![]() In line with social constructionism, our proposal suggests that emotion categories are a product of social reality and are culturally relative similarly, emotion concepts develop through contextualized social interactions in which language plays a significant part ( Harré, 1986 Lutz, 1983 Ratner, 1989). The present approach to emotional development follows a number of constructionist theories. In this way, a brain is continuously assembling prediction signals that prepare the body for situation-specific action, creating perceptions and experiences. The brain starts with current conditions and creates an ad hoc, embodied concept, reinstating prior experiences that are similar to the present. The basic hypothesis is that emotional events derive from an active, constructive process within the brain. The theory also incorporates discoveries from cognitive science (e.g., Barsalou, 2008), linguistics (e.g., Vigliocco, Meteyard, Andrews, & Kousta, 2009), anthropology (e.g., Lutz, 1983), human evolutionary biology (e.g., Boyd, Richerson, & Henrich, 2011), and evolutionary/developmental neuroscience (e.g., Barrett & Finlay, in press). The theory of constructed emotion itself integrates social constructionist (e.g., Averill, 1980 De Leersnyder, Boiger, & Mesquita, 2013 Vygotsky, 1934/1987) and psychological constructionist views of emotion (e.g., Cunningham, Dunfield, & Stillman, 2013 James, 1894 Russell, 2003) with a predictive coding approach to brain structure and function that provides an intrinsically constructionist account of the mind and behavior ( Barrett, 2017b Barrett & Satpute, 2017 Barrett & Simmons, 2015 Chanes & Barrett, 2016). Our approach integrates two constructionist approaches: the theory of constructed emotion and rational constructivism ( Barrett, 2017a, 2017b Lindquist, 2013 see Box 1). In this paper, we question both assumptions and in doing so introduce a novel theoretical framework for guiding research on emotional development. Similarly, both perspectives assume that emotion concept development means acquiring a representation to be stored in memory, as a set of necessary and sufficient features, a prototype, or an intuitive theory. This lack of resolution may be rooted in a deeper concern: both perspectives assume that instances of an emotion category such as anger are relatively similar in their physical and perceptual features. Empirical studies have been unable to settle the matter, with scientists drawing divergent conclusions, sometimes from the same data. ![]() Or are children born with undifferentiated affective sentiments such as distress, pleasure, quiet attention, high arousal, and sleepiness, such that emotional development refers to the process by which children carve affect into differentiated emotional responses (e.g., Bridges, 1932 Camras, 1992 Matias & Cohn, 1993 Oster, Hegley, & Nagel, 1992)? In this latter view, children learn to experience and perceive emotions in culture-specific ways, so as to be maximally effective at eliciting responses from their caregivers ( Holodynski & Friedlmeier, 2006 Weiss & Nurcombe, 1992 Werner, 1948). Does it refer to the formation of emotion concepts that are scaffolded onto inborn or early-developing emotional capacities ( Izard, 1997 Izard, Woodburn, & Finlon, 2010)? Emotional development, in this view, refers mainly to the ability to regulate innate, universal emotional reactions. Scientists continue to debate the nature of emotional development. Specifically, we offer a predictive processing account of emotional development. Finally, we hypothesize that emotional development can be understood as a concept construction problem: a child becomes capable of experiencing and perceiving emotion only when her brain develops the capacity to assemble ad hoc, situated emotion concepts for the purposes of guiding behavior and giving meaning to sensory inputs. We hypothesize that infants and children learn emotion categories the way they learn other abstract conceptual categories – by observing others use the same emotion word to label highly variable events. Next, we discuss the possibility that emotional development is the process of developing emotion concepts, and that emotion words may be a critical part of this process. We first discuss the hypothesis that emotion categories are abstract and conceptual, whose instances share a goal-based function in a particular context but are highly variable in their affective, physical, and perceptual features. be convulsed with laughter, rage, etc.In this paper, we integrate two constructionist approaches – the theory of constructed emotion and rational constructivism – to introduce several novel hypotheses for understanding emotional development.
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