Chapter 4 Flashcards
Functions of Emotions
- Serve many purposes for human beings
- Provide us with a trusty arsenal of survival skills
- Fear response- alerts us to a dangerous situation signals us to fight back or escape to protect ourselves
- The urge to engage in sexual relations- propagates the species
- The disgust we experience when we encounter decaying material- protects us from exposure to potentially toxic bacteria
- The affection elicited by a baby’s smiling face- the caregiving needed to ensure his continued survival
- Conscience- a thermostat that is ordinarily set at the “feel good” level
- Morally or ethically wrong- our emotional temperature changes -> experience shame or guilt
- Resitution or to change our errant ways so that we can regain the “feel good” setting
- Social emotions- powerful reinforcers of behavior
- Communication
- Emotional message conveyed through the face, posture, and gestures
- The basic social significance of the emotions
- Stepping-stones that infants use to develop reciprocity with caregivers
- Emotions in cognitive functions
- Overall mental health and wellness
Phineas Gage matrix
- Damasio (1994)
- Damage to the frontal lobe region
- cognitive dysfunctions- poor planning, inadequate decision making, inability to take another’s perspective, and problems in sustaining employment
- Emotional problems- lack of an enriched emotional life, lack of passion and initiative, and a diminished sense of pleasure and pain
- Lacking in resourcefulness
- The organizing role emotions play in higher-order cognitive functions like memory, decision-making, and planful behavior
Emotional Intelligence
- (emotional IQ)
- Ability to perceive emotions, to identify and understand their meaning, to integrate them with other kinds of cognition, and to manage them
Basic emotion
infant expressive behaviors
Differential emotions theory (DET)
- he direct product of the underlying neutral processes related to each discrete feeling
- Emotions are universal, naturally occurring phenomena mediated by evolutionarily old subcortical brain structures
Self-conscious emotions:
pride, shame, embarrassment, empathy and guilt, depend upon self-recognition and higher levels of cognitive functioning
Emotion
Feeling, or affect, that occurs when a person is in a state or an interaction that is important to him or her, especially to his or her wellbeing
Biological and Environmental Influences on Emotions
- Changes in baby’s emotional capacities with age
- Development of certain brain regions plays a role in emotions
- Emotions are the first language with which parents and infants communicate
- Social relationships provide the setting for the development of a variety of emotions via attachment relationship
Primary emotions
Emotions that are present in humans and animals
- Appear in the first 6 months
- Surprise, interest, joy, anger, sadness, fear and disgust
Emotion schemas
- the product of experience and culture
- May include memories, thoughts, images, and noncognitive elements like hormonal shifts that interact with and may amplify basic emotional experience
- Can become quite durable and begin to reflect a person’s typical response style
- Emotion schema development: depends upon later language development, when words can be used to describe feeling states
Interest and interest schemas
- Primacy in emotion and cognitive operations
- The basic emotion of interest connect to cognitive capacities like attention, intelligence, persistence, and goal-directed behavior
- Interest: driver of selective attention, from which all processing of information occurs as well as subsequent positive and negative emotions
Orthogenetic
develop from undifferentiated responses into more differentiated ones-> integrated emotional repertoire
Releasers
Infant physical characteristics that elicit nurturing responses from adults, such as small body size, large eyes, and large head size relative to the total body size
Emotion regulation
- one of the cornerstones of emotional well-being and positive adjustment throughout the life span
- Encompasses the strategies and behaviors- moderate our emotional experiences in order to meet the demands of different situations or to achieve our goals
Synchrony
interactions between young infants and their mothers soon exhibit a repetitive-rhythmic organization, a temporal coordination of nonverbal behaviors
Still-face paradigm
- gazing intently at the mother and vocalizing
- Coping strategies
- If mother fails to response -> other-directed coping behaviors -> self-directed coping behaviors: self-comfort
Interactive repair
During caregiver-infant interactions, a caregiver’s effort to help the infant shift from a negative emotional state that has derailed the interaction back to a positive emotional state, mending the interaction
Social referencing
infants use the emotional information provided by caregivers to help them interpret situations that are ambiguous to them
Depressed caretakers
- Show less positive affect than non-depressed caretakers
- Look away from their babies more often
- Display more anger, intrusiveness
- Poorly timed responses
Field (1995)- assymmetrical electrical activity in the right frontal area of 3-4 month infants of depressed mothers
