Emotional Development

Definitions #

An emotion is a state of feeling that has physiological, situational, subjective, and cognitive components and desire to take action.

Emotions are:

• contagious
• highly complex (many ways of describing the same emotion)
• feelings that make us experience the world in different ways
• evaluations that make us determine whether objects, events, and other people are worthy of reacting in a certain way towards
• motivations that prompt us to act
• neural responses that change our thought processes
• physiological responses that affect heart rate, breathing, and hormone levels
• emotional and bodily expressions
• subjective
• a desire to take action (escape, approach, or change people or the environment)

In terms of theory of mind, emotional states both have mind-to-world fit (evaluating the world as we see it) and world-to-mind fit (desiring the world to be a certain way). Additionally, emotions are an expression of how we represent the world; as such, they can be seen as appropriate/inappropriate in certain contexts.

6 Basic Emotions #

1. Disgust: repulsion, both physically (spoiled food…) or morally (certain individuals/groups to avoid…)
2. Fear: strong urge to avoid or run away from something or someone
3. Happiness: positive; urge to approach
4. Sadness: reaction to loss or failure; need to regroup
5. Anger: negative emotion that leads to approaching or confronting; a motivator of moral progress
6. Surprise: an epistemic emotion where expectation is violated; motivation to approach and seek more information

What makes them basic? #

• Cross-culturally recurrent: appear throughout all cultures that have been studied
• Early emerging: expressed by infants from 0-9 months of age
• Universal: ability to understand basic emotions expressed by people/cultures individuals have never met before

Self-conscious emotions #

Pride, shame, guilt, embarrassment

Self-conscious emotions result from evaluating the self according to some standard or norm. They are biologically innate (especially pride, which is expressed in the same way by congenitally blind individuals who have never observed how other people express pride).

Shame = violation of moral norm (did something bad), embarrassment = violation of common norm

These emotions have more cultural variation compared to basic emotions, and emerge later (18-24 months).

Mirror task: after sticking a dot onto the forehead of an infant and placing them in front of a mirror, do they recognize that they are looking at themselves and attempt to remove the dot?

Theories of Emotion #

Evolutionary approach #

Charles Darwin: facial expressions of basic emotions are innate. We are born with a specific, discrete set of physiological and facial reactions that are similar across everyone, including babies.

Experience-based approach #

Newborns have broad, global emotional states that differentiate over development.

Constructivist approach #

Context is required to truly understand emotion. For example, a very determined athlete who is really feeling confident or elated might look angry, guilty, or in pain when only looking at their facial expression. Similarly, faces of people who just won or lost a contest look very similar.

Emergence of Emotions #

Basic positive emotions

• 0-3months: reflexive smiles
• 3 months: social smiling (directed at others)
• 3-4 months: laughter
• 7 months: smiling at familiar people
• 12-24 months: positive emotions with varying intensity based on context
• Preschool: decline in positive emotion expression

Basic negative emotions:

• newborn: general distress from hunger, pain
• 6-7 months: adaptive fear of strangers, novel objects, loud noises
• 8 months: stranger anxiety
• 4-8 months: anger and frustration at needs not being met
• Preschool: decline in negative emotion expression

Self conscious emotions:

• emerges at 18-24 months
• requires a basic sense of self, and awareness of others/norms

Understanding of emotions:

• 4 months: ability to distinguish basic facial expressions
• 7 months: prefer consistent emotions between face and voice
• 10-12 months: social referencing - look for emotional cues to understand novel or ambiguous situations

Emotion Regulation #

Emotion regulation is the process of initiating, inhibiting, modulating emotions

• develops over time: newborns rely on caregivers to regulate externally
• self-regulation increases and reliance on others decreases throughout school years

Individual differences in ability to regulate emotions: see marshmallow test

• Better delay of gratification in preschool is associated with higher social/cognitive competence in adulthood