Effects of Maltreatment Socio-Emotional: Emotion Regulation and Peers

Question 1

What are the 6 basic emotions?

Answer 1

fear
disgust
anger
surprise
happiness
sadness

Question 2

How are emotions evolutionary

Answer 2

• Fear can keep us safe! (Fight or flight response)
• Emotions may promote prosocial behaviors and can motivate us to help others, function as a cooperative society, etc

Question 3

What are the three major components of Normative Emotion Development?

Answer 3

Emotion Recognition
Emotion Expression
Emotion Regulation

Question 4

What is emotion recognition?

Answer 4

The ability to accurately recognize and identify emotional expressions in others

• You see facial cues and you can make predictions of what is likely to happen next
• Your experiences shape your predictions

Question 5

What is Normative Development in Emotion Recognition

Answer 5

-Complex process
-Influenced by child experiences, expectations, & learning

-Females are generally more accurate at labeling facial expressions of emotion than males in childhood and adulthood

• Typically, children are first able to accurately identify happy faces, followed by sad and angry, then fear and surprise; neutral faces are challenging for young children to identify
• Typical children and adults attend to happy, fearful, and angry faces similarly (some biases to angry/fearful faces in adults, as an evolutionary process to alert us to possible danger in the environment)

Question 6

What is Emotion Expression

Answer 6

• Showing emotion that is appropriate to the situation

-Ideally, the expression on one’s face matches the emotion being experienced (as opposed to smiling to cover anger; these mismatched emotional expressions are common to pathology)

• Sometimes it is adaptive to disguise your emotions

Question 7

What is Normative Development in Emotion Expression?

Answer 7

• Young children will often behave according to their current emotional status (as would be expected, sad children may cry, angry children may pout or tantrum, etc)
• Kids aren’t always great at knowing how they feel or how to appropriately express themselves, they learn this process from caregivers who help regulate emotion expression

Question 8

What is Emotion Regulation?

Answer 8

The process of controlling (regulating) the expression, magnitude, or duration of an emotional response in order to accomplish specific goals or meet situation demands

• We need to regulate positive emotions also

Question 9

What is the Emotion Regulation strategy of Avoidance or Distraction?

Answer 9

Avoidance or distraction: avoiding situations that may make you feel uncomfortable/unhappy/scared, a form of attentional deployment

Question 10

What is the Emotion Regulation strategy of Suppression

Answer 10

Suppression: suppressing or burying thoughts that are scary or remind you of painful things

Question 11

What is the Emotion Regulation strategy of Worry and Rumination

Answer 11

Worry & Rumination: examples of attentional deployment where one focuses on the negative without productively solving problems

Question 12

What is the Emotion Regulation strategy of Reappraisal/Reframing

Answer 12

Reappraisal/reframing: Thinking of a situation in a new way (“Jane didn’t wave back at me the other day on campus, I guess she could be mad at me, but it’s also possible she just didn’t see me because she’s so busy these days”)

Question 13

What is the Emotion Regulation strategy of Humor

Answer 13

Humor: an effective strategy that can upregulate positive emotions & downregulate negative ones; may also be used as a form of avoidance

Question 14

What is Normative Development in Emotion Regulation

Answer 14

• Effective emotion regulation: Children can flexibly use a range of socially appropriate responses to deal with demands of a situation that elicit negative emotions
• Even in infancy, emotion regulation can be seen as attempts to self-soothe

-Older children may use distraction or more advanced self-soothing behaviors such as singing to self when upset

Question 15

What are the intrinsic influences Development of Emotion?

Answer 15

Temperament
Biological factors (stress reactivity)
Distress intolerance

Question 16

What are the extrinsic influences Development of Emotion?

Answer 16

Parent plays critical role as “co-regulator” in early childhood

Example: Child falls and scrapes knee, parents rushes over to calm and soothe child

Question 17

What Developmental processes do emotional recognition, expression, and regulation support?

