Emotional Development Flashcards
Development of
Emotional Experience: What are emotions?
- Emotions: combination of physiological and cognitive responses to
experiences - Neural response (-Amygdala activation-Release of cortisol and adrenaline)
- Physiological factors (-Heart racing
-Nausea) - Subjective feelings (-Recognition of
danger -Feeling of fear) - Emotional expression
- Urge to take action (-Lock the door
-Run away -Defend home)
Discrete Emotions Theory
* Neurological and biological systems have evolved to allow humans to
experience and express a set of innate, basic emotions
* Basic emotions: innate emotions that were important for survival
and communication and thus as largely automatic
- Happiness
- Fear
- Anger
- Sadness
- Disgust
- Surprise
* Evidence:
- Basic emotions are universal across cultures
- Basic emotions are present from infancy
Beyond Basic Emotions
* Other emotions develop later
and/or are not culturally
universal
* Other emotions are:
* Variation in intensity of basic
emotions
- High level anger = rage
- Low level anger = annoyance
* Combination of basic
emotions
- Anger + sadness =
betrayal/disappointment
Development of Emotional Expression
How do you know what a baby is feeling?
* Systems of coding facial cues have been developed to make
interpretations of infants’ emotions more objective
- Link particular facial expressions and facial muscle movements with
particular emotions
Happiness:
-Smiling
-Raised cheeks
-Eyes squinting
Anger:
-Strongly furrowed brow that
comes down in the centre
-Open square-shaped mouth,
sometimes baring teeth
-Flared nostrils
Emergence of Basic Emotions
* At birth, infants experience 2 general emotional states:
- Positive, indicated by approach behaviour
- Negative/ distress, indicated by crying or withdrawal behaviour
* Basic emotions emerge in a predictable sequence over the first year
of life
Happiness
* Adaptive because motivates us to approach situations that are likely to
increase chances of survival
* From birth: Smiles are reflexive and evoked by biological states
- e.g. being satiated or during sleep
* 2-3 months: Social smiles emerge
- Usually in interactions with parents
- Promote care from caregivers and foster bonding
* 5 months: Infant’s first laugh
- What makes children smile and laugh changes with
cognitive development
- At 5 months old, laugh at bodily noises but at 4 years old laugh
at jokes
Anger
* Adaptive because helps us defend ourselves against threats and to
overcome obstacles to our goals
* 4 months: infants begin to express anger
* 24 months: Peak in tendency to react with anger
- Tantrums in “terrible twos”
- Frequency of anger declines after this likely due to
greater ability to express self with language and
improved emotion regulation skills
* As children get older, are better able to match anger
to situation
- Angrier if hurtful action was intentional vs. unintentional
Fear
* Expressions of fear are adaptive because motivates escape from
danger or solicits protection from caregivers
* 7 months: Infants begin to express fear
* 8 months: Fear of strangers and separation anxiety emerge
- Separation anxiety declines around 15 months of age
- What scares children changes with cognitive
development
* 3-5 years old: fear imaginary creatures
* 7+ years old: fears related to everyday situations
Surprise, Sadness, and Disgust
* All emerge in the first year
* Surprise: Indicates that the world is working contrary
to expectations and is thus important for learning
* Sadness: Elicits care and comfort from caregiver in
reaction to a loss
- Emerges once object permanence has been acquired
- Usually in reaction to being separated from parents
* Disgust: Adaptive because helps us avoid potential
poisons or bacteria
- First expressions of disgust often directed towards food
Self-Conscious Emotions
* Emotions that emerge once:
1. A child has a sense of self separate
from other people
- Emerges around 18 month of age
2. An appreciation of what adults
expect of them
* Include: Guilt, shame, embarrassment,
pride, empathy
* Emerge around 2 years of age
* Culture influences the frequency and type of self-conscious emotions
that are most likely to be experienced
- Individualistic cultures: more likely to experience pride
- Collectivistic cultures: more likely to experience guilt and shame
Guilt and Shame
* Guilt and shame are often elicited by similar
situations but are distinct emotional reactions
* Guilt: Feelings of regret about one’s behaviour associated with desire to “fix” the consequences of that behaviour
* Shame: Self-focused feeling of personal failure associated with desire to hide
* Generally, guilt is healthier than shame
* Expressions of guilt and shame can be
distinguished at 2 years of age
* When 2 year olds play with a doll that has been
rigged so that one leg falls off during play, they
showed different reactions:
* Guilt: trying to fix the doll and quickly told the adult
about the “accident”
* Shame: didn’t try to fix the doll, avoided the adult
and delayed telling them about the “accident”
* Parental reactions to children’s actions influence
which emotion a child experiences:
* Child is more likely to feel guilt, if parent emphasizes
the “badness” of the action
- “You did a bad thing”
* Child is more likely to feel shame, if parent emphasizes
the “badness” of the child
- “You’re a bad boy/girl
Summary so far
Summary
* Basic emotions are biologically based and have evolved to enable
survival and communication
