Week 10 - Emotions Flashcards
What are Emotions?
Transient states
(1) Behaviour
(2) Physiological response
(3) Subjective internal state
How is emotion shown through behavior?
Facial expressions Vocal cues (Pitch, Intensity, Speed) Other behaviors (Freezing, Withdrawing, Laughing, Crying)
How is emotion shown through physiological responses?
Autonomic nervous system (Sweat, Heart rate) Startle: • Response to a sudden, intense stimulus • Tensing of back and neck muscles • Eye blink
How is emotion shown through subjective experience?
Person’s report of how they are feeling • Positive and Negative Affect Scale • Rate how often you have felt this way today from 1 (not at all) to 5 (very) • Miserable Mad Afraid Scared Sad • Joyful Cheerful Happy Lively Proud
Why Do We Have Emotions?
- Functional approach
- Mobilize and coordinate our response systems
- Communicate our needs to others and shape interpersonal behaviors of others
How do we measure emotions in infancy?
- Facial expressions
- Vocal cues
- Posture
Facial Action Coding System
Code movement of 44 facial muscles
What Emotions Do Infants Display?
Infants make facial expressions that correspond to discrete emotions
• But ….
• Untrained adults do not reliably differentiate among them
• Babies do not make these facial expressions in the expected situations
The Emotional Lives of Infants
Facial expressions of infants can be reliably coded
• By 6 months of age, infants show the basic emotions
• Joy, sadness, disgust, surprise, anger, fear
• Untrained adults do not differentiate among these negative facial expressions
• The vocalizations laughing and crying are linked to positive and negative affect
The Emotional Lives of Toddlers and Preschoolers
Tantrums are an expression of distress in toddlers and preschool-aged children
Acoustic properties of scream and yell differ from
those of whine and cry
• Scream/yell acoustically similar to adult anger (e.g, high pitch); Yelling, hitting, kicking: anger
• Whine/cry acoustically similar to adult sadness (e.g., lower pitch); Whining, crying, comfort seeking: sadness
Complex emotions in toddlers and preschoolers
Differentiation of negative affect • Emergence of complex emotions Self-conscious thought • Envy • Simple embarrassment Incorporation of rules and norms • Complex embarrassment • Shame
Pride and Shame in 3 yo
- hard/easy puzzle study
3-year-olds express shame and price under the same conditions as adults
• Evaluation of task is necessary
Daily Experience of Affect During Adolescence
On average, positive affect decreases across adolescents
What Is Emotion Regulation?
Internal and external processes involved in initiating, maintaining, and modulating the occurrence, intensity, and expression of emotions
Internal Emotion Regulation
- Cognitive re-appraisal
- Suppression of behavioral signals of emotion
- Distraction
- Self-soothing
External Emotion Regulation
Co-regulation
Emotion Regulation in Newborns
Newborns are completely dependent on caregivers for emotion regulation
Emotion Regulation in 3 mo
Early self-soothing
Emotion Regulation in 3-6 mo
Shift attention from a negative stimuli to a positive stimuli
Emotion Regulation in 1 yo
More complex motor responses
• Retreat, reach, self-soothing
• Explicitly social signaling
• Recognize that others can help them and seek that out
Emotion Regulation in 2 yo
Can use different strategies to manage affective states
• Can respond to caregiver directives
• Better language skills provide new opportunities
Emotion Regulation During Adolescence
voluntary/involuntary engagement/disengagement
Voluntary engagement
- Problem-solving
- Emotional expression
- Cognitive reappraisal
Involuntary engagement
Rumination
Voluntary disengagement
- denial
- avoidance
Involuntary disengagement
- escape
- cognitive interference
What strategies did adolescents report using more to regulate emotion?
Reported using more voluntary engagement strategies than involuntary engagement and disengagement strategies
How were strategies associated with current negative affect?
Disengagement and involuntary engagement predicted greater anger and sadness
No strategy was associated with decreased negative
Emotional Recognition in Infancy (visual)
By 3 months of age, infants can tell when the same person is making a different emotional facial expression
• Between 4 and 6 months of age, may be able to discriminate facial expressions posed by different people
• In general, there is agreement that by 6 months of age, infants can discriminate facial expressions
• Less agreement about whether younger infants can do this
Emotional Recognition in Infancy (auditory)
There is evidence that by 6-months-of-age, infants can discriminate between both facial and vocal expressions
• But …
• Evidence is not consistent
• These studies have not used “real” emotional expressions
• Discrimination is not recognition
Peek-a-boo Study
suggest that 4-month-olds
• Discriminate facial expressions
• Recognize facial expressions
Age difference in recognizing happiness
- No age differences in recognition at peak intensity
- No age differences in threshold (25%)
- 5-year-olds misidentified happiness more often than did adults, but 7-year-olds were adult like
Age difference in recognizing anger
- No difference between age groups at 100% intensity
- All three groups of children had higher thresholds (24-28%) than adults did (21%)
- No age group differences in misidentification
Age difference in recognizing sadness
- At 100%, 7-year-olds were less accurate than were adults
- 5- and 7-year-olds had a higher threshold to identify an
emotion (42%) than did adults (31%) - 7-year-olds made more misidentification errors than
did adults
Age difference in recognizing surprise
- 5-year-olds were less accurate than were adults at 100% intensity
- 5-year-olds had higher thresholds (35.2%) than did
adults (20.2%) - 5- and 7-year-olds made more misidentifications than did adults
Which emotions are more difficult to recognize and which are easier?
- Happiness, anger, and fear are easier
* Surprise, sadness, and disgust are harder
When is recognition of facial expressions adult-like?
10- to 11-years-of-age
Variability across emotions
• Recognition of happiness, fear, and anger become adult-like between 5- to 7-years
• Sadness, surprise, and disgust become adult-like between 7- to 10-years
When is recognition of vocal expression of emotion adult-like?
later than recognition of facial expressions
• 10- and 11-year-olds less accurate than adults at identifying angry, sad, fearful and vocal expressions
at 100% intensity
• Improvement from 8- to 17-years-of-age in recognition of vocal expressions of affect
Vocal and semantic cues in emotion recognition
- Between ages of 4- and 10-years, children show a semantic bias
- Rely on what is being said, rather than how it is being said
