Lecture 4: Emotions Flashcards
1
Q
What components do emotions consist of? [4]
A
- Feelings
- Physiological changes; autonomic arousal (e.g. increased heart rate, sweaty palms).
- Cognitions; thoughts accompanying feelings (but in some cases also elicits feelings).
- Goals; desire to take action based on the feeling (e.g. wanting to punch someone if you’re angry).
2
Q
primary emotions [4]
A
- Measured using facial reactions.
- Requires no introspection.
- At birth: interest, disgust, distress.
- Starts developing around 2-6 months, fully developed around 1 year: joy, anger, fear, sadness.
3
Q
secondary emotions [4]
A
- Form around 2 years and continues onwards developing.
- Require self-reflection and introspection.
- Due to theory of mind developing, usually have to do with others.
- Include: pride, shame, guilty, jealousy, embarassment, empathy.
4
Q
How do we measure emotions in infants? [3]
A
- Quite difficult to do, have to rely on coding on facial expressions.
- Maximally Discriminative Facial Movement (Max)
- Coders look at three areas of the face: forehead, middle (eyes, nose, cheeks), mouth (and chin).
5
Q
primary emotions: joy [9]
A
- Marked by a reflex smile in infants, responding to positive stimuli.
- Occurs without any social interaction preceeding it.
- Infants with positive temperaments will tend to reflex smile a lot.
- Also influenced by external factors: tactile, repitition (e.g. playing peek-a-boo).
- Declines with age; joy is related to interpersonal bonds rather than emotional state.
- Perhaps adaptive: aside from crying and being neutral, infants have no way of expressing themselves.
- Around 2-6 months old: social smiles (brought on by interactions), duchenne smile (genuine smile).
- Around 7 months of age, joy becomes more discriminating.
- Infants more likely to look joyful when interacting with their primary caregiver than anyone else, since they’ve learned to associate it with social interaction.
6
Q
primary emotions: interest [9]
A
- Relaxed/open interest, indicates curiosity/wonder.
- For infants: open mouth eyes and mouth, gaze that doesn’t divert.
- Most common form of interest.
- Positivity offset: bias for positive emotions in infants.
- Isn’t controlled by infants, unaware they’re doing it; leads them to seek out higher pitched voices and preferring pictures of happy faces.
- Knit brows interest, trying to figure out what something is.
- Often fixate for 10s then react positively or negatively.
- Emerges around 10-12 months, accompanying more social interactions.
- Effortful attention (e.g. pushing away from negative stimuli, want to get away from it, using effort).
7
Q
primary emotions: anger [6]
A
- Newborns: not necessarily anger; more like tensing of muscles.
- 2-3 months: facial expressions measured using Max, e.g. furrowed brows.
- Elicited by pain and frustration.
- First 6 months: increasing anger due to increased understanding that they have control over their environments to some degree.
- 6 months: can direct their anger towards specific people.
- Connected to control and violation of expectations (which is frustrating).
8
Q
primary emotions: fear [11]
A
- Develops latest; tends to increase with age and becomes more socially oriented (e.g. fear of failure, rejection by peers).
- 3-7 months: wariness at new events.
- Not really afraid, more interest in unfamiliar faces.
- 5 months: staring.
- 6 months: distress, running away from distressing thing and/or towards the caregiver.
- 7-9 months: genuine fear.
- Stranger anxiety, negative emotions based on seeing strangers; emerges/peaks around 9 months.
- 7-10 months: social referencing, able to refer to other agents (usually caregivers) and their emotional responses to determine how they should act in novel situations.
- Can be measured using the social cliff test (crawling over a fake cliff towards mom).
- 15 months: separation anxiety peaks around this point.
- Related to TOM, afraid that caregiver is going to disappear forever (no TOM before 7-9 months).
9
Q
What factors will lead to more fear in infants? [8]
A
10
Q
primary emotions: sadness [4]
A
- Less common than anger in infancy.
- Signal used to inform and control social partner (usually caregivers).
- Elicits natural instinct of caregivers to want to give them support and comfort.
- Still-face paradigm and depressed mothers show how lack of response is distressing for infants.
11
Q
secondary emotions: shame [4]
A
- Comes from failing to do something or doing something morally wrong/embarassing.
- e.g. Lying to your friend is morally wrong, feel ashamed because you’re not a person who lies.
- Perceiving deficiency; more self-focused.
- Often want to hide this thing from others.
12
Q
secondary emotions: guilt [5]
A
- Causing harm or discomfort to others.
- e.g. Lying to your friend makes you feel guilty because you feel bad for doing that to another person.
- More interpersonal, wrongdoing towards others.
- Complex understanding of this emotion develops with age.
- Around 6 years: taking more responsibility, understands their own role in causing the wrongdoing.
13
Q
development of emotional recognition [4]
A
- Recognizing emotions is an important step to developing emotional regulation.
- 3-4 years: able to label happiness, sadness, anger, and fear when they feel it.
- 5-7 years: able to identify multiple emotions being felt at the same time.
- 8 years: recognize situational differences in why they feel certain ways, relating emotions and personality.
14
Q
Why do kids learn how to recognize emotions? [6]
A
- Functionalist perspective:
- Rewarding; when children are able to talk about positive emotions with their parents, leads to strengthened emotional bonds.
- Coping strategies; identifying negative emotions leads to identifying healthy coping strategies for them.
- Learning perspective:
- Early emotional experiences serve as opportunities for parents to teach children how to deal with emotions later on.
- Frequency; more interactions with emotions leads to faster learning of how said emotion feels and how to deal with it.
15
Q
influence of parent-child interaction on emotional recognition [4]
A
- Negative parent-child interaction leads to adverse effects.
- Abused children (9 years): tend to be better at identifying anger (serves as a warning signal to abuse) but not better at identifying sadness (which doesn’t signal anything).
- Neglected children (4-5 years): deficits in labelling, matching, and recognizing emotions all across the board.
- High levels of neglect also related to lower levels of IQ (lack of enriching environment).
