Emotional Development

Emotion - A rapid appraisal of the personal significance of situation, which prepares you for action.
Cognitive processing - emotional anxiety impairs thinking by diverting attention to threatening irrelevant stimuli. Emotions can also effect memory. Emotions serve as outcomes of mastery and the force for continued involvement and learning.
Social Behaviour - Emotional signals powerfully affect the behaviour of others. As age increases, emotional expressions become deliberate means through which babies communicate. Through social referencing children learn how to behave in many situations.
Health - Persistent psychological stress is associated with increased heart rate and blood pressure and depressed immune responses e.g. CVD, infections. cancers, and gastrointestinal issues.
Chronic depression - 8-10% women suffer from it. Maternal depression - In the weeks after birth, infants of depressed mothers sleep poorly, are less attentive to their surroundings, and have elevated cortisol levels. Common symptoms in babies of depressed mothers are delays in motor and mental development, irritable mood and attachment difficulties. Depressed mothers view their children more negatively than other mothers do. They also use inconsistent discipline. Paternal depression - Persistent paternal depression is a strong predictor of behavioural problems, especially overactivity, defiance and depression in boys.
The functionalist approach to emotion - The broad function of emotions is to energise behaviour aimed at attaining personal goals. Emotions also contribute to the emergence of self-awareness.
Basic Emotions - 7 universal emotions: happiness, sadness, interest, surprise, fear, anger and disgust.
1. Happiness - When infants achieve new skills they smile and laugh, encouraging parents to be more affectionate and stimulating, thus creating a warm supportive relationship. During the first few weeks infants smile in REM sleep, when full and in response to sounds and touching. By 4 weeks infants smile at eye catching sights. Between 6 and 10 weeks the 'social smile' appears. Laughter appears around 3-4 months. 10-12 month olds have several smiles.
2. Anger and Sadness - Newborns respond with distress to hunger, changes in body temperature, too much or too little stimulation.From 4-6 months to the 2nd year, angry expressions increase in frequency and intensity. This increase is due to an increase in desire to control their own actions. They are more persistent about obtaining desired objects and less easily distracted. Sadness occurs much less often and happens when deprived of a familiar ovine caregiver.
3. Fear - Fear rises from 6 months to 2 years. Stranger anxiety - The most common expression of fear is that of unknown adults. This depends on temperament, past experience with strangers and the current situation. The strangers style of interaction effects the babies fear level. Secure base - Infants use adults as a safe base from which to explore.
4. Self-conscious emotions - Guilt, shame, embarrassment, envy and pride. These appear in the middle of the second year. Envy appears at age 3. These emotions require adult instruction about when to feel them.
Emotional Self-regulation - Strategies we use to adjust our emotional state to a comfortable level of intensity so we can accomplish our goals. It requires attention focusing, inhibiting thoughts and behaviour and planning. This effortful control improves gradually with development of the prefrontal cortex.
1. Infancy - In the first few months infants have a limited ability to control their emotional states.They depend on the soothing interventions of parents. By 4-6 months the ability to shift attention allows the baby to self soothe. Infants whose parents read and respond sympathetically to their emotional cues tend to be less fussy, easier to soothe, express more pleasure are more willing to explore. Parents who respond angrily or wait to intervene until the baby is extremely agitated encourage a rapid rise to intense distress. Temper tantrums occur in toddlers because they cannot control the intense anger, especially when tired or hungry.
2. Early childhood - After 2 children often talk about feelings and language becomes a way to control them. 3 -4 year olds shift their attention away from the source and therefore show less emotional outbursts.Adult-child conversations that prepare children for difficult experiences foster self regulation.
3. Middle Childhood and adolescence - Between ages 6 and 8 children become aware of the difference between feeling emotion and expressing it. Common fears of the school years are poor academic performance, rejection, personal harm, poor parental health, and media events (e.g. war). By age 10 children shift between problem-centrered coping (the situation is changeable) and if this does not work they resort to emotion centred coping (internal, private and aimed at controlling distress when nothing can be done about the outcome). When emotional self regulation has developed well a sense of emotional self efficacy occurs.
