1. Developmental perspectives on emotions
Week 3

2. Today’s questions When did you first felt an emotion?
When did you first knew that you felt an emotion?
When did you first knew that other people also are able to experience an emotion?

3. Part 1
Emotional experience

4. Let’s watch this “experiment”
Is this “experiment” ethical?
Why or why not?
What are you basing your ethical judgments on?

5. How many emotions do infants have?
We generated over 40 emotions in Week 1.
How many of them apply to
1-month old infants?
3-month old toddlers?
2-year old toddlers?
We then examined some emotions using appraisal dimensions in Week 2. What are the implications of appraisal theories on the emergence of children’s emotions?

6. Question Suppose a 9-month old infant watches…
What emotions would the infant feel?

7. Events triggering emotions in infants
Events (“elicitors”)
Fear
Sadness
Anger/frustration
Disgust
Joy
_____________________

8. Emotion Elicitors Innate (“nature”) Learnt (“nurture”)
Heights  _________
Bitter food  _________
Strangers  _________
Social-cultural norms
Personal standards (regardless of social-cultural norms)

9. Same emotion, different elicitors

10. Social-cultural norms
Imagine you grew up in this culture:
Would you experience shame if you don’t wear clothes?

11. What do these emotions have in common?
Shame
Guilt
Pride
Embarrass-ment
Tracy & Robins. (2004). Keeping the self in self-conscious emotions: Further arguments for a theoretical model. Psyc Inq.

12. Emergence of self
It’s freaky – but when you were young, you didn’t know that you exist (recall “The Self” in social psychology)
Some(times) dogs will chase their own tail. Why?
What implications does the dog example reveal about animal vs. human emotions?

13. Let’s examine shame in depth
Shame = Ideal self – Actual self

14. Clinical manifestation
Dysfunction of ideal self How would a CBT therapist treat a patient with anorexia?

15. Features of self-conscious emotions
Require self-awareness and other-awareness
Emerge later than basic emotions
Facilitate attainment of complex social goals
Do not have distinct universally recognized facial expressions
Cognitively complex

16. Implications on parenting
Some caregivers try to induce shame in infants. This is futile because shame requires _______ & _______, capacities that don’t emerge until much later.
Implications on treating post-partum depression?
1. Self awareness
2. Understanding of social-cultural norms

17. Part 2
Emotional expression

18. Spontaneous expressions

19. Hiding emotional expressions
Watch 5:30 of this YouTube clip.

20. What are cognitive abilities are needed to mask emotional expressions?
Meta-cognition (mind-reading)

21. A general model of emotional development
Simple expressions
Cry
Satiated (is this even an expression?!)
Differentiated expressions
Unique & spontaneous expressions
Masked emotions
Ability to mask emotions emerge
Birth
Bipolar emotional life
3 months
Joy, sadness, disgust, interest, anger, fear
>2.5 years
Self-conscious emotions

22. Children’s understanding of emotion
Part 3
Children’s understanding of emotion

23. Fundamental rules To experience emotion is one thing
To understand emotion is another thing
“Understanding” requires language

24. Emotions as linguistic labels
Children 3-5 can identify and label happy, sadness, and anger
“No one wants to be friends with Elly.
What do you think she would feel?”
Stifter & Fox. (1986). Preschool children's ability to identify and label emotions. J Nonverbal Behav.

25. Linguistic labels as categorization tasks
“anger”
[label]
[Anger]
[feeling]
“fear”
~ [label]

26. Evidence Language proficiency correlates with emotional understanding
Children with language impairment (but preserved cognitive, sensory and motor development) have more difficulty with emotion perception tasks
de Rosnay, et al. (2004). Relationships with linguistic ability and mother’s mental-state language. Br J Dev Psychol.
Dyck et al. (2004). Emotion recognition/understanding ability in hearing or vision-impaired children. J Child Psychol Psychiatry.

27. Why do we care whether children can label emotions or not?
The better you can label your emotion, the better you are able to regulate them
We will touch on this more in the week on Emotional Regulation.

28. Take home messages
The development of infant emotions must be seen in tandem with the development of the brain
The emergence of self-conscious emotions reveal when infants become aware that they exist (self-knowledge)
But brain development is not the only thing relevant for development of emotions. Scripts shape emotions as well, especially from toddlerhood.