Joint reasoning about social affiliation and emotion

Social relationships powerfully influence human emotions. Understanding how relationships influence emotions enables people to make important social inferences, such as what will delight or upset someone and which people are allies or enemies. In this Perspective, we bring together research that has separately addressed reasoning about emotion and reasoning about affiliation. People expect others’ emotions to reflect their appraisals of a situation relative to what they value. People also expect others to value the welfare of friends, family and group members. This common connection to value can support joint reasoning across these two domains. An intuitive theory representing the connection between affiliation and emotion can enable people to use relationships to better predict others’ emotions, including empathy and counter-empathy, and to infer relationships from observed emotional responses. We also review evidence that human infants can make inferences about emotion and affiliation separately, and we propose future work to explore the development of joint reasoning across these domains. People can reason about the relationships between people and about other people’s emotions. In this Perspective, Smith-Flores and Powell review research in both domains and propose a framework of how people jointly reason about social affiliation and emotion.