Chapter 6 + Allen: Emotional development and temperament Flashcards
What are 3 stages of emotional development?
- Recognize facial emotional expressions + making them yourself
- Understanding emotions
- Regulate own emotions
Which 6 basic emotions are universal?
Happiness, fear, anger, sadness, disgust, surprise
What is ethology?
Approach that emphasizes evolutionary origins of behaviors that are important for survival
What are two ways of investigating if facial expressions are innate?
- Are they universally understood
- Do new-borns spontaneously produce them
What are complex emotions?
Emotion that consists of 2 or more emotions and they require sophisticated understanding
What is script knowledge with regard to understanding emotions?
Children may not understand the emotion but know how to react to it
What is emotional ambiguity?
Realization that a person’s feelings may not be clear-cut or may be different than yours
What is mind-mindedness and of what is it a good predictor?
Caregiver’s tendency to view child as an individual with a mind
–> predictor of secure attachment
Why is Freud’s theory controversial but also important?
Controversial: unfalsifiable
Important: role of unconsious drive, early experiences have impact later in life
What is the difference between the id, ego and superego?
Id = emotions, impulses, desires
Ego = mediator between id and superego
Superego = conscience
What are the 5 psychosexual stages and when do you pass on to the next stage?
In every stage a conflict has to be resolved to go to the next stage
- Oral stage: sucking, exploring
- Anal stage: potty training
- Phallic stage: oedipus/electra complex, differences boys-girls
- Latency stage: rest of sexual feelings, practice future roles with same sex peers
- Genital stage: start fertile life
What are the Oedipus and Electra complexes?
Oedipus in boys, electra in girls
Child is attracted to opposite sex parent and wishes to exclude the same sex parent
Why was Anna Freud important for developmental psychology?
Founder of psychoanalytic child psychology
What’s the similarity and the difference between Freud’s and Erikson’s theory?
Similar: developmental stages with conflict
Different: Erikson focused on the social conflicts rather than sexual ones
What are Bowlby’s 4 attachment styles?
- Secure: health communication, good regulation emotions
- Anxious: clinginess, fear abandonment
- Avoidant: little emotion expression, withdrawal
- Disorganized: anxious + avoidant, fear of rejection
What is infant attachment and why is it evolutionary relevant?
Universal need for close emotional bond between caregiver and child
–> Innate and universal
How has infant’s understanding of facial expressions been assessed? What were the results?
Habituation-dishabituation technique
- 3 mths: distinguish smiling/frowning
- 4-7 mths: distinguish happiness/surprise
- Neonates also distinguish, doesn’t mean they know the meaning
Can young infants empathize?
They can imitate expressions, but it’s unclear if it shows an understanding of emotion
What is measured with the visual cliff paradigm?
If infant can use caregiver’s facial expression for guiding a potentially dangerous situation
What is social referencing in infants?
Infants look at caregiver for advice when faced with difficult situation and search social cues
What are three tasks for assessing emotion understanding?
- Denham test
- Harris’s false belief emotion task
- Harris’s test of emotion comprehension
What is the Denham test? What were the results?
Puppet did the exact opposite thing of what the children liked/disliked. The child had to predict which emotion the puppet would feel
Results: 2/3 year olds perform well
Which conclusion was derived from results of the Denham test?
Children who thought the puppet was happy more often showed better emotion understanding
–> Emotion understanding can be related to ability to form harmonious relationships with others
What is a false belief emotion task and what were the results?
Like a Sally-Anne task
Age 4: able to represent false beliefs, but can’t predict response
Age 6: able to reason with false beliefs
What is the developmental timeline of emotion comprehension?
<5: understand public aspects of emotions
7y: understand emotion and mental states and a bit of ToM
9-11: one can feel 2 emotions in response to same event, regulating emotions with cognitive strategies, morals relate to emotional responses
What is the relationship between family interaction quality and emotional understanding?
Children could understand false belief and emotion more if mothers focused on mental characteristics when talking