Comment: Emotions Are Abstract,Conceptual Categories That Are Learned by a Predicting Brain

Abstract

In their review, Ruba and Repacholi summarize the methods used to assess preverbal infants’ understanding of emotions, and analyze the existing evidence in light of classical and constructionist accounts of emotional development. They conclude that aspects of both accounts are plausible and propose a perceptual-to-conceptual shift in infants’ emotional development. In this comment, we clarify the nature of emotions as abstract, conceptual categories and suggest that infants may learn them as such from the start by using language to infer functional similarities across highly variable instances. This hypothesis is supported by predictive processing accounts of brain function, which can speak to the context-dependent nature of emotion and may be able to resolve debates in the study of emotion concept development.