Module 10: Emotions and temperament Flashcards
emotions vs affect
emotion= internal, affective response about something in environment
affect= general positive or negative feeling
two categories of emotions
Primary or basic
- Surprise, interest, joy, anger, sadness, fear, disgust
Secondary or self-conscious
- Required development of sense of self and other
- Embarrassment, envy, pride, shame, guilt
- Non-evaluative: embarrassment, envy
- Evaluative: shame, pride, guilt
Discrete emotions theory
different emotion reflect discrete system that evolved as universal biological reactions to common challenges
- Each has an expression, neural signature, and a physiological state
- Universally experienced and detected
- Emerge at particular times in infancy
Emergent theory of emotions
emotions are outcome of process including changes in body and cognition about what’s happening in environment
- Not like inside out, not particularly clear-cut or discrete
- Correspondence between experiences and emotional expressions is messy at best
- Diff people experience diff emotions differently
- Emotions pretty global early in infancy and eventually become more discrete
Display rules
how and when one should express different emotions
- Varies by culture, gender, must be learned
- Babies/kids notoriously bad at this
- However some differences already observable in infancy
when does emotional expression develop?
Begins in womb
- Cry-face seen from 20 wks gestations
when is happiness expressed?
- Neonatal smile: smiling due to internal positive sensations; mainly during REM sleep
- 3rd-8th weeks; smiling to external stimuli
- By 2 months (often by 6 weeks) see first social smiles
- Typically to familiar people
- Cross-cultural differences; more with more one to one interactions
- Laughing from 2-5 months
- During interesting/ positive sensations and stimuli
- Also culturally variable
when are anger and sadness expressed?
- Newborns have general distress (hunger, pain, cold, when over/under stimulated)
- By 2-4 months you can elicit anger by, removing interesting objects/ events, preventing babies from reaching goals
- Arm-holding/ contingency disruptions paradigms elicit strong anger by 4 months
- Perhaps because requires means-ends reasoning
- Increases to a peak between 18-24 months as infants increasingly want to control environment
- Arm-holding/ contingency disruptions paradigms elicit strong anger by 4 months
- Sadness elicited in similar situations as anger
when is fear expressed?
First sign by 7 months
- Same time as recognize fear expressions in others
stranger anxiety
fear of strangers
- Clear by 7-8 months, peaks 12-18 most, less by age 2
- Big individual diffs based on temperament, experience, situations
- More outside home, more if not in parents’ laps, more to males
- Cultural diffs: little stranger anxiety in Efe peoples in Congo where group caregiving common
separation anxiety
fear of caregiver leaving
- Begins 8 months, begins to decline by 15 months
- Cross-cultural universal, despite diffs in childrearing practices
when is surprise expressed?
- Not same as startle (present at birth)
- Present by 6 months
- Relatively infrequent (not clearly observable in violation of expectation experiments)
when is disgust expressed?
- Distaste of bitter tastes present at birth
- Babies generally do NOT get disgusted by gross things
- Disgust in a broader sense emerges around age 4
Self conscious emotions
- Begin to appear 18-24 months, require sense of self
- Shame/ embarassment- eyes lowered, head hung, hiding face
- Pride after success- not until 2+
broken toy procedure
trick 24 most into thinking they broke experiments fav toy (Barett)
- Some respond with same (avoid experimenter, do not admit guilt)
- Others with guilt (fix toy, admit)
- Individual and cross-cultural diffs in tendencies to experience these emotions
fear bias
7 months, preferentially look to/ daily to disengage from fearful faces
social referencing
use others’ emotional reactions to appraise novel situations
- 10-12 months old
- younger infants need both faces and voice cues; voice cues generally stronger
- Negativity bias —> negative signals especially likely to change babies’ behaviours
- Retain messages for longer with age
10 most look longer when…
characters expresses negative reaction after achieving a goal
Strategies for adjusting emotional states to comfortable level of intensity
Attention focusing/shifting, inhibiting thoughts/ behaviours, planning
co-regulation
Holding, rocking, shushing, feeding
Young babies can’t do this stuff; parents must do it for them
US babies who were held/cuddled as infants
had better emotional functioning as adults
babies do some self-regulation….
- Young babies fall asleep if overwhelmed
- Look away from aversive stimuli from 4 months
- From 4-6 months, self-soothe via physical sensations
- Increasingly able to distract themselves
Theory behind sleep training
encouraging babies to learn to self-soothe
Still face paradigm
- Mothers interact with babies for 2 minutes, then go totally neutral for 2 min, then go back to interacting
- Infants find still-face phases extremely distressing
