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Now researchers at the University of Washington have found that children as young as 15 months can detect anger when watching other people’s social interactions and then use that emotional information to guide their own behavior.

The study, published in the October/November issue of the journal Cognitive Development, is the first evidence that younger toddlers are capable of using multiple cues from emotions and vision to understand the motivations of the people around them.

“At 15 months of age, children are trying to understand their social world and how people will react,” said lead author Betty Repacholi, a faculty researcher at UW’s Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences and an associate professor of psychology. “In this study we found that toddlers who aren’t yet speaking can use visual and social cues to understand other people – that’s sophisticated cognitive skills for 15-month-olds.”

The findings also linked the toddlers’ impulsive tendencies with their tendency to ignore other people’s anger, suggesting an early indicator for children who may become less willing to abide by rules.

Infants were bystanders to a social exchange in which an Experimenter performed actions on objects and an Emoter expressed anger, as if they were forbidden acts. Next, the Emoter became neutral and her visual access to the infant was experimentally manipulated. The Emoter either: (a) left the room, (b) turned her back, (c) faced the infant but looked down at a magazine, or (d) faced and looked toward the infant. Infants were then presented with the test objects. When the previously angry Emoter was facing them, infants were hesitant to imitate the demonstrated acts in comparison to the other conditions. We hypothesize that infants integrated the emotional and visual-perceptual cues to determine whether the Emoter would get angry at them, and then regulated their behavior accordingly.