Emotions and Emotional Development

Emotions: Understanding and Development

Introduction

• Emotions and their expressions change and influence social development in children.
• Children display a wide range of emotional expressions from infancy.
• These expressions communicate feelings, needs, and desires.
• Emotions influence others' behavior (e.g., smiles elicit smiles, screams deter approaches).
• The chapter covers the importance of emotions, theories of emotional development, early expressions (smiling, crying), later emotions (pride, shame), recognizing emotions in others, emotional regulation, thinking about emotions, and the role of parents, siblings, teachers and peers in socializing emotional expression and regulation.
• Atypical emotional development, focusing on childhood depression, is also discussed.

What Are Emotions?

• Emotions are complex and involve a subjective reaction to the environment.
• They are accompanied by physiological arousal and communicated through expressions or actions.
• Emotions are experienced as pleasant or unpleasant.
• Infants show displeasure through facial expressions and physiological responses (e.g., accelerated heart rate).
• As children develop, emotional expressions and awareness become refined, influenced by emotional vocabulary and regulation skills.
• A distinction is made between primary and secondary emotions.
  • Primary emotions: Fear, joy, disgust, surprise, sadness, and interest. They emerge early and do not require introspection.
  • Secondary emotions: Pride, shame, guilt, jealousy, embarrassment, and empathy. They emerge later and depend on self-awareness and understanding of others' reactions.

Why Are Emotions Important?

• Emotions allow children to communicate how they feel.
• They're linked to social success: expressing and interpreting emotions is a key component of navigating social environments.
• Emotions impact mental and physical health.
• Excessive sadness can lead to poor concentration and social withdrawal.
• Emotional dysregulation can impact physical health by affecting stress responses and cortisol levels.
  • Heightened cortisol levels \rightarrow Physical Problems
• Exposure to parental hostility impairs children's physical health.

Perspectives on Emotional Development

• Emotional development is influenced by nature and nurture.
• Three theoretical perspectives explain emotional development.

Biological Perspective

• Explains the expression of basic emotions.
• Structural view of emotions: Emotional expressions are innate, universal, and rooted in evolution, based on anatomical structures (Darwin, 1872).
• Research supports the universality of facial expressions for basic emotions across cultures (Ekman, 1972).
• Blind and sighted people display similar expressions, supporting the claim that emotional expression is innate.
• Infants begin to smile at 46 weeks after conception, regardless of exposure to smiling faces (Dittrichova, 1969).
• Each emotion is expressed via a distinct group of facial muscles.
• The left cerebral hemisphere controls the expression of joy, while the right hemisphere controls fear.
• Genetic studies highlight a biological basis, showing identical twins are more similar in emotional traits than fraternal twins.
• Identical Twins > Fraternal Twins in:
  • Age at which they first smile.
  • Amount they smile.
  • Onset of fear reactions.
  • General degree of emotional inhibition.

Learning Perspective

• Explains individual differences in emotional expression.
• The frequency of smiling and laughing relates to caregiver behavior.
• When parents enthusiastically respond to infants' smiles, it encourages infant to smile more.
• Studies confirm that positive stimulation increases the rate of infant smiling.
• Learning experiences can reinforce fear responses through classical or operant conditioning.
  • Classical Conditioning: Children can become classically conditioned to fear the doctor who gives a painful shot during their office visit.
  • Operant conditioning: Acquire fear when a painful fall. follows climbing up a high ladder
• Fears can be acquired by observing others' reactions (Bandura, 1986).
• Parents influence emotional management by rewarding emotional displays or by being punitive.

Functional Perspective

• Emotions help people achieve social and survival goals (Saarni et al., 2006).

• Emotions are aroused by social and survival goals.

• Emotions impel children toward their goals.

• Emotional signals provide feedback that guides others' behavior.

• Reactions of others to a child's social overtures influence subsequent feelings and actions.

• Positive emotional expressions during negotiations lead to more successful outcomes (Kopelman et al., 2006).

• Memories of past emotions shape future responses to new situations.

• Emotions help children:

  • Achieve their goals.
  • Establish and maintain social relationships.
  • Adapt to their environments.

• No single perspective explains all aspects of emotional development; each is useful for answering specific questions.

Development of Emotions

• Infants express a wide range of emotions early in age.
• Mothers report seeing interest, joy, anger, surprise, fear, and sadness in their 1-month-old infants (Johnson et al., 1982).
• Researchers use detailed coding systems to document facial expressions and movements to distinguish emotions.
• The Maximally Discriminative Facial Movement (MAX) is a coding system for infant emotional expressions.

Primary Emotions

• Babies experience primary emotions: joy, fear, distress, anger, surprise, sadness, interest, and disgust.
• These emotions are directly related to the events that caused them.
• Fear responds to a visible threat; distress is a direct result of pain; and joy often rrsults from interacting with a primary caregiver.

