chapter summary:

The Development of Emotions in Childhood

• Discrete-emotions theorists believe that each emotion is packaged with a specific set of bodily and facial reactions and that distinct emotions are evident from early in life. In contrast, functionalists believe that emotions reflect what individuals are trying to do in specific situations—that is, their concerns and goals at the moment—and that there is not a set of innate, discrete emotions but many emotions based on people’s many different interactions with the social world.
• From early in life, emotions play an important role in both survival and social communication. Although infants show negative and positive affect from birth, it is not clear whether young infants experience different types of negative emotions such as anger, fear, and sadness.
• Emotions undergo change in the early months and years of life. Smiles become social around the second to third month of life, and what makes children smile and laugh changes with cognitive development.
• Newborns exhibit distress due to discomfort and hunger. By 6 to 7 months of age, they often are distressed when strangers approach them, and by approximately 8 months of age, they tend to get distressed when separated from their parents.
• The social emotions—embarrassment, pride, shame, and guilt—emerge in the second year of life. Their emergence is tied in part to the development of a rudimentary sense of self and to an appreciation of others’ reactions to the self.
• In childhood, emotional reactions are increasingly influenced by a growing cognitive understanding of events and emotions. For some children, there is an increase in the experience of negative emotion from childhood to adolescence. Rates of clinical and subclinical depression are much higher in adolescence than at younger ages, especially for girls.

Regulation of Emotion

• Emotional self-regulation involves the process of initiating, inhibiting, or modulating internal feeling states and emotion-related neural and physiological processes, cognitions, and behavior in the service of accomplishing one’s goals.
• Young infants are not very skilled at regulating themselves and must rely on adults to manage their emotions. However, children’s self-regulation improves with age as they increasingly use cognitive strategies and more appropriate and effective means of managing their emotions and behavior. Improvements in children’s regulatory capacities are based on increases in both their cognitive development and their ability to control their own bodies, as well as on changes in others’ expectations of them.
• Emotional self-regulation is generally associated with high social competence and low problem behavior.

Individual Differences in Emotion and Its Regulation

• Both biological and environmental factors contribute to the differences we see in children’s emotions and related behaviors. Temperament, which is believed to have a constitutional basis but can also be affected by social experiences, predicts adjustment in childhood and adulthood. However, children with difficult temperaments often do well if they receive sensitive and appropriate parenting.

Children’s Emotional Development in the Family

• Children’s emotional development is affected by the quality of their early social relationships and their parents’ discussion of emotion. High levels of positive emotion in the home are associated with favorable outcomes for children, whereas high levels of negative emotion and punitive reactions to children’s displays of negative emotion are often linked to negative developmental outcomes (the latter pattern may be especially likely in Western cultures). Parental discussion of emotion or other internal states (e.g., desires, cognitions) may promote children’s understanding of emotion and increase their social competence, although the discussion of emotions per se may be less associated with social competence in some cultures.

Culture and Children’s Emotional Development

• There may be differences in temperament across some cultures, which affect children’s tendencies to experience and regulate emotions.
• There are cultural differences in beliefs about what emotions are valued and when emotions should be expressed, and these shape children’s expression of emotion.

Children’s Understanding of Emotion

• To interact with others effectively, a person must be able to identify others’ emotions and have some knowledge of their causes and significance. By 5½ to 7 months of age, infants start to treat others’ emotional expressions as meaningful. Between 5½ and 12 months of age, children start to exhibit social referencing.
• By age 2 to 3 years, children demonstrate a rudimentary ability to label facial expressions and simple situations associated with happiness. Children’s understanding of facial expressions, the situations that cause emotions, display rules, and the complexities of emotional experience increases in the preschool and elementary school years.