Please enable JavaScript.
Coggle requires JavaScript to display documents.
Emotional Development - Y2 - Coggle Diagram
Emotional Development - Y2
What are emotions?
Shaffer and Kipp, 2020 -
Subjective reactions to something in the environment
Generally accompanied by some form of psychological arousal
Often communicated to others by some expression or action
usually experienced as either pleasant or unpleasant
Defining concepts - emotional development is experiencing, expressing, understanding and regulating emotions
Emotion expression - behavioural, non-verbal and/or verbal expression of emotions
Emotion understanding - the ability to recognise, understand, predict and explain our own and other people's emotions (involves recognition of emotional cues)
Emotion regulation - ability to increase, maintain, and decrease negative and positive emotions
Emotion competence - the ability to understand, express and regulate one's emotions
Emotions -
Children express a wide array of emotions from infancy
Emotional expression in is the first form of emotion communication
Children communicate feelings, needs and desires by means of these expression - in doing so, they influence other people's behaviour
Why are emotions important?
Emotions helps us adapt to our environment (Izard, 2007)
For example, fear is adaptive because it allows you to organise your behaviour around an important goal of avoiding danger
Through emotional expression, children let other people know how you feel
They act as a window into children's likes and dislikes and communicate their general views of the world
They are linked to children's social success and school success (Eisenberg, 2020; Thompson et al, 2020)
Emotional development in infancy - Shaff and Kipper, 2020:
Birth - contentment, disgust, distress and interest
-> Could be biologically programmed
-> Basic emotions
2-7 months - anger, fear, joy, sadness and surprise
-> Emerge in all healthy infants about the same age and interpreted similarly in all cultures
-> Basic emotions
12-24 months - embarrassment, envy, guilt, pride and shame
-> Complex emotions that involve being self conscious and self-evaluating
-> Require sense of self and cognitive ability to evaluate one's actions against standards of rules
How do we determine emotions -
-> Facial expressions provide important clues about which emotion the child is experiencing
-> 6 basic and universal emotions - Ekman - fear, disgust, anger, sadness, interest and joy
Recognising and interpreting emotions - Shaffer and Kipp, 2020:
Babies aged 7-10 months - use other people's emotional reactions to regulate their own behaviour
Children aged 2 look at others reactions after appraising a new situation
Conversations about emotions can occur between 18-24 months
How is emotional development studied - different methods to measure children's emotional understanding:
Lab experiments
Storybooks with pictures and short stories
Puppets telling stories
Inducing children with emotional stimuli and interviewing them about emotions
Questionnaires about emotions (children and parents)
Emotion understanding
Repacholi et al, 2016 - toddler understanding of other people's emotions:
Aimed to investigate how children interpret and attribute emotions to others
Two experiments explored 15 month old toddlers predictive generalisations about other people's emotions (N = 270)
Children watched an adult (experimenter) perform actions on a series of objects (beads) and observed another adult (emoter) react with anger or natural affect
Children were then handed the objects (beads) to test whether they would play with them
Results - children were hesitant to play with the beads when the previously angry emoter was watching them
Children observed the emoters emotional response and, were able to predict that she would become angry again if she saw them playing with the beads
Making predictive generalisations of this type may be a precursor to more mature trait-like attributions about another person's emotional dispositions
Pons et al, 2004 - investigating emotion understanding in a sample of children:
Administered the Test of Emotion Comprehension (TEC) to 100 children aged 3-11
Results -
-> Children showed a clear improvement with age on each component
-> The authors identified 3 phases in the development of emotion understanding
Identified 3 developmental stages in the development of emotion understanding
External understanding (age 3-5) -
Recognition - recognise and name basic emotions
Reminder - understand the effect of past information on emotions
External cues - understand how external events affect people's emotions
-> Research - Voltmer and van Salisch, 2022 - recognising faces, external causes and reminiscence
Mentalistic (age 5-7) -
Belief - understand the effect of beliefs (true or false) on the emotional reactions of others
Desire - understanding that people's emotional reactions depend on their desires
Hiding - understanding the discrepancy between outward expression of emotions and actual feelings
Developing knowledge about others - theory of mind:
Shaffer and Kipp, 2020 -
Theory of mind - children's understanding that people have mental states such as thoughts, beliefs, and desires that affect their behaviour
It allows children to get beyond people's observable actions and appearances and respond to their unseen states
False belief - the most frequently used tool to assess children's theory of mind is the false belief task
3 year olds cannot understand lack of information, 4 year olds can
Harris et al, 1989 -
-> To test children's understanding of the impact of beliefs and desires on emotion - N = 72, aged 3-5, and N = 56, aged 5-7
-> Vignette - Ellie the Elephant wants a drink, but she only likes one kind of drink and that is coke, she does not like milk, she only likes coke
-> Neutral container - oh look, it's coke, is Ellie happy or sad?
Results -
-> Both 3-5 year olds judged Ellie would be happy if she got her favourite drink
-> However, 5 year olds were more likely to differentiate whether Ellie would be happy or not
Only 5 out of 20 3 year olds always said unhappy if Ellie did not get what she wanted
Desire therefore develops by age 5-7
Are there any cross-cultural differences in children's understanding of desire-belief?
