6 - Development of Emotion
The authors consider emotions to be the first human language. Within seconds of being born, a human child makes its first emotional communication - a cry that serves no physical purpose but to communicate distress so that it is not ignored.
More primitive species of animal, such as reptiles, do not do this, and throughout their lifetimes make very little attempt to communicate to one another at all. A few species of reptile exhibit warning behaviors (the hiss of a lizard or the rattle of a snake). Birds are more communicative and mammals even more so - but even the most sophisticated animal has a very limited capacity for communication when compared to mankind.
One perspective on emotions, which has been considered in the previous few chapters, is that there are a small range of survival emotions generated by the striatal and limbic systems, but a much broader range of cerebral emotions. In higher orders of animal the emotional response to stimuli can be developed, out of conditioning by habit or intentional programming. To a relatively high degree.
A second theory is one of "dynamic systems," which maintains that there are no innate neurophysiological programs, merely a number of genetically derived components that "become organized" into patterns of interaction. How they become organized is a somewhat vaguely defined, though it's generally considered to be a matter of conditioning.
We act, to notice the impact of this action, and to utilize feedback to determine whether the action should be repeated or avoided in future, sometimes on the unconscious level but often quite consciously. The mind becomes like a computer that is running many programs and once and rewriting its own code for efficiency.
Specifically, the theory of dynamic systems (per Fogel 1992) is based on three principles:
- Emotions are based on self-organizing dynamic systems
- The systems evolve over time, based more on the external environment in which action is taken rather than the internal one where it is considered
- Emotions are constructs based on observations of causality and consistency, deriving from lower-level interactions that are not themselves emotions
The authors admit that there are more than just these two theories, but many other views that take some of the principles of each along with other information - they do have their favored theory, but concede it is not the only approach to understanding emotion.
Expression of Emotion in the First Year
There can be little argument that emotions begin to evidence themselves in infancy, well before any formal learning takes place. A child's first exposure to a sour taste elicits a distinctive expression of disgust, which is common across cultures. This cannot be but a response to a stimulus, and it cannot be but innate.
Studies that have asked adults to identify emotions in photographs of two- to twelve-month-old babies demonstrate that they are quite adept at reading the emotions of children - which in turn means that children are quite adept at expression emotion even at a preverbal stage.
While it is generally agreed that the infant smile is a sign of contentment, the cause of the contentment is less clear. Even in the first few weeks of life, babies smile while they are in the REM stage of sleep. They smile when handled gently, and after a few months smiles are elicited by the presence of their caregiver. But until about four months of age, the smiling expression is merely a reflexive response rather than an indicator of happiness.
Additional experiments (Lewis et. al. 1990) also demonstrate that infants of three to four months smile in recognition of a successful action. The experiment in question involved a toy that would play music when a string was pulled - either consistently or inconsistently - and those infants whose toy performed consistently smiled more often and showed greater interest, demonstrating that mastery of a skill made the children happy.
Additional studies suggest that the functional purpose of the infant smiles is to create a sense of attachment in caregivers and other adults, such that adults feel positively disposed toward the child and will act in a way to maintain its welfare. There is further evidence (Huebner 1988) that the stimulus of a happy infant even creates happiness in adults.
However, considerations of negative emotions in infants and young children is more problematic: some researchers have concluded that infants are capable only of communicating undifferentiated distress, whereas others argue that there are demarcations between fear, anger, disgust, and sadness.
There follows an extended but about expression recognition systems (AFFEX, FACS, and MAX) that consider the movement of specific facial muscles to interpret emotion, and the way that some of them have had to be adapted to interpret infant expressions. (EN: It's a bit fastidious and ultimately seems oblique to the present topic.)
Back to the musical-toy experiments, once babies associated pulling the string to playing music, the toy was swapped for one that did not play music - which naturally caused the children to become quite frustrated. However, frustration itself is a complex emotion that combines the elements of anger, fear, disgust, and sadness - such that the observation is not particularly specific.
There is also the argument that experimentation with a contrived instrument is less indicative of emotional experience than "real" elicitors - particularly in infant subjects who are not intellectually sophisticated enough to "play along" with an experiment.
An "elegantly designed" study (Hyatt 1979) presented ten to twelve-month-old infants with six eliciting conditions and compared their reactions to predicted expressions based on the emotion that was expected to result. This found that the emotion of happiness was displayed in a consistent manner, and surprise was also highly consistent, but expressions related negative emotions such as fear were highly inconsistent.