* 6 universal basic emotions: happiness, fear, anger, sadness, surprise
disgust
* Emotions develop in a predictable sequence
* All basic emotions are present by the end of the first year
* Self-conscious emotions develop around 2 years old once an infant has a
sense of self and appreciation of others’ expectations of them
Understanding Emotions
Emotional Recognition in Infancy
* Identifying emotions in adults’ faces comes before identifying own
emotions
* Rudimentary recognition of others’ emotions emerges very early in
life
- 3 month olds can distinguish facial expressions of happiness, surprise,
and anger
- E.g. Habituated to pictures of happy faces and then dishabituate when
presented with a picture of a surprised face
- 7 month olds can distinguish expressions of fear and sadness
Social Referencing
* Recognizing parents’ emotions enables social referencing
* Social referencing: use of parents’ facial expressions and tone of voice to decide how to deal with novel/ ambiguous situations
Social Referencing and Visual Cliff
* Parent’s facial expression matters:
- 0% of babies cross if parent looks scared
- 75% of babies cross if parent looks happy
* Demonstrates that:
- Children can distinguish between emotional expressions
- Children rely on parents’ reactions to figure out how to react to a
situation themselves (social referencing)
Labelling Emotions
* 3 years old: rudimentary ability to identify and label emotions in others and self
- Initially describe feeling “good” vs. “feeling bad”
* Ability to label emotions improves over early childhood
Understanding Mixed Emotions
* 5 years old: understand that people can experience more than one
emotion at a time
* 3 year olds don’t understand this
Understanding Real vs. Fake Emotions* 5 years old: begin to understand that a person’s facial
expressions do not necessarily match what they’re really
feeling
* Study: Children hear story about child forgetting her
favourite toy for a sleep over but that she doesn’t want to
show how she feels
- 5 year olds know that the child will be sad but will be
showing happiness on her face
- 3 year olds think that the child will be showing sadness
* Improvement in understanding false emotions due to greater
understanding of DISPLAY RULES
- Social norms about when, where, and how much one should show
emotions and which emotions are appropriate in a given context
- Crucial for successful social interactions
* Understanding false emotions also allows children to fake emotions
themselves
Development of Emotion Regulation
Emotion Regulation
* Set of conscious and unconscious processes used to manage
emotional experiences and expressions
* Develops gradually during childhood
* Co-regulation: Parents’ regulate infants’ distress through soothing or distraction
* Necessary because infants cannot regulate their own emotions
- 5 month olds: infant show rudimentary emotion regulation skills
- Self-comforting behaviours: repetitive actions that create a mildly
positive sensation - Self-distraction: looking away from the upsetting stimulus
- Over the course of the first few years of life, children learn to rely
more on self-distraction rather than self-comforting behaviours (ex: the marshmallow test) - E.g. play as a distraction
- Beginning in middle childhood (6-8 years old), children also rely on
cognitive strategies and problem-solving - E.g. thinking of a situation in a different way, telling themselves it’s going
to be okay, addressing a conflict with a friend
Importance of Emotion Regulation
* Children that have good emotion regulation skills:
* Have higher well-being
* Are more socially skilled and are liked better by their peers and teachers
- Poor regulation skills put kids at risk for bullying
* Do better in school
Why does emotion regulation improve?
* Motor development
- Greater ability to control bodily movements enables self-soothing and
distraction in infancy
* Increased parental expectation that child should be able to manage
their own emotional arousal
- Children internalize this expectation and comply
* Cognitive development
- Improved attention and inhibition enables better emotion regulation
skills
Emotions in
Adolescence
Are adolescents more moody?
* Study: Experience-sampling method
* Adolescents and adults wore a pager that
beeped at random times
* Reported on mood when it beeped
* Results:
* Adolescents report more frequent high’intensity emotions than adults
* BOTH more intense negative and positive
emotions
* Intense moods last less long compared to adults
* Shows that adolescents are indeed more
“moody” than adults
Emotional Changes in Adolescence
* Longitudinal study:
* Adolescents rated emotions during each day of the school week for 3
weeks
* Did this every 5 years
* Results:
- Happiness decreases over adolescence
- Sadness and anxiety increase, especially for girls
- Anger increases and then decreases towards the end of adolescence
Implications
* Gender differences in emotional experience in adolescents
* Increase in negative emotions during adolescence is normal
* Struggles to cope with these changes can lead to the development of
depression and anxiety disorders
* Can be difficult to distinguish between normal changes in adolescent
emotional experience vs. mental health issues
Risk-Taking in Adolescents
* Impulsivity increases during early adolescence, peaks in middle/late
adolescence, and then declines in adulthood
* Found across cultures and historical time
Ex: Motor Vehicle Deaths in 2016 (see graph slide 64)
Why do adolescents take more risks?