Avis and Harris (1991) - To test Baka’s children understanding of desire-belief
-> N = 34 children aged 3-6
-> Task - experimenter tells children to look at food they are cooking, and then asked to move the food to a hiding place in the absence of adult preparing the food
-> Asked when the experimenter comes back where they will look and how they will feel before and when they lift the lid
-> Results -
--> Older children (>5) were able to predict that adult would look for food in the original contained (now empty)
--> Older children were able to predict that adult would be happy before opening the contained and sad after opening it
--> The results provide support for the claim that belief-desire reasoning is universally acquired in childhood
Cross cultural differences in emotion understanding: Karstad et al, 2016 -
Variations in emotion understanding among Brazilian, Italian and Norwegian children aged 4 were observed to be more related to socio-economic status than culture
-> More authoritarian parenting -> less emotion talk
Parents with lower SES might use more physical punishment and might not discuss the consequences of different behaviours and emotions
-> Over-generalisation - middle class researchers, children not used to interacting with them
When do babies start to understand that others might think differently to them?
Early reasoning about desires - evidence from 14-18 month olds
Repacholi and Gopnik (1997) - Aimed to investigated toddler’s understanding of other people’s desires
-> N = 81 children aged 14 months; N = 78 aged 18 months (51% girls and 49% boys)
-> Task - children observed an experimenter expressing disgust as she tasted 1 type of food and happiness as she tasted another type of food
--> They were then required to predict which food the experimenter would subsequently desire
-> Results - children aged 14 months offered the food they liked
--> Children aged 18 months inferred that the experimenter wanted the food associated with her positive affect
Re-examination of the broccoli task - Implications for children’s understanding of subjective desire
Ruffman et al, 2018, were not able to replicate the findings from Repacholi & Gopnik (1997)
-> The broccoli task reveals some emerging understanding of desire in children aged 24 months, but only ⅓ of these children show a clear understanding of people’s desires
Hidden emotions - Joshi and MacLean, 1994:
Aimed to test children's understanding of real v apparent emotions
-> N = 48 children from India and 48 children from England (aged 4-6)
Vignette - Meena’s grandfather has just given her a very special chocolate. Meena does not want her mother to know that she’s had a chocolate, or she won’t give her another one
-> How does Meena feel about just having had chocolate?
-> How does Meena try to look at her face when her mother comes in?
Results -
-> Children aged 6 perform better in terms of understanding real v apparent emotions
-> Indian girls aged 4 performed better than English girls aged 4 - cultural practice
Reflective (age 7-9) -
Mixed - understand that a person might experience multiple or even contradictory (ambivalent) emotional responses to a given situation
Regulation - understand the effectiveness of using cognitive strategies to maintain control of emotions
Morality - understand emotions are morally reprehensible actions to praiseworthy actions
Ambivalent emotions - can you feel two emotions at the same time:
Harter & Buddin, 1987 -
-> 4-6 years - state you can feel one emotion at a time
-> 6-8 years - two emotions can be felt at the same time
-> 8-9 years - two distinct emotions in response to different situations at the same time
-> 10 years - two opposing feelings when the events are different or there are different aspects of the same situation
-> 11-12 years - same even causing opposing feelings
Showed that understanding of this increased with age
Emotion regulation - Sala, Pons and Molina (2014):
During preschool years, children develop autonomous strategies regarding emotion regulation
Children's use of social support does not appear to vary as a function of age - even children aged 3 use social support as an emotion regulating strategy
5 and 6 year olds as compared to younger children aged 3 and 4 use a wider repetoire of ER strategies, as well as more complex strategies such as cognitive reappraisal of a situation, allowing more regulation through reinterpretation
Cognitive reappraisal emerges around the age of 5, but it becomes stable over later developmental stages
Children aged 5-6 use more behavioural strategies (engaging in a sequence of actions to regulate one's emotion) compared to those aged 3-4, to regulate their emotions
Morality (Krettenauer et al, 2008; Smith et al, 2013:
Pre-school children might be aware of moral norms, but often fail to adhere to these
There is a discrepancy between young children's understanding of moral rules and the attribution of positive emotions to wrongdoers
For example, when children are told about a character who gets a toy she or he wants harms someone else to get it, 4 year olds often attribute positive emotions to the transgressor and focus on his/her satisfied desires
However, by age 8, children are much more likely to attribute negative emotions to the transgressor, and to focus on his normative transgression
Emotion understanding and gender -
No gender differences - several components assessed / TEC
Hughes and Dunn (1998) - N = 50, 4-5 years
Pons et al (2004) - N = 100, 3-11 years
Bennet et al (2005) - N = 188, 4 years
Albanese et al (2006) - N = 367, 3-11 years
Denham et al (2012) - N = 322, 3-5 years
Girls perform better in EU than boys - several components assessed:
Brown and Dunn 1996 (N=47) 3-6 years
Denham et al. 2002 (N=127) 3-5 years
Bosachi and Moore 2004 (N=53) 3 years
Garner and Waajid 2008 (N=74) 3-5 years
Aznar and Tenenbaum 2013 (N=63) 4-6 years
Boys perform better than girls at component levels - Rocha et al, 2015 (N = 142, 8-11 years)
Boys better at EU than girls at external level at age 6 - Aznar and Tenebaum, 2013 (N = 63)
Boys better at EU than girls - several components - Laible & Thompson (1998), N = 45, 2 ½ -6 years
Boys better at EU than girls with one component assessed - Whissell & Nicholson (1991), N = 74, 5-13 years
Literature is inconclusive - it is likely a range of factors such as parenting, exposure to peers in nursery settings and environments which impact emotional understanding
Rochat (2010) - from birth, we have a complex sense of our own bodies as differentiated from others - social mirror theory
Emergent self awareness comes from the capacity to become one’s own attention and it has both private and public aspects
Development of emotional intelligence - Salovey and Meyer (1990) - five key EI abilities -
Understanding feelings
Managing feelings
Self-motivation
Handling relationships
Empathy
How do parents influence children?
