Department of Developmental and Clinical Child Psychology, Eötvös Loránd University, Izabella St. 46, 1064 Budapest, Hungary.
Psychol Sci. 2013 Jul 1;24(7):1348-53. doi: 10.1177/0956797612471952. Epub 2013 May 29.
Object-directed emotion expressions provide two types of information: They can convey the expressers' person-specific subjective disposition toward objects, or they can be used communicatively as referential symbolic devices to convey culturally shared valence-related knowledge about referents that can be generalized to other individuals. By presenting object-directed emotion expressions in communicative versus noncommunicative contexts, we demonstrated that 18-month-olds can flexibly assign either a person-centered interpretation or an object-centered interpretation to referential emotion displays. When addressed by ostensive signals of communication, infants generalized their object-centered interpretation of the emotion display to other individuals as well, whereas in the noncommunicative emotion-expression context, they attributed to the emoting agent a person-specific subjective dispositional attitude without generalizing this attribution as relevant to other individuals. The findings indicate that, as proposed by natural pedagogy theory, infants are prepared to learn shared cultural knowledge from nonverbal communicative demonstrations addressed to them at a remarkably early age.
它们可以传达表达者对物体的特定个人主观倾向，或者它们可以作为交际性的指涉符号装置被用来传达关于可以推广到其他个体的指涉物的与文化相关的、与价值相关的共有知识。通过在交际和非交际情境中呈现目标指向的情绪表达，我们证明了 18 个月大的婴儿可以灵活地将情绪表达赋予以个人为中心的解释或以物体为中心的解释。当婴儿被交际的明示信号所指向时，他们会将对情绪表达的以物体为中心的解释推广到其他个体，而在非交际的情绪表达情境中，他们会将特定于个人的主观情绪态度归因于表达情绪的主体，而不会将这种归因推广为与其他个体相关。这些发现表明，正如自然教学理论所提出的，婴儿准备在非常早的年龄从针对他们的非言语交际示范中学习共享的文化知识。
