Lecture 6- Emotion Development

Question 1

What are the 4 main components emotional development?

Answer 1

Physiological factors
Subjective feelings
Cognitions and Perceptions
Expressive Behaviour

Question 2

What are action tendencies?

Answer 2

Specific sets of things we associate with specific behaviours

Question 3

What are the action tendencies for disgust?

Answer 3

Active rejection of the thing causing disgust

Question 4

What are the action tendencies for fear?

Answer 4

Flight or withdrawal

Question 5

What are the action tendencies for Anger?

Answer 5

Forward movement, eliminating obstacles to our goal

Question 6

What are the action tendencies for sadness?

Answer 6

Withdrawal and avoiding others

Question 7

What are the action tendencies for guilt?

Answer 7

Movement to making amends with/informing others and punishing oneself

Question 8

How can parents be misinformed about recognising emotions in their children?

Answer 8

Parents assume they see many emotions in their baby from early on due to observation of facial expressions, but this can be very subjective and parents are often hyper focused on the child.

Question 9

What is the first sign of positive emotion in infants? How may this be misleading?

Answer 9

Smiles are the first sign of positive emotion in infants. However, during the first month this is actually just a reflex experienced during rem sleep

Question 10

When do infants begin to smile at external stimuli?

Answer 10

Between the third and eighth.

Question 11

When do social smiles occur in infants?

Answer 11

By 3 months, meaning these smiles only occur only due to social interaction

Question 12

Why is it hard to recognise emotions in infants?

Answer 12

we can often detect distress, but this is often just pain or hunger. It is often quite hard to pinpoint the cause as infants often seem to experience distress in incongruent situations

Question 13

When do infants FIRST develop wariness of unfamiliar objects?

Answer 13

At 4 months (though this does not yet extend to people)

Question 14

When can we first detect signs of fear?

Answer 14

6-7 months, most likely as the infant has learnt that strangers do not bring the comfort that familiar individuals do

Question 15

When does fear of intense stimuli develop? Why?

Answer 15

At 7 months. This is an adaptation as the child is not yet fully mobile, so can not protect themselves, so need their caregiver’s help

Question 16

When do children first experience observable anger?

Answer 16

By their first birthday

Question 17

How does expression of anger develop over time?

Answer 17

Toddlers are more likely to show anger at 18 months than 36 months. This is likely due to learned language skills and self regulation

Question 18

When can babies start to distinguish between facial expressions?

Answer 18

AT 3 months, the baby can distinguish between happy, surprised and angry faces (Grossman 2010). By 7 months, we can also recognise interest in faces

Question 19

What are self-conscious emotions?

Answer 19

guilt, pride, shame and embarrassment. They are developed later than other emotions as they rely on an awareness of how others react to your actions

Question 20

What is the difference between guilt and shame?

Answer 20

Shame is more focused on oneself, feeling exposed and wanting to hide, while guilt is based on remorse and regret.
For instance, after breaking a toy, guilty behaviours would be telling your parents you broke the toy, shameful behaviours would be hiding.

Question 21

How did Darwin argue that emotions are innate?

Answer 21

Darwin argued that facial expressions for basic emotions are innate.

Question 22

What is discrete emotions theory?

Answer 22

It argues that emotions are packaged with a set of facial and bodily expressions, behaviours and physiological responses to help us recognise emotions early on in life.

Question 23

What is one behaviour that disgust is characterised by?

Answer 23

Crinkling noses. This can be linked to disgust often occurring around contaminants, so we wrinkle are nose/eyes to stop germs from coming in.

Question 24

What is a brief outline of the three model system?

Answer 24

Suggests there are three basic affect systems that  undergo developmental changes as we develop, i.e. fear is originally loud sounds and then becomes separation anxiety. 
These three systems are- 
Joy/pleasure
Anger/Frustration
Wariness/Fear

Question 25

Briefly outline the functional approach to learning development?

Answer 25

All emotion is goal oriented, and are affected by social goals and what others desire from a child.

Question 26

Do young children have emotional regulation skills?

Answer 26

In early development, young children are easily overwhelmed by loud noises, abrupt movement etc. so must rely on the caregiver to calm them down as they don’t have their own regulation skills yet

Question 27

What are the three stages to emotional regulation development?

Answer 27

The transition from caregiver to self-regulation
The use of cognitive strategies and problem solving to control negative emotions
The selection of appropriate strategies.

Question 28

How early will children show signs of self regulation? What are these signs?

Answer 28

From 6 months, infants will show signs of self regulation, by doing behaviours such as averting their gaze, sucking their thumb or rubbing soft things on their face. This could be due to them now having more control over their attention/movements.

Question 29

How do cognitive strategies develop into knowing when to use these strategies in children?

Answer 29

The child will then develop better ability to select the right strategies to self soothe (i.e. leaving the room). This is developed both with planning and problem solving and the ability to distinguish controllable stressors (homework) and uncontrollable stressors (parents arguing)

Question 30

What is temperament?

Answer 30

a person’s emotional and attentional reactivity and self-regulation that show consistency across situations and stability over time

Question 31

What are the 6 aspects of temperament?

Answer 31

Six aspects to temperament
Fearful distress- the child withdraws when distressed
Irritable distress- fussiness, anger,especially when denied something you want
Attention span/persistence- Duration of orienting towards goal/object of interest
Activity level- how much children explore and move about
Positive affect/approach- smiling/laughing, approaching people, cooperativeness
Rhymicity- regularity and predictability of routines such as sleeping

Question 32

How do we know that temperament tends to have a hereditary component?

(include the rebuttal about the environmental factors)

Answer 32

We have observed this in monozygotic twin studies.

However, extreme environmental stressors such as poor parenting, neglect, stress or abuse can cause certain temperaments and issues with regulation

Question 33

How can we measure temperament?

include detail of psychological measures (hair vs saliva)

Answer 33

using questionnaires of parents, longitudinal design etc. However, we can use less bias measures, such as physiological ones- i.e. tracking cortisol levels that are released when different children are put in the same situation and then link this to temperament (i.e. if the child has a stressful temperament and they have more cortisol released, we can link this) This can occur, via tracking releases in saliva a few hours apart, or if we want to track cortisol over time, we can see cortisol in hair samples.

Question 34

What are the strengths/weaknesses of questionnaires as a measure of temperament?

Answer 34

relies on parents, who will have the most insight into children’s behaviour. However, parents may not be objective

Question 35

What are the strengths/weaknesses of lab measures as a measure of temperament?

Answer 35

objective, unbiased data, but it is a limited set of circumstances, often with low mundane realism and the results are often varied based on the child’s mood within the day

Question 36

What are the strengths/weaknesses of using lab measures as a measure of temperament?

Answer 36

objective data, but we can’t always tell if the changes/measures that we record (i.e. EEGs, cortisol levels) is a cause or consequence of temperament.