* Result of changes to 2 important brain
regions involved in decision-making:
1. Limbic system: involved in emotional and
reward processing
Changes to Limbic System in Adolescence
* Reward processing in limbic system is heightened in adolescence
- Due to synaptogenesis of dopamine receptors
* Degree of nucleus accumbens activation during reward anticipation
is positively correlated with self-reported risk-taking in daily life
2. Prefrontal cortex: involved in goal-directed behaviour, deliberation, and
inhibitory control
Changes to Prefrontal Cortex in Adolescence
* Synaptic pruning and myelination in prefrontal cortex (PFC) until
mid-20s
- Myelination: Thickening of myelin sheath surrounding axons which
increases speed of neural signal transmission
* Immature PFC associated with difficulties with inhibition, impulse
control, and planning,
Implications:
* Adolescents take more risks because of a
maturational imbalance between their limbic
system and prefrontal cortex
* BUT risk-taking is also a good thing
* Promotes independence by trying new
experiences
Summary so far
- Rudimentary emotional recognition begins in early infancy
- Emotional recognition enables social referencing
- Age 3: Children begin to label emotions in others
- Age 5: Children begin to understand that emotions can be mixed and that
emotional expressions don’t necessarily match how someone actually feels - Emotion regulation improves over the course of childhood
- Initially rely on co-regulation but beginning at 5 months are able to engage in some self-regulation
- Emotion regulation skills have massive consequences for children’s
psychological, social and academic well-being - Adolescents are more emotional and take more risks than adults
- Due to maturational imbalance in limbic and prefrontal brain areas
Temperament
Temperament
* Individual differences in emotion, self-regulation, activity level and
attention that are consistent over time and across contexts
* Present from infancy thus thought to be genetically-based
* The reason why kids show very different reactions to the same
situation
Type Approach to Temperament
Thomas et al., 1968; 1977
* Easy babies: adjust easily to new situations, quickly establish daily routines
such as sleep and eating, and generally are cheerful in mood and easy to
calm
- 40% of babies
* Difficult babies: slow to adjust to new experiences, tend to react negatively
and intensely to novel stimuli and events, irregular in their daily routines
and bodily functions
- 10% of babies
* Slow-to-warm-up babies: somewhat difficult at first but become easier
over time as they have repeated contact with new objects, people, and
situations
- 15% of babies
Dimensional Approach to Temperament
* Many children did not fit into one of Thomas et al.’s categories
- Prompted a need for a dimensional, non-categorical approach
* 5 key dimensions of temperament
* Assessed using:
- Parent and/or teacher responses to questions assessing each
dimensions
- Observing how kids react to lab tasks designed to assess each
dimension
* Smiling and laughter: Positive emotional response to a change in a
stimulus
* Distress (in infancy)/ anger (in childhood): Negative emotional
response related to having an ongoing task interrupted or blocked
* Fear: Tendency to experience unease or nervousness to new
situations
* Attention span: Attention to an object or task for an extended
period of time
* Activity level: Rate and extent of gross motor body movements
Consistency of Temperament
* Temperament is largely consistent/stable over time
- Reflects influence of genetics
- Identical twins have more similar temperaments than fraternal twins
* BUT some change in temperament over time is possible
- Especially the younger a child is
- Reflects role of caregivers in shaping emotional development
Implications of Temperament
* Children contribute to their own emotional development through
their temperament
* Some children are easier to parent than others
*-E.g., children with difficult temperament require more patience from a
parent
The Influence of Family
The Influence of Family in Emotional
Development
* Family, especially parents, play a huge role in children’s emotional
development
1- Parent’s expression of emotions
- Indirect influence on emotional development
2- Parent’s reactions to children’s emotions
- Direct influence on emotional development
Parents’ Expression of Emotions
* Parents’ emotional expression serve as a model of when and how to
express emotions
Ex: very expressive Tula’s family in My Big Fat Greek Wedding vs. Ian’s (full movie on youtube!)
Parents’ Lack of Emotional Expression
* Children who grow up with parents that tend to not show emotions
tend to:
* Not express emotions themselves
- Learn to see emotions as “bad”
* Have trouble identifying and understanding emotions in self and others
* Struggle with regulating intense emotions
Parents’ Expressions of Positive Emotions
* Children that grow up with parents that express a high level of
positive emotions tend to:
* Express more positive emotions themselves
* Have higher well-being
* Have better social skills
Parents’ Expressions of Negative Emotions
* Children that grow up with parents that express a high level of
negative emotions tend to:
* Experience and express more negative emotions themselves
* Be less socially competent
* Have poorer emotion regulation skills
Parents’ Reactions to Children’s Emotions
- Parents’ reactions to their children’s emotions directly influence
children’s emotional development
Mirroring
* Behaviours in which a parent reflects the
emotions of their child back to them
- Conveyed through verbal and non-verbal cues
* Contingent responding to the infant
- Quick responsiveness to infant’s behaviour
* Characterized by warmth
Examples of Mirroring
* A baby looks upset. The parent also furrows their eyebrows and frown.
