Developmental & Computational Affective Cognition Lab
University of Toronto Scarborough
University of Toronto Scarborough
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Perspectives & Highlights
Doan, T., Ong, D. C., & Wu, Y. (2025). Emotion understanding as third-person appraisals: Integrating appraisal theories with developmental theories of emotion. Psychological Review, 132(1), 130–153. https://doi.org/10.1037/rev0000507 [Preprint] [PDF]
Wu, Y., Schulz, L. E., Frank, M. C., & Gweon, H. (2021). Emotion as information in early social learning. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 30(6), 468–475. https://doi.org/10.1177/09637214211040779 [Preprint] [PDF]
Wu, Y., Taylor, I. M., Chen, H., Frank, M. C. (2023). Adults tailor their emotional expressions to infants through "emotionese." In M. Goldwater, F. K. Anggoro, B. K. Hayes, & D. C. Ong (Eds.), Proceedings of the 45th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 3312–3318). [PDF]
Emotion as Information About the Physical World
Wu, Y., Merrick, M., & Gweon, H. (2024). Expecting the unexpected: Infants use others’ surprise to revise their own expectations. Open Mind, 8, 67–83. https://doi.org/10.1162/opmi_a_00117 [PDF] [Repository]
Wu, Y. & Gweon, H. (2021). Preschool-aged children jointly consider others’ emotional expressions and prior knowledge to decide when to explore. Child Development, 92(3), 862–870. https://doi.org/10.1111/cdev.13585 [PDF] [SI] [Repository]
Wu, Y., Muentener, P., & Schulz, L. E. (2017). One- to four-year-olds connect diverse positive emotional vocalizations to their probable causes. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 114(45), 11896–11901. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1707715114 [PDF]
Emotion as Information About Others' Mental states and Actions
Bolic, M. & Wu, Y. (under review). Children's Integration of Verbal and Emotional Cues for Communicative Inferences.
Doan, T. & Wu, Y. (under review). Who did it? Children use others' facial and body emotional cues to determine agent responsibility.
Wu, Y. & Schulz, L. E. (2020). Understanding social display rules: Using one person's emotional expressions to infer the desires of another. Child Development, 91(5), 1786–1799. https://doi.org/10.1111/cdev.13346 [PDF] [Repository]
Wu, Y. & Schulz, L. (2018). Inferring beliefs and desires from emotional reactions to anticipated and observed events. Child Development, 89(2), 649–662. https://doi.org/10.1111/cdev.12759 [PDF] [Repository]
Wu, Y., Haque, J. A., & Schulz, L. E. (2018). Children can use others' emotional expressions to infer their knowledge and predict their behaviors in classic false belief tasks. In C. Kalish, M. Rau, J. Zhu, & T. T. Rogers (Eds.), Proceedings of the 40th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 1193–1198). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society. [PDF]
Emotion as Information About One's Own and Others' Competence
Sun, W. & Wu, Y. (2025). “Wow! You drew it!”: How overly positive emotional reactions influence children's motivation in learning contexts. In D. Barner, N.R. Bramley, A. Ruggeri and C.M. Walker (Eds.), Proceedings of the 47th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 1252–1259). Cognitive Science Society. [PDF]
Asaba, M.*, Wu, Y.*, Carrillo, B., & Gweon, H. (2025). When success is surprising: Children's ability to use surprise to infer competence. Open Mind, 9, 825–843. https://doi.org/10.1162/opmi.a.2 [PDF] [Repository] *Co-first authors
Children's Intuitive Theory of Emotion
Gulati, S. & Wu, Y. (under review). Is It Better Not to Know?: Adults' and Children's Understanding of How Uncertainty Affects Emotion Over Time.
