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.

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.