Emotion and Emotion Regulation

Student Inclusion and Class Discussion

• Student inclusion, belongingness, and motivation are predictors of overall achievement.
• Fostering inclusion involves engaging in class discussions and activities.
• It also requires respecting each other’s point of view.
• Everyone’s unique perspectives and developmental experiences are important and valuable, providing a richer understanding of human development.

Learning Outcomes

1. Explain what an emotion is and why emotions are useful.
2. Describe the development of emotions in infancy and early childhood.
3. Explain what emotion regulation is, how it develops, and two key strategies.
4. Understand the socialization of emotions, focusing on caregivers.

What is an Emotion?

• An emotion consists of:
  • Subjective experience: what you are feeling.
  • Physiological changes: how our body responds.
  • Behavior: what you do.
  • Cognitive appraisal: making sense of the feeling.

Why Do We Have Emotions?

• Emotions drive our behavior.

Basic Emotions

• Eckman's 6 basic emotions are happiness, sadness, fear, anger, surprise, and disgust.

First Emotions

• Primary emotions:
  • Contentment, joy, interest, surprise, sadness, disgust, distress, anger, fear.
  • Emerge from birth to 1 year.
• Secondary or self-conscious emotions:
  • Embarrassment, self-awareness, envy, empathy, pride, shame, guilt.
  • Emerge from 1.5 years to 3 years.

Primary Emotions

• Primary emotions are key for survival.
• Tied to cognitive maturation.
• Ensure caregivers respond appropriately.
• Infant temperament matters.

Social Referencing

• Infants monitor emotional reactions in others to help define ambiguous situations.
• They use this information to decide how they should behave.
• Develops around 9-12 months of age.
• Example: Visual Cliff studies demonstrate maternal emotional signaling.

How Do We Socialise Infants' and Children's Emotions?

• Babies gain experience with emotions through face-to-face interactions.
  • Parents model emotions.
  • Baby gets experience feeling, expressing, and eliciting emotions.
• Modelling, imitating, and reinforcing emotions

Caregivers Matter

• Parent-caregiver bond involves strong emotions, providing a rich environment for shaping emotional responses and teaching emotion regulation.
• Emotion coaching is associated with fewer child emotional and behavioral problems compared with emotion dismissing.
• Problem with emotion dismissing
  • Child not able to express emotions, don’t learn how to cope with it.
  • Don’t feel that their caregiver understands and empathises with them and will be able to help them when needed.

Emotion Regulation

• Emotion regulation = processes involved in initiating, maintaining, and altering emotional responses.
  • Down-regulating = reducing experience of emotions.
  • Up-regulating = increasing experience of emotions.
  • May involve regulating one’s own emotions or another’s emotions

Emotion Generation

• Emotion Generation involves:
  • Situation, attention, evaluation, response.
• Strategies for emotion regulation based on this model:
  • Situation selection
  • Situation modification
  • Attentional deployment
  • Cognitive change
  • Response modulation

Two Emotion Regulation Strategies

• Suppression: Decreasing emotion-expressive behavior.
  • Emotion-expressive behavior = the outward display of emotions (facial expressions, gestures, body language, tone of voice etc.).
  • Effortful inhibition of external signals of an emotion.
• Reappraisal: Change the meaning of a situation to decrease its impact.
  • "Cognitive reappraisal involves changing one’s perception of the meaning or self-relevance of a situation to change its emotional impact."

Suppression

• Decreases negative emotion-expressive behavior.
• No impact on emotional experience (how we actually feel).
• Increases autonomic responses – no change or increase in amygdala and insula.
• Increased negative emotions.
• Increased depressive symptoms.
• Cognitive costs – reduced memory.
• Less close relationships.
• Higher cardiovascular disease.

Reappraisal

• Decreases negative emotion-expressive behavior AND experience.
• Increased positive emotions.
• Decreases physiological responses.
• Greater life satisfaction.
• Better interpersonal relationships

Context Matters!

• Reappraisal is useful in some contexts, but not others.
• Less useful when emotions are extremely intense
  • Low emotion – use reappraisal
  • High emotion – use distraction
• Less useful when situation can be changed
  • Measured Cognitive-reappraisal ability, severity of recent life stressors, stressor controllability, level of depression.
  • Participants with uncontrollable stress, higher cognitive- reappraisal ability was associated with lower levels of depression.
  • In contrast, for participants with controllable stress, higher cognitive-reappraisal ability was associated with greater levels of depression.

How Does Emotion Regulation Develop?

• Emotion regulation develops in infancy:
  • Involves a mix of self and other oriented ER strategies:
• Young infants:
  • Suck dummy or thumb to soothe – downregulating
  • Turn away from unpleasant stimuli
• 1 yr olds:
  • Move away from unpleasant stimuli/move towards pleasant stimuli
  • Seek out caregivers when upset – downregulating
• 2 yr olds:
  • Try to control the actions of others and objects
  • Push away a scary toy or a noisy peer
  • Attempts to distract self
  • Attempts to suppress emotions (compress lips, furrow brow)
  • Regulate distress symbolically- “Mummy is coming back”
• Preschool years:
  • Acquire cognitive skills for emotion regulation:
    • Ability to inhibit responses
    • Theory of Mind
  • Learn that changing thoughts can change emotions
    • 3-4 year olds use simple reappraisals during emotionally challenging situations with adult scaffolding
    • 5-6 year olds can independently use reappraisal as an emotion regulation strategy.
    • Self-report studies of 7-8 year olds show that when reappraising negative stimuli, negative affect lowers

Example: Soccer Game

• Michael reappraised the situation and thus changed its emotional meaning.
• Jacob suppressed the external signs of his disappointment.

Tripartite Model

• Observation (e.g., modeling, social referencing, emotion contagion)
• Parenting practices (e.g., emotion coaching, reactions to emotion)
• Emotional climate of the family (e.g., attachment/parenting style, marital relations, expressivity)
• Parent characteristics (e.g., reactivity and regulation, mental health, familial history)
• Child characteristics (e.g., sadness and anger reactivity, fearfulness, development)
• All leads Emotion regulation (e.g., anger, sadness, fear, positive affect)
• Which all leads Adjustment (e.g., internalizing, externalizing, social competence)

Socialisation of Emotions (Research Methods)

• Parents’ reports of increased reappraisal modelling and supportive reactions to neg emotions = reports of increased child reappraisal.
• Parents’ reports of increased suppression modelling and nonsupportive reactions to neg emotions = reports of increased child suppression.
• No differences between mothers and fathers.

Contextual Influences

• Emotion regulation is a way we conform to cultural and societal expectations about when and how different emotions should be expressed
  *Display rules
  *Become more aware of inner and expressed emotions
  *Shaped by:
  *Parent socialisation
  *Gender
  *Age
  *Culture
  *Religion
  *Society

Summary

• Emotions are complex and involve several elements.
• Primary emotions are useful for survival.
• Secondary emotions reflect an evaluation of the self.
• Emotional development is socialized!
  • Social referencing
  • Modeling
  • Talking
  • Parenting behavior (emotion coaching)
• Emotion regulation is about altering our emotional experiences.
  • Suppression
  • Reappraisal
• Context matters for when emotion regulation strategies are used/effective.
• Emotion regulation reflects cultural and societal norms and expectations.