in the story narrative. However, within each age group there were few consistent associations between the kind of emotional inference and the type of justification offered for it, and adults failed to consistently generate the kinds of attribution-dependent inferences predicted by the model. The contributions and limitations of the attribution-emotion model are assessed in light of these findings.