Infants Track Patterns of Emotion Transitions in the Home

Predicting others’ feelings enables efficient social interactions. How do infants learn which emotions precede and follow each other? We propose that infants develop this ability by tuning into the dynamics of their socioemotional environment, in which they observe reliable patterns in how adults shift from one emotion (e.g., anger) to another (e.g., sadness). If infants learn about emotion transitions by observing the adults around them, we expect that the way infants process emotion transitions will reflect both average patterns seen in adults as well as specific patterns of their primary caregiver. We measured 4- to 10-monthold American infants’ (N = 70) pupillary responses to emotion transitions and surveyed primary caregivers on the frequency of their own emotion transitions. As expected, infants were attuned to average adult patterns of emotion transitions, showing greater pupillary synchrony for more common transitions. Infants also showed sensitivity to their own primary caregiver’s specific pattern of emotion transitions, showing similar pupillary responses to other infants in the sample whose caregivers show similar patterns. These findings suggest that infants learn about emotion dynamics by attending to both average and specific statistical patterns in the people around them.