Developmental psychology
Chapter 6
Emotional development and attachment relationships
Introduction
Emotional development underlies many other aspects of development, and has serious implications for how we conduct research with children.
Children’s emotional development can broadly be divided into three areas.
- Young children’s ability to recognize different facial expressions and to convey their own emotions.
- Children’s understanding of emotions.
- Children’s ability to regulate their emotions.
Expressing and recognizing emotional expressions
Are expressions of emotions innate?
Cross-cultural evidence
There is good evidence for the universality of human facial expressions of emotion.
Understanding of how emotions are conveyed through facial expressions is universal, but does not necessarily mean that understanding emotional expressions is innate.
Expressions of emotion in infancy
Infants from birth spontaneously display a wide repertoire of emotions though their facial expressions.
Basic emotions: happiness, interest, surprise, disgust, sadness, distress, anger, fear.
Complex emotions: pride, shyness, jealousy, guilt, shame, embarrassment.
Adults are skillful in accurately reading infants’ expressions.
However, adults are less accurate in discriminating infant’s negative facial expressions indicative of fear, anger, sadness or disgust. This appears not to be due to a lack of subtlety in young infants’ expression, but to the fact that the facial expressions arising from these different emotions are quite similar.
There is a biological basis for infant’s emotional facial expressions.
Multiple facial cues are used to signal emotion and the ability to convey and accurately interpret emotional expressions is impressively robust.
Infants indisputably display basic emotions very early in life. But there is considerable debate about when complex emotions emerge.
Infant discrimination of facial expressions
3-month-olds can distinguish between photographs of people smiling and frowning.
4- to 7-month-olds can distinguish between expressions of happiness and surprise.
Can young infants empathize with others’ emotions?
Very young infants may be emphasizing with the emotion they see portrayed.
But we cannot be sure.
Social referencing
Social referencing: infants and young children look at their caregiver for ‘advice’ when faced with an difficult or uncertain situation and seek social cures to guide their actions.
This provides and excellent way to assess infants’ understanding of other people’s emotional expressions.
Emotion understanding
Children begin to talk about emotions at a surprisingly young age, and parents readily give anecdotal accounts of their children using emotion words in the second year of life.
There are differences between emotional responses of infants and young children and those of older children and adults.
Emotional ambiguity: the realization that a person’s feelings may not be clear-cut or match your own emotional response.
Emotion understanding tasks
There are links between young children’s task-based
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