Among social stimuli, the human face is unique. Its properties and features, both static and dynamic, reveal different aspects of a person. Perceivers use this information when they aim, for example, to recognize individuals, identify their social groups, discern their personality, detect their focus of attention, understand their verbal and non-verbal behaviours, and infer their emotions. Emotions that we read from facial actions are crucial to social interaction: They provide information that helps us understand social intentions, how to react to others, and to evaluate the affective meaning of many events that we encounter in our environment. In this chapter, we focus on social appraisal – one of the central mechanisms involved in affective social learning. In particular, we discuss the notion that, through a particular socio-affective inferential mechanism, social appraisal plays a significant role when the emotional expression of person A is used to learn about the value of the emotion expressed by person B. The first section of this chapter provides a brief historical introduction to the relation between contextual information and emotion recognition in faces. Then, we focus on the construct of social appraisal and its manifestation in socio-affective inferential mechanisms involved in emotion recognition. In the third section, we present empirical evidence supporting the automaticity of such socio-affective inferential mechanisms and discuss its implication for the theoretical framework of affective social learning. Next, we discuss the idea that ambiguous situations may be particularly prone to social appraisal taking place. Finally, we discuss how social appraisal, underpinned by a socio-affective inferential mechanism, may be integrated into the affective social learning framework.

Recent research has shown that children often learn what to believe by attending to the claims of other people. Similarly, they often learn how to act by attending to the actions of other people. Moreover, in each of these two domains, children are selective in their learning – they prefer to endorse and to emulate individuals who, as representatives of the surrounding culture, can serve as good models. I argue that this type of selective social learning also plays a major role in children’s emotional development. Although young children may encounter some situations that have a universal biological significance – for example a steep cliff or a sudden loud noise – the emotional implications of many encounters, especially with artefacts, people and foods, are likely to vary from one culture to another. Children can learn to perceive these encounters through the distinctive emotional lens of their own culture if they attend to and adopt the expressive appraisals of individuals who are representative of their culture. Such appraisals may be conveyed non-verbally, as in the classic social-referencing paradigm, but they can also be conveyed verbally.

In this chapter I revisit the literature on culture and emotion through the lens of affective social learning (ASL). Conceptualizing emotions as evaluations of the world, I consider the different processes through which people come to fit in emotionally with their culture as processes of ASL. By describing how children enculturate and immigrant minorities acculturate emotionally, I thus aim to shed more light on ASL. The main results of this undertaking are not only that culture and emotion are integral to the study of ASL, but also that ASL (i) encompasses many more processes than those initially described; (ii) affects children, immigrant minorities and even adult majorities; and (iii) is, in many cases, multidimensional and context-dependent. In closing the chapter, I outline some of the ways forward for studying ASL, such as further integrating it with other literatures and conducting empirical studies that take into account some of the complexities and contextual factors that may shape both its speed and course. By embarking on this journey, it is my hope (and belief) that ASL may become a mature and multidisciplinary approach that can stimulate novel research to shed light on meaning-making in context.

Interpersonally presented emotions help to calibrate people’s orientations to things happening in the shared environment. For example, social referencing involves one person seeking clarification of the appropriate appraisal of an object, event, or person, and another person responding with an emotional orientation that disambiguates things. However, this paradigmatic case represents only one of the possible ways in which emotions affect other people’s physical or mental attitudes. In other cases, emotion-related responses affect other people’s orientations independent of their explicit informational content. Further, emotional knowledge may be co-constructed dynamically rather than transmitted unidirectionally from one person to another. In these cases, affective social learning need not involve changes in the perceived meaning of emotional objects, but rather adjustments in interactants’ orientations to what is happening. This chapter suggests ways of extending and going beyond existing methodological and theoretical approaches to emotional influence and identifies some of the blindspots of previous research.

In this chapter, we apply the affective social learning (ASL) concept to the social learning of natural skill sets in immature orang-utans since it can serve as an illustration of the majority of learning that occurs in wild apes. Most orang-utan social learning happens during everyday tasks and without any active involvement of the role model. Consequently, detecting the emotional state(s) of the role model is nearly impossible. We focus therefore on the emotional responses of the immature learners to the role models’ behaviours. Our data on peering (attentive, sustained close-range watching of conspecifics), which is often followed by selective practice of the observed behaviour by the peerer, suggests that there is some highly specific emotional arousal of the immatures during social learning. The role models’ actions with the object seem to play a central role in the learning process. However, immatures appear to decide on their own whether to attend to the information or not, as in affective observation, the second stage of ASL. Developmental changes in role-model preferences support the notion that trust in the role model is critical for ASL to work. Given that we can use the learners’ responses as proof of the affective states of the role models, ASL may be an important part of the mechanism that guides and optimizes the acquisition of learned skills in wild great apes. However, the lower we set the bar for the affective states (or emotions) of the role models for ASL to work, the more difficult it is to verify their presence and the more ASL will overlap with ordinary social learning.