Answer 17

• Ability to identify/understand one’s own feelings
• Accurately read/interpret emotional states in others
• Manage own strong emotions and their expression in a constructive manner
• Regulate one’s own behavior
• Develop empathy for others
• Establish and maintain relationships

Question 18

What is Maladaptive Emotion Development

Answer 18

A disruption in normal functioning in these emotional processes can lead to a cascade of negative effects

Often leads to long term deficits in emotional regulation & functioning

Question 19

What are some of the issues that stem from Maladaptive Emotion Development?

Answer 19

• Problems with emotion regulation characterize appx 75% of psychological disorders in the DSM
• Mood and anxiety disorders are diagnosed primarily on the basis of emotion dysregulation
• Adaptive emotion regulation may protect you from risk of developing coronary heart disease (mitigates toxic effects of stressful life experiences, such as maltreatment)

Question 20

How does Maltreatment affect Emotional Recognition?

Answer 20

• Physically abused children show sensitivity to anger cues; quicker to identify angry faces (selective attention to threat)
• Enhanced capacity to identify threatening cues in the environment may be adaptive depending on context
• Neglected children show difficulty recognizing emotions across the board; more difficulty discriminating emotional expressions than control or physically abused children

Question 21

How does Maltreatment affect Emotional Expression?

Answer 21

Evidence of over-expression of negative emotions and under-expression of positive emotions

Question 22

How does Maltreatment affect Emotional Regulation?

Answer 22

More difficulty calming after negative emotions are elicited:
- Faster to react
- More likely to get stuck
- Longer to calm down
- Physically abused children: Increase in brain electrical activity when looking for angry faces; rapid orienting to & delayed disengagement from anger cues

Question 23

What can Maladaptive emotion recognition, expression, and regulation predict?

Answer 23

• Difficulty with social interactions
• Psychopathology
• Internalizing
• Externalizing

Question 24

What is the purpose of studying Peer Relations?

Answer 24

• Quality of social relationships are linked to functioning in other areas
• Mental & physical health is negatively impacted by not having close others
• Social support for parents: critical (must be able to connect with others, trust, seek help, etc, and is shaped by early experiences)

Question 25

What are the two models in studying relationships between parent relations and peer relations?

Answer 25

• Attachment theory
• Social network theory

Question 26

What is Attachment Theory?

Answer 26

Quality of parent-child relationships is directly predictive of peer relationships

Question 27

Under the Attachment Theory, what comes from Secure attachment?

Answer 27

• Secure attachments lead to more positive peer interactions
• Developed positive “internal working model” (how you think about yourself, others, and your relationships)
• Likely think of self as worthy of attention and care
• Think of others as available to provide support when needed
• Think of relationships as positive and important

Question 28

Under the Attachment Theory, what comes from Insecure attachment?

Answer 28

• Hostile, negative interactions and greater likelihood of being rejected by peers
• Passive, unskilled interactions and greater likelihood of being ignored by peers
• Insecurely attached individuals: less likely to develop these positive representations, may have trouble trusting others, or don’t see self as worthy of positive relations

Question 29

What is the Social Network Theory?

Answer 29

Other factors beyond early attachment predict quality of peer relationships

• Availability of peer contact
  Does parent facilitate interactions with peers? Joining a play group? Daycare?
  If no, child’s peer problems may reflect skills deficits in lack of experience/opportunities to develop peer skills
• General social fearfulness
  If child is generally fearful of interacting with others, may not approach peers as often, will lack experience
• Social isolation is a key factor for maltreating parents, so important to consider this theory!

Question 30

How does Maltreatment affect Peer Relations

Answer 30

Maltreated Children are more:
- More aggressive
- More withdrawn
- Peer rejection/victimization
- Deficits in positive social interactions

Question 31

What goes wrong that leads to problematic peer relationships?

Answer 31

Social cognitive skills deficits and emotion regulation difficulties

• Problems with perspective-taking
• Problems identifying alternative solutions to peer problems
• Difficulty understanding appropriate affective responses

Hostile attribution biases
- Perceive ambiguous cues & interactions as hostile