What is emotion?
-Emotion is the body's physiological reaction to a situation, the cognitive interpretation of the situation, communication to another person, and actions
-There is considerable evidence that how we display emotions and how we understand the emotions shown by others are mediated in part by our culture, language, gender, temperament, and personality.
Temperament is the general emotion style an individual displays in responding to events. Although different experiences evoke different emotional responses, the concept of temperament implies that individuals have a general emotional style that guides their tendency to respond in certain ways to a variety of events in their environment.
Infants go from basic to complex emotions. Children begin to experience self-conscious emotions, which are emotions that depend on awareness of oneself such as pride, guilt, and shame, by age 3. By age 4 or 5, they can identify pride from others' nonverbal signals.
Sharing other people's feelings, whether pain or pleasure, is the essence of empathy. When we experience another's distress we are more likely to show sympathy.
Normal Emotions and Emotional Problems
-Externalizing behaviors: behaviors such as aggressive or destructive behavior, in which the child or adolescent acts out on the environment
-Internalizing behaviors: behaviors in which a child's emotions are turned inward and become hurtful to themselves
Bowlby's Stages of Attachment
-Emotion is the body's physiological reaction to a situation, the cognitive interpretation of the situation, communication to another person, and actions
-There is considerable evidence that how we display emotions and how we understand the emotions shown by others are mediated in part by our culture, language, gender, temperament, and personality.
Temperament is the general emotion style an individual displays in responding to events. Although different experiences evoke different emotional responses, the concept of temperament implies that individuals have a general emotional style that guides their tendency to respond in certain ways to a variety of events in their environment.
Infants go from basic to complex emotions. Children begin to experience self-conscious emotions, which are emotions that depend on awareness of oneself such as pride, guilt, and shame, by age 3. By age 4 or 5, they can identify pride from others' nonverbal signals.
Sharing other people's feelings, whether pain or pleasure, is the essence of empathy. When we experience another's distress we are more likely to show sympathy.
Normal Emotions and Emotional Problems
-Externalizing behaviors: behaviors such as aggressive or destructive behavior, in which the child or adolescent acts out on the environment
-Internalizing behaviors: behaviors in which a child's emotions are turned inward and become hurtful to themselves
- Fear is generally thought of as a response to a real event, while anxiety os a vague fear about events that may or may not occur. When children's fears and anxieties are very severe, last a long time, and begin to limit their activities, they may have developed an anxiety disorder.
- A phobia is an irrational fear of something that is so severe that it interferes with day-to-day functioning
- Clinical depression: a condition marked by feelings of worthlessness and hopelessness, a lack of pleasure, sleep and appetite disturbances, and possibly suicidal thoughts
- Conduct disorder: a persistent pattern of behavior marked by violation of basic rights of others or major age-appropriate social norms or rules
- Oppositional defiant disorder: a persisting pattern of behavior marked by defiant, disobedient, and hostile behavior toward authority figures
Bowlby's Stages of Attachment
- Preattachment - birth to 6 weeks - stage of development of attachment from birth to 6 weeks, in which infant sensory preferences bring infants into close connection with parents
- Attachment in the making - 6 weeks to 6/8 months - infants develop stranger anxiety, differentiating those they know from those they don't
- Clear-cut attachment - 6/8 months to 2 years - an infant develops separation anxiety when a person he is attached to leaves him
- Goal-corrected partnership - 18 months on - toddlers create reciprocal relationships with their mothers
Mary Ainsworth was a developmental psychologist who worked with John Bowlby and further developed his ethological theory. Ainsworth was interested in looking at individual differences in the types of attachment that infants and mothers formed together, based on the degree of security that infant felt in the relationship. Ainsworth used naturalistic observations of infants and mothers. The strange situation is Mary Ainsworth's experimental procedure designed to assess security of attachment in infants.
-Anxious avoidant attachment: attachment classification in which the infant is not distressed when his mother leaves, is just as comfortable with the stranger as with his mother, and, when his mother returns, does not rush to greet her
-Anxious/ambivalent resistant attachment: the infant is reluctant to move away from his mother to explore and is very distressed when his mother leaves, but when his mother returns, he wants to approach her but also angrily resists her attempt to pick him up
-Disorganized/disorientated attachment: behavior is unpredictable and odd and shows no coherent way of dealing with attachment issues, often linked with parental abuse or neglect