Week 4 - Emotional Development

Week 4

Basic emotions

Set of emotions that are innate, experienced/expressed by all humans, and have distinct differentiable features like facial expressions, physiological patterns and subjective feelings

Examples of basic emotions

happiness, fear, anger, surprise, sadness, disgust

Complex, dependent Emotions

Emotions dependent on interactions between affective and cognitive processes, influenced by experience, learning, and socialization.

Examples of complex, dependent emotions

Guilt, shame

Dynamic Systems Theory

Assumes that we have different components within a system that sometimes work together, and sometimes they don't.

Components develop independently with different developmental trajectories, but may come together via self-organisation (that is itself context-dependent)

Self-organisation

In a dynamic system, components influence and change each other over time via the process of self-organisation. For most people, self-organisation is a flexible, efficient way of functioning

Attractor States

The outcome of self-organisation

Ekman & Friesen (1971)

South Fore people in New Guinea had to identify correct emotional pictures. Adults correctly identified emotions most of the time but struggled differentiating fear from surprise. Children correctly identified all emotions. Support for Discrete Emotion Perspective

Facial expressions in congentially blind people

Can produce similar spontaneous facial expressions as sighted people, but have trouble producing voluntary facial expressions

Facial expressions in unborn fetuses

Produce variety of emotions inc. smiles and pain expressions but unlikely to be linked to emotions.

Findings align with dynamic systems view of emotional development, supporting the model

Bennett et al. (2002)

4-month infants.

Consistent with differential emotions theory (DET) - joy expressions were most common to tickling, surprise most common to jack-in-the-box, but also in arm restraint and masked-stranger incidents, indicating lack of specificity - little support for DET

Duchenne smile

Real, genuine smile associated with happiness

White et al. (2018) - experiment 1

Infants viewed morphed facial images to test whether they better discriminate emotions across categorical boundaries (e.g. sadness vs. disgust) than within the same category

Found 5-month-olds showed categorical perception for sadness-disgust, happniess-surprise, and sadness-anger, but not anger-disgust.

9-month-olds still had no clear boundary between anger and disgust.

White et al. (2018) - experiment 2

Infants habituated to 60% morphed face showing a specific emotion, then shown two faces: one from the same emotion category and one that crossed the emotion border.

Infants looked longer at the face crossing the emotion border for sad vs. angry - showing categorical perception, but no difference in looking time for anger vs. disgust.

Test of emotion recognition

recognising and naming of emotional expressions

Pons et al. (2004)

Children tested on 9 emotion components, e.g. by asking which picture shows someone who is sad?

3-year-olds struggled to do this but performance improved with age - all children were successful at 9 years

Chronaki et al. (2015)

Facial emotional recognition reached adult levels by 11.

Vocal emotional recognition developed more slowly, continuing into late childhood

Social referencing

Where infant uses emotional signals from caregiver to inform their behaviour/decision-making

TikTok and social referencing

The trend where knocking a door, pretending baby hit their head and showing concerned facial expression makes them cry

Vaish & Striano (2004)

12-month-olds on a visual cliff received positive facial-only, vocal-only, or both facial and vocal cues from mothers.

Infants crossed faster with Voice Only and Face + Voice than with Face Only.

Looked more at mother in Face + Voice than Voice Only

Vocal cues, even without visual reference, are more potent than facial cues in guiding infants’ behaviour.

Emotion components

Recognition - recognising and naming of emotional expressions.

External cause - understanding how external causes affect others’ emotions

Desire - emotional reactions depends on desire (two people may feel different in same situation)

Belief - belief determines emotional reaction

Reminder - relationship between memory and emotion

Regulation - behavioural/psychological strategies

Hiding - discrepancy between expressed and felt emotion

Mixed - having multiple or contradictory emotions

Morality - negative feelings from morally reprehensible situation/positive for praiseworthy situation

Empathy

An emotional response dependent on the interaction between trait capacities and state influences.

Empathic processes automatically elicited but shaped by top-down control processes.

Resulting emotion is similar to one’s perception and understanding of the stimulus emotion, with recognition that source of the emotion is not one’s own.

Emotional regulation

Ability to modify or maintain the duration, intensity of nature of emotional experiences

Tripartite model of the impact of the family on children’s emotional regulation and adjustment (Morris et al., 2007)

1. Children learn about emotional regulation through adjustment

2. Specific parenting practices and behaviours related to the socialisation of emotion affect emotional regulation

3. Emotional regulation affected by the emotional climate of the family, as reflected in the quality of attachment relationships, parenting styles, family expressiveness, emotional quality of the marital relationship

Sensitive responding

Perceiving and correctly interpreting children’s signals and situation by promptly reacting in manner that addresses their momentary emotion-regulation needs and tailoring responses to their developmental status

Cooke et al. (2019)

Securely attached children better regulated their emotions than insecurely attached children.

Defined overall emotional regulation ability as ability to experience emotion in ways that are not overwhelming

Gullone et al. (2010)

Emotion regulation strategies in 9-15 year-olds.

Suppression was lower for older participants, and participants reported less use of this strategy over time.

Older participants scored lower on reappraisal, and this remained stable over time.

Males reported more suppression than females.

Cracco et al. (2017)

Emotion regulation strategies in Dutch 8-18 year-olds.

Adaptive strategies - problem-solving, distraction, acceptance.

Maladaptive strategies - giving up, withdrawal, rumination.

Between 12-15 there was a transient shift: decrease in adaptive strategy use and increase in maladaptive strategy use.

Zimmerman & Iwanski (2014)

Emotional regulation across 11-50 year olds.

Measured 7 emotion regulation strategies: adaptive emotion regulation, social support seeking, passivity, avoidant regulation, expressive suppression, dysfunctional rumination, dysregulation.

More passivity reported in sadness than fear or anger.

Age differences only found for sadness and anger.

Anger-related passivity decreased steadily from 11-22.

Fear-related passivity declined from adolescence to adulthood.

What could explain temporarily lowered emotion regulation capacity in adolescence

Temporary maturational imbalance between brain regions: subcortical system (affective experience), prefrontal system (cognitive control)

Discrete emotion perspective

suggests that emotions are fundamental, distinct, and biologically-based experiences

Claims of dynamic systems theory

Emotions result from physiological responses, facial expressions, subjective feelings, and instrumental behaviours, and over time, these interactions lead to stable patterns of self-organisation in emotional responding. 

Smiling at 0-2 months

Smiling during sleep

Smiling at 2 months

Social smiling

Smiling at 2-6 months

Interactive smiling

Smiling at 6-18 months

Referential smiling

Smiling in childhood

Increasingly specific use of duchenne smiles in contexts of social sucess