Emotional Development
Vocabulary:
Emotion: A rapid appraisal of personal significance of a situation, helps to energize behavior
Basic emotions: Seen from birth, include things like happiness, anger, sadness, and fear. Observed in other primates, demonstrated in facial expression
Happiness: A basic emotion shown from birth with smiles in response to individual things (hunger, sleep), social smile is later
Social smile: Babies showing smiles in terms of social situations (normal smiles), demonstrates happiness, develops around 6-10 weeks
Laughter: 3-4 months, may require some cognitive development
Anger: Shown from birth in terms of general distress, 4-6 months is when real anger emerges, the amount of this in terms of intensity and frequency increases with age until stagnant at 2 years
Sadness: Less commonly demonstrated within the first year, when shown might indicate ineffective caregiving where needs aren’t met
Fear: Shown 6-12 months, mostly separation anxiety or fear around strangers, decreases over time but shifts to new topics (fear of the dark)
Self-conscious emotions: Appear around 1.5-3 years, include things like shame, embarrassment, guilt, pride, and envy. Come from social interactions and socialization. Require an awareness of self (their behaviors are their own), and adult guidance (feedback from an adult about if a behavior was good or bad). Important for developing a sense of self, increasingly internalized as children grow in age and inner standards are created
Social referencing: Develops 8-10 months though is used throughout life, the use of another person’s reaction to a situation to help guide behavior in uncertain situations. Can be used to evaluate safety, gather information, and guide actions
False emotions: When an emotion is shown that isn’t how someone is actually feeling, can change with display rules. Can be recognized and displayed in preschool years
Display rules: Social understandings of when/where it is appropriate to display an emotion (is it okay to scream and shout in a classroom?), can lead to false emotions
Sympathy: Feelings of concern or sorrow for another person
Empathy: Grows through emotional development, different from empathy as it is the ability to detect emotions and take them from another person’s perspective, this improves with age. This also correlates with altruistic/helping behaviors. This can also lead to personal distress (inability to help those who need it)
Self-regulation: The ability to adjust one’s emotional state to a comfortable level that will allow us to achieve our goals, certain emotional expressions hinder rather than help situations
1-3 months: there is better co-regulation of attention, also dependent on caregivers for soothing/comfort
4-6 months: ability to self-comfort and shift attention away from unpleasant stimuli
6-12 months: ability to self-distract, with more mobility they have more control over their surroundings and can move away from negative stimuli
2 years: Ability to talk about feelings and identify them to other people, they will actively try to control their emotions and have fewer tantrums
3-4 years: Ability to describe strategies for adjusting emotions, tied with aspects of personality and temperament and parental guidance
Adolescence: Rapid gains in coping skills/strategies, positive self-regulation leads to emotional self-efficacy and feeling in control of emotional experiences. Better self regulation leads to more emotional control
Coping: The ability to deal with emotions, done in adolescence and specifically around 10
Problem-centered: A problem is being faced and the problem is viewed as changeable, a problem is identified and it is decided what to do to resolve it, may happen due to an argument with a friend where they aren’t talking anymore
Emotion-centered: There isn’t much that can change the outcome, but the emotional response can be monitored. More internal and private, controlling distress, may happen due to things like parental divorce
Temperament: Appears early in life, doesn’t change much throughout life and stays stable, personality characteristics are stable appearing in infancy
New York longitudinal study: Thomas & Chess in 1956 for 141 infant → adulthood, found that early temperaments were an early indicator of psychological problems in life, found it was also an indicator of resilience, personality could be a buffer. Made 3 categories based on 9 dimensions (don’t need to memorize). Temperament categories doesn’t add up to 100%, as the remaining 35% are blended categories and display qualities of multiple
Activity level: How active/inactive a child is
Rhythmicity: How regular were body functions like sleep/wake cycle, when hungry
Distractibility: How easily distracted is a child, how strong does a distractor need to be
Approach/withdrawal: Response to novelty, if a new person/toy appears to they shy away or approach it
Adaptability: How responsive is a child to the environment, such as a change in rooms of daycare
Attention span: How long can focus be maintained, how long are toys played with
Intensity of reaction: How much energy is put into emotional responses, do they scream and cry or just move away from a toy they don’t like
Threshold of responsiveness: How strong does a stimulus need to be to garner a response from the child
Quality of mood: How often is there good behavior or bad behavior
Easy temperament (40%): Adapt easily to changes, establish routines, cheerful
