Emotional Development Flashcards
What are emotions?
Combination of physiological and cognitive experience
What are five factors of emotions?
- Neural response (e.g. amygdala firing)
- Physiological response (e.g. heart racing)
- Objective feeling (e.g. fear)
- Emotional expression (e.g. eyes wide)
- Urge for action (e.g. run)
What is the discrete emotion Theory?
Idea that biological systems have evolved to allow humans to experience and express a set of innate, basic emotions
What are the basic emotions?
Innate emotions are important for survival and largely automatic. Happiness, sadness, anger, fear, disgust, and surprise.
Beyond basic emotions, what are the others made of? Why are they not innate?
Other emotions developed later and are not culturally universal or are not biologically preprogrammed. They are rather combination of basic emotions that vary in intensity
What are two pieces of evidence for discrete emotion theory?
- Basic emotions are universal
- Basic emotions are present from infancy
How do we know what infants feel?
Coding of facial expression to interpret infant’s emotions
What are the two general emotional states at birth?
- Positive/happiness (approach behavior)
- Negative/distress (withdrawal behavior)
What is happiness?
Motivates us to approach situations that increase survival. At birth, smiles are only indicators of biological state (e.g. eating). Starting at 2-3m, children will smile for social reasons and by 5m they start laughing
What is anger/distress?
State that helps us defend ourselves against threats and overcome obstacles. By 4m, ability to express anger and at 2y, peak in anger
What is fear?
Adaptative response to motivates us to escape from danger. By 7m, infants starts to express fear, from 8-15m, they have a lot of seperation anxiety. From 3-5y, they fear imaginary creatures, but by 7y they begin to fear everyday event
At what age does surprise, sadness and disgust start?
by 1 year old
What is surprise?
Violation of expectation
What is sadness?
Reaction to loss, begins with object permanence
What is disgust?
Helps avoid toxins and bacteria, especially in food.
What are self-conscious emotions?
Emotions that emerge when a child has sense of self separate from others and understands adults’ expectation.
Name 5 self-conscious emotions.
Guilt, shame, pride, empathy and embarrassment
What is the difference between guilt and shame?
Guilt is the feeling of regret over one’s behavior and desire to fix it. Shame is a self-focused feeling of failure
Children will feel guilt when parents…?
Emphasize the ‘badness’ of the actions (you did a bad thing)
Children will feel shame when parents…?
Emphasize the badness of the child (you are bad)
Are self-conscious emotions similar across cultures?
No, collectivist cultures feel more guilt and shame, while individualist cultures experience more pride
What is emotional recognition like in infancy? What age?
Ability to recognize and identify adults’ emotional faces before being able to identify your own (3m)
What study was done on infants and emotional recognition?
Habituation paradigm with 3 month olds who were habituated to pictures of smiling faces then shown pictures on sad and surprise faces. They were able to distinguish between emotions
At what age can infants recognize fear and sadness?
7m
What is social referencing? What study was done?
Ability to recognize parent’s emotions, which helps decide how to deal with ambiguous situations. Using the visual cliff test, infants were much more likely to cross when parents were smiling than when they were still-faced
By 3 years, infants can label…?
Happiness, anger, fear and sadness
By 5 years, infants can label…?
Surprise and disgust
By 6 to 8 years, infants can label…?
Self-conscious emotions, gets better at it throughout adolescence
Did COVID impact emotional recognition?
No, because masks were not worn at home, where emotional recognition is most important and because eyes are also quite expressive
By what age can children understand mixed emotions? What study was performed?
By 5 years old, because of improved executive functioning, infants understand we can experience more than 1 emotion at once. When watching Arielle, 5 years old could identify that she was both sad and happy, while 3 years old only said happy
By what age do infants start to understand fake emotions? What study was done?
By 5 years old, children understand that a person’s facial expression is not always their real feelings. Story of the girl who lost her doll but didn’t want her friends to find out: 5 years old would say that she is sad, but looks happy. 3 years olds would say she looks sad.
What improves children’s understanding of real vs. fake emotions?
Better understanding of display rules, which are the social norms about when and how to display emotions
By what age are children good at faking emotions?
By 6 to 8 years old, they understand display rules well enough to fake emotions
What study was done on children and fake emotions?
Children were given a bad toy, at 4y, they could not masked disappointment. But by 6y, they faked happiness, and by 8y they had mastered it.
What is emotional regulation?
Set of strategies to manage emotional experience, developed in childhood
What is co-regulation?
Children before 5m aren’t able to regulate their distress, so parents do so through soothing or distraction.
What is self-regulation?
By 5m, infants can engage in (1) self-comforting behaviors (e.g. sucking thumb) or self-distracting behaviors (e.g. play distraction)
Which sel-regulation strategy becomes more prominent over time?
Self-distraction is much more effective
By 6 to 8 years old, what regulation strategies are used?
Cognitive strategies and problem-solving—looking at situation from a different perspective
What are 4 reasons emotion regulation improves?
- Motor development: greater ability to control body
- Increased parental expectation: less tolerance for outbursts
- Cognitive development: improved executive functioning, better attention control and increased language skills
- Neurological development: development of prefrontal cortex
What are the benefits of emotional intelligence?
Better social relationship, decreased loneliness, better academically (better attention and favored by teacher) and better mental health
Are teens moodier?
Based on the questionnaire, teens report more frequent high-intensity emotions than adults and they last for shorter period of time = yes, they are more moody
What are emotional changes that happen over adolescence?
Based on the questionnaire, teens are happy 70% of the time, but that number decreases over time. Increased in anger, peaking at 15 and increased sadness and anxiety, especially for girls
Are teens more risk-takers?
Yes, teens are more impulsive across time and culture which is associated with more accidents/crime, but also more independence and experience
Why do teens experience more emotional change (3)?
- Cognitive change: better abstract thinking leads to new ways to interpret situations
- Social changes: school becomes harder, strong desire for independence, and more time spent with peers.
- Neurobiological change: developmental gap between maturation of limbic system/reward center at 15-16y, but underdeveloped prefrontal cortex/impulse control until 25y.
