Emotional Development Flashcards
4 components of an emotion
- Subjective feelings
- Physiological feelings (ex. Sweaty hands)
- Desire to take action (ex. Fear creates desire to run away or fight)
- Cognitions (ex. The thoughts that accompany those feelings)
Directionality of emotions
- Physiological changes precede feelings
- Ex. Pen in the mouth study -> people holding pens in their teeth made them smile, which led to them feeling happier
- Interpretation aspect: we interpret our physiological changes depending on the environment around us
- ex. Adrenaline study -> people who knew they took adrenaline interpreted their emotions as side effects of adrenaline, whereas people who didn’t take adrenaline interpreted their emotions as happier or angrier depending on whether the confederate was happy or angry
why are emotions important?
- Emotional expressions are communicative and facilitate learning (ie. Social referencing)
- Motivational (makes us want to change our state or keep it the same – ie. Operant learning)
- Strengthens memory for important events – if you experience a really great event, you’ll remember it easily and want to do it again (and vice versa)
Changes in emotional expression: birth to 3 months
- can display postive emotions (like contentment, interest, and non-social smiles) and negative emotions (like generalized distress)
- facial expressions hard to read -> expression/situation mismatch occurs (Unless we know the situation, we often don’t correctly recognize infant’s facial expressions)
Changes in emotional expression: 3 to 6 months
- Positive emotions: social smiles (~3 months)
- Negative emotions: become more differentiated and match situation (ie. Sadness, surprise, anger)
Changes in emotional expression: 7 to 12 months
- Positive emotions: smiles more restricted to familiar people
- Increased fear: main causes are strangers or seperation; other causes are loud noises, heights, novel toys, etc.
- 6-7 months to 2 years: stranger anxiety
- 8 months to 15 months: separation anxiety
Changes in emotional expression: 12 to 24 months
- First signs of more complex emotions like jealousy
- Appearance of self-conscious emotions like embarrassment, pride, shame, guilt
- Requires self awareness, some degree of perspective-taking
- First emerges around time they pass mirror recognition task (aka: rouge test)
Shame vs. guilt
- self vs. other focus
- Shame does not include concern for others, while guilt includes empathy for others
- Guilt is considered to be healthier than shame
how can parents influence whether their kids feel guilt instead of shame?
- Focus on the “badness” of the behaviour rather than the child
- Help child understand consequences of their behaviour
- Teach child the need to repair damage that’s been done
- Avoid publicly humiliating them (ie. Talk to them about their behaviour privately rather than in front of family, friends, etc.) and communicate respect
Emotional expression: preschool and childhood
- Cognitive and verbal changes lead to changes in emotions (ex. changes in fear and jealousy)
- Fears change (ie. No longer afraid of monsters under the bed)
- Targets of jealousy change (ie. Only get jealous when attention is given to peers their own age – rather than other adults or babies)
- Increased inhibitory control helps regulate emotions, along with learning strategies for emotion regulation
- Understand more subtle distinctions (ie. Produce and understand verbal jokes, insults)
- Increasing understanding of mental states, social perspective-taking
frequency of experiencing emotions
- In preschool and early school age, there’s an increase in positive emotions and/or decrease in negative ones
- Typical adolescents experience mild increase in negative emotions and/or a decrease in positive ones
- Minority (15-20%) experience a major increase in negative emotions (clinical depression)
gender difference in clinical depression
- girls more likely to be diagnosed than boys
- Potential explanations: rumination (women) vs. Distraction (men); emotional expressivity of women vs. Men; physical activity in women vs. Men, etc
directionality of emotional understanding
expression precedes understanding -> they can show anger before being able to recognize it in someone else
development of emotional understanding: 3-6 months
not much; differentiate (discriminate or tell the difference) but may not understand meaning
development of emotional understanding: 7-12 months
now they recognize emotions – understand something about the meaning (eg. Social referencing, face/voice [mis]matching -> happy faces should go with happy voices, and babies recognize this by looking longer at the mismatch)
development of emotional understanding: 2 years
- most children this age know words for 6 universal basic emotions (happiness, sadness, fear, anger, surprise, disgust)
- have some understanding about links between events/actions and emotions (ex. “Grandma mad, I wrote on wall”)
- they recognize that people have reasons for feeling different ways (ex. “You sad? What happened?”)
- realize you can tell how people feel by how they look (ex. “Katie not smiling. Katie sad.”)
- understand that it’s not the reality of the outcome per se that leads to an emotion, but that the outcome must be consistent with someone’s desire (ie. Boy who wanted a dog for his birthday might be sad if he got a bike)
development of emotional understanding: 18 months
understand that someone else’s desires don’t have to be consistent with their own and they can use a person’s facial expressions to interpret emotions (ex. Broccoli/Goldfish cracker study
development of emotional understanding: preschool age
- learn how to infer emotions from events; happy is easier than sad (ie. Giving them scenarios with blank faces, have child fill in faces to predict what person in that situation would be feeling).
- learn how to understand masked emotions (ex. Michelle and lost teddy bear internal vs. External labelling – by age 5, are correct almost all the time)
- ability to understand that memories of past events can cause emotions develops with age (all 5 yr olds understand this)
development of emotional understanding: elementary school age
~8-10 year-olds understand that mixed feelings can exist at the same time towards different sources; a bit later they can understand that positive and negative emotions can exist toward the same source
3 ways parents influence their child’s emotional development
- Their expression of emotion with their children and other people (ex. Parents who are expressing more positive emotions at home result in kids who express more positive emotions at home and vice versa… but this is correlational evidence)
- Their reactions to their children’s expression of emotion (ex. Praise vs. Discipline when kids express certain emotions influence child’s likelihood to express it again)
- Their discussion with their children about emotion and the regulation of emotion (ex. If parents talk about their own emotions and their child’s emotions with their kids, kids will have better EI)
2 dimensions of parenting styles
- Degree of parental warmth, support, and acceptance vs. Parental rejection and nonresponsiveness
- Degree of parental control and demandingness
Baumrind’s parenting styles
- authoritative
- authoritarian
- permissive
- rejecting-neglecting
authoritative parenting
- high on demands, high on support. Relationship is reciprocal and responsive; high in bidirectional communication. Style with best outcomes.
- Kid outcomes: competent, self-assured, high social and academic ability, show little problematic/aggressive behaviours
authoritarian parenting
- high on demand, low on support. Relationship is controlling, power-assertive, and high in unidirectional communication.
- Kid outcomes: poorer social and academic ability, less friendly, boys affected more than girls
permissive parenting
- high on support, low on demands. Relationship is indulgent, low in control attempts.
- Kid outcomes: impulsive, lack in self-control, low academic ability, more likely to engage in drugs and misconduct than kids of authoritative kids
