Preschoolers use emotional reactions to infer relations: The case of ownership

In three experiments, we examined whether young children use emotional reactions to infer relations, focusing on their inferences of ownership relations. In Experiment 1, children aged three to five years (N = 108) inferred ownership from emotional reactions to a positive event, in which a broken object became fixed. In Experiment 2, children aged three to six years (N = 138) inferred ownership from emotional reactions to a negative event in which an object became broken. Finally, in Experiment 3, children aged four and five (N = 68) again used sad emotional reactions to a negative event to infer ownership, but they did not use these reactions to infer who likes an object. These findings reveal that children use emotional reactions to infer one kind of relation between people and objects.