The Development of Emotions

• Emotions are a combination of physiological and cognitive responses to thoughts/experiences.

• They have several components which are neural responses, physiological factors, subjective feelings, emotional expressions, and the desire to take action.

• Ex. You come across a growling dog without an owner nearby. What happens? You stop suddenly, feel a sense of dread (subjective feeling), recognize your heart is racing etc. (physiological factors). Your eyebrows are raised (emotional expression), all while you figure out how to get away from the dog (desire to take action). While all of this is happening, your brain is processing info about the dog and the enivronment and is producing hormones to help you accomplish your goals (neural responses) these happen so quickly they’re almost simultaneous.

  Theories on the Nature and Emergence of Emotion

• The discrete emotions theory argues that emotions are innate and each emotion has a specific and distinctive set of bodily and facial reactions.

• The functionalist perspective argues that the basic function of emotions is to promote action towards achieving a goal. Emotions are not discrete from another and vary somewhat based on the social environment.

The Emergence of Emotions

• 6 basic emotions: happiness, fear, anger, sadness, surprise, disgust.

• Each emotion serves important survival and communication functions.

• Basic emotions appear very early in life leading to support the idea that emotions may be partly innate.

Fear

• By the age of 7 months, initial signs of fear begin to appear as well as the ability to recognize fear in other faces.

• Seperation anxiety is feelings of distress children feel when they are seperately from those they are emotionally attached to, and this tends to appear around 8 months.

• Children learn to differentiate between real and imaginary fears as they approach ages 5-6.

• School-age children's anxieties and fears tend to be related to real-life issues.

ANGER

• Anger is an adaptive emotion as it helps marshal self-defense mechanisms and can motivate to work towards goals.

• Children's tendency to react to a situation with anger peaks around 18-24 months.

• Causes of anger change as children develop a better understanding of other's intentions and motives.

  • Ex. in early years, child may feel anger hwen harmed by peer but later they will be less likely to be angered if they believe the harm was unintentional.

SADNESS

• Infants exhibit sadness in the same types of situations they show anger.

• Sadness is an adaptive emotion because it draws in attention and support from a caregiver.

SURPRISE

• Emotional reaction to a sudden, unexpected event.

• It involves a cognitive understanding that something is not as it usually is.

DISGUST

• How infants express emotions is influenced by how strongly their caregivers express emotions.

• This emotion has an evolutionary basis as it helps humans avoid potential poisons/disease-causing bacteria.

• Older children and adults view some behaviours and moral transgressions with disgust as well as food.

The self-conscious emotion

• Self-conscious emotions are emotions like guilt, shame, embarrassment, and pride that relate to our sense of self and our consciousness of other's reactions to us.

• Guilt is associated with specific behaviours, but feelings of shame are associated with self-worth.

  • Both these feelings can be distinguished as early as 2 years old.

• To ensure children do not feel shame when making mistakes, parents need to not humiliate them and communicate respect and love during disciplining.

• The situations likely to induce self-conscious emotions in children vary across cultures along with the freuquency.

  • Ex. In many Asian or Southeast Asian cultures that emphasize the welfare of the group rather the individual, not living up to social and familial expectations evokes shame and guilt and efforts to elicit shame from young children are direct from parents.

Understanding Emotions

Identifying the Emotions of Others

• By 3 months, infants can distinguish facial expressions of happiness, surprise, and anger

• such skills are evident in children's social referencing which is their use of a parent's or other adult's facial expression/vocal cues to decide how to deal with possibly threatening situations.

• Children’s facility for reading other’s emotions can be determined by their environments as those who grow up in environments with violence may develop heightened awareness to emotional cues of conflict.

Understanding Real and False Emotions

• By age 5, children’s understanding of false emotion improves considerably.

• Part of this involves a growing understanding of display rules which are a social/cultural group’s informal norms about when, where, and how much one should show emotions, as well as when and where displays of emotion should be suppressed or masked by displays of other emotions.

• Children as young as 1.5 years of age can recognize fake emotional displays, and with age they better understand signs of deception and use it to conceal their own.

• Children experience a steep increase in their understanding and implementation of display rules in middle childhood.

• Social factors affect children’s understanding of display rules as cultures have display rules that reflect societal beliefs (different rules for males and females).

Emotion Regulation

• Emotional regulation is a set of conscious and unconscious processes used to monitor and modulate emotional experiences and expressions.

The Development of Emotion Regulation

• When infants are distressed, parents try to sooth or distract them.

• Thus, the emotional states of young infants are controlled by a process called co-regulation where a caregiver provides the needed comfort or distraction.

• As children get better at taking care of themselves, they can regulate their emotions by themselves as well.

• One strategy is self-comforting behaviours that are repetitive actions that soothe them by making mildly positive physical sensations (sucking fingers, rubbing hands).

• Another is self-distraction which is looking away from the upsetting stimulus.

