Humans in diverse cultures develop a capacity to recognize and share others’ emotional states. In this article, studies in adult and developmental populations are reviewed and synthesized to build a framework for understanding the neural bases and development of emotion recognition. It is proposed that foundations for the development of emotion recognition are provided by an experience-expectant neural circuitry that emerges early in life, biases infants to attend to biologically salient information, and is refined and specialized through experience for processing (...) species-typical signals of emotions. It is also discussed how genetic variations and experiences during sensitive periods of development can affect the developmental process and give rise to subtle individual differences in emotion recognition. (shrink)

Theories of emotion have often maintained artificial boundaries: for instance, that cognition and emotion are separable, and that an emotion concept is separable from the emotional events that comprise its category (e.g. “fear” is distinct from instances of fear). Over the past several years, research has dissolved these artificial boundaries, suggesting instead that conceptual construction is a domain-general process—a process by which the brain makes meaning of the world. The brain constructs emotion concepts, but also cognitions and perceptions, all in (...) the service of guiding action. In this view, concepts are multimodal constructions, dynamically prepared from a set of highly variable instances. This approach obviates old questions (e.g. how does cognition regulate emotion?) but generates new ones (e.g. how does a brain learn emotion concepts?). In this paper, we review this constructionist, predictive coding account of emotion, considering its implications for health and well-being, culture and development. (shrink)