Emotional Development Flashcards
(40 cards)
emotions
Subjective reactions to the environment that are usually experienced cognitively as either pleasant or unpleasant, generally accompanied by physiological arousal, and often expressed in some visible form of behaviour.
why are parent-child interactions important?
Parent- child interactions in infancy are important not only for a child’s emotional development, but also for the development of language and communication skills
reflex smile
A smile seen in the newborn that is usually
spontaneous and appears to depend on some internal stimulus rather than on something external such as another person’s behaviour.
what is it important that infant s perceive to develop socially?
Being able to perceive
faces is an important skill
for infants and serves an important function in the early development of social interactions.
what is an important factor in the development of ethnic group prejudice from a young age?
Fear of strangers has been proposed as an important factor in the development of ethnic group prejudice from a young age.
social referencing
social referencing The process of ‘reading’ emotional cues in others to help determine how to act in an uncertain situation.
separation protest
An infant's distress reaction to being separated from his or her mother, which typically peaksat about 15 months of age.
emotional display
rules
Rules that dictate
which emotions one may appropriatelydisplayin
particular situations.
emotional script
A complex scheme that enables a child to identify the emotional reaction likely to accompany a particular sort of event.
emotional control and regulation
Being able to control and regulate emotions is
important for the control of
aggression,
EKMAN, SORENSON & FRIESEN (1969)
- Undergraduates in Brazil, Japan and US
- The Fore in Papua New Guinea
- The Sadong in Borneo
- High agreement for the facial expressions of emotion
- Ekman- videos of Fore emotional expressions shown to US students
- Caroll Izard (1969)- similar results with other cultures
DISCRETE EMOTION THEORY (IZARD, 1972)•
- Biologically determined
- Expression and recognition universal
- Each emotion is innately packaged with a specific set of physiological, bodily, and facial reactions
DARWIN ON EMOTIONS
“His nurse pretended to cry, and I saw that his face instantly assumed a melancholy expression, with the corners of the mouth strongly depressed; now this child could rarely have seen any other child crying, and never a grown-up person crying, and I doubt whether at so early an age he could have reasoned on the subject. Therefore it seems to me that an innate feeling must have told him that the pretended crying of his nurse expressed grief; and this through the instinct of sympathy excited grief in him”
Darwin (1872)
Expressing emotion
Recognising emotion
Discerning meaning of emotion
CONTRAST - CONSTRUCTIVIST THEORIES
- Emotions are linked to appraisal processes
- Different emphasis on whether emotions emerge largely as a function of physiological maturation or through learning
some cognitive processing, social experience learning, is required - not innate, constructed through social experiences - different from discrete emotion theory
CHILDREN’S EMOTIONAL DEVELOPMENT
- Expressing emotion
- Recognising emotion
- Discerning meaning of emotion
GANCHROW ET AL. (1993)
- 23 infants hours after birth given different formulas
- Neutral, sweet and bitter tastes
- Varied with stimulus intensity; no response to neutral stimuli
- “Blind” observers could identify facial expression - different facial responses to different taste
IZARD ET AL. (1980)
- 5 studies to investigate 1-9 month old infants’ ability to produce identifiable emotion expressions
- Filmed babies in various activities and showed still images of facial expressions to:
- Judges trained in microanalytic coding systems
- Untrained participants
RESULTS (IZARD ET AL., 1980)
Both groups could reliably identify facial expressions of emotional states
Untrained participants’ recognition rates:
joy - 81% sadness - 72% surprise - 69% fear - 52% anger - 41% sadness - 72% interest - 67% contempt - 44% Disgust - 37%
Trained judges achieved higher rates
BUT DO THESE EXPRESSIONS JUST RESEMBLE CERTAIN ADULT FACIAL EXPRESSIONS?
SOCIAL SMILE
- Social smile emerges between 6-12 weeks
- Different situations elicit different types of smiles (Messinger & Fogel, 2007)
intensity varies
AUDIENCE EFFECT (JONES ET AL., 1991)
- Mothers and 10mo infants in lab
- Mother either attentive or non-attentive - 3m away on chair - reading magazine instead vs responding in normal way
- Infant plays with toys
- Infants purposefully look toward mother
- Mother looking – infant smiles
- Mother not looking- no smiles
- Less smiles to toys than to mother
smiles to mother and matching their smiles to environment
blind babies produce these expressions so innate and requires little input in environment
INFANT VISUAL PREFERENCE (JOHNSON ET AL.,1991)
- 24 newborn babies - lay on knee, paddleboard above face - one with face, scrambled face, blank
- Test of preferential looking
- More following for face-like display on picture vs scrambled face or blank face
eyes open rather than closed
eyes looking forwards vs averted
INFANTS’ PREFERENCE FOR CAREGIVER (BUSHNELL, 2001)
- 2-7 hour old infants were observed for 72 hrs
- Mother-stranger discrimination task (visual preference) was carried out at 72 hours old
- Little exposure is required for newborn infants to develop preferences to their mother’s face to that of a stranger
Attachment-enabling
HAVILAND & LELWICA (1987)
- Mothers displayed 3 emotions to 10-week old babies
- Happiness, sadness and anger
- Facial expressions were rated similarly for expressiveness and animation
- Infants discriminated each expression
match, contingent, interest to happiness
anger - cry, matching
crying - mirroring, sucking rate increase
•in other research - Effects carried over to a play period
(Termine & Izard, 1988)
if they were exposed to a sad ace, they play with toys with a sad face
INFANTS’ NEGATIVE EMOTIONS (CAMRAS ET AL., 2007)
- 11-month-old infants from the US, Japan and China
- Situations designed to elicit anger/ frustration and fear
- Facial coding system
- Non-facial body movements differed across situations
- No distinction for facial expressions across emotions
The context caused the parent to project an interpretation