• Over the first year, infants decrease use of self-comforting behaviours and increase use of self-distraction.

• These changes are partly due to increasing maturation of neurological systems that are central to managing attention and inhibiting thoguth and behaviours, and because that is what adults expect them to do.

• Over early years, they become less likely to seek comfort from parents when they are upset and are more likely to discuss with a parent than have an emotional outburst once they can use language.

• As children’s ability to regulate their attention improves across early years, they can conform to adult’s expectations.

• In adolescence, neurological changes occur in the corext that contribute to self-regulation, likely contributing to the decline in risk taking and improvement in judgement that occurs in transition from adolescence to young adulthood.

• Younger children regulate emotional distress by using behavioural strategies, but older children use cognitive strategies and problem solving to adjust to emotionally difficult situations.

The Relation of Emotion Regulation to Social Competence and Adjustment

• Social competence is the ability to achieve personal goals in social interactions while maintaining positive relationships with others.

• Children who can stop inappropriate behaviours, delay gratification, and use cognitive methods of controlling their emotion and behaviour tend to be well adjusted.

• Children who are able to deal constructively with stressful situations are generally better adjusted than children who lack these skills.

• Children who are unable to successfully regulate their emotions are at a higher risk of becoming victims of bullying compared with their peers.

• Well-regulated children do better in school than others as well.

The Role of Family in Emotional Development

Parent’s Expression of Emotion

• Parent’s expression of emotion provides children with a model of when and how to express emotion

  • In families where parents don’t experss emotions children may get the message emotions are bad and should be avoided.

• consistent and open expression of emotions at home is associated with children’s emotional expressions as well as behaviour (a lot of positive emotions → happy children which makes them more social skilled, well adjusted, low in aggression, and emotionally mature)

  • in contrast, when there is conflict in the home → increased likelihood they will develop anger and behaviour problems and overall issues in emotional maturity)

• essentially, parent’s failures and successes in expressing emotion influences children’s emotional development

Parent’s Socialization of Children’s Emotional Responses

• emotional socialization is the process thorugh which children acquire the values standards, skills, knowledge and behaviours that are regarded as appropriate for their present and future roles in their culture

• culture plays a very significant role in influencing which emotional expressions are encouraged or discouraged by parents

Parent’s Reactions to Children’s Emotions

• parent’s reactions to children’s emotions directly influence children’s own tenedenices to express emotions along with their social competence and adjustment

• parents who invalidate and threaten their kids make their kids less emotionally and socially competent than parents who are emotionally supportive

• emotionally supportive parents help children regulate emotional arousal and find ways to express them constructively

Parent’s Discussion of Emotion

• family conversations about emotion are important to children’s emotional socialization

• by discussing emotions with children, parent teach them about circumstances where it is acceptable to express them ad the consequences of expressing or not expressing them

• emotion coaching is the use of discussion and other forms of instruction to teach children how to cope with and properly express emotions

  • children who recieve this tend to display better emotional understanding than children who do not

Temperament

• Temperament is the individual differences in emotion, activity level, and attention that are exhibited across contexts that are present from infancy.

  • Some infants are relatively mellow and others are quite emotional and they differ in their timidity, expression of emotions and ways they deal with emotions.

• Temperament is influenced by the child’s’ environment.

3 groups of infants:

1. Easy babies

   1. Readily adjusted to new stiuations and quickly established daily routines and are generally cheerful or easy to calm.

2. Difficult babies

   1. Slow to adjust to new experiences, react negatively and intensely to new events, irregular daily routines and bodily fucntions.

3. Slow-to-warm-up babies

   1. Somewhat difficult at first but became easier over time as they had repeated contact with new objects, people and situations.

• Temperament in infancy predicted how children were doing years later.

Measuring Temperament

• Researchers characterize every child along the same set of dimensions of temperament.

• 5 key dimentions of temperament: fear, distress/anger, frustration, attention span, activity level, and smiling and laughter.

• There are measures of temperament in infancy and early childhood that ask observers to rate each child and they tend to be fairly stable over time and tend to predict later development in areas of behavioural problems, anxiety disorders and social competence.

• Researchers also use physiological measures of emotional reactions to lab situations to assess temperament (ex. heart rate).

• Parents may not always be objective in their observations and they do not have enough knowledge of other children’s behaviour to use as basis, making parent’s reports of temperament not entirely reliable.

• Observational data is less likely to be biased but behaviour is observed in a limited set of circumstances so they may not have external validity.

• Temperament is relatively consistent over time but it does change over time as genes switch on and off throughout development this impacts when and how temperament and behaviours that relate to it are expressed.

Determinants of Temperament

• Temperament is believed to have a strong basis in biology and genetics, but environment plays a role as well even from before birth (teratogens).

• Behaviours of parents have a strong influence on temperament.

• Children’s temperamental characteristics can affect environments and parent’s behaviours too.

