My research investigates how infants and young children understand emotions and use this understanding to learn about the physical and social world. Emotions provide powerful cues about people’s experiences, relationships, and intentions, and I study how children leverage these cues to guide their learning and social interactions. My work combines behavioral methods, cross-sectional and longitudinal designs, and open science practices.
To date, I have shown that even infants link emotional expressions—such as empathy and counter-empathy—with underlying social relationships, and that children use these links to evaluate others in morally sensitive ways. I have also demonstrated that children apply emotion understanding to object reasoning, using emotional cues to infer preferences and reason about others’ beliefs. More recently, I have begun examining how individual differences and early experiences shape children’s emotion reasoning, and how detecting errors in their environment influence their curiosity, information-seeking, and exploration.
Looking ahead, I aim to expand this research by (1) characterizing variability in early emotion reasoning and its relationship to later social outcomes; (2) examining how cognitive mechanisms underlying emotion processing interact with learning processes; and (3) exploring how children use emotion and social information to guide decisions about social partners.