Not talking about autistic people specifically, talking about people in general. On some level the idea of emotions should be pretty intuitive, what I'm asking about is how we learn to talk about feelings. People communicate using words, and words gain meaning through consensus. If people can't agree on the meaning of words, more or less, they are useless for communication. That means that when words are first being learned, they need to refer to something fairly objective, for example an observable object like a dog. But emotions aren't objective, they are very much subjective. So how do we learn about them? I think the earliest concept of emotion links it just the expression of emotion. I have a baby cousin who I've been watching develop, and she's been taught to mime emotions like "sad". I have no idea if at that point she had any association between the expression sad and her experiences of actually being sad, but she probably learned from her parents referring to as sad when she actually cried. As people grow older and their language skills develop, they probably develop more complex schemes of both the subjective experience of emotion, and of the observable behavior relating to emotion. This is all conjecture though. I'm wondering if there is any linguists or developmental psychologists here who know the answer to this.
01 Mar 2017, 6:35 pm
