Module 10: Emotions and temperament

Question 1

emotions vs affect

Answer 1

emotion= internal, affective response about something in environment

affect= general positive or negative feeling

Question 2

two categories of emotions

Answer 2

Primary or basic
- Surprise, interest, joy, anger, sadness, fear, disgust

Secondary or self-conscious
- Required development of sense of self and other
- Embarrassment, envy, pride, shame, guilt
- Non-evaluative: embarrassment, envy
- Evaluative: shame, pride, guilt

Question 3

Discrete emotions theory

Answer 3

different emotion reflect discrete system that evolved as universal biological reactions to common challenges
- Each has an expression, neural signature, and a physiological state
- Universally experienced and detected
- Emerge at particular times in infancy

Question 4

Emergent theory of emotions

Answer 4

emotions are outcome of process including changes in body and cognition about what’s happening in environment
- Not like inside out, not particularly clear-cut or discrete
- Correspondence between experiences and emotional expressions is messy at best
- Diff people experience diff emotions differently
- Emotions pretty global early in infancy and eventually become more discrete

Question 5

Display rules

Answer 5

how and when one should express different emotions
- Varies by culture, gender, must be learned
- Babies/kids notoriously bad at this
- However some differences already observable in infancy

Question 6

when does emotional expression develop?

Answer 6

Begins in womb
- Cry-face seen from 20 wks gestations

Question 7

when is happiness expressed?

Answer 7

• Neonatal smile: smiling due to internal positive sensations; mainly during REM sleep
• 3rd-8th weeks; smiling to external stimuli
• By 2 months (often by 6 weeks) see first social smiles
  
  • Typically to familiar people
  • Cross-cultural differences; more with more one to one interactions
• Laughing from 2-5 months
  
  • During interesting/ positive sensations and stimuli
  • Also culturally variable

Question 8

when are anger and sadness expressed?

Answer 8

• Newborns have general distress (hunger, pain, cold, when over/under stimulated)
• By 2-4 months you can elicit anger by, removing interesting objects/ events, preventing babies from reaching goals
  
  • Arm-holding/ contingency disruptions paradigms elicit strong anger by 4 months
    
    • Perhaps because requires means-ends reasoning
  • Increases to a peak between 18-24 months as infants increasingly want to control environment
• Sadness elicited in similar situations as anger

Question 9

when is fear expressed?

Answer 9

First sign by 7 months
- Same time as recognize fear expressions in others

Question 10

stranger anxiety

Answer 10

fear of strangers
- Clear by 7-8 months, peaks 12-18 most, less by age 2
- Big individual diffs based on temperament, experience, situations
- More outside home, more if not in parents’ laps, more to males
- Cultural diffs: little stranger anxiety in Efe peoples in Congo where group caregiving common

Question 11

separation anxiety

Answer 11

fear of caregiver leaving
- Begins 8 months, begins to decline by 15 months
- Cross-cultural universal, despite diffs in childrearing practices

Question 12

when is surprise expressed?

Answer 12

• Not same as startle (present at birth)
• Present by 6 months
• Relatively infrequent (not clearly observable in violation of expectation experiments)

Question 13

when is disgust expressed?

Answer 13

• Distaste of bitter tastes present at birth
• Babies generally do NOT get disgusted by gross things
  
  • Disgust in a broader sense emerges around age 4

Question 14

Self conscious emotions

Answer 14

• Begin to appear 18-24 months, require sense of self
• Shame/ embarassment- eyes lowered, head hung, hiding face
• Pride after success- not until 2+

Question 15

broken toy procedure

Answer 15

trick 24 most into thinking they broke experiments fav toy (Barett)
- Some respond with same (avoid experimenter, do not admit guilt)
- Others with guilt (fix toy, admit)
- Individual and cross-cultural diffs in tendencies to experience these emotions

Question 16

fear bias

Answer 16

7 months, preferentially look to/ daily to disengage from fearful faces

Question 17

social referencing

Answer 17

use others’ emotional reactions to appraise novel situations
- 10-12 months old
- younger infants need both faces and voice cues; voice cues generally stronger
- Negativity bias —> negative signals especially likely to change babies’ behaviours
- Retain messages for longer with age

Question 18

10 most look longer when…

Answer 18

characters expresses negative reaction after achieving a goal

Question 19

Strategies for adjusting emotional states to comfortable level of intensity

Answer 19

Attention focusing/shifting, inhibiting thoughts/ behaviours, planning

Question 20

co-regulation

Answer 20

Holding, rocking, shushing, feeding
Young babies can’t do this stuff; parents must do it for them

Question 21

US babies who were held/cuddled as infants

Answer 21

had better emotional functioning as adults

Question 22

babies do some self-regulation….