* A child begins pouting over a change in family plans. The family won’t
be going to the park anymore. The parent says, “You look sad. You have tears in your eyes and your face is turning red.”
* A child feels very anxious about an upcoming test. The parent says
“You seem anxious about the test. I sometimes feel the same way
when I have a big thing to do at work.”
Mirroring
* Important because:
* Validates and normalizes the child’s emotions
* Helps the child identify and understand their emotions
Still-Face Paradigm
* Lab procedure in which a parent goes through a
repetitive sequence with their child in which
they:
* 2 mins of play with infant
* 2 mins of “still face”
- No reaction to infant
* Infants quickly become distressed in reaction to still-face and this distress increases with each
still-face “episode”
- Infants are attuned to parents’ emotions
- Distressed when parent doesn’t react as expected
- Often engage in self-distraction
Emotional Coaching
* The use of discussion and other forms of instruction to teach children
how to cope with, regulate, and appropriately express emotions
- What is seen as appropriate depends on culture
Examples of Emotional Coaching
* “You seem anxious about the test. Let’s walk through the first step
that can get us going in the right direction…”
* “I know you’re frustrated that your sister took your toy without asking,
but it’ not okay for you to pull her hair. That hurt her. Use your words
instead to tell her that you’re frustrated
Importance of Supportive Reaction
* Supportive/sensitive reaction, characterized by mirroring +
emotional coaching, is ideal way to react to children’s emotions:
* Validates child’s emotions
* Helps the child understand their emotions
* Fosters emotional regulation
* Associated with higher self-esteem
* Fosters social competence
* Associated with better performance in school
A child feels very anxious about an upcoming test.
-Supportive/sensitive
(mirroring + emotional coaching):
“You seem worried and upset about
the test. I sometimes feel the same
way when I have a big thing to do at
work. Let’s walk through the first
step that can get us going in the
right direction…”
-Critical (no mirroring or emotional
coaching):
In an angry tone. “What’s wrong
with you? You always get like this
before a test and then you get a bad grade.”
-Over-validating(mirroring but no coaching):
Parent looks anxious. “OMG! The test is next week! You must be so
nervous. You have so much material to study. Where do we even begin?”
-Dismissive (coaching but no mirroring):
“You’re fine. There’s no need to be
nervous. You’ll just study and it’ll be
ok” (invalidates feelings)
Implications of Lack of Effective Emotional Reaction
* Children who grow up with parents that habitually (often, normally) do not show a supportive/sensitive reaction tend to be:
- Less emotionally competent
- Less socially competent
Why do parents react the way they do?
* Cultural differences
- Emotional expression is more encouraged in independent vs.
interdependent cultures
- Reactions to specific emotions differ by culture
- E.g. reactions to shame in independent vs. collectivistic cultures
* Generational differences in norms for emotional expression
* Family reactions to emotions when parents themselves were children
- Intergenerational transmission of emotional reactions and regulation
* Parents’ mood and emotions in the moment
- Harder to be supportive if parent is having a bad day
Summary
- Children contribute to their own emotional development through their
temperament - Temperament is largely determined by genetics, but environmental factors
also play a role - Parents influence children’s emotional development indirectly through
their own emotional expression and directly via their use of mirroring and
emotional coaching - Lack of mirroring from a parent is very distressing to infants as shown in the
still-face paradigm - How parents react to children’s emotions has important consequences for
their psychological, social and academic well-being - Parents’ emotional reactions are determined by many different social
factors
Fit Between Children
and Parents
Differential Susceptibility Hypothesis
* Some children are highly sensitive to both negative AND positive
environmental conditions
- “sensitive” temperament+ negative home environment = negative
outcomes
- “sensitive” temperament + positive home environment = positive
outcomes
“Dandelions and Orchids”
E.g. Negativity and Childcare (orchids)
* Children with more difficult/negative
temperaments have:
- More behavioural problems if raised
with low quality childcare
- BUT have the lowest levels of
behavioural problems if raised with
high quality childcare
Eg: Impulsivity and Harsh Parenting
* Children with impulsive
temperaments have:
- Higher levels of alcohol abuse in
adolescence if raised in harsh
families
- BUT have the lowest levels of
alcohol abuse if raised in positive
family environments
Implications of Differential Susceptibility
* Children’s temperament and the environment they grow up in jointly
determine their outcomes
* While all kids benefit most from sensitive parenting, it is particularly
important for children that are more temperamentally sensitive to
their environment (orchids)
