Week 10:
Emotional Development
Emotions
Outline for
Week 10
Emotion Recognition and
Regulation
Temperament
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Reflection Questions
Sort these terms from most to least broadly encompassing:
Emotion
Mood
Affect
What differentiates these?
Why do we have emotions? What are they good for?
What is the difference between an emotion and a cognition?
How can we assess emotions?
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Functions of Emotions
Motivational importance
David Hume: Reason alone cannot move us to do
anything
Individual functions
Facilitate responding to environment
Social functions
Communicate one’s situation to others nearby
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Components of Emotions
Processing a stimulus (or a thought)
Appraisals
Concerns
E.g., relevance, implication, coping
Somatic
Motor expression
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Components of Emotions
Processing a stimulus (or a thought)
Appraisals
Concerns
E.g., relevance, implication, coping
Somatic
Motor expression
Subjective feeling
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What is an Emotion?
To paraphrase Klaus Scherer:
An episode over synchronized
changes across subsystems in
response to an evaluation of a
stimulus deemed to be relevant to
major concerns of the organism.
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Emotion and Cognition
Emotions require some form of cognition to be activate
Conscious or unconscious
Not all cognitions elicit emotions
So, what’s the difference between emotions and cognitions?
Carrol Izard:
Emotions have to do with
Cognitions have to do with
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Emergence of Emotions:
Basic Emotions
Basic emotions:
Set of early-emerging emotions
believed to be universal,
biologically-rooted with unique
physiological responses and
facial expressions
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Emergence of Emotions:
Basic Emotions
Happiness
Smiles: Within first month, but
fleeting, in REM sleep
Social smiles: 3 months
Anger: 4 to 6 months
Sadness: 4 to 6 months
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Emergence of Emotions:
Basic Emotions
Fear: 7 months
Separation anxiety: feelings of
distress related to being
separated from people they’re
emotionally attached to
Emerges around 7 to 8 months
Surprise: 6 months
Disgust: 4 months
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Emergence of Self-Conscious Emotions
Self-conscious emotions
Emotions which relate to our sense of self
and our awareness of others’ reactions to us
Typically develop around 2 or 3 years of age
Ex.: guilt, shame, pride, embarrassment
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Emotion Recognition
By 3 months children can distinguish
between prototypical facial expressions of
Happiness, surprise, and anger
By 7 months they can also distinguish
between
Fear, sadness, interest
Social referencing: using others’ emotional
cues to decide how to react to novel or
ambiguous stimuli
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Emotion Regulation
Processes used to monitor and
modulate emotional experiences
and expressions
Part of executive functions
mental processes necessary for
goal-directed behaviour
Core transdiagnostic factor
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Development of Emotion Regulation
Emerges in childhood through long, slow
process
First months: parents help infants regulate
their emotional arousal
6 months: reduce distress by averting their
gaze
Attentional control
1 to 2 years: infants increasingly use selfdistraction
As children get older, they generally use more
adaptive strategies
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Development of Emotion Regulation
Younger children = more behavioural strategies;
Older children = more cognitive strategies
Cognitive Reappraisal:
Construing a situation in a way that changes
its emotional impact
Examples
Comes online between 3–5 with caregivers
Possible independently by 7–8 years of age
Frequency of use continues linearly through
adolescence, and into adulthood
r = .26 with positive parts of mental health;
r = -.20 with negative parts of mental health
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How Can Caregivers Promote
Children’s Emotion Regulation Skills?
See required reading by Morris et al.
Includes emotion coaching
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Temperament
Temperament: individual differences in emotion,
activity level, and attention that are exhibited across
contexts
Present from infancy, seems quite stable
Becomes more stable from year-to-year with age
Biologically-based predisposition
Thought to be heavily genetic
But, subject to prenatal factors, like teratogens
Can be predictive of later behaviour
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Individual Differences in Emotion and Regulation
Chess and Thomas’s three temperament groups:
Easy babies (40%)
Difficult babies (10%)
Slow-to-warm-up babies (15%)
Modern approaches use continuous perspective over
categorical perspective
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Categorical vs. Continuous: Two Categories
Low
High
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Categorical vs. Continuous: Three Categories
Low
Med
High
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Categorical vs. Continuous:
Continuous (Dimensional) Perspective
Range
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Later Temperament Categories
Mary Rothbart’s five overarching
temperament categories:
Distress or anger
Attention span
Activity Level
Smiling and laughter
Fear
Behavioural inhibition
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Behavioural Inhibition
Behavioral inhibition (BI): temperamentally-based
tendency to react with fear or wariness in response to
novel events.
Prevalence:
High Behavioural Inhibition: 15–20%
Intermediate Behavioural Inhibition: 40–55%
Low Behavioural Inhibition: 30–40%
High BI: more likely to be shy, experience mental
health challenges
Compared to low BI, high BI are 3.5x more likely to
develop social anxiety (43% prevalence)
Caregivers: encourage gradual exposure to novelty,
promote emotion regulation skills
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Cross-Cultural Differences In Behavioural Inhibition
Ken Rubin et al. (2006)
2-year-olds
Behavioural inhibition assessed by
How long they sat with their mother
How long till they touched the robot
Countries:
Australia
Canada
China
Italy
South Korea
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