Week 5 Lecture 2 - Emotional Development

What are emotions?

Combination of physiological and cognitive responses to thoughts or experiences

• Neural responses

• Physiological factors

• Subjective feelings

• Emotional expressions

• The desire to take action

Are emotions innate or learned?

Discrete/Basic Emotion Perspective

Emotional are innate, biological based, and universal

Six basic emotions:

Joy, sadness, anger, disgust, fear, surprise

Criticisms of basic emotion perspective

• Disagreement about which emotions are the basic ones

• Vagueness of the biological bases

• Problematic cross-linguistic mapping

• Rejection on the assumption that emotions are discrete categories

Constructive Perspective

Emotions are learned through individual experiences, cultural context, and social interactions

• Not innate or universal

Eg. Some cultures portray dogs as cute, don’t need to be kept on a leash — aren’t scared of dogs. Some children may have had a bad experience with a dog, so grow up not liking dogs

Functionalist Perspective

Emotions are biologically evolved responses that serve adaptive functions, helping individuals navigate and respond to environmental challenges for survival and well-being

Goal: attaining the end stage that the individual currently is invested in

Meaning regarding the self: my goal is achievable, my goal is unattainable, there is an obstacle to my obtaining my goal

Action tendence: engagement, disengagement and withdrawal, forward to eliminate obstacles to one’s goal

Emotion type: joy, sadness, anger

What is emotion regulation?

Develops across lifespan and can be influenced by various factors, including cognitive development, temperaments, social interactions and enviornemnt, etc. A set of both conscious and unconscious processes used to both monitor and modulate emotional experiences and expressions

Importance:

• Affects social functioning and relationships

• Affects mental health and overall well-being

• Affects academic and professional success

Regulatory strategies:

• Co-regulation, self-comforting behaviours, self-distraction, social support, cognitive reappraisal, mindfulness etc.

• Developmental

What is temperament?

• Innate, biologically based style of reacting to the world, including emoticons reactivity, self-regulation and activity level

• Individual differences in emotion, activity level, and attention that are exhibited across contexts

• Influenced by both genes and the environment

• Relatively stable but can undergo some change over time

Measuring temperament

Questionnaires - Rothbart

• Every child has some level of same set of dimensions

• Developed questionnaires to measure temperament from infancy to adulthood

  • The Infant Behaviour Questionnaire

  • The Child Behaviour Questionnaire

• Temperament can be measured in five dimensions: fear, distress/anger/frustration, attention span, activity level, smiling and laughter

• Ratings tend to be stable over time and predict later behavioural problems, anxiety disorder, and social competence

Physiological measures

• Emotional reactions to laboratory situations

  • Heart-rate variability

  • Electroencephalogram (EEG) - measures brain electrical activity; used to link patterns of neural activation with temperament traits