Difficult temperament (10%): Negative and intense reactions, don’t adapt to change easily and have irregular routines. Found to be at higher risk for anxiety and adjustment problems later in life
Slow-to-warm-up temperament (15%): Showed mild reactions but skewed negative, inactive, adapted slowly to change. Had fewer problems than difficult temperament children but still showed fearfulness and slow behavioral responses
Rothbart’s Revisions: Rothbart revised the findings of Thomas & Chess, mainly combined and overlapped dimensions (for example distractibility and attention span could be combined, along with threshold of response as it relates to distracting), introduced effortful control, used a within-person approach to describe children within their characteristics (categories are adjusted to the child, not the other way around like with Rothbart). Used dimensions of activity level, attention span, fearful distress (fear of novelty), irritable distress (fear of restriction, ‘no’), positive affect (pleasant mood), and effortful control
Effortful control: The ability to suppress a dominant response to plan and execute a more adaptive one, kind of like emotional self regulation
Goodness of fit: Described how temperament and environment interact, effective child rearing is a fitting of the child’s temperament with the positive parenting experience, responding with patience instead of yelling and violence. Parenting acts as a buffer to negative temperaments
Attachment: An emotional bond with a specific person/thing that is enduring across time and space, often between child and mother. Later formed with friends and partners
Strange situation paradigm: Tests attachments between 1-2 year olds and primary care givers, behavior is observed with caregiver and then with a stranger, and how they respond when both are present. 8 episodes total. Classified into 4 attachment styles
Secure (50-70%): Parent is seen as a secure base but the child doesn’t need them present, they just add comfort. Play with toys and are happy in the assessment, may pause/cry when parent leaves but welcome their return
Insecure avoidant (10-20%): Kids play happily and are unresponsive to the parent leaving. Don’t show distress when parent leaves, nor preference for stranger or parental return. Comes from parents unresponsive to child’s needs, reject child’s need for attention
Insecure-resistant (10-20%): Clings to their parent and need closeness, quite distressed when caregiver leaves, demonstrate anger when they leave and get mad at caregiver when they return. Comes from inconsistent or awkward parental responses to child’s needs
Disorganized (5-10%): Also called disoriented, most insecure. Atypical behavior, maybe flat emotional affect. May be cautious when the parent is present, staring and yelling and throwing things. Can come from abuse or intrusive parenting, or emotionally unavailable parents (antisocial personality disorder)
Sensitive caregiving: Tied to secure attachment, characterized by being present, warm, and considerate of their child
At 3 months, infants can distinguish expressions of happiness, surprise, and anger. At 8-10 months, social referencing occurs. At 2 years, they can label emotions that they see, with strong influence of caregivers (saying “Wow, that was very nice seeing grandparents” it gets labelled as happy)
Understanding of mixed emotions improves greatly during preschool years (pain from a bee-sting but getting ice cream for it). At this age, they also understand false emotions and can identify self-conscious emotions in others.
Overall emotional development is shaped by things like personality (sensitivity to emotion and ability to self-regulate), social interactions with parents/siblings/peers (feedback guides what is/isn’t okay), play (being the bad guy might mean they are more angry)
For temperament to be a useful indicator, it had to be a stable measure throughout life. It has been found that stability is lower across early life. Stability increases around preschool years (age 3), as activity and routine are more established within life, along with development of the frontal lobe (as it relates to attention)
Genes may play a role in around half of individual differences in temperament, less of a role before stability of temperament (at around 3). This is demonstrated by twin studies, MZ are more similar than DZ.
Another influence on temperament is environment. Those raised with nutritional and emotional deprivation will alter temperament negatively, the home environment shapes it. Noisy and crowded environments skew negative, along with those who are institutionalized (orphanage) lead to inattention and low impulse control
Insecure-avoidant can be developed due to lack of parental care, insecure-resistant can come from irregularity. Cross-culturally, there are the most secure attached children, though there are differences with the second most common. In Japan and Israel it is resistant, and in Germany and the US it is avoidant. This is due to cultural expectations for parenting, like how Germany encourages childhood independence and discourages clinginess
In Romainia where there is a lot of war and unrest there are a lot of orphans and lack of infrastructure for care, so these kids. They do have lots of emotional difficulties, though if adopted by 4-6 by countries like the UK, they do form attachments with caregivers
Worse temperaments are associated with more insecure attachment styles, though parenting can override this.