Emotional Development
April 5th, 2007
Emotional Development
Emotion: “A feeling or affect that involves a mixture of physiological arousal (e.g. rapid heart beat) and overt behaviour (e.g. smile)”
Emotional Development
Emotions play important roles in organising developments such as relationships with caregivers, exploration of the environment, and discovery of the self.
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Function of Emotions
• Adaptation & survival • Regulation • Communication
Basic Emotions
• “Emotions that can be directly inferred from facial expressions”. • Signs of almost all basic emotions are present in infancy. • Most research has focused on 3 basic emotions: happiness, anger and fear.
Happiness
• Reflexive smile appears during first month after birth. Usually appears during irregular patterns of sleep, not when infant is in an alert state. • Social smile appears c.a 2-3 months, usually in response to external stimuli (e.g. human face) • 3-4 months: first laughs!
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Anger & Fear
• Generalised distress response present at birth (e.g. to hunger, pain, boredom) • Gradual increase in frequency and intensity from 6 months • Role of cognitive development • Cultural factors can modify these effects. E.g. Child rearing practices among the Efe (Tronick, Morelli, & Ivey, 1992)
Interpreting Emotions
• Infants’ emotional expressions tied to ability to interpret emotional cues of other. • 7-10 months: can match the emotion in a voice with the appropriate face of a speaking person. • 8-10 months: social referencing, where baby actively seeks info about a trusted person's feelings in an uncertain situation
Interpreting Emotions
• A caregiver's facial and emotional signals influence whether a 1-year-old will be wary of strangers, play with an unfamiliar toy, or cross to the deep side of the visual cliff (e.g. Sorce et al, 1985). • Enables toddlers to learn about the world through indirect experience. • Enables them to appreciate others’ emotional reactions
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Self-Conscious Emotions
• Involve injury to or enhancement of our sense of self (e.g. guilt, pride, shame, envy). • Emerge at end of second year. • 18-24 months: shame and embarrassment • 36 months: envy and guilt. • Help children acquire socially valued behaviours and goals.
Emotional Self-Regulation
• Refers to strategies we use to adjust our emotional state to a comfortable level of intensity so we can accomplish our goals (Eisenberg, et al, 1995). • Very limited at birth – baby is easily overwhelmed by internal & external stimuli • 2-4 months – tolerance for stimulation increases
Emotional Self-Regulation
• By end of the first year, crawling & walking enable infants to regulate emotions more effectively by approaching or retreating from various stimuli. • Caregiver contributes to the child's style of emotional self-regulation. • Also provides lessons in socially approved ways of expressing feelings
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Emotional Self-Regulation
• Age 2: Growth in representation and language leads to new ways of regulating emotions. • Vocabulary of words for talking about feelings such as 'happy', 'sad', 'yucky', 'scary', develops rapidly after 18 months (Dunn et al, 1987).
Temperament
“An individual’s behavioural style characteristic way of responding” (Santrock, 1997)
New York Longitudinal Study
• Initiated by psychiatrists Alexander Thomas and Stella Chess. • Longest, most comprehensive, study of temperament to date. • Traced a 141 individuals from infancy into adulthood.
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New York Longitudinal Study
Results: • Temperament linked to risk and resiliency in children • Temperament – not fixed and unchangeable. Can be modified by parenting practices. • Found certain characteristics cluster together.
Chess & Thomas (1977)
3 basic types of temperament; 1. Easy Child (40%) 2. Difficult Child (10%) 3. Slow-to-Warm-up Child (15%) The remainder showed unique blends of temperamental characteristics.
NY Longitudinal Study
‘Difficult’ children: • 70% ‘Difficult’ preschoolers developed behaviour problems by school age (vs 18% of ‘easy’ children); • Also linked to defiant, aggressive behaviour in early and middle childhood.
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Slow-to-Warm-up children • Tend to present with problems later, after they enter school. • 50% show adjustment problems by middle childhood (Chess & Thomas, 1984).
Alternative Models
• Rothbart & Mauro (1990) • Buss & Plomin (1984, 1987) – believe temperament falls into 3 basic categories: emotionality, sociability, and activity level
Measuring Temperament
• Behavioural assessments – interviews, questionnaires. • Physiological assessments – heart rate, hormone levels, EEG
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Stability of Temperament
• A number of studies have shown modest support for the long-term stability of temperament. • Kerr et al (1994): Some characteristics stable in the long term only in children at the extremes (e.g those who are very inhibited or very outgoing to begin with).
Genetic Influences
• Twin and adoption studies. • Find moderate influence of heredity on temperament. • Strength of association tends to decline as infants get older (Goldsmith & Gottesman, 1981).
Environmental Influences
• Influence of cultural beliefs and practices. • Example: Japanese mothers believe babies enter the world as independent beings & must learn to rely on their mothers through close physical contact. American mothers believe opposite. Must wean babies from dependence into autonomy (Kojima, 1986).
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Environmental Influences
• Gender stereotyping. • Vogel et al, (1991): Within first 24 hours after birth parents already perceive male and female newborns differently. Males rated as more alert & coordinated, stronger and larger. Girls rated as softer, more awkward, delicate. • Affect way parents treat their children
Temperament & Child Rearing
• Goodness-of-Fit Model (Thomas & Chess, 1977) explains how temperament and environmental factors interact to produce positive outcomes. • States child rearing should be responsive to child’s temperament. • Also depends on life conditions and cultural values.
Week 9 Quiz
• Define attachment. • Who formulated the ethological theory of attachment? • Give an example of an attachment behaviour. • Name Ainsworth's procedure for testing the quality of attachments. • Name a factor that affects attachment security.
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