The Still Face Paradigm (SFP):
Introduced to assess infants' response to socioemotional stress during the first few months of life (Tronick et al, 1978)
-> Parents who react to children show emotion regulation in the children and teach emotions - depressed parents and other mental health conditions may impact the parents ability to reciprocate emotions
In the SFP, infants are generally observed in a three step face-to-face interaction with an adult
-> Baseline normal interaction episode
-> The still-face episode in which the adult becomes unresponsive and maintains a neutral facial expression
-> A reunion in which the adult resumes normal interaction
Conversations about emotions:
Aznar and Tenebaum (2013) -
Mother’s use of emotional labels predicts children emotion understanding over time (6 month interval)
Father’s use of emotional labels -> positively associated with children’s emotional understanding (cross sectional association), however father’s use of emotional labels did not predict children’s emotion understanding over time
Overall, these findings add support to the existing literature showing that there is an association between parents’ emotion talk and their children’s emotion understanding
Gender differences - Aznar and Tenebaum (2020):
Are there gender differences in parents talk to sons v daughters
34 different studies looking at parent talk (Cohen’s d = .04, p = .36)
Findings of this meta-analysis suggest that mother-child emotion talk has not been shown to be gendered
Thompson et al, 2020:
Emotion knowledge - awareness of and insight into one’s own emotions and the emotions of others
There is longitudinal evidence showing that maternal depressive symptoms negatively predict emotion knowledge among children - dysregulation from lack of emotional engagement
Children’s emotion knowledge positively predicts social competence (e.g. cooperativeness; assertiveness and self-control)
Karstad et al, 2015:
What predicts increase in children’s emotion understanding from age 4-6
-> Parents mentalisation scores: parental ability to value and understand their children’s emotions and thoughts
-> Child social skills - cooperation, assertion, responsibility, empathy and self-control
-> Verbal skills - children’s receptive language ability
Parental emotional expression - Murray et al, 2008:
Aimed to investigate the intergenerational transmission of social phobia (SP)
N = 79 mothers with social phobia and their infants
Infants and mothers took part in a lab study at 10 and 14 months
Infants in highchair watched while mothers interacted with stranger
Female stranger approached and picked up infant
Results -
-> No difference for 10 month old infants
-> Infants of mothers with SP increased in social avoidance compared to comparison mothers (14 months)
Understanding parental emotional expression -
Social referencing - looking at caregiver for emotional expression to decide how to react to a situation and future ones that are similar
Wary reaction to strangers - looking at parents for how to react to strangers
Visual cliff - parents who adopt happy faces have infants who are more likely to cross a fake cliff, compared to fearful parents
Harris (1989) - three precursors to understanding people’s emotions - distinguishing reality from pretence, self-awareness and capacity for pretence
Summary
Emotions are subjective reactions to something in the environment - they are generally accompanied by some form of physiological arousal and are communicated to others verbal and non-verbal behaviours (e.g. facial expressions)
Emotional development encompassess different aspects including experiencing, expressing, understanding and regulating emotions
Emotion understanding is an important aspect of emotional development; researchers have identified 9 components of emotion understanding - development of the 9 components of emotion understanding in children can be divided into 3 developmental periods, with each one being characterised by the emergence of a group of 3 components
-> External understanding (external cues, recognise and remind), mentalising (desire, hiding and belief) and reflective (morals, regulation and mixing)
Existing literature is inconclusive of gender differences in emotion understanding
There is longitudinal evidence showing that maternal depression negatively predicts emotion knowledge in children
Infants (aged 14 months) of mothers with social phobia are more likely to show social avoidance over time, compared to infants of mothers who do not present social phobia
Parents play a role in terms of children’s emotion understanding - for example, children of parents who use emotional language have higher scores on emotion understanding
Other research
Young children’s talk about learning events - Bartsch, Hovarth and Estes (2014):
Children talk mostly about their own learning, rarely mentioning sources of knowledge besides other people
Behaviour learning was mentioned more than fact learning
Implications for characterisation of children’s developing conceptions of knowledge acquisition
Children and adults referred most frequently to what was learned and who learned / taught, and less frequently to when, how and where learning occurred - this pattern does not change with age