- Consistent with patterns observed in extremely fearful and inhibited children and in chronically depressed adults
- Risk babies of emotional problems
Neurobiology of social bonding
- Right hemisphere appears to be more mature than left hemisphere in infancy
- Right orbitofrontal region- social bonding -> limbic system, hypothalamus, brain stem
Basic trust
seeing others as dependable and trustworthy
Attachment theory
Bowlby
*infant and caregiver participate in an attachment system that has evolved to serve the purpose of keeping the infant safe and assuring his survival
*Accommodate the infant’s more advanced physical and cognitive abilities
*Making child secure
*An affectional bond develops between infant and caregiver
In stages
*The quality of care that an infant receives will affect the nature and the eventual impact of his attachments
*Full-fledged attachment at about 7 or 8 months
3 purposes of attachment
- Proximity maintenance: nurturing the emotional bond
- Secure base: ongoing protection
- Safe haven: have when babies are distressed
Separation anxiety
protest being separated from the mother and will greet her happily when she returns
Stranger anxiety
increased tendency to be wary of strangers is present
Working models
prototypes of social functioning that affect the child’s expectations and behaviors in future relationships
Ethologists
biologists who do careful observations of animal behavior in natural environments
Strange situation test
Measurement technique designed to assess the quality of an infant’s attachment to a caregiver (Mary Ainsworth)
Four Attachment Styles
- Securely attached
- Anxious ambivalent-insecurely attached
- Avoidant-insecurely attached
- Disorganized-Disoriented- Insecurely attached
Securely Attached
- show distress when separated from the mother, often crying and trying to go after her, but they greet her happily on her return, usually reaching up to be held, sometimes modling their bodies to the mother as they seek comfort
- Secure base
- Optimism or hope (Erikson)
- Learned to tolerate more separation -> confidence in mother’s availability
Anxious ambivalent- insecurely attached
- High levels of anxiety
- Cannot quite achieve a sense of security and even when mother is available
- Distressed when separated
- Angry, alternately approaching and resisting the mother, or they may respond listlessly to her efforts to comfort
- Preoccupied with their mothers and rarely return to exploration after a separation
Avoidant- insecurely attached
- fail to cry when separated from their mothers
- Actively avoid or ignore her when she returns
- Sometimes combining proximity seeking and moving away
- Mostly, turn away
- Unemtoional during separation and reunion
- Heart rates are elevated when separation as other babies
- Do not show the heart rate drop when accompanies concentration and interest
- Direct their attention to toys to defend themselves against anxiety when mother is gone
Disorganized-distorted (Insecurely attached)
Contradictory behaviors
Showing both an inclination to approachthe mother when stressed and a tendency to avoid her when she approached!
Linking Maternal Care and Attachment Quality
- Caregiving during baby’s 1st year
- Securely attached infants
- Mothers responded promptly and consistently to crying during the 1st year
- Handled infant with sensitivity
- Held the baby tenderly
- Face-to-face interactions- responsive to baby’s signals
- Create trust and security
- Insecurely attached
- Mothers seemed insensitive to their infants in one way or another
- Ambivalent babies
- -Mothers were affectionate but were often awkward in holding
- -Inconsistent in their responsiveness to crying
- -Face-to-face interactions- failed to respond to their babies’ signals
- Avoidant babies
- -Mothers actively avoid holding their babies
- -More often rejecting and angry
- -Showed less warmth and affction
- Disorganized-disoriented
- -Frightening and/or abusive parental behavior
Oxytocin
- Hormone that is released in the hypothalamus and modulates the transmission of impulses
- Enhanced in preganancy, labor, delivery, and lactation
- Promotes physical proximity, responsive caregiving, empathy, and affection
- Reduces stress and helps mothers deal with the physical and emotional challenges of childbirth and childrearing
- Individual differences in maternal oxytocin- mother’s own early experiences
- Oxytocin is released by infant behaviors -> release of dopamine, a neurotransmitter associated with the rewarding aspects of caregiving -> reinforce attachment behaviors
Temperaments
different babies have different emotional and behavioral characteristics from the time they are born
Fearfulness or reactivity
the infant’s proneness to cry or pull away from new stimuli
Irritability or negative emotionality
the infant’s tendency to react with fussiness to negative or frustrating events
Activity level
the intensity and quantity of movement
Positive affect
smiling and laughing, especially to social stimuli
Attention-persistence
duration of orienting or looking
Rhythmicity
predictability of sleep, feeding, elimination, and so on
Where do temperament traits come from?
