Humans are social animals, and child development is continuously shaped by interactions with other people. Although the emotional tone of these relations may vary greatly, any relationship between two persons involves some degree of emotion. Therefore social and emotional development are tightly connected. This week focuses on socio-emotional development. As even the briefest sketch of this very broad domain of development cannot be covered in a single lecture the current lecture will focus on emotional development, while the next lecture addresses some aspects of social development. Today, I will first discuss what emotions are and what function they may have. Then I will sketch the development of how some emotions are expressed, and how children learn to regulate them.
Following this, I will turn to how children learn no interpret emotional cues of others.
Next, I will discuss temperament, which refers to characteristic individual differences in how emotions are experienced and expressed.
Finally, I will point at various influences within and outside the individual that may influence emotional development.
Emotional development closely interacts with developments in the brain, motor, cognitive and language systems. Try to actively notice these connections when I mention them during this lecture and see the bigger picture.
So what are emotions? I guess all of you will have an idea what I am referring to when I use the term emotion. It refers to the experience of feelings like, anger, sadness, fear, happiness, and disgust. You could say that emotions are the affective spices that flavor our experiences of past, present and future.
But what exactly defines an emotion is something that scholars do not agree upon. What is clear, is that emotions are complex, involving several components including: neural responses, physiological responses (like heart rate, and hormone levels), subjective feelings, emotional expressions, and the desire to take action (like approach or avoidance).
One approach, called the functionalist approach, states that emotions result from how we interpret our internal and external environment: is it helping or hindering us from getting what we want. As such, emotions are thought to prepare our bodies for particular actions and energize and motivate behavior aimed at attaining personal goals. For instance, when we have lost something we become sad, which can stimulate us to try to regain what was lost. When we perceive a threat we become afraid which stimulates us to look for means to avert the danger. When we perceive something potentially sickening, we become disgusted, and try to spit it out or distance ourselves from it.
Thus, emotions are involved in organizing and regulating how we react. For instance, they influence cognitive processing: high anxiety focuses attention to the threat, and intense emotional experiences are remembered better than low emotional ones. Emotions also have an important social and communicative function. They enable us to form and maintain long term intimate relationships by promoting closeness and harmony, and thus avoid social isolation. Emotions even influence physical well-being. The persistent experience of negative emotions like anxiety depressed mood, anger and irritability, is related to a variety of health difficulties from infancy to adulthood. And growing up in an environment without emotionally responsive caregivers has severe detrimental consequences for development.
There are several basic emotions, happiness, fear, disgust, anger, sadness and surprise, that are universal in all human cultures, and thought to be innate. However the ability to express these emotions develops only gradually. For instance, young babies express only two global arousal states: attraction to pleasant stimulations, and withdrawal from unpleasant stimulations. So how does the expression of emotions emerge over time. I will briefly discuss this for the four basic emotions that have received most research attention: happiness, anger, sadness and fear.
Happiness is first expressed with smiles later combined with lauHaghter. A baby first only smiles during sleep, later also when gently touched or in response to its mothers voice. After one month infants start smiling at eye-catching sights, and between 6-10 weeks the social smile appears. These developments are in line with the development of the visual system allowing the child to focus at objects increasingly further away and track them, distinguish between more subtle contrasts and better recognize patterns. By the end of the first year the smile has become a deliberate social signal, which encourage others to continue to interact with the child. In addition, the experience of joy in response to their own achievements is probably also a powerful motivator for children themselves.
Anger and sadness are rarely shown apart by infants. Instead, infants usually express a general state of distress to a variety of unpleasant experiences, ranging from being hungry or cold, to receiving too much or too little stimulation. By the age of 1 infants clearly and frequently express anger and this frequency increases until they are around 18-24 months old. This increase is probably due to developing cognitive and motor skills that increase children’s capacity for intentional action and a matching desire to control their own actions. In addition, children are less easily distracted and therefore more persistent in obtaining desired goals. The frequency of anger starts to decline from the age of 3 to 6. This decrease is probably due to children’s increasing ability to express themselves in language and regulate their emotions. The function of anger is to motivate caregivers to help relieve the distress. It is therefore no surprise that most us find infant crying such an unpleasant sound and will do much to make it stop as soon as possible.
Fear, initially arises during the second half of the first year, most notably for strangers. It is likely to reflect children’s recognition that unfamiliar people often do not provide the comfort and pleasure that familiar people do. fear also functions to keep newly mobile children’s explorations in check. Around the age of 2 fear of strangers declines, as cognitive development enables children to better differentiate between threatening and nonthreatening individuals and situations.
Next to the innate basic emotions, children develop self-conscious emotions, like guilt, shame, envy, embarrassment, and pride. The emergence of these emotions requires children to have developed a sense of themselves as separate from other people, a topic that I will discuss in the next lecture. The emergence of self-conscious emotions is also influenced by a growing sense of what adults and society expect of them. These emotions emerge around the age of 18-24 months.
