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