Final Exam PSYC 301

Chapter 6



The Development of Emotions

  • Humans do not have a biological emotional meter

  • A lot of our theories about emotions are influenced heavily by the methods we use

    • Ex. facial expressions of children, verbal expressions of children’s emotional states

  • Emotion: a shift in the mode of physiological and cognitive processing

  • Six basic emotions:

    • Happiness

    • Sadness

    • Fear

    • Anger

    • Surprise

    • Disgust

  • Facial expressions are now largely symbolic and universal

    • Functional benefits to many facial expressions related to emotion

  • The differentiation of emotions in the first 3 years of life

    • Emotions developed after 6 months require complex cognitive processes (complex emotions: embarrassment, pride, shame, guilt, envy, empathy)

    • Primary emotions: contentment, interest, distress

  • Social referencing: the process of learning how to react to certain situations or express certain emotions in the face of different contexts by using other people’s facial expressions or vocal cues

  • Separation anxiety: feeling of distress children expereince when separated from their primary caregivers

    • Attachment styles: secure, avoidant, insecure

  • Morality and emotion

    • Children prefer helpers over hinderers; their initial orientation predisposes them to be prosocial

  • Children are capable of inferring action from emotion

  • Emotional contagion: the emotions of other people that surround oneself affect the emotions one feels

  • Emotion regulation

    • Co-regulation: caregiver provides comfort or distraction to reduce a child’s distress (external)

    • Self-comforting behaviors: repetitive actions that regulate arousal by providing a positive physical sensation

    • Self-distraction: looking away from an upsetting stimulus to regulate one’s level of arousal

  • Temperament

    • Weather : climate is to emotions : temperament

    • Constituionally based individual differences in emotional, motora nd attentional reactivity and self-regulation that demonstrate consistencya cross situations, as well as relative stability over time

    • Present from infancy

    • Genetically based

    • Influenced by genes and environment

  • Temperaments (easy, difficult, slow-to-warm-up) do not impact development of infants as much as goodness of fit with parents does

  • Gender differences in rates of depression

    • Depression more common in adolescent girls than in adolescent boys

    • Puberty

    • Socioemotional stress

    • Genetic reasons

  • Emotional preparedness

    • Kids are not born afraid of most things

    • They are, however, born “prepared” to develop fears

    • Threat detection task:

      • When tasked to find snake stimuli within flowers, children are very good at this

      • When tasked to find flower stimuli within snakes, children struggle a bit



Chapter 7



Early Social Development & Attachment

  • Observational learning

    • Bandura’s Social Learning Theory: people learn new behaviors by observing and imitating others

    • Children imitate behaviors that are reinforced, but not behaviors that are punished

  • Ethological theories

    • When ducklings hatch, they imprint on the first thing they see

    • When infants are born, they have a preference for oval-shaped objects with more stimuli in the top half than the bottom half

  • Children who are orphans and no main caregiver have more developmental problems

  • Strange Situation

    • Procedure:

      • Parent and baby enter playroom

      • Parent sits quietly while baby plays

      • Stranger enters and talks with parent

      • Parent leaves the room. Baby is alone with the stranger

      • Parent returns. Stranger leaves

      • Parent leaves. Baby alone in the room

      • Stranger enters and offers comfort

      • Parent returns and offers comfort if needed and tries to get the baby to play

    • Secure, insecure-resistant, insecure-avoidant, insecure-disorganized

    • Distance a baby travels away from the parent in the first step demonstrates level of security/trust that the baby and parent share

  • The sensitivity that families/caregivers have for infants, the more likely a secure attachment will develop

    • Attachment styles are more consistent in stable families, less so in dysfunctional families

  • Infant’s attachment style to a caregiver predicts:

    • Social development

    • Risk behavior

    • Physical health

  • Cultural variations in attachment styles

    • All four attachment styles have been found in many other cultures, but with different proportions

    • Avoidant attachments are rare in cultures where children are seldom left alone

  • Contingent response back and forth between caregiver and infants with facial expressions and vocal cues

    • A predictor to the development of secure attachment



Chapter 8



The Development of Self and Gender

  • Rouge test: children recognize the rouge spot on their face in the mirror by 15-18 months

  • Self-concept may exist in children as young as 3 months

  • Self esteem is central to sense of self

    • Kids at a fairly young age develop a sense of being highly valuable or not

  • Self esteem varies with age

    • Drops during adolescence, especially for girls (related to development of depression in adolescence)

    • Participation in team sports reduces self-esteem drop in females

  • Gender identity

    • 18-30 months - children preferentially choose gender-typed toys

    • By 3-4 years of age, children express strong gender-typed behavior



Chapter 10



The Development of Language

  • Humans - extremely advanced language ability to represent things with symbols

    • Symbols

    • Comprehension

    • Production

  • Human language

    • Generative

    • Phonemes

    • Morphemes

    • Syntax

      • Rules specifying how words from different canteogries can be combined to form meaningful sentences

    • Pragmatics

      • Knowledge about how language is used (ex. turn taking)

  • Humans are much better at using language than any other species on Earth

  • Brain-language lateralization

  • Hemispheric language learning differences

    • Left-hemispher for 90% of right handers and life-long signers

  • Early years until around age 5 sensitive for language learning (easier to learn languages)

  • Infant-direct speech (IDS)

    • Culturally universal

  • Bilingual infants

    • Smaller vocabularies, less complex syntax in the beginning

    • Advantage with working memory

    • Better at switching between rules

  • Language is acquired by listening and speaking (or watching and signing)

    • Active and interactive task

  • Speech perception

    • Categorical perception of speech sounds

      • Infants can hear differences in certain speech sounds that adults cannot

    • Word segmentation: process of discovering where words begin and end in fluent speech; begins during second half of the first year

    • Distributional properties: certain sounds are more likely to appear together than others

    • Infants identify patterns in the speech surrounding them

  • Babbling (early phases of language development)

  • Word learning constraints

    • Assumptions children make that constrain their understanding

      • Mutual exclusivity

      • Whole-object assumption

      • Shape bias

      • Overextension/underextension of meaning

  • Applying rules

    • Overregularization: speech eros in which children treat irregular forms of words as if they were regular

  • Infants produce recognizable, meaningful gestures before they speak recognizable words

  • Dual representation: understanding what a symbol represents and the literal object of the symbol itself




Chapter 11



Theory of Mind

  • Young children are terrible at the chocolate task

  • Unable to understand that he knowledge state of others can be different from their own knowledge state



Wason card task

  • When the task is not abstract (underage drinking), people are able to figure out which cards to flip easily

  • When the task is abstract (numbers and letters), it becomes more difficult for people to figure out which cards to flip



  • Cosmides and Tooby argue that humans possess a ToM “cheating” detector specialty… maybe a brain module

  • Human brains are not general information processors



Acquiring a Theory of Mind (Chocolate bar task)

  • 4-year olds succeed

  • 3.5-year-olds fail

  • Suggests qualitative shift in the fourth year (which is pretty late)

  • 3-year-olds capable of complex reasoning

  • Also, kids as young as 2 years lie

  • Competence vs. performance



Kids fail to understand that the knowledge state of others can be different from their own knowledge state



Acquiring a Theory of Mind: Adults?

  • Adults biased to think that others believe in truth

    • Fischoff “hindsight bias” with two armies

      • Adults are prone to “hindsight bias:” believing past events to be more predictable than they were 

    • People tend dnot to remember prior beliefs

    • ToM is complex and probabilistic for everyone