Joy

• Is reflected in infants' smiling and laughter.
• Reflex smiles are spontaneous and depend on the infant's internal state, and adaptive for the infant by ensuring caregiver attention and stimulation
• Between 3 and 8 weeks, infants smile in response to external stimuli.
• High-pitched voices or face-voice combinations elicit social smiles between 2 and 6 months.
• By 3 months, babies smile more at familiar faces.
• Infants' smiling becomes more discriminating as they mature.
• 10-month-old infants reserve Duchenne smiles (upturned mouth and wrinkles around the eyes) for their mothers.
• The amount infants smile depends on their environment's social responsiveness.
• Differences in smiling are related to gender - girls show more positive emotions than boys.
• Expressions of emotion change with age.
• Auditory stimuli elicit few laughs: Tactile stimuli elicited a substantial amount of laughter, but only at 7 to 9 months: Visual and social stimuli elicited more laughter over- all

Not All Smiles Are Alike

• Infants use different smiles to express different positive emotions: coy, gleeful, riotous smiles (Messinger & Fogel, 2007).
• Duchenne smiles involve upturned mouth and wrinkles around the eyes.
• In adults, Duchenne smiles are expressions of joy; smiles that do not involve the eyes are merely polite.
• Authentic Happiness (2002), labeled these inauthentic smiles Pan American smiles and are the expressions that Pan American World Airways stewardesses plastered on their faces in television ads and often used when they were providing in-flight service.
• The facial muscles involved in the Duchenne smile are difficult to voluntarily control.
• EEG recordings revealed that the 10-month-olds' Duchenne smiles were associated with relatively more activation of the left frontal cerebral hemisphere.
• A third kind of smile when they play, a combination of the Duchenne smile and a wide-open mouth. This play smile is associated with rapid breathing, vocalization, and laughter.
• A fourth type of smile seen in infants is a combination of a Duchenne smile and a play smile.This Duplay smile involves both eye con- striction and mouth opening.
• According to emotions expert Paul Ekman (Ekman, 2004), at least 17 types of smiles are exhibited in adulthood.

Fear

• Appears in infancy in two phases (Sroufe, 1996).
  • 3-7 months: Wariness, exhibiting unease where they encounter events and people.
  • 7-9 months: True fear, immediate negative reaction to unfamiliar events or people.
• Experience intense negative emotions show the same kinds of constrictions around the eyes that we saw in the case of the Duchenne smiles.
• Fear of strangers was once believed to be a developmental milestone that was both inevitable and universal.
• Stranger distress emerges in a majority of infants between 7 and 9 months, but not a constant
• Whether a baby is fearful of a stranger depends on a host of variables including who the stranger is, how he or she behaves, the setting in which the encounter occurs, and the child's experiences with strangers in the past
• When babies meet strangers in their own homes, they are less afraid than when they meet them in an unfamiliar setting, such as a research laboratory
• If infants see their mother interacting positively with the stranger, they are likely to smile, and approach the stranger.
• A baby's reaction depends on how the parent reacts to the stranger and infants use parental facial expressions and voices as a social reference.
• Degree of control over the stranger's behavior helps the infant be less fearful (Mangelsdorf et al., 1991).
• Characteristics and behavior of stranger also matter: Infants are less afraid of child strangers than adult strangers.
• Separation anxiety peaks at about 15 months
• Fear of heights begins at about 6 months.
• Fears become less about physical events and are more influenced by cognitive interpretations (Sayfan & Lagattuta, 2009).

Anger

• Expression reliably seen from 2 to 3 months (Izard 1994; Izard et al., 1995).
• Infants display anger in response to particular external events (Saarni et al., 2006; Sroufe, 1996).
• Anger reactivity increases from 4 to 16 months (Braungart-Rieker et al., 2010) as pain and frustration.
• Overall, anger reactivity increases with age from 4 to 16 months but then begins to decline.
• Declines in the expression of anger from 14 to 33 months are related to secure attachment:
• By preschool, children express anger less frequently and school-age children continue improving their regulation skills.
• Boys express more anger than girls especially during preschool and middle childhood.

Sadness

• Is a reaction to pain and frustration, but in infancy it occurs less often than anger.
• Young infants become sad when parent-infant communication breaks down
• Is a signal children can use to control their social partners, an indication that they were using this emotional display to elicit the mother's support.
• Children can use this to control their social partners.
• Sadness is an effective emotional signal for eliciting care and comfort from adults.
• Females express it more than males.

Secondary Emotions

• Babies begin to experience more complex secondary emotions including pride, shame,jealousy, guilt, and empathy. These social or self- conscious emotions depend on children's abilities to be aware of, talk about, and think about themselves in relation to others
• These emotions play important roles in social development: Pride and shame help define children's feelings about themselves and others; jealousy is expressed when chil- dren assess other children who seem to have an advantage; guilt motivates children to apologize; empathy leads children to perform prosocial acts.

