5.1 Flashcards
Parents as important for children’s emotional development:
attachment figures, cognitive and emotional expertise, teach cultural and subcultural rules.
Parents as support persons
Parents teach young children whether their distress-related emotions are generally worth attention of the parent. When a parent ignores such emotions often enough, a child learns that their emotion needs to be minimized or maximized in order to suit the response style of the parent. General responsiveness to their child’s distress tends to ameliorate their current distress and help them in the long run to tolerate negative affect temporarily. Parent’s lack of support in these distressing situations challenges children to develop and practice strategies of distraction which ultimately limit their access to own appraisals and subjective experience of distress-related emotions.
Differences in caregivers responsivity to children’s signals of attachment-related distress has consequences for emotional development.
- secure attachment: promotion of understanding of negative valenced emotions and mixed emotions
- insecure attachment: risk of making hostile attributions about peer’s intentions and to behave aggressively and tendency to show more dysfunctional anger and fewer positive emotional expressions.
Parents as emotional coaches and teachers
talk to their children about verbal labels for inner experiences, antecedents of other’s emotional experience and about consequences of their own expressive displays. Talking about family member’s emotions is helpful for children’s emotional development: the more time a mother spends with this type of teaching the more advanced is her child’s affective perspective taking, emotion understanding and moral sensitivity.
provide their children with access to modes of thinking which prevail in their own culture and subculture.
advise their children on culture-specific rules for coping with negative emotions. Also Parent-specific child-rearing values include ways of appraising emotional events and of feeling and displaying emotions in certain situations
Frequent discourse about feelings challenges children to describe their own inner state and to learn strategies of regulation in areas of attention, appraisal, subjective experience and emotion expression both by explicit and implicit teaching.
!Structural limitations for emotional development in the parent-child relationship (4)
1) Because parents are adults, their understanding for their child’s emotions is generally limited, cannot share all of their children’s appraisals.
2) Also the fact that for many years parents are responsible for the well-being of their child might restrict their understanding of their children’s emotional appraisal.
3) Because the parent- child relationship is asymmetrical, children are requested by their parents to conform to culturally prescribed rules and conventions about the experience and the display of emotions.
4) Because parents are expected to transmit and enforce these rules, they may not appreciate their children’s expression of emotions that deviate from theses norms.
One big difference between boys and girls and mothers and fathers:
Boys in elementary school expected more negative reactions from their fathers than from their mothers when disclosing how sad they were at a third person.
Peers have a big influence on children’s emotional development:
1)They are in a better position to understand the emotional life of their age mate than parents or children of other age groups.
. 2) Peers form a group and being together with a group of like-minded peers intensifies some emotions (e.g. glee over teachers faux-pas), they share an appraisal of emotion-eliciting events. These appraisals are likely to differ from time to time and from place to place and children may seek each other out on the basis of similar emotional appraisals. When emotion appraisals take on a prescriptive character and are internalized to the extent that they guide children’s experience of emotions, they are called ‘‘feeling rules’’ or emotional scripts. Also peer groups usually have rules about the expression and regulation of emotions (explicitly + implicitly).
Peer norms about the expression of emotions
Display rules in today’s peer culture favor dampening the expression of many emotions.
The peer norm is to remain relatively calm or in control in the face of emotions in may situations (especially for boys). Peers tend to reject children who do not conform to their display rules about emotions (e.g. frequently exploding in anger or expressing envy). Greater social maturity is generally associated with having a broader repertoire of motion regulation strategies at one’s disposal
emotional front
In early elementary school grade children become aware of the “emotional front”: emotions they show with their “public self” need not coincide with what they feel in their “private self. Children are challenged to learn the skill for self-presentation and impression management. This means to be able to control expression of subjective feelings in most cases. Although emotional fronts make emotional expressions less genuine, children learn to reduce anger so that they are able to negotiate or reframe conflicting viewpoints and are challenged to overcome the hurt resulting from unfulfilled wishes for special treatment.
The development of emotion regulation strategies
School-age children increasingly learn to distance themselves from anger. They refine their voluntary control over their emotional expressions. Externalizing was selected as the worst strategy for coming to terms with experiences of shame, anger, or hurt feelings in peer contexts, because social gain could only be made when peer’s negative comments were ignored.
Friendships
differentiated from relationships to ordinary peers in preadolescence because friendships now attain a new quality of intimacy. Also friends chose each other, so friendships become voluntary relationships, based on mutual sympathy.
Friends as support persons
- Reality testing
- Adolescents are challenged to be helpful to friends when needed and to respond to their emotions. Close friendships thus stimulate to learn how to be supportive and generally to acquire skills necessary for building and maintaining intimacy, such as expressing caring and concern, admiration and affection in appropriate ways.
Reality testing
Within friendship emotion-colored evaluations are compared, contrasted and validates. Friends help each other in sorting out “appropriate” feelings and purely idiosyncratic feelings; this process is referred to as reality testing.
Disagreements between friends
1) Name-calling by the friend challenged teenagers, for example, to regulate emotions hurt feelings, and emotional turmoil or distress which were reported to be more intensive when the provocateur was a best friend.
2) The relationship context influences the interpretation of meaning for a disagreement as well as the intensity of subjective feelings, choice of coping behaviors and excepted long-term results for the relationship: e.g. fight with best friend -> talk it over vs. fight with classmate -> avoid.
3) Especially management of anger in conflicts is of particular importance in friendships. Another social and emotional task in friendship is learning to deal with competitive and contemptuous feelings.
4) When friendships are overshadowed by competitiveness or other forms of antagonism, emotional experiences and expressions in conflict situations will be colored by the underlying emotions, such as anger or contempt. These emotions challenge friends to evaluate and possibly change their relationship. They may stimulate self-exploration, since these emotions signal implicit plans, goals or expectations that might have been violated. Knowing about these internal states is helpful in building a realistic self-concept.
Structural limitations for emotional development in friendships
- Close friendships are more vulnerable than e.g parent-child relationships.
- one or both friends may succumb to sufficciently severe emotional problems that their friendship is compromised
- One friend can betray the other’s trust and tell the other’s emotional secrets which exposes her vulnerability before the peers. Threats to do so, as in relational aggression, may also limit emotional development in close friendships.