Interpersonally presented emotions help to calibrate people’s orientations to things happening in the shared environment. For example, social referencing involves one person seeking clarification of the appropriate appraisal of an object, event, or person, and another person responding with an emotional orientation that disambiguates things. However, this paradigmatic case represents only one of the possible ways in which emotions affect other people’s physical or mental attitudes. In other cases, emotion-related responses affect other people’s orientations independent of their explicit informational content. Further, emotional knowledge may be co-constructed dynamically rather than transmitted unidirectionally from one person to another. In these cases, affective social learning need not involve changes in the perceived meaning of emotional objects, but rather adjustments in interactants’ orientations to what is happening. This chapter suggests ways of extending and going beyond existing methodological and theoretical approaches to emotional influence and identifies some of the blindspots of previous research.

In this chapter we discuss the ways in which expressions of regret provide “lessons” for observers of those expressions, thereby constituting a case of affective social learning. We review three lines of research to argue that another person’s regret tells us something about the aversive consequences of a decision made by that person and influences our own behaviour when we have to make a similar decision. In the first line of research we found that participants who had seen another person acting unfairly but then expressing regret – as opposed to pride – were more likely to anticipate regret if they were to act the same way, and this anticipated emotion affected the likelihood of participants themselves acting fairly. This “lesson” learned by witnessing another person’s regret can also be extended to relations between groups. In the second line of research, observers appeared to “learn” from an out-group’s expression of regret that members of the out-group were unhappy about the decision they took, which encourages the observers to see the out-group as more trustworthy. In the third line of research, we show that similar effects are found when an in-group member expresses regret about the in-group’s failure to reciprocate the trust shown by an out-group. Thus, expressing regret serves the function of communicating the inappropriateness of the in-group’s decision and thereby encourages trusting behaviour in other in-group members. Our contention is that the effects of emotional expression in the experiments described here are due to shifts in the perceived appropriateness of certain behaviours, shifts that result from a process of affective social learning.

Recent research has shown that children often learn what to believe by attending to the claims of other people. Similarly, they often learn how to act by attending to the actions of other people. Moreover, in each of these two domains, children are selective in their learning – they prefer to endorse and to emulate individuals who, as representatives of the surrounding culture, can serve as good models. I argue that this type of selective social learning also plays a major role in children’s emotional development. Although young children may encounter some situations that have a universal biological significance – for example a steep cliff or a sudden loud noise – the emotional implications of many encounters, especially with artefacts, people and foods, are likely to vary from one culture to another. Children can learn to perceive these encounters through the distinctive emotional lens of their own culture if they attend to and adopt the expressive appraisals of individuals who are representative of their culture. Such appraisals may be conveyed non-verbally, as in the classic social-referencing paradigm, but they can also be conveyed verbally.

Emotions have often been considered negatively in the animal literature, offering so-called parsimonious explanations to uncontrolled animal behaviour. This has particularly been the case for primate vocalizations, as opposed to flexible human language and potential goal-directed primate gestures. We believe that affective social learning (ASL) can offer a useful way to analyse emotions through a different perspective, integrating emotions and learning to analyse primates’ and other animals’ behaviour. In this chapter, we review the primate literature for potential cases of ASL, re-analysing classic cases such as the vervet alarm call system as well as more recent discoveries related to emotional behaviour. To decipher whether ASL is cognitively possible for non-human primates, we dissect the cognitive requirements for each step of ASL: emotional contagion, affective observation, social referencing and natural pedagogy. Our review suggests that, despite the lack of evidence for the latter step, there is evidence for all other types of ASL in primates, particularly in the domains of the ontogeny of communicative and cultural learning. We conclude by highlighting that ASL may constitute a useful comparative framework to describe various types of teaching that do not necessitate the demanding requirement of full-blown human intentional teaching.