Pride and Shame

• Pride is shown when children are pleased with their accomplishments.
• Shame expressed when children perceive that someone finds them wanting or
  deficient.
• By 3 years old, solving problems elicits joy but succeeding on a difficult task produces pride (Lewis, 1992).
• Pride is most evident when others are around.
• Culture and gender are significant factors in how pride and shame are shown: Japanese children express more shame than either American or Korean children while American children with the emphasis on individual achievement being highest in the expression of pride (Furukawa et al., 2012).
• Girls are also tend to feel more prone to shame than boys

Jealousy

• Occurs as early as 1 year (Hart, 2015).
• Children express jealousy when their mother directs attention away from them toward another child.
• Researchers explored jealousy in pairs of siblings and both younger and older children expressed jealousy of the sibling who received the parent's attention.
• Jealousy less prevalent where strong familial relationships.

Guilt

• Children begin to experience feelings of guilt when they are quite
  young.
• By 9, children realized that to feel guilty, it was necessary to be responsible.
• Girls are more prone to guilt than boys

Empathy

• An emotional response to another person's. It involves sharing and understanding the other person's feelings.
• Evidence of empathic responding can be seen in functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) of the brain.
• Newborns' crying in response to other infants' cry is termed rudimentary empathic responding (Hoffman, 2000).
• At 13or14 months old, they often approach and comfort another child in distress. This comforting, though, is quite general. When children are about 18 months old, they not only approach a distressed person but offer spe- cific kinds of help.
• From about age 7, children understand that emotional expressions are produced by inner states, not solely by situations
• As they grow older, they also respond to stories of other people's distress.
• Promting viewers to pay attention to the pain, rather than the race of the participant these race-related differences in empathy can be reduced (Sheng&.
  Han, 2012).

Individual Differences in Emotional Expressiveness

• Differences in emotional reactions are related to temperament (Thomas and Chess's (1986) and Rothbart's (2011)) temperament dimensions) the behaviourally inhibited temperament).
• Biological factors play a central role in how intensely children react to emotionally arousing situations and how well they regulate their reactions.
• Children whose emotions are more positive have higher self-esteem, more social competence and better adjustment

Development of Emotional Understanding

• Emotionally competent people have an understanding of emotion.
• Children must acquire knowledge about emotions and be able to recognize them in themselves and in others.

Recognizing Emotions in Others

• Between 3 and 6 months, babies are exposed to parents' facial expressions of emotion 32,000 times (Malatesta, 1982).
• Infants learn to recognize some emotions, recognizing the positive ones more often and earlier than the negative ones (Denham et al., 2011).
• By 3 months, infants discriminate smiling from frowning and surprised faces.
• 4- and 7-month-olds prefer to look at happy faces over angry and neutral faces
• Infants' recognition of joy before anger has functional value.
• Most infants recognize emotional expressions of their mother earlier.
• Early experience affects children's abilities to recognize emotions
• Most abuse children are able to identify anger better than other emotions.
• Abilities to recognize emotions continue to improve as children grow up .
• By age 9, children can reliably discriminate between Duchenne smiles and non-Duchenne smiles (Gosselin et al., 2002).
• Up to 8 years old, a majority of children studied believe that the standard disgust face indicates anger (Widen & Russell, 2013).

Beyond Recognition: Knowledge of and Understanding About Emotions

• As they grow, children go beyond merely recognizing emotions to thinking more deeply about them.
• Emotional knowledge consists of knowledge regarding others' mental states, including the ability to differentiate emotional states across and within situations and to use beliefs and desires to attribute emotions during common emotion-eliciting situations.

Matching emotions to situations: emotional scripts

• As they mature, children develop a more complete understanding of the meanings of emotion terms and the situations that evoke different types of feelings.
• This understanding is based on a collection of emotional scripts, that enable children to identify and predict emo¬tional reactions to specific events (Camras & Halberstadt, 2017; Saarni et al., 2006).
• By age 5, they generally understand situations that lead to emotions with recognizable facial displays like anger displayed in frowning
• By age 7, they can describe situations that elicit emotions with no obvious facial or behavioral expressions.

Multiple emotions, Multiple causes

• Awareness that a person can have more than one feeling at a time and can even experience conflicting feelings.
• Although infants show signs of experiencing conflicting feelings, such as fearing even frightened the a toy robot.
• They can understand and describe mixed emotions develops slowly.
• Approximate age table (Harter & Buddin, 1987):
  • 4 to 6 years - Conceive of only one emotion at a time
  • 6 to 8 years - Conceive of two emotions of the same type occurring simultaneously: