Clarifying the neurocognitive mechanisms of emotion reasoning and development in school-aged children

A fundamental component of human social cognition is our ability to reason about emotions. Reasoning about our own and others’ emotions is essential to building and maintaining social relationships that are critical to health and well-being throughout the lifespan – in humans and across species. Despite its importance, key open questions limit our understanding of emotion reasoning and development in human children and, by extension, the potential benefits of this research for people and societies. Specifically, the normative developmental trajectory of emotion understanding in school-aged children (i.e., 5–10-year-olds) remains unclear because children’s performance on emotion tasks improves at the same time as continued language development. This makes it difficult to know whether children’s understanding of emotions undergoes development during this time, or if apparent development actually reflects improved language abilities. As a consequence, there is disagreement about children’s emotion understanding and development, which has implications for how educators, parents, and clinicians support children to develop positive, healthy relationships, and help children to identify and reason about their own and others’ emotions and social experiences. Research investigating links between emotion understanding and real-world outcomes (e.g., development of social relationships, mental well-being) also often suffers from this confound – making it difficult to develop strategies to support children’s social and emotional development. The proposed research aims to address this challenge through the use of non-invasive brain imaging (functional magnetic resonance imaging; fMRI) studies of adults and children. When adults and children reason about emotions, a particular network of brain regions is recruited; this network is sometimes referred to as the ‘mentalising’ network. While the mentalising network interacts with nearby brain regions that support language, it is specifically recruited to reason about mental states (i.e., beliefs, desires, emotions), across linguistic and non-linguistic contexts. Putative homologous regions in non-human primates suggest some evolutionary continuity in this system and its role in supporting social interactions across species. Because the mentalising network is recruited for emotion reasoning and largely insensitive to linguistic features, we can use fMRI to tease apart contributions of domain-specific change in emotion understanding to developmental improvements on emotion reasoning tasks among children. If developmental improvements on emotion tasks involve change in emotion understanding, then behavioural improvements should be accompanied by developmental change in the mentalising network. Our studies will also characterise concurrent development in language brain regions, to provide a full picture of the interactions between mentalising and language systems in human development. The proposed research leverages recent advances in adult fMRI research; specifically, we will use ‘multivariate’ analyses to capture fine-grained response patterns in the mentalising network to test specific, competing theoretical accounts of children’s emotion understanding and development. We will also use these data to characterise the links between mentalising network development and development of social relationships and mental well-being – to understand the nature of these relationships early in human development and inform education, clinical, and parenting practices. This research will provide critical insights into children’s emotion reasoning and development, establish an approach for future research studying other aspects of cognitive development in children, and forge new links between emotion research and real-world social behaviour and outcomes. More broadly, this research will significantly accelerate our understanding of a fundamental component of human social cognition that supports health and well-being throughout the lifespan.