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Children learn to read emotion using a brain that evolved to do so over millions of years

snowwrestler 8y ago
Yes, and children experience emotions before they learn to reason or use language, so they have a personal basis to work from when learning to reason about the emotions of others. "Empathy" is the name of the reasoning process by which children analyze the experience of their own emotions and behaviors, to draw inferences about the emotional state of others based on observing their behaviors. But long before that, they are reacting emotionally to the behaviors of others. For example, you can scare a baby.
BenMorganIO 8y ago
The scale of the learning is interesting in itself. From a few months, to years old, to all the way to preteens, emotions are constantly being reevaluated and developing new ones as well.
- Bartweiss 8y ago
  Is there any decent model of what actually happens when children develop theory of mind? Along with having a suite of emotions and recognizing cues in others, it's pretty obviously a required piece of learning to read emotion for humans. Below a certain age, it's literally impossible to generate ideas like "the cat doesn't like that", since there's no space between "I like that" and "that is likable". But I don't think I've ever seen somebody describe what kind of structural or chemical changes are correlated with e.g. passing the mirror test.
  - BenMorganIO 8y ago
    From what I remember, when children are born, they're born with a very underdeveloped brain. The prefrontal cortex to I believe isn't present but I could be wrong, otherwise it's very small. The self conscious emotions, pride, shame, guilt, envy, remorse, embarrassment, hubris, and many more come from the prefrontal cortex. As it develops over a very long period of time, so do the emotions. I remember that embarrassment doesn't typically develop until you're approximately 7-years-old.
  - BenMorganIO 8y ago
    I don't remember many models besides: here's a brain, here's how it developed, and here's what is and isn't able to get done given approximate ages.
Bartweiss 8y ago
True, and I don't mean to underplay the difficulty of that style of learning. In particular, it seems important that our emotion-reading is reflexive - we learn to map other people's expressions to our emotions, and it's not clear how similar a learning process without some reference class of emotions. (We have a decent example in autism of how emotion without instinctive mirroring plays out in learning emotional signals. The associations are learned consciously, which works out alright. But I'm not sure there's any precedent for people who have mirroring but nonexistent emotions. Is there something like abulia for lack of emotion? ...is it abulia?) I'm going to stand by the original statement, though. We have proof that this sort of learning without a backing theory can be done, and no real evidence that having a general theory would make it easier to actually learn the specific associations needed to make predictions. To steal an example from the article: knowing whether the six-emotion model is right or wrong doesn't automatically help us recognize a clenched fist as threat or celebration, and fretting about the impact of psych textbooks on AI without proposing an actual connection isn't particularly compelling.

Yes, and children experience emotions before they learn to reason or use language, so they have a personal basis to work from when learning to reason about the emotions of others. "Empathy" is the name of the reasoning process by which children analyze the experience of their own emotions and behaviors, to draw inferences about the emotional state of others based on observing their behaviors. But long before that, they are reacting emotionally to the behaviors of others. For example, you can scare a baby.

BenMorganIO 8y ago

The scale of the learning is interesting in itself. From a few months, to years old, to all the way to preteens, emotions are constantly being reevaluated and developing new ones as well.

Bartweiss 8y ago
Is there any decent model of what actually happens when children develop theory of mind? Along with having a suite of emotions and recognizing cues in others, it's pretty obviously a required piece of learning to read emotion for humans. Below a certain age, it's literally impossible to generate ideas like "the cat doesn't like that", since there's no space between "I like that" and "that is likable". But I don't think I've ever seen somebody describe what kind of structural or chemical changes are correlated with e.g. passing the mirror test.
- BenMorganIO 8y ago
  From what I remember, when children are born, they're born with a very underdeveloped brain. The prefrontal cortex to I believe isn't present but I could be wrong, otherwise it's very small. The self conscious emotions, pride, shame, guilt, envy, remorse, embarrassment, hubris, and many more come from the prefrontal cortex. As it develops over a very long period of time, so do the emotions. I remember that embarrassment doesn't typically develop until you're approximately 7-years-old.
- BenMorganIO 8y ago
  I don't remember many models besides: here's a brain, here's how it developed, and here's what is and isn't able to get done given approximate ages.

Bartweiss 8y ago

True, and I don't mean to underplay the difficulty of that style of learning. In particular, it seems important that our emotion-reading is reflexive - we learn to map other people's expressions to our emotions, and it's not clear how similar a learning process without some reference class of emotions. (We have a decent example in autism of how emotion without instinctive mirroring plays out in learning emotional signals. The associations are learned consciously, which works out alright. But I'm not sure there's any precedent for people who have mirroring but nonexistent emotions. Is there something like abulia for lack of emotion? ...is it abulia?) I'm going to stand by the original statement, though. We have proof that this sort of learning without a backing theory can be done, and no real evidence that having a general theory would make it easier to actually learn the specific associations needed to make predictions. To steal an example from the article: knowing whether the six-emotion model is right or wrong doesn't automatically help us recognize a clenched fist as threat or celebration, and fretting about the impact of psych textbooks on AI without proposing an actual connection isn't particularly compelling.