Emotional Development Flashcards
What is emotional Awareness
- Being aware of one’s own emotions
- Reacting to the emotions of others (this can be done implicitly)
- Being sensitive to the effects of one’s own emotions or behaviour on others
- Adhering to social conventions of emotional expression
- Regulating our own emotions
- Coping with negative emotions
Why is it important
Appropriate emotional expression, emotional understanding, and empathy essential for effective social and communication
Case of autism
emotion recognition difficulties lead to difficulties with social functioning and relationship formation
Case of alexithymia
difficulties in effectively describing one’s own internal emotional experience associated with difficulties in empathy
Expression of emotions in Infancy
•Basic/primary emotions (Darwin,
1872) – happiness, anger, disgust,
sadness, fear and disgust)
•General agreement that positive
emotions are expressed in response
to positive events from a young age (e.g. Izard, 1992)
•Less agreement as to whether negative emotional expressions match underlying states
Early reactions to the emotions of others
Meltzoff and Moore 1977
Infants as young as 12 days old copy facial expressions
Early reactions to the emotions of others
Caron et al, 1986
Infants can discriminate between the emotional expression of others-habituation paradigm
Early reactions to the emotions of others
Haviland & Lelwicka (1987)
10 week olds respond with happy/angry expressions when their mother is happy/angry
Social referencing
Gibson and Walk 1960
Evidence for innate expression and understanding of emotions early in development
–Infants imitate facial expressions
–Infants show appropriate facial expressions in response to situations
–Infants more likely to cross ‘visual cliff’ in response to smiling than scared caregiver
Appropriate expression and understanding of others’ emotions important for
Communication
Smith 2006; Baron-Cohen et al. 2013
Empathy
●Affective empathy – ability to react implicitly to others emotions
●Cognitive empathy – ability to understand others emotions and where they occur
●Autism – lack cognitive empathy
●Psychopathy – lack affective empathy
Affective empathy
ability to react implicitly to others emotions
●Cognitive empathy
ability to understand others emotions and where they occur
Autism
lack cognitive empathy
●Psychopathy
lack affective empathy
Dunn (1988);
Empathy
●Toddlers attempt to comfort siblings in distress
●Deliberate teasing and hurting
●Suggest basic understanding of their ability to affect the emotional states of others
Acquiring emotional knowledge
Basic understanding of emotions acquired in the
1st 2 years then has to become mentalistic
Wellman, 1990
Acquiring emotional knowledge
One of the first concepts to be integrated into a child’s Theory of Mind
Talking about emotions
Smiley & Huttenlocher, 1989
At about 2 years
Smiley & Huttenlocher, 1989
Conversations about emotions result in
quick accumulation of knowledge (link to language and learning)
Dunn, 1991
Talking about emotions
By age 3 children ask questions about mental states and emotions
Not until much later (6ish) do children fully appreciate the link between
emotions and internal states (they relate emotions to external events)
Understanding the relationship between situation and emotion
Harris, 1987
5 year olds have a basic understanding of the relationship between situations and emotions - but only basic ones (those obviously related to facial expressions