Infants’ and children’s emotion predictions following failed goals

Understanding others’ emotions requires not only recognizing their expressions but also reasoning about the events that give rise to them. One foundational context for emotion prediction is goal-directed action: people often feel positive emotions when goals are achieved and negative emotions when goals fail. Across four experiments (N = 160), we examined whether 16- to 18-month-old infants and 3-year-old children expect different emotional responses following completed versus failed goals. Using looking-time and forced-choice methods, we found that infants showed emerging, though variable, expectations for happiness following successful goal completion (Experiments 1-3), and children reliably predicted happiness in these contexts (Experiment 4). In contrast, infants did not consistently expect a negative emotion to follow failure. Still, 3-year-olds did not reliably predict sadness in response to failure. These findings suggest that emotion-outcome reasoning is asymmetrical early in development: while success-happiness mappings emerge early and strengthen over time, failure-sadness predictions may require more contextual support and develop more gradually.