4. Emotional Display Rules - They specify when, where and how it is appropriate to express emotions. At first young children modify emotional expressions to serve personal needs and they exaggerate their true feelings. Parents teach babies at a young age to suppress negative emotions, more so for boys than girls. By 3rd grade children value display rules in ensuring social harmony.
Responding to the emotions of others - Around 3-4 months children can match the emotion in a voice with the appropriate face of a speaking person.
1. Social Referencing - At 8 - 10 months babies start relying on other peoples emotional reactions to appraise a certain situation (social referencing). The caregiver's voice plays a vital role in this. By the middle of the 2nd year referencing expands to include indirect emotional signals.
Emotional understanding
1. Cognitive development- Children attribute emotions to external factors. After age 4 they appreciate that desires an beliefs motivate behaviour too. 4 year olds realise that thinking and feeling are interconnected. They also come up with effective ways to relieve others negative feelings (hugs). In middle childhood the ability to consider conflicting cues when explaining others emotions improves. Older children are also more aware of situations that spark mixed emotions. Preschoolers deny that 2 emotions can occur at once.
2. Social experience - The more mother's label emotions, explain them and express warmth, the better developed children's emotional understanding is. As early as 3 emotional knowledge is related to friendly considerate behaviour.
3. Empathy and Sympathy - Empathy involves a complex interaction of cognition and affect: detecting different emotions, taking anthers emotional perspective, feeling with them and responding emotionally in a similar way. Sympathy - feelings of sorrowNewborn babies empathise - crying when another baby cries. for another persons plight. Although true empathy requires self awareness, which begins around age 2. Temperament plays a role in determining if empathy prompts sympathetic prosocial behaviour or a personally distressed response. Empathy is moderately heritable. Aggressive children's high hostility blunts their capacity for empathy and sympathy.
Temperament and Development
1. Temperament -(Thomas & Chess) Early appearing, stable individual differences in reactivity and self regulation. The structure - There are 3 types of children 1) Easy child - 40% quickly establish regular routines, generally cheerful, adapts to new experiences. 2)Difficult child - 10%. Irregular daily routines, slow to accept change, reacts negative and intensely. 3) slow to warm up child - 15% inactive, shows mild low key reactions, negative moods, adjusts slowly. 35% show unique blends of temperament. The difficult temperament places children at high risk for adjustment problems (anxious withdrawal and aggression). Rates children on 9 aspects activity level, rhythmicity, distractibility, withdrawal, adaptability, attention span, intensity of reaction, threshold of responsiveness,quality of mood. Rothbart has 6 items - activity level, attention span, fearful distress, irritable distress, positive affect, effortful control.
2. Temperament is assessed through interviews and behaviour ratings.Biological based reactivity (heart rate, hormone levels, brain waves) differentiate children with inhibited and uninhibited personalities.
3. Differences in the amygdala contributes to contrasting temperaments. In shy children the amygdala in excited and it excited the sympathetic nervous system which prepares the body to rests to threats. Heart rate, cortisol levels, pupil dilation, blood pressure and skin temperature are all higher in shy children.
4. Stability of temperament is only low to moderate. Long term prediction from early temperament is best after age 3.
5. Genetics - Half of individual differences in temperament are due to genetic makeup. Persistent nutritional and emotional deprivation profoundly effects temperament.
6. Effortful control is strongly related to persistence, task mastery, academic achievement, cooperation, moral maturity, empathy and sympathy, residence to stress.
7. Goodness of fit model - creating child rearing environments that recognise each child's temperament while encouraging more adaptive functioning. difficult children frequently experience poor parenting and are higher risk for adjustment problems. In contrast when parents react positively and sensitively, difficulties declines by age 2-3. Effective parenting of challenging children depends on life conditions - mental health, marriage harmony, favourable economic conditions. Parents can turn an environment that exaggerates a child's problems into one that builds on the child's strengths.
