Lecture 4: Emotions

Question 1

What components do emotions consist of? [4]

Answer 1

• Feelings
• Physiological changes; autonomic arousal (e.g. increased heart rate, sweaty palms).
• Cognitions; thoughts accompanying feelings (but in some cases also elicits feelings).
• Goals; desire to take action based on the feeling (e.g. wanting to punch someone if you’re angry).

Question 2

primary emotions [4]

Answer 2

• Measured using facial reactions.
• Requires no introspection.
• At birth: interest, disgust, distress.
• Starts developing around 2-6 months, fully developed around 1 year: joy, anger, fear, sadness.

Question 3

secondary emotions [4]

Answer 3

• Form around 2 years and continues onwards developing.
• Require self-reflection and introspection.
• Due to theory of mind developing, usually have to do with others.
• Include: pride, shame, guilty, jealousy, embarassment, empathy.

Question 4

How do we measure emotions in infants? [3]

Answer 4

• Quite difficult to do, have to rely on coding on facial expressions.
• Maximally Discriminative Facial Movement (Max)
• Coders look at three areas of the face: forehead, middle (eyes, nose, cheeks), mouth (and chin).

Question 5

primary emotions: joy [9]

Answer 5

• Marked by a reflex smile in infants, responding to positive stimuli.
• Occurs without any social interaction preceeding it.
  
  • Infants with positive temperaments will tend to reflex smile a lot.
  • Also influenced by external factors: tactile, repitition (e.g. playing peek-a-boo).
  • Declines with age; joy is related to interpersonal bonds rather than emotional state.
• Perhaps adaptive: aside from crying and being neutral, infants have no way of expressing themselves.
• Around 2-6 months old: social smiles (brought on by interactions), duchenne smile (genuine smile).
• Around 7 months of age, joy becomes more discriminating.
  
  • Infants more likely to look joyful when interacting with their primary caregiver than anyone else, since they’ve learned to associate it with social interaction.

Question 6

primary emotions: interest [9]

Answer 6

• Relaxed/open interest, indicates curiosity/wonder.
  
  • For infants: open mouth eyes and mouth, gaze that doesn’t divert.
  • Most common form of interest.
  • Positivity offset: bias for positive emotions in infants.
  • Isn’t controlled by infants, unaware they’re doing it; leads them to seek out higher pitched voices and preferring pictures of happy faces.
• Knit brows interest, trying to figure out what something is.
  
  • Often fixate for 10s then react positively or negatively.
  • Emerges around 10-12 months, accompanying more social interactions.
  • Effortful attention (e.g. pushing away from negative stimuli, want to get away from it, using effort).

Question 7

primary emotions: anger [6]

Answer 7

• Newborns: not necessarily anger; more like tensing of muscles.
• 2-3 months: facial expressions measured using Max, e.g. furrowed brows.
  
  • Elicited by pain and frustration.
• First 6 months: increasing anger due to increased understanding that they have control over their environments to some degree.
  
  • 6 months: can direct their anger towards specific people.
  • Connected to control and violation of expectations (which is frustrating).

Question 8

primary emotions: fear [11]

Answer 8

• Develops latest; tends to increase with age and becomes more socially oriented (e.g. fear of failure, rejection by peers).
• 3-7 months: wariness at new events.
  
  • Not really afraid, more interest in unfamiliar faces.
  • 5 months: staring.
  • 6 months: distress, running away from distressing thing and/or towards the caregiver.
• 7-9 months: genuine fear.
  
  • Stranger anxiety, negative emotions based on seeing strangers; emerges/peaks around 9 months.
  • 7-10 months: social referencing, able to refer to other agents (usually caregivers) and their emotional responses to determine how they should act in novel situations.
    
    • Can be measured using the social cliff test (crawling over a fake cliff towards mom).
  • 15 months: separation anxiety peaks around this point.
    
    • Related to TOM, afraid that caregiver is going to disappear forever (no TOM before 7-9 months).

Question 9

What factors will lead to more fear in infants? [8]

Answer 9

Question 10

primary emotions: sadness [4]

Answer 10

• Less common than anger in infancy.
• Signal used to inform and control social partner (usually caregivers).
  