Answer 22

• Young babies fall asleep if overwhelmed
• Look away from aversive stimuli from 4 months
• From 4-6 months, self-soothe via physical sensations
• Increasingly able to distract themselves

Question 23

Theory behind sleep training

Answer 23

encouraging babies to learn to self-soothe

Question 24

Still face paradigm

Answer 24

• Mothers interact with babies for 2 minutes, then go totally neutral for 2 min, then go back to interacting
• Infants find still-face phases extremely distressing

Question 25

Parental depression/anxiety

Answer 25

• Depressed mothers/ fathers show flat effect- frequent still-face
• Less sensitive/ appropriate caregiving- sometimes too intrusive, sometimes too withdrawn

Question 26

infants of anxious mothers

Answer 26

• Become more way of strangers over time
  - Less able to look away from angry faces

Question 27

temperament

Answer 27

stable individual differences in emotional reactivity and regulation
- present from infancy and somewhat stable across childhood
- tied to biology
- also influenced by environment

Question 28

thomas and chess: measuring temperament

Answer 28

• studied 141 children from infancy to childhood
• 6 dimensions on which to characterize infants, divides into 3 types

Question 29

3 categorizations of thomas and chess

Answer 29

• 40% easy= happy, adaptable, regular routines, not over-nor under-sensitive
  
  • 10% difficult= unhappy, unadaptable, irregular, intense reactions
  • 15% slow to warm up= negative, low activity and intensity, unadaptable, withdrawn
  • rest didn’t fit cleanly

Question 30

what did thomas and chess conclude?

Answer 30

categorization predicts functioning years later
- difficult children at high risk for adjustment problems
- shyness in slow to warm up children

Question 31

mary rothbart on measuring temperament

Answer 31

more quantitive than categorical
- measured via infant behavioral questionnaire
- 6 dimensions: activity level, attention span/ persistence, fearful distress, irritable distress, positive affect, effortful control
- reveal similar temperament range across cultures (with some proportional differences)
- attempts to reduce parental bias by having report behavioral frequency
- lab tab is an in-lab procedure

Question 32

inhibited and uninhibited infants

Answer 32

15% of 4mos can be characterized as inhibited (overstimulated/ upset by novelty)
- more likely to end up shy children (who have peer difficulties and are 4-6 times more likely to develop anxiety)

40% of 4mos uninhibited (delighted by novelty)
- more likely to end up sociable children

Question 33

inhibited infants show

Answer 33

greater amygdala reactivity, higher heart rates, higher cortisol, greater pupil dilation, higher blood pressure, and greater cooling of fingertips when presented with novelty than uninhibited infants

Question 34

frontal EEG asymmetries observed within an individual when encountering something positive/negative

Answer 34

more activity on right when infants see sad face, more on left when see happy face
inhibited infants show greater EEG activity on right and uninhibited infants how opposite

Question 35

heritability of temperament

Answer 35

• MZ twins more similar than twins on pretty much every facet of temperament
  
  • as with other things, heritability estimates increase over development

Question 36

harsh/ unstable parenting leads to

Answer 36

self-regulatoin issues; warm/ responsive parenting has opposite effect

Question 37

goodness of fit

Answer 37

the idea that despite everyone different, and some being more difficult than others, most children can flourish if put in the right env.

Question 38

Cultural differences in emotion socialization

Answer 38

west: inhibited children= bad, independence/ boldness= good
- shyness decreased over time
- shyness associated with negative outcomes

east: inhibited children= good, independence/ boldness= bad
- shyness increases over time
- shyness associated with positive outcomes

Question 39

when does separation anxiety start?

Answer 39

8 months

Question 40

when does joint attention begin?

Answer 40

1 year

Question 41

when do babies recognize themselves in photographs?

Answer 41

2 years

Question 42

Mirror recognize test

Answer 42

• Mirror self recognitions
• Pass by 18% (50%)- 24 months
  
  • But so do chimps, gorillas, elephants, dolphins, etc
• Autistic kids have trouble with this

Question 43

shopping cart study

Answer 43

• Also pass by 18 months
• Sense of your body as a physical entity
• non-western children outperforming western in shopping cart tasks

Question 44

Cross-cultural differences in sense of self

Answer 44

• Keller compared German, greek, Costa Rican, and Cameroonian 18-20 most on mirror self-recognitions
  
  • Cameroonian babies failed