  • Parents of unregulated children may become more punitive, making the child more angry, making a circle.

• Temperament plays a role in development of children’s social and psychological development but it varies depending on child’s social environment and how challenging the child is to the parent.

• A large portion of the variance in three aspects of temperament (effortful control, negative affectivity, and extraversion) was explained in heritability.

• How chaotic and unsafe home environments were had a heritable component as well (parents’ temperaments affected children through genetic transmission and through enviornment).

How Temperament Fits with Environment

• How well a child’s temperament matches the demands of a particular context is called goodness of fit.

• Family provides the most important context for issues related to goodness of fit (children who are impulsive or low in emotion regulation seem to have more problems and are less sympathetic if exposed to hostile parenting).

• Some children’s temperaments make them highly reactive to positive and negative family environments.

  • These children exibit differential suspectibility which means they have the same temperament characteristic that puts some at high risk for negative outcomes when exposed to harsh environment but leads them to blossom when home environments are positive.

Mental Health, Stress, and Internalizing Mental Disorders

• Mental health is a sense of well-being internally (emotions and stress levels) and externally (relationships with family and peers).

• The absence of safe and healthy environments or supportive and nurturing caregivers increases the risk of development of stress and related mental health disorders (genetics play a role too).

Stress

• Stress is a physiological reaction to some change or threat in the environment.

• It involves increased heart rate, secretion of stress hormones, increased blood flow to brain and heightened sense of vigiliance and fear.

• All of these reactions are under the flight or fight response to a threat in the environment.

• Periodic stress serves the beneficial function of mobilizing the child to take actions to handle the situation appropriately. However, stress can become quite problematic when children - and adults- experience it repeatedly.

• Toxic stress is the experience of overwhelming levels of stress without support from adults to help mitigate the effects.

• Adverse childhood experience (ACEs) (traumatic experiences such as abuse, neglect, violence exposure or death of a parent) are linked to mental and physical health problems later in life.

• Experiences of toxic stress in childhood may prime children to experience high levels of stress in adulthood as well which can lead to physical health problems like severe obesity.

• Exposure to non-stressful environments and treatment can reverse some of the harmful effects of toxic stress and public health research is focused on preventing the circumstances in the first place.

• Sometimes a single major negative event can trigger a form of stress called traumatic stress (sudden stress brought on by a sudden catastrophic event like hurricanes, or terrorist attacks).

  • Children and teenagers exposed to these tend to experience mood disorders and have high levels of fear and anxiety in general.

Internalizing Mental Disorders

• Mental disorders are developed with exposure to repeated or tramatic stress and they are chronic negative emotional reactions to aspects of the environment or social relationships that affect daily life.

• Some categories are psychotic disorders, eating disorders, personality disorders, and behaviour disorders.

• Internalizing mental health disorders are those that involve internal emotional states including depression and anxiety.

• Equifinality is the concept that various causes (genetic predisposition, chaotic home, traumatic event) can lead to the same mental disorder.

• Multifinality is the concept that certain risk factors do not always lead to a mental disorder (children who have been maltreated are more likely to develop depression or anxiety but not everyone does).

Depression

• Depression is a mental disorder that involves a sad or irritable mood along with physical and cognitive changes that negatively affect daily life.

• In order to be diagnosed, a child or adoslescent needs to be observed feeling sad or irritable for 2 weeks and they must exhibit symptoms like difficulties sleeping, significant changes in weight, inability to concentrate or loss of interest in activities.

• Some also think about or attempt suicide.

• Girls are 2-3 times as likely as boys to develop depression.

• Rumination is the act of focusing on one’s own negative emotions and causes and consequences without trying to improve their situation and the more they do this, the more likely they are to be depression.

• Co-rumination is discussing emotional problems with another person extensively, and both these acts are more common for girls than boys.

• Genetics have an influence on whether a child experiences depression.

• Low levels of parental sensitivity, support, or acceptance have been linked with higher levels of depressive symptoms in children.

• Depressed children tend to have unrealistic expectations about social relationships and see themselves as causing negative events.

Anxiety Disorders

• Anxiety disorders a set of mental disorders that involve the inability to regulate fear and worry.

• Anxiety disorders are believed to involve overactivation of areas of the brain associated with reaction to threat (amygdala, hippocampus brain structures, sympathetic nervous system).

• In young children the most common anxiety disorder is separation anxiety disorder.

• Both nature and nurture factors contribute to the onset of anxiety.

Treatment of Internalizing Mental Disorders

• Drug therapy is a common treatment for depression in children.

• Cognitive behavioural therapy has been found to be very effective in treating both depression and anxiety in children.

  • Children learn to recognize when they are having maladaptive thoughts and learn ways to modify those thoughts and their reactions to them.

• CBT and drug therapy are very effective in reducing depressive symptoms.

• Children living in disadvantaged familie are less likely to receive services or treatment despite having a higher rate of diagnosed mental disorders than peers.