An additional study (Camras 1992) compared the facial expressions of infants to the AFFEX recognition system, to suggest that infants in the first few months of life demonstrate facial expressions in a wider range for negative emotions (disgust, fear, distress, anger etc.) but these expressions do not occur with the expected elicitors. For example, a sour taste would in some instances result in an expression of fear rather than disgust.
This, at last, leads to the admission that the results of these studies may be corrupted not by the behavior of infants, but by the expectations of the adult researchers - who consider with an adult mind how an emotion ought to be expressed and conditions that ought to elicit it.
Another detractor is that measuring emotion by facial expression assumes motor control of the various muscles that contort the face in emotional reaction - and given that infants have so little control over the movement of their bodily muscles, it also follows that they may be just as clumsy and imprecise in controlling the facial muscles.
The authors then reflect on the differences between the two theories of emotion (differential emotion vs. dynamic systems) and suggest that there can't be much distinction in dealing with subjects of this age. However, given that infants lack experience and cognition, it seems questionable whether dynamic systems holds sway - that is, there is consistency of expression among infants when they encounter something for the first time and have no previous "programming" to guide their reactions.
At the same time, the inconsistency among infants in the expressions elicited by negative emotion give some credence to the notion that emotions are highly individualistic and based on experience, such that dynamic systems seems credible.
The synthesis between these two conflicting approaches is likely that neither one of them is exclusively true or false - differential emotion may be predominant in basic emotions related to the amygdala and dynamic systems to the more cerebral emotions. And because human beings are highly cognitive creatures, it's entirely possible that within even a few months of birth a child is beginning to form mental frameworks that leverage experience to filter sensory stimuli and guide an emotional response ... but for the first few months of life before sufficient experience is gained, natural or innate tendencies hold sway.
Developmental Changes in Elicitation of Emotion
The kinds of stimuli that elicit emotion also change as children age. In comparative experiments (Scarr 1970) children of various age groups were exposed to a number of different stimuli that are expected to provoke fear or attraction (sudden movements, loud noises, strangers, a visual cliff, unfamiliar objects, etc.). Children demonstrate little fear until about seven months, at which time they begin to show a fear response. This fear response peaks at age one and diminishes thereafter.
Certain fears seem universal, with anxiety at the proximity of a stranger or distance of an attachment figure causing increasing levels of distress from very early years through three years of age, peaking at about eighteen months.
- Preschoolers are mainly frightened by imaginary themes (monsters, ghosts, etc.)
- In the early school years, this shifts to bodily injury and physical danger
- By the teen years, social fears take over
(EN: The author doesn't continue into the adult years, but what he finds here likely carries forward. The basic elicitor of fear is a threat or uncertainty of stability, though the developmental difference seems to be what, exactly, is taken as a threat.)
Reaction to Emotions Demonstrated by Others
People also respond to the emotional behavior that they witness in others - even if they are not aware of its cause.
The authors concede some difficulty in measuring emotion in infants, who are nonverbal - it requires reading nonverbal signals such as facial expression and posture, whether they move toward something or away from it. (EN: It's likely the same with adult subjects - though they can describe their emotions, they are prone to misinterpret or misrepresent their emotions when relating them to others.)
One experiment considered the reaction of infants between three days and ten weeks, who show intense interest in human faces but quickly become habituated to expressions. The only observation is that the children seemed to mimic facial expressions.
The initial conclusion was that children recognize emotion - but with the disclaimer that they may well be mimicking the expression without understanding the emotion it portends. Follow-up studies (such as Caron 1985) suggest that seven-month-old subjects reacted the same to expressions of anger or happiness based on whether the object's teeth were showing or hidden.
The authors mention that even adults have trouble with accurately recognizing emotional expression, and the development of recognition systems such as AFFEX and FACS suggests that even the interpretation of researchers who are highly familiar with expression is not trustworthy.
Further experimentation involved not only facial expressions but vocal expression as well - the pitch, tone, and volume of the voice accompanying a facial expression. What was found that prior to five months, children did not seem to recognize emotion at all. Between five and seven months, they could distinguish happiness from anger based on audiovisual stimuli, but not by visual stimuli alone. Only at seven months did infants react to pictures without sound.
Audio-only distinctions are evident at a much younger age, as infants are able to distinguish the voice of their mothers from any other voice, and react to the positive or negative tones in the voice. From five months, they can recognize tones of approval or disapproval in voices of their mother and others, even without understanding the words themselves (which was tested using phrases in foreign languages).
