Chapter 10 Emotions o What are they Why do we have them o Emotion is a rapid appraisal of personal significance of situations which prepares you for action For example happiness makes you approach sadness withdraw fear move away An emotion expresses your readiness to establish maintain or change your relation to the environment on a matter of importance to you Triggered because important to individual o Functionalist approach to emotion Emphasizes that the broad function of emotions is to energize behavior aimed at attaining personal goals Already having a goal in mind others social behavior and any sensation or state of mind can become personally relevant and evoke emotion Your emotional reaction affects your desire to repeat the experience Energize behavior Prepare for action Central to achieving personal goals Functionalist theorists believe that emotions are central in all our endeavors cognitive processing social behavior and even physical health Functions of emotions Development of emotional expression o Early emotional life consists mainly of two global arousal states Attraction to pleasant stimulation Withdrawal from unpleasant stimulation o Middle of first year expressions become well organized and specific o According to one view sensitive contingent caregiver communication in which parents selectively mirror aspects of the baby s diffuse emotional behavior helps infants construct emotional expressions that more closely resemble those of adults o Dynamic systems perspective Emotional expressions vary with the person s developing capacities goals and context Children coordinate separate skills into more effective systems as CNS develops and child s goals and experiences change To infer babies emotions more accurately researchers must attend to multiple interacting expressive cues vocal facial and gestural and see how they differ across situations believed to elicit different emotions o Facial expressions offer most reliable cues of infant emotions o Across cultures interpret same emotions o Basic emotions can be directly inferred from facial expressions Happiness surprise fear anger sadness disgust are basic emotions and are universal in humans and other primates and have a long evolutionary history of promoting survival Basic emotions First appearance of basic emotions Self conscious emotions o Self conscious emotions emotions that involve injury to or enhancement of our sense of self Include shame embarrassment guilt envy and pride o Emerge end of second year As 18 24 month olds become firmly aware of the self as a separate unique individual o These emotions require adult instruction about when to feel them Adult feedback is strongly related to self evaluation Parent telling their child they do good or bad affects what the child thinks of one self o Emotional self regulation strategies for adjusting our emotional state to a comfortable level to accomplish our goals o Requires voluntary effortful management of emotions o The capacity for effortful control improves gradually as a result of brain development and assistance of caregivers who help children manage intense emotion and teach them strategies for doing so o Effortful control is considered a major dimension of temperament Emotional self regulation Development of emotional self regulation Coping strategies o There are two that children shift between o Problem centered coping Used when situation is seen as changeable They identify the difficulty And decide what to do about it o Emotion centered coping Used if problem centered coping does not work Situation seen as unchangeable Internal private control of distress when little can be done about an outcome Emotional display rules o At first children modify emotional expressions to serve personal needs and they exaggerate their true feelings Soon they learn to restrain their expressive behavior and substitute other reactions such as smiling when feeling anxious or disappointed o Emotional display rules are norms that specify when where and how it is appropriate to express emotions o Parents encourage suppressing negative emotion Boys encouraged to suppress more In part because boys have harder time regulating negative emotion Girls encouraged to display more o Emotional masks more often are of positive feelings of happiness and surprise because more cultures teach children to communicate positive feelings and inhibit unpleasant emotional displays o Children gradually learn to express neg emotions in ways likely to evoke desired response o Cultural specific Understanding and responding to emotions of others Social referencing o Children s emotional expressiveness is intimately tied to their ability to interpret the emotional cues of others o Begins early By 3 4 months have expectations for caregiver responses for emotional exchanges For example when the gaze smile or vocalize they now expect their social partner to respond in kind and they reply with positive vocal and emotional reactions o Still face experiment Suggested that they have some sense of relationship between facial expression and emotion that they have some primitive social understanding and that they are able to regulate their own affect and attention to some extent o When infants start to evaluate unfamiliar people objects and events in terms of their own safety and security they engage in social referencing o It is relying on another person s emotional reaction to appraise an uncertain situation o Caregiver s role important can be used to teach children how to react Caregiver s voice either alone or combined with a facial expression is more effective than a facial expression alone The voice conveys both emotional and verbal information and the infant doesn t need to turn toward adult and can just focus on the event o In social referencing toddlers move beyond simply reacting to others emotional messages They use those signals to evaluate safety and security And to aid in gathering information about others intentions To guides action and preferences o These experiences along with cognitive and language development probably help toddlers refine meanings of emotions of the same valence happiness vs surprise Cognitive development and emotional understanding o As children age begin referring to causes consequences and behavioral signs of emotion and over time their understanding becomes more accurate and complex Become better judges of emotions Children tend to emphasize external factors over internal
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