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.

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.