Development of Attachment
1. Bowlby's Ethological Theory - Infant's emotional tie to the caregiver is an evolved response that promotes survival. The relationship begins as a set on innate signals that call the parent to the baby's side over time a true affectionate bond forms. Attachment develops in 4 phases: 1) Preattachment phase (Birth to 4 weeks) grasping, gazing, crying, smiling are built in signals designed to bring babies into close contact with carers. 2) Attachment in the making - (6 weeks to 6-8 months) Infants respond differently to a caregiver than a stranger. Although they don't protest when separated. 3) Clear cut (6-8months to 12-18 months) Attachment is evident and babies display separation anxiety. 4) formation of reciprocal relationships (18 months onwards) Separation protest declines and chidden can negotiate with parents.
  1. Internal working model - A set of expectations about the availability of attachment figures, their likelihood of providing support at times of need. It serves as a guide for all future relationships.
2. By the 2nd half of the first year children have become attached to familiar people.
3. Measuring Attachment - Assessed by Ainsworth's Strange Situation. Secure attachment - Infants use the parent as a secure base. When separated they may or may not cry, but when the parent returns they actively seek contact and are immediately soothed. Avoidant attachment - Infants are unresponsive to parents when present. When they leave the baby is not distressed and they react o strangers in the same way as parents. During reunion they aren't clingy and are slow to greet the parent. Resistant attachment - Before separation they remain close to the parent, when the parent leaves they are distressed and on return they are clingy yet angry and not soothed easily. Disorganised/disoriented attachment - The greatest level of insecurity. At reunion these infants show confused behaviour. crying after being settles.
  1. Attachment Q-Sort - For children aged 1-4 years. Parents or observers rate 90 behaviours into 9 categories ranging from high to low.
4. Stability of attachment - Securely attached babies more often maintain their attachment than insecure babies, whose relationship with their parents are fragile. However the disorganised attachment style is as stable as secure attachment.
5. Factors affecting attachment - Early availability of consistent caregiver - 1) Institutionalised children have difficulty reading emotions, are either indiscriminately friendly or sad, anxious, and withdrawn. These symptoms persist and are associated with later mental health problems. 2) Quality of caregiving - Sensitive caregiving (responding promptly and consistently) is moderately related to attachment security. Insecurely attached infants tend to have mother's who engage in less physical contact, handle them awkwardly and are rejecting. Interactional synchrony (well times sensitive response). Avoidant babies receive overstimulating care. They avoid the parent to avoid overstimulation. Resistent babies often receive inconsistent care. 3) infant characteristics - Prematurity, birth complications and newborn illness are linked to attachment issues in families under stress. The heritability of attachment is virtually zero.
  1. 4) Family circumstances - Job loss, a failing marriage, financial strain undermine attachment directly by interfering with sensitive care. 5) Parent's internal working models - They apply these to the bonds they build with their children. However the way we view our childhoods appears to be more influential in how we rear our children than the actual history of care we received.
6. Multiple Attachments
  1. Fathers - The preference for mother over father usually declines over the second year. When babies are not distressed they respond to both parents equally. Father's sensitivity and interactional synchrony predicts attachment security just like mothers. Mother's devote more time to physical care and expressing affection whereas fathers have more playful interaction Mothers and fathers also play differently. Mothers provide more toys, talk more, and gently play conventional games. Whereas fathers (especially with sons) engage in highly arousing physical play with bursts of excitement and surprise.
  2. Grandparents - They tend to take on 2 or more children in high stress situations such as child abuse, teenage parenting, domestic violence, mental illness, imprisonment, substance abuse. These children show high rates of learning difficulties, depression and antisocial behaviour.
7. Continuity of caregiving determines whether attachment security is linked to later development. As children encounter new attachment-related experiences they refine and update their internal working model.
8. Parental employment - Infants exposed to long hours of mediocre non parental care have lower cognitive and social skills,However good child care can reduce the impact of a stressed low SES home life. Parenting quality has a more powerful impact on children's adjustment than exposure to childcare. At age 4.5 those who average more than 30 hours in childcare a week display more behavioural problems. In Australia, infants who spend full days in government funded, high quality child care centres have higher rates of secure attachment than children cared for by relatives, friends or babysitters. Amount of time in childcare is also unrelated to preschoolers behavioural problems.

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	Created by Wendy Frogley almost 11 years ago