  • Elicits natural instinct of caregivers to want to give them support and comfort.
  • Still-face paradigm and depressed mothers show how lack of response is distressing for infants.

Question 11

secondary emotions: shame [4]

Answer 11

• Comes from failing to do something or doing something morally wrong/embarassing.
  
  • e.g. Lying to your friend is morally wrong, feel ashamed because you’re not a person who lies.
• Perceiving deficiency; more self-focused.
• Often want to hide this thing from others.

Question 12

secondary emotions: guilt [5]

Answer 12

• Causing harm or discomfort to others.
  
  • e.g. Lying to your friend makes you feel guilty because you feel bad for doing that to another person.
• More interpersonal, wrongdoing towards others.
• Complex understanding of this emotion develops with age.
• Around 6 years: taking more responsibility, understands their own role in causing the wrongdoing.

Question 13

development of emotional recognition [4]

Answer 13

• Recognizing emotions is an important step to developing emotional regulation.
• 3-4 years: able to label happiness, sadness, anger, and fear when they feel it.
• 5-7 years: able to identify multiple emotions being felt at the same time.
• 8 years: recognize situational differences in why they feel certain ways, relating emotions and personality.

Question 14

Why do kids learn how to recognize emotions? [6]

Answer 14

• Functionalist perspective:
  
  • Rewarding; when children are able to talk about positive emotions with their parents, leads to strengthened emotional bonds.
  • Coping strategies; identifying negative emotions leads to identifying healthy coping strategies for them.
• Learning perspective:
  
  • Early emotional experiences serve as opportunities for parents to teach children how to deal with emotions later on.
  • Frequency; more interactions with emotions leads to faster learning of how said emotion feels and how to deal with it.

Question 15

influence of parent-child interaction on emotional recognition [4]

Answer 15

• Negative parent-child interaction leads to adverse effects.
• Abused children (9 years): tend to be better at identifying anger (serves as a warning signal to abuse) but not better at identifying sadness (which doesn’t signal anything).
• Neglected children (4-5 years): deficits in labelling, matching, and recognizing emotions all across the board.
  
  • High levels of neglect also related to lower levels of IQ (lack of enriching environment).

Question 16

What are the three components of emotional competence? [5]

Answer 16

• Usually only applies to negative emotions.

1. Emotional expressivity
2. Emotional knowledge
3. Emotion regulation: managing and modifying emotional reactions to appropriate level of intensity and duration to achieve one’s goals.
   
   • Ability to cope with negative experiences in order to no longer feel negative.

Question 17

development of emotion regulation strategies [5]

Answer 17

• Infants: simple tactics, e.g. sucking on thumb, turning away, looking at their feet.
• Preschool: self-distraction, flexible, control.
• Elementary school: complex awareness, agency, efficacy, trying to confront their own problems.
  
  • 3 healthy methods of emotional regulation: problem solving, support seeking, cognitive restructuring/reframing.
  • Should be developed by elementary school age.

Question 18

emotional display rules [4]

Answer 18

• Culturally specific understanding of how and when an emotion should be expressed.
• Learned before full regulation; only encompasses behavioural control, not cognitive regulation.
• End of preschool: pout instead of screaming and yelling; still showing emotion but reduced to being acceptable.
• 8-10 years: should be able to offset the emotion they really feel and behave in a different way (e.g. pretending to like a bad gift).

Question 19

emotion regulation and social competence

Answer 19

• Higher levels of positive affect and lower levels of negative affect lead to more favourbale perceptions by others and better relationships.
• People will perceive you more positively and respond more positively if you can regulate emotions.
• Later on in life, children are expected to develop emotion knowledge and appropriate expression.

Question 20

negative treatment and emotion regulation [3]

Answer 20

• Neglect and physical/sexual abuse negatively related to emotional regulation.
• Lower emotion regulation leads to lower levels of internalizing, higher levels of internalizing problems, and lower levels of peer acceptance.
• Emtotion regulation consistent through time, with internalizing/externalizing problems at T1 related to same problems at T2.

Question 21

What kind of parenting leads to healthy emotional regulation? [3]

Answer 21

• Modeling; children similar to parents in intensity, type.
• Reactions; belittling or not showing interest is problematic.
• Coaching; acknowledge, recognize, discuss, label, solve.