Week 3a: Expression and Recognising Emotional Expressions Flashcards
(16 cards)
What three areas is children’s emotional development divided into?
- Recognizing different emotional expressions.
- Understanding emotions.
- Regulating emotions.
Are emotional expressions innate?
Darwin argued that the ability to communicate emotions through facial expressions is innate.
What did Ekman and Friesen (1971) find regarding cross-cultural understanding of emotions?
They found that adults from different cultures, including the Fore people of New Guinea, could interpret facial expressions similarly. They interpreted americans and americans interpreted them.
Can newborns produce recognizable facial expressions?
Yes, infants can display basic emotions (like happiness, sadness, anger and fear) early in life, though the emergence of complex emotions (like pride, shyness, jealously and guilt) is debated.
Some argued complex emotions are not evidence until second year of life, others have suggested that very young infants may show complex emotions and others found that children as young as 2-4 months could display shyness and embarassment but this remains controversial.
How accurately can adults judge infant facial expressions?
Adults can accurately judge facial expressions in infants, especially following pleasant or unpleasant experiences. They are however, less accurate discriminating types of facial expressions like fear/anger.
What technique is used to examine children’s abilty to identify facial expressions
habituation-dishabituation technique - If you show an infant the same stimulus repeatedly they will become bored and look at it less (i.e. habituate), if you show them a new stimulus, looking time will identify if they recognize that it is different.
Examples of infants showing evidence of identifying different facial expressions
- Barrera and Maurer (1981) 3-month-old could distinguish between smiling and frowning.
- Caron et al. (1982) 4-7-month-olds could distinguish between happiness and surprise.
But this doesn’t mean they know what the face expression means. It just means they can differentiate them. Do they have emotional understanding?
At what age do infants begin to understand that others can have different emotions?
By 18 months, infants can understand that others may have different emotional reactions, as demonstrated in the broccoli and crackers study.
- Repacholi and Gopnik (1997) infants watched experimenter taste broccoli and crackers, reacting positively to broccoli and negatively to crackers. 18 month olds selected to ‘feed’ the experimenter broccoli even though personal preference for cracker.
They learn that others can have different likes and dislikes compared to them and respond to those emotional cues appropriately.
What is social referencing in infants?
Around 10 months, infants look to caregivers to determine how to respond in uncertain situations.
Parent influence can be:
- direct (language or action)
- indirect (observation and modelling)
Define emotional contagion and how it differs from social referencing
emotion contagion is where infants demonstrate the same emotion as their caregiver. Social referencing is about guidance on how to react or act in a given situation/new stimulus.
How is the effect of social referencing enhanced
when a child feels uncertain.
How does a mother’s social anxiety/phobia affect her child’s behavior?
Children of mothers with social anxiety may exhibit increased avoidance behaviors, especially by 14 months.
When do children begin using emotion words?
Children as young as 18 months start using emotion words, with rapid growth in emotional vocabulary during the 3rd year.
28 month olds could use emotion words to comment on their own and other’s behaviours.
What are the three pathways to fear learning identified by Rachman (1977)?
1)Classical conditioning.
2)Observation.
3)Verbal information.
How do anxious parents influence their children’s perceptions?
- Parents communicate messages of threat and safety.
- Parents of anxious children communicate more ‘anxious’ messages (e.g. “be careful) (Beidel & Turner, 1998).
- Moore et al. (2004) anxious mothers used more catastrophising in their communication
- Suveg et al. (2005) anxious mothers described positive emotions less
At what age can children begin to regulate the expression of mild negative emotions?
Young children tend to be bad at hiding their true feelings. Children as young as 3 years old can control the expression of mild negative emotions. - This is likely due to learning from others reactions when displaying emotions.
- By the age of 5 years, some children have even learnt that some positive emotions are undesirable e.g. showing off (Reissland & Harris, 1991). Children learn to mask certain emotions.
