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Chapter 4 - Natural pedagogy of social emotions

from Part II - On human development and affective social learning

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 August 2019

By
György Gergely  and
Ildikó Király
Edited by
Daniel Dukes  and
Fabrice Clément
Daniel Dukes
Affiliation:
Université de Fribourg, Switzerland
Fabrice Clément
Affiliation:
Université de Neuchâtel, Switzerland
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Summary

This chapter proposes that during human evolution emotion-based social learning systems and the capacity for ostensive communication have become integrated to serve affective social learning and cultural knowledge transmission during ontogenetic development. Human infants communicate and learn by emotions as well as about emotions through ostensive communication and natural pedagogy even before acquiring language. We will argue that the human species’ unique cognitive adaptations for ostensive communication and natural pedagogy provide specialized social learning mechanisms for the acquisition of culturally shared representations of social emotion concepts. We will explore how ostensive emotion-reflective interactions through the mechanism of social bio-feedback also play a central role in the development of introspective sensitivity in infants for detecting and representing their own categorical emotion states and establishing their emerging capacity for emotional self-attribution and affective self-control. Based on this account, we will propose an evolutionary-based view of social emotions as special types of dispositional kind concepts that belong to the ontological kind categories humans share with other social agents in their cultural community. This theory implies a view of dispositional essentialism about representing categorical emotion kinds in humans, which will be contrasted with current versions of biological essentialism exemplified by recent approaches to basic emotions such as differential emotions theory.

Keywords

Affective social learningemotions and essentialismemotions as dispositional kind conceptsnatural pedagogysocial emotionssocial biofeedback theorysocial learning of emotions
Type
Chapter
Information
Foundations of Affective Social Learning
Conceptualizing the Social Transmission of Value
 , pp. 87 - 114
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2019

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