Module 10: Emotions and temperament Flashcards
emotions vs affect
emotion= internal, affective response about something in environment
affect= general positive or negative feeling
two categories of emotions
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
Discrete emotions theory
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
Emergent theory of emotions
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
Display rules
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
when does emotional expression develop?
Begins in womb
- Cry-face seen from 20 wks gestations
when is happiness expressed?
- 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
when are anger and sadness expressed?
- 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
- Arm-holding/ contingency disruptions paradigms elicit strong anger by 4 months
- Sadness elicited in similar situations as anger
when is fear expressed?
First sign by 7 months
- Same time as recognize fear expressions in others
stranger anxiety
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
separation anxiety
fear of caregiver leaving
- Begins 8 months, begins to decline by 15 months
- Cross-cultural universal, despite diffs in childrearing practices
when is surprise expressed?
- Not same as startle (present at birth)
- Present by 6 months
- Relatively infrequent (not clearly observable in violation of expectation experiments)
when is disgust expressed?
- 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
Self conscious emotions
- Begin to appear 18-24 months, require sense of self
- Shame/ embarassment- eyes lowered, head hung, hiding face
- Pride after success- not until 2+
broken toy procedure
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
fear bias
7 months, preferentially look to/ daily to disengage from fearful faces
social referencing
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
10 most look longer when…
characters expresses negative reaction after achieving a goal
Strategies for adjusting emotional states to comfortable level of intensity
Attention focusing/shifting, inhibiting thoughts/ behaviours, planning
co-regulation
Holding, rocking, shushing, feeding
Young babies can’t do this stuff; parents must do it for them
US babies who were held/cuddled as infants
had better emotional functioning as adults
babies do some self-regulation….
- 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
Theory behind sleep training
encouraging babies to learn to self-soothe
Still face paradigm
- 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
Parental depression/anxiety
- Depressed mothers/ fathers show flat effect- frequent still-face
- Less sensitive/ appropriate caregiving- sometimes too intrusive, sometimes too withdrawn
infants of anxious mothers
- Become more way of strangers over time
- Less able to look away from angry faces
temperament
stable individual differences in emotional reactivity and regulation
- present from infancy and somewhat stable across childhood
- tied to biology
- also influenced by environment
thomas and chess: measuring temperament
- studied 141 children from infancy to childhood
- 6 dimensions on which to characterize infants, divides into 3 types
3 categorizations of thomas and chess
- 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
what did thomas and chess conclude?
categorization predicts functioning years later
- difficult children at high risk for adjustment problems
- shyness in slow to warm up children
mary rothbart on measuring temperament
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
inhibited and uninhibited infants
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
inhibited infants show
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
frontal EEG asymmetries observed within an individual when encountering something positive/negative
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
heritability of temperament
- MZ twins more similar than twins on pretty much every facet of temperament
- as with other things, heritability estimates increase over development
harsh/ unstable parenting leads to
self-regulatoin issues; warm/ responsive parenting has opposite effect
goodness of fit
the idea that despite everyone different, and some being more difficult than others, most children can flourish if put in the right env.
Cultural differences in emotion socialization
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
when does separation anxiety start?
8 months
when does joint attention begin?
1 year
when do babies recognize themselves in photographs?
2 years
Mirror recognize test
- Mirror self recognitions
- Pass by 18% (50%)- 24 months
- But so do chimps, gorillas, elephants, dolphins, etc
- Autistic kids have trouble with this
shopping cart study
- Also pass by 18 months
- Sense of your body as a physical entity
- non-western children outperforming western in shopping cart tasks
Cross-cultural differences in sense of self
- Keller compared German, greek, Costa Rican, and Cameroonian 18-20 most on mirror self-recognitions
- Cameroonian babies failed