Affective social learning is a novel concept that aims to conceptualize the transmission of social value. Within the pages of this volume, this simple idea and our presentation of it has already inspired researchers from different disciplines to address what this might mean for their research and for affective science more generally. In this concluding chapter, we restate the motivation for coming up with the concept in the first place, with its origins in psychological and philosophical emotion theory most obviously, but also in anthropology, comparative psychology and sociology. We also insist on the novelty of the concept, undoubtedly due, at least in part, to its multidisciplinary origins. While avoiding the temptation to explicitly answer the points raised by the chapter authors one by one, we address the main points implicitly by either modifying or reformulating aspects of affective social learning before highlighting the points that we think most urgently need to be focused on in future research. While we will of course be continuing our research in this area, we hope that this chapter and indeed this volume more generally will continue to inspire others to join us in this project. In other words, and to paraphrase the title of this volume, we hope to have transmitted the value of affective social learning, socially speaking.

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.

Affective social learning is a relatively new concept that needed teasing out. In this introductory chapter, we set out what we meant by the notion as we initially set it out in previous versions. The goal here is to provide the reader with the background to the concept and indeed to the following chapters and, ultimately, to use as a starting point when measuring how the concept evolves over the length of the book. We begin then, by explaining how difficult it can be, conceptually, to marry three important areas of (psychological) research – emotion (affect), the ‘social’ and learning, before setting out the conditions and describing the major components involved in affective social learning. We end by briefly introducing the following chapters.

In this chapter we discuss the ways in which expressions of regret provide “lessons” for observers of those expressions, thereby constituting a case of affective social learning. We review three lines of research to argue that another person’s regret tells us something about the aversive consequences of a decision made by that person and influences our own behaviour when we have to make a similar decision. In the first line of research we found that participants who had seen another person acting unfairly but then expressing regret – as opposed to pride – were more likely to anticipate regret if they were to act the same way, and this anticipated emotion affected the likelihood of participants themselves acting fairly. This “lesson” learned by witnessing another person’s regret can also be extended to relations between groups. In the second line of research, observers appeared to “learn” from an out-group’s expression of regret that members of the out-group were unhappy about the decision they took, which encourages the observers to see the out-group as more trustworthy. In the third line of research, we show that similar effects are found when an in-group member expresses regret about the in-group’s failure to reciprocate the trust shown by an out-group. Thus, expressing regret serves the function of communicating the inappropriateness of the in-group’s decision and thereby encourages trusting behaviour in other in-group members. Our contention is that the effects of emotional expression in the experiments described here are due to shifts in the perceived appropriateness of certain behaviours, shifts that result from a process of affective social learning.

In this chapter, we apply the affective social learning (ASL) concept to the social learning of natural skill sets in immature orang-utans since it can serve as an illustration of the majority of learning that occurs in wild apes. Most orang-utan social learning happens during everyday tasks and without any active involvement of the role model. Consequently, detecting the emotional state(s) of the role model is nearly impossible. We focus therefore on the emotional responses of the immature learners to the role models’ behaviours. Our data on peering (attentive, sustained close-range watching of conspecifics), which is often followed by selective practice of the observed behaviour by the peerer, suggests that there is some highly specific emotional arousal of the immatures during social learning. The role models’ actions with the object seem to play a central role in the learning process. However, immatures appear to decide on their own whether to attend to the information or not, as in affective observation, the second stage of ASL. Developmental changes in role-model preferences support the notion that trust in the role model is critical for ASL to work. Given that we can use the learners’ responses as proof of the affective states of the role models, ASL may be an important part of the mechanism that guides and optimizes the acquisition of learned skills in wild great apes. However, the lower we set the bar for the affective states (or emotions) of the role models for ASL to work, the more difficult it is to verify their presence and the more ASL will overlap with ordinary social learning.

This chapter provides a theoretical discussion of the boundaries of affective social learning (ASL), focusing on the conditions under which ASL takes place and the processes underlying ASL. In other words, the question is not so much what, but rather how we learn from others’ emotions. I propose three conditions that form a minimal requirement for others’ emotional reactions to have an initial impact on an individual: (1) the source (displaying the emotion and from whom the target learns) needs to show some emotional expression; (2) the target pays attention to the source, and is aware of the source’s focus of attention and the relevance of the emotion expression for him or her; (3) the source needs to put some trust in the source’s judgement or evaluation of the world. I next discuss the conditions under which we are most motivated to learn from others – when we are in an uncertain or ambiguous situation, for example, but also when the target experiences or expresses emotions, which can then be regulated by the source. This form of ASL may form the basis of emotional psychopathology in families, where children’s emotions are often met with depressed, anxious or indifferent reactions by their parents, through which children unintentionally learn inappropriate emotional responses. Different types of learning are then discussed that may be involved in ASL, ranging from fear conditioning to cognitive learning.