Key Findings

• A study conducted at UC Davis between 2021 and 2023, featuring children (predominantly White) and adults (predominantly Asian), shows that by age 6, children recognized the protective factor of lowering expectations before receiving bad news.
• Only adults recognized that lowering expectations would be emotionally protective and lead to attenuated outcomes.
• With age, children became better at understanding how thoughts influence emotions.

Children Recognize the Silver Lining of Lowering Expectations 

Unexpected outcomes create intense emotions. Imagine you applied for a job, thought you aced the interview, and started looking for apartments in the area, only to find out weeks later that you did not get the job. Now imagine how you would feel had you strategically lowered your expectations before opening the email containing the rejection letter. You would probably feel upset, but less upset than if you had never considered an alternative, negative outcome. Psychological research backs this up with findings that suggest unexpected losses feel worse than expected losses, and unexpected wins feel better than expected wins¹. 

What has been less studied, however, is children's reasoning about expected and unexpected outcomes. Specifically, little work has been done to determine whether children can reason like adults about the emotional protection afforded by strategically lowering one’s emotions to prepare for a potential negative outcome. I am a fourth-year PhD candidate at UC Davis researching this question, hoping to shed light on when, during development, children make connections between thoughts and emotions.

Evidence suggests that children develop some awareness of how expectations are connected to emotions around age 6, with further development into adulthood. For example, one study of children in the United States found that older, but not younger, children judged that a person with a high expectation would feel worse after a negative outcome than a person with a low expectation².

Eight- to 10-year-olds and adults, but not younger children, also viewed low expectations as emotionally beneficial following attenuated outcomes (outcomes between a high and low expectation). Developmental differences also appeared in explanations, with significant age-related increases in attributing emotions to expectations (e.g., “She didn’t think she’d win”) and decreases in attributing emotions solely to situations (e.g., “Because the snowman melted”). 

One limitation of this prior developmental work is that it focused on the emotional impact of a single expectation. In everyday experiences, people often form expectations at multiple time points before an outcome is known, sometimes to strategically manage their future emotions. Indeed, expectations are rarely static: They can shift in response to new information, changes in context, and fluctuations in mood.

Thoughts Closest to an Outcome Drive Emotional Reactions

To test a more advanced understanding of the influence of multiple expectations on post-outcome emotions, we conducted two studies with children and adults from the United States. In two studies, 6- to 10-year-olds (predominantly White and Hispanic/Latino) and adults (predominantly Asian, Hispanic/Latino and White) viewed scenarios featuring characters who varied in the following ways leading up to a future event: valence (high vs. low expectations), timing (expectations held at the beginning of the day vs. expectations held right before finding out about an outcome), and sequence of their expectations (e.g., whether characters raised or lowered their expectations or whether they remained consistent over time). We assessed how they predicted and explained characters’ emotions following negative (low expectation met) and attenuated outcomes (between high and low expectations; neither clearly positive nor negative).

In the moment—before an outcome had occurred—both children and adults reasoned that high expectations felt good and low expectations felt bad. What changes developmentally, however, is the influence that these expectations had across time. In particular, the sequence of past expectations significantly altered children’s emotion predictions about negative outcomes. This suggests an early understanding of the strategic power of moderating one’s thoughts to regulate one’s emotions—something I will elaborate on below.

Children Know That Lowering Expectations Softens Bad News

Like the job scenario discussed earlier, children and adults predicted that unexpected losses would feel worse than expected losses. Across age groups, participants reliably judged that characters with low expectations right before finding out about the negative outcome felt better after the negative outcome, compared to characters with high expectations right before finding out about the negative outcome. Importantly, both children and adults predicted more positive emotions for characters with consistently low expectations and for characters who lowered their expectations closer to the outcome, compared to characters with high expectations close to the outcome. Because these two patterns produced equivalent emotional benefits, the results suggest that children recognize the value of strategically lowering expectations—not merely of being persistently pessimistic.

Attenuated Outcomes Complicate Emotion Reasoning

Only adults viewed low expectations held right before finding out about an outcome as emotionally beneficial following attenuated outcomes. In comparison, children showed no clear integration of expectations into their emotion predictions for attenuated outcomes. Neither 6- to 7-year-olds nor 8- to 10-year-olds reliably distinguished between characters with different expectation patterns following attenuated outcomes, suggesting a stronger reliance on outcome information or difficulty linking attenuated outcomes to prior mental states³. 

Consider a time when an outcome was not something you had hoped for, but it was not necessarily all that bad. Like winning $10 from a scratch-off lottery ticket—sure, you probably had hoped for more, but at least you still won something. In these situations, children may not have been sure how to think about such an unexpected outcome, considering they knew that neither character had explicitly hoped for something “in the middle.” But it is in these attenuated situations that we see the greatest potential to help children recognize and reappraise, or reevaluate, their emotions. When children’s realities fall somewhat short of their expectations, they may need extra help in managing their emotional reactions. This is where parents and educators can implement meaningful emotional regulation skills.

For Children, Outcomes—Not Thoughts—Drive Emotions

So far, we have reviewed children's and adults’ emotion predictions in response to different expectations and outcomes. While these ratings show meaningful variations in emotion reasoning, we are not yet able to understand why children and adults are displaying these patterns. This is where our qualitative data comes into play. After asking our participants to predict a character’s emotion, we also asked them to explain their thought process. We found that 6- to 10-year-olds more often explained emotions as caused exclusively by the situation (e.g., winning a prize) or desires (e.g., wanting the teddy bear), and adults more frequently referred to characters’ thoughts and expectations as shaping their emotions (e.g., “She thought they would win”). These qualitative explanations show us that even though children as young as 6 years old seem to understand the positive emotional impact of lowering expectations before receiving bad news, they do not yet make the explicit connection between thoughts and emotions until later. Given that adults recognize the importance of lowering expectations even for attenuated outcomes and they make a causal connection between thoughts and emotion, this provides important evidence for teaching children about the power of their thoughts. Explaining how thinking strategically can help them not just avoid negative outcomes but also those outcomes they may not see as clearly good or bad may help support mature emotion regulation skills in these more attenuated, or uncertain, contexts.

Policy Implications

Not all events in children’s lives will be clearly positive or negative. This research points to a gap in children’s expectation-emotion reasoning in such attenuated situations. Regarding policy implications, this research can be useful for adults who work closely with young children to help teach emotion regulation skills. It will be important for these adults to understand why children may react negatively to certain situations and to help pinpoint the causes of these emotions in children’s thought processes. By explicitly and regularly supporting children’s capacity to reflect on the connections between their internal mental states and external situations, parents and educators can help scaffold adaptive emotion regulation in a complex social world.

Lucy M. Stowe, MA, is a Developmental Psychology PhD Candidate at the University of California, Davis.

¹ K. Sweeny and J. A. Shepperd, “The Costs of Optimism and the Benefits of Pessimism,” Emotion, 10(5): 2010, 750-753; T. D. Wilson,  S. Lindsey, and T. Y. Schooler, “A Model of Dual Attitudes,”  Psychological review, 107(1): 2000, 101.

² K. H. Lara, K. H. Lagattuta, and H. J. Kramer, “Is There a Downside to Anticipating the Upside? Children's and Adults’ Reasoning about How Prior Expectations Shape Future Emotions,” Child development, 90(4), 2019, 1170-1184.

³ K. H. Lagattuta,  L. Sayfan, and A. J. Blattman, “Forgetting Common Ground: Six-to Seven-year-olds Have an Overinterpretive Theory of Mind,” Developmental Psychology, 46(6), 2010, 1417; H. M. Wellman, Making Minds: How Theory of Mind Develops (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).