Doan, T. & Wu, Y. (2024). Children and adults consider others' resources when inferring their emotions. In L. K. Samuelson, S. L. Frank, M. Toneva, A. Mackey, & E. Hazeltine (Eds.), Proceedings of the 46th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 1091–1097). Cognitive Science Society. [PDF]
Wu, Y., Schulz, L. E, & Saxe, R. (2018). Toddlers connect emotional responses to epistemic states. In T.T. Rogers, M. Rau, X. Zhu, & C. W. Kalish (Eds.), Proceedings of the 40th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 2711–2716). Cognitive Science Society. [PDF]
Mapping Emotional Cues to Emotion Labels
Chen, H. & Wu, Y. (in press). The emergence of emotion word comprehension in toddlerhood: Evidence from a looking-while-listening paradigm. Child Development. [Preprint]
Chen, H., Gulati S., & Wu, Y. (2025). Toddlers' mapping of emotion words to facial expressions and body postures in a looking-while-listening task. In D. Barner, N.R. Bramley, A. Ruggeri and C.M. Walker (Eds.), Proceedings of the 47th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 1456). Cognitive Science Society.
Wu, Y., Matteson, H. M., Baker, C., & Frank, M. C. (2023). Angry, sad, or scared? Within-valence mapping of emotion words to facial and body cues in 2- to 4-year old children. Collabra: Psychology, 9(1), 74333. https://doi.org/10.1525/collabra.74333 [PDF] [Repository]
Computational Models
Wu, Y.*, Tessler, M. H.*, Asaba, M., Zhu, P., Gweon, H., & Frank, M. C. (2021). Integrating emotional expressions with utterances in pragmatic inference. In W.T. Fitch, C. Lamm, H. Leder & K. Tessmar-Raible (Eds.), Proceedings of the 43rd Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 2260–2266). Cognitive Science Society. [PDF] [Repository] *Co-first authors
Wu, Y., Baker, C. L., Tenenbaum, J. B., & Schulz, L. E. (2018). Rational inference of beliefs and desires from emotional expressions. Cognitive Science, 42(3), 850–884. https://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.12548 [PDF] [SI] [Repository]
Methods Paper
Schuwerk, T., Kampis, .., Wu, Y., … Frank, M. C., & Rakoczy, H. (accepted pending revision). Action anticipation based on an agent’s epistemic state in toddlers and adults. Child Development.
Lucca, K., Yuen, F., Wang, Y., Alessandroni, N., Allison, O., Alvarez, M., ..., Wu, Y., ... & Hamlin, J. K. (2025). Infants’ Social Evaluation of Helpers and Hinderers: A Large‐Scale, Multi‐Lab, Coordinated Replication Study. Developmental Science, 28(1), e13581. https://doi.org/10.1111/desc.13581 [PDF]
Singh, L., Barokova, M., Bazhydai, M., Baumgartner, H. A., Franchin, L., Kosie, J. E., ..., Wu, Y., & Frank, M. C. (2024). Tools of the Trade: A guide to sociodemographic reporting for researchers, reviewers, and editors. Journal of Cognition and Development, 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1080/15248372.2024.2431106 [PDF]
Singh, L., Barokova, M., Baumgartner, H. A., Lopera, D., Omane, P., Sheskin, M., Yuen, F., Wu, Y., … Frank, M. C. (2024). A Unified Approach to Demographic Data Collection for Research with Young Children Across Diverse Cultures. Developmental Psychology, 60(2), 211–227. https://dx.doi.org/10.1037/dev0001623 [PDF]
Chuey, A., Asaba, M., Bridgers, S., Carrillo, B., Dietz, G., Garcia, T., Leonard, J., Liu, S., Merrick, M., Radwan, S., Stegall, J., Velez, N., Woo, B., Wu, Y., Zhou, X., Frank, M. C., & Gweon H. (2021). Moderated Online Data-Collection for Developmental Research: Methods and Replications. Frontiers in Psychology, 4968. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.734398 [PDF]
Other Work on Children's Causal Reasoning
Wu, Y., Muentener, P., & Schulz, L. (2016). The invisible hand: Toddlers connect probabilistic events with agentive causes. Cognitive Science, 40(8), 1854–1876. https://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.12309 [PDF] [OSF]