Kagan: the behavioral and physiological characteristics of high reactive infants- a lower than average threshold of excitability in parts of the brain- the amygdala and associated structures- mediate stress responses
- Genes- differences in brain structure
- Affect production and metabolism of neurotransmitters- dopamine, serotonin
- Nature and nurture coact to influence stress reactivity from the parenatal period onward
Difficult babies
*more fearful, more irritable, and more active
Displayed less positive affect
*More irregulat
*Difficult and challenging to parents
Easy babies
more placid, less active, more positive, and more regular in their rhythms
*Easier to care for
Slow-to-warm-up babies
- Like difficult babies in their fearfulness
- Showing more wariness in new situations
- Reactions in general were less intense and negative than difficult babies
Thomas and Chess (1982)- Temperament’s 9 dimensions
- Rhythmicity- regularity of basic functions
- Attention span/persistence: activity maintaned
- Activity level
- Approach: withdrawal
- Adaptability: adjustment to new circumstances
- Threshold of responsiveness: intensity level required to evoke a response
- Intensity of reaction (Emotional reactivity): energy level of a response
- Quality of Mood: joyful, pleasant, friendly, unfriendly and unpleasant
- Distractibility: extent to which novel stimuli disrupt
Genetic vulnerability/diathesis-stress
- Children with difficult temperaments
- their physiological makeup makes them more prone to the negative effects of unsupportive parenting or other negative environmental influences (stress) than other children
Differential susceptibility
- It may be, however, that difficult temperamental qualities actually make infants more susceptible to environmental influences in general
- Experience both more benefit from positive parenting and more harm from negative parenting than other children
Goodness of fit model
- Thomas and Chess
- temperament and caregiving should interact to determining the quality of a child’s attachment relationships
- Temperament and sensitivity of care (both also influenced by other variables) interact at several levels to produce attachment security
Rothbart and Bates’s Classification (2004)
- Extraversion/surgnecy
- Negative affectivity
- Effortful control (self-regulation)
- High-control: successful coping strategies
- Low control: disruptive and intensely emotional
Proneness to distress
Defined as a baby’s tendency to exhibit negative emotions, was inversely related to mothers’ warmth, support, and positive emotional tone
Culture
- Distribution of attachment patterns varies between countries and subcultures
- Contribute meaningfully to the kinds of attachments that are likely to develop
Mothers and Fathers
- Infant-mother attachments tend to be the first to form
- If the infant was securely attached to one parent, he was unlikely to be insecurely attached to the other parent
- On average, mothers were more positive and more responsive than fathers
- Father’s care of their infants is more affected by the harmony of the father’s relationship to the mother than the mother’s caregiving
Reactive attachment disorder
Lack of ability to form affectional bonds with other people and a pattern of markedly disturbed social relationships
Importance of early attachment
- Securely attached-> direct and appropriate in their dependency behaviors, seeking help when they realistically need it but functioning independently in other situations, more self-confident, have more friends, have better social skills, more likely to trust a best friend, resolve conflicts with a romantic partner
- Insecurely attached children-> helpless, act out for attention, passively avoid seeking help when they genuinely needed it
- When infants are securely attached to both parents-> best outcomes
Adult Attachment Inventory (AAI)
- valuated mothers’ and fathers’ own models of attachment using a structured interview
- Parents: memories of the parenting they had received and their beliefs about whether that parenting influenced their own personalities
- The security of their attachment -> quality of attachment the had established with their own infants
“Secure-autonomous” parents
- valued relationships and believed that their own personalities were influenced by them.
- Talk openly and objectively about early experiences
- Have secure attachments with their own infants
“Insecure” parents
- Attachment relationships were not readily recalled, not valued
- Not seen as influential infants tended to have avoidant attachments with parents who showed this “dismissive” pattern
“Preoccupied-entangled”
- Were preoccupied with their own parents
- Struggling to please
- Seemed confused, angry or especially passive
- Their infants’ attachments to them- ambivalent
“Unresolved-disorganized” parents
- Irrational and inconsistent comments
* Disorganized-disoriented infants
Three central characteristics in personality development
- Erikson
- 1st year: trust vs. mistrust
- Development of a sense of self-> 18 months
- Independence through separation and individuation
Face-to-face play
Begins to characterize interactions at 2-3 months of age
- Decreases after 7 months
- Peer interactions- 18-24 months via imitative & reciprocal play
Play
A pleasurable activity that is engaged in for its own sake
Play therapy
Freud & Erikson: plays help child master anxieties and conflicts
*Allows child to work off frustrations, analyze conflicts and learn coping skills
Piaget on Play
Play advances cognitive development
*Allows children to practice competencies and acquired skills in a relaxed, pleasurable way
Vygotsky on Play
Play is an excellent setting for cognitive development
-Symbolic and make-believe play
Berlyne on Play
Play satisfies our exploratory drive which involves curiosity and a desire for new info
6 types of play (Parten)
- Unoccupied
- Solitary
- Onlooker
- Parallel
- Associative
- Cooperative play
Unoccupied
Child might stand in place and perform random movements that do not seem to have a goal
Solitary
Playing alone, engrossed in activity (2-3 years)
Onlooker
Child watches other children; ask questions
Parallel
Child plays separately but with like toys or in a manner that mimics the other child
Associative
Social interaction with little or no organization; children more interested in each other
Cooperative play
Social interaction in a group with a sense of group identity and organized activity
Sensorimotor play
- Early infancy
* Derive pleasure from exercising sensorimotor schemas
Practice play
- Primarily in infancy
* Repetition of behavior when new skills or being learned
Pretense/Symbolic play
(9-30 months)
*Increased use of symbolic play
Social Play
- Peer interactions
* Involves peers
Constructive play
Combines sensorimotor/practice play with symbolic representation
Games
Activites that are engaged in for pleasure and have rules
Family
Constellation of subsystems
- Each subsystems has a reciprocal influence on the other
- Adjustment of parents during infant’s first years
- Infant care competes with parents’ other interests
- Marital satisfaction and relationship dynamics may change
Reciprocal socialization
Two-way interaction process whereby parents socialize children and children socialize parents
Parent-infant synchrony
Temporal coordination of social behavior
Scaffolding
Parental behavior that supports children’s efforts through turn-taking sequences
