Before narrating this tenth chapter, Mrs. Gribbin scarfed down a plateful of beans in a revolting display of disgusting manners, stuffing her mouth with both hands, belching and grunting, slopping bean juice all over my table, and performing many other unmentionable acts. Later she explained that this had simply been to illustrate that social behaviors are acceptable, or not, for purely cultural reasons. Her narration goes on to describe how Bandura’s social/cognitive theory of observational learning provides a widely accepted explanation for social learning. The theory explains how some behaviors are controlled by stimuli, more are influenced of their outcomes, but the most important are those that are under symbolic control. Symbolic control processes have to do with our ability to anticipate the consequences of our actions and to control them. We are agents of our own behaviors, says Bandura. True, we are affected by our environments, by our own actions, and by personal factors such as mood or knowledge or intelligence. But each of these three factors affects the others in a sort of triadic reciprocal determinism. Do we really have free will, asks Mrs. Gribbin in one of her asides. Her answer: Do some research; think about it.

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.

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.