While the basic emotions are relatively universal in all cultures, the self-conscious emotions are not. This has to do with the fact that they are based on what is expected of individuals in a particular culture. For instance, in individualistic Western culture, personal achievements, like winning a game, are a reason for pride. On the other hand in collectivist cultures like Japan and China calling attention to a purely personal success would evoke embarrassment and self-effacement. I will not address cultural influences on emotional development in any detail here, but you will find out more about this in this week’s required and optional readings.
During development children not only come to express an ever wider range of emotions, they also have to learn to regulate these emotions. Emotion regulation refers to the strategies we use to monitor and modulate emotional experiences and expression.
At first infants have very little means for regulating their own emotions and depend on their parents for comfort and distraction. This is process is called co-regulation. As children develop motor control over their own bodies and start to understand their environment, they gradually take control of regulating their own emotions. By 5 months the first signs of self-regulation emerge, for instance in the form of self-comforting (sucking a thumb) or self-distraction (looking away). The developing capacity to regulate emotions goes hand in hand with developments in neurological systems that are involved in managing attention, and inhibiting thoughts and behaviors. By the age of 2 children will be able to inhibit their motor behaviors when asked to do so, for instance when aiming a knitting pin towards the power outlet. With a growing ability to use language it becomes ever more easy to resolve issues without emotions getting out of hand. In addition children will learn a whole range of planning and problem-solving skills that help managing emotions. Parents and in particular their parenting practices play an important role in teaching and modelling their children emotion regulation skills. It is not surprising then that problems in the development of emotion regulation can lead to problem behaviors.
Another aspect of emotional development is the ability to interpret the emotional cues of others.
By the age of 3 months infants can distinguish facial expressions of happiness, anger and surprise. By 7 months they additionally appear to distinguish fear, sadness, and interest. Children then also start to understand that emotional expressions convey information about a specific object or event. At around 8 to 10 months children start to actually use the facial, vocal, and behavioral expressions of others to interpret uncertain situations. This is called social referencing. For instance if a child sees a parent react fearfully to a dog, it will infer that the dog is dangerous. Indeed, animal fears are often transmitted from parents to their children, possibly via this route.
The development of emotional understanding is tightly connected with cognitive development. To give some examples:
understanding other people emotions requires insight in cause and effect (she is happy because she won the prize, or he is angry because I broke his toy)
it also requires the realization that thinking and feeling are connected (if someone thinks back of something sad it can make them feel sad).
and the ability to combine multiple, sometimes seemingly conflicting, cues to understand what happened. For instance, a girl that is smiling but also has a fresh cut on her knee, may have just been promised an ice cream to cheer her up.
While the overall development of emotions and emotion regulation capabilities is roughly similar for most children, there are characteristic individual differences in how emotions are experienced and expressed. These are differences in temperament. Some children are inhibited and shy, others are uninhibited and sociable, still others are irritable and quick to anger. More precisely temperament refers to individual differences in emotion, activity level, and attention, and how this reactivity is regulated.
Again attesting to the close relations between the various domains of development, children’s temperamental traits are very good predictors of their cognitive and social functioning. Take for example attention. Attentional strategies are important means to regulate emotion, but also predict cognitive development and learning. Another example is that active children are often sociable, while shy and inhibited children show anxious behaviors which discourages interaction. Finally, children who are high on problematic dimensions of temperament like anger and inattention are more likely to exhibit problem behaviors that children scoring low n these dimensions.
Individual differences in temperament are often assumed to be rather stable. However, while a shy preschooler is very unlikely to become a highly sociable teenager, temperament is certainly not set in stone and develops over time. This development is influenced by various factors at various levels of organization both within and outside the individual child.
Temperament has a very strong basis in our genes and resulting biology. For example, particular genes control the functioning of dopamine appear to be especially relevant for self-regulation. Dopamine is a substance that relays signals between neurons in the brain system involved in attentional processing. Thus, gene activity influences neural functioning which affects specific cognitive functions with are involved in emotion regulation which affects temperament. Think back of Gottliebs model of probabilistic epigenisis and see how this fits within that model.
Also factors at various levels of the environment outside the child influence the development of temperament. For instance various prenatal factors like nutritional deficits, exposure to cocaine and maternal stress can negatively influence young children’s ability to regulate their attention.
After birth parents have a strong influence on temperament: Children from unstable and harsh homes have more problems with self-regulation and emotion expression than children with warm and responsive parents.
Conversely children with difficult temperaments elicit less patience and more punitive parenting while more regulated and sociable children elicit more warmth. This nicely illustrates the directionality of effects.
At the macro level cultural factors are important, which you will read about later during this week.
To sum up, in this lecture I talked about what emotions are, what function they may have and how the expression, regulation, and recognition of emotions develops over time. I concluded with a discussion of individual differences in how emotions are experienced and expressed and used some examples to illustrate how emotional development is influenced by various factors at multiple levels of organization. I hope that it is clear that emotional development does not occur in isolation but is closely intertwined with developments in the brain, motor, cognitive and language systems.
