Emotion and Emotional Development Flashcards
Defenition
-
Emotion: an evolutionarily adapted set of physiological, neural, cognitive reactions, triggered by the detection of a personally significant event
–Functional: Avoid threat and approach benefits -
Emotional Regulation: processes that change the occurrence, valence, intensity, duration, and timing of emotional reactions
–Processes within self, actions from caregivers -
Temperament: biologically based individual differences in
emotional, attentional, and motor reactions & their regulation
– Are other individual differences, & environment can modulate - All deeply interwoven
Milestones
- Social Smile 6-7 weeks : smile at faces(any faces) - no real reason
- Fear of Strangers 5-8 months
- Separation Distress 7-14 months
- Social Referencing 9-10 months on
Theories on the Nature and
Emergence of Emotion
- Discrete Emotions Theory
- The Functionalist Approach
- Text suggests: Emergent Theory
Discrete Emotions Theory
– Emotions are innate and are discrete(one vs the other)
from one another from very early in
life.
ex : crying means sedness no other emotions invoveld
- some of the emotions come with maturation/appear later
– Each emotion is packaged with a
specific and distinctive set of bodily and facial reactions.
The Functionalist Approach
- Emphasizes the role of the
environment in emotional
development - Proposes that the basic
function of emotions is to
promote action toward
achieving a goal - Maintains that emotions are
not discrete from one
another and vary somewhat
based on the social
environment
ex: crying means sadness and/or anger and/or fear (one can come after the other or at the same time) - same for emergent thory
Emergent Theory more like a
Functionalist Approach
- Emotions are the outcome of a
process that happens when
someone encounters changes in the
environment
focused more how these emotions development based in the enviroment vs functionalist talk about emotions to achive a goal
Different ways to measure
emotions
- Ask people how they feel – not w/infants!
-
Measure behavioral responses
– Approach/Avoidance
– Facial Expressions -
Measure physiological responses
– Brain changes (EEG)
– Heart rate
– Sweating
Research Tools
- To make their interpretations of infants’ emotions objective, researchers have devised highly elaborate systems for coding and classifying the emotional meaning of infants’ facial expressions.
- Code facial cues and analyze the combination in which these cues are present (e.g. Baby FACS; ; AFFEX).
– Nonetheless, it is often hard to determine exactly which
emotions infants are experiencing.
– It is particularly difficult to differentiate among the various
negative emotions that young infants express.
Goal connected with the
emotion
Happiness
Social Smile Around** 6-9 weeks**
Laughter about a month later
Anger
4-6 months
Negative affect when
goal is blocked
Sadness
4-6 months
Negative affect when
attention, care lost
Fear
8-12 months
(some say as early as 6 mos)
Often see it first in negative affect
to a stranger
But perhaps also to visual cliff
Disgust
text says 3-12 years
The facial expression of
disgust is produced much
earlier – even in the first
months of life – and results
in spitting out the food,
turning away, etc.
Children don’t say things
like “Yuck” until 3-4 years,
so many argue that they
can’t really have that
emotion until then
Surprise
Text doesn’t list it
as a basic emotion
Paul Eckman and
Discrete emotion
theorists do
By 4-6 months
Controversial as
very brief, and often
resolves into a
different emotion
and different
courses of action