There's also a brief mention of audiovisual mismatches, which indicates that at around seven months children begin to become puzzled when the two are not coordinated - whether it is a matter of being out of synch with the video or communicating an emotional overtone that is a mismatch for the facial expression, children at this age pause for a longer amount of time before reacting when they receive mixed signals.
It is concluded that within the first few months babies gain the ability to signal their own emotional state (happiness and distress) as well as the ability to recognize aspects of a parent's emotional state, primarily by voice - but it takes several months for this to become attuned to expressions of emotion in other people as well as for facial expression to be recognized. It's finally suggested that by one year of age, the skills have developed to enable infants to use emotions interactively, both signaling and interpreting signals of other people.
Children's Relationships with Others
The functional purpose of emotions is in constructing and maintaining relationships with other human beings: the display of emotion communicates to others that their behavior is acceptable or unacceptable to the subject.
It is plainly evident in the way that mothers interact with their children that emotions are expressed to encourage acceptable behavior and discourage unacceptable behavior.
The authors present a brief ethnographic study to illustrate this further, then present a more formal experiment in which mothers spoke to their infant children in neutral, positive, and negative tones. Infants were largely indifferent to neutral tones, but responded as expected to positive and negative tones (coupled with corresponding facial expressions). It can also be observed that mothers change their behavior as well, according to the emotional expression of their children.
(EN: I wonder if the response to emotional neutrality is really indifferent, as my sense is that neutrality is subject to interpretation, and a person may infer approval, disapproval, or indifference from an expressionless face. I also have the sense that people are uncomfortable with expressionless faces in general. This does not seem to be explored or even considered by the authors, at least in this context.)
Additional ethnographic studies (Wolff 1963) observe that infants seem to respond to tone of voice for the first six months, and later seem to include and even switch to facial expression.
Another experiment is mentioned in which infants of varying ages are placed in a chair facing their mother while a proctor restrains their arms so they cannot reach to her. The one-month-old subjects expressed frustration vocally, and no facial expression was evident until age four months. At four months subjects would direct their gaze to the proctor's hands, and at seven they would direct their gaze to their mothers. This is interpreted to mean that at one month general distress was experienced, at four months the cause of the distress was identified, and at seven months the expression of distress was intended as a communication to another person.
Brief mention of the visual cliff experiments (Sorce 1985) in which 70% of one year old children would cross a visual cliff to reach a caregiver who showed a happy expression, but none would do so if the caregiver displayed a fearful expression - a definite indication that they were reading and responding to the emotions of others.
It's noted that it is generally at about the age of ten months that infants seem to look to caregiver's faces for emotional information, and it is particularly evident in the way in which a toddler will glance at a parent before taking action to gain guidance and after acting to gain feedback.
Cooperative Action and Goal-Corrected Partnership
One function of emotions is in helping people to work together to achieve outcomes. The authors borrow the term "goal-corrected" (from Bowlby 1971), which differs from "goal-directed" in that most instances of cooperation are mutually beneficial: one party does not "direct" the other to achieve their aims, but rather both parties "correct" their goals such that their cooperative effort is beneficial to both, even if it does not fully achieve what was originally wanted.
Recognizing Differences Between Self and Others
Developmental researchers suggest that the distinction of self from others is "only rudimentary" during the first year of life - and the authors add that this is based on the concept of "self" in western cultures, which is significantly more pronounced than the self-other differentiation of other cultures that are more collectivistic.
The way in which children demonstrate knowledge of themselves and others genereally follows a sequence of four stages:
- A child can experience distress in reaction to the distress of others, without being conscious of the source (global empathy)
- The child recognizes that the distress is attributable to a specific person, and reacts as if he is the one in distress
- The child recognizes that the feelings of others are different to his own
- Recognizing that different experiences lead to differing emotions over the course of a person's life
It's noted that even newborn babies will cry when they hear other infants crying, and there is some debate on whether this is empathy or merely a reflex action. However, by the age of six months, infants begin to respond in a more specific way to others' emotions - they will lean toward or touch another infant who is signaling distress. Between one and two years they will offer more distinctive indications of comforting and even call the distress of a peer to a caregiver.
Observational studies suggest that when an infant seeks to care for another in distress, it acts in a way that it wishes others to respond to its own distress ("do unto others" in action). Two examples are given of toddlers attempting to comfort a younger sibling - the first offering the distressed sibling a pair of shoes that she liked, and the second mimicking a gesture that the parents made to amuse