The majority of research on infants’ and children’s understanding of emotional expressions has focused on their abilities to use emotional expressions to infer how other people feel. However, an emerging body of work suggests that emotional expressions support rich, powerful inferences not just about emotional states but also about other unobserved states, such as hidden events in the physical world and mental states of other people (e.g., beliefs and desires). Here we argue that infants and children harness others’ emotional expressions as a source of information for learning about the physical and social world broadly. This “emotion as information” framework integrates affective, developmental, and computational cognitive sciences, extending the scope of signals that count as “information” in early learning.

大多数关于婴儿和儿童对情绪表达理解的研究都集中在他们使用情绪表达来推断他人感受的能力上。然而，一项新兴的工作表明，情绪表达不仅支持关于情绪状态的丰富而有力的推论，还支持其他未观察到的状态，例如物理世界中的隐藏事件和其他人的心理状态（例如，信念和欲望）。在这里，我们认为婴儿和儿童利用他人的情绪表达作为广泛了解物理和社会世界的信息来源。这种“情绪即信息”框架整合了情感、发展和计算认知科学，扩展了早期学习中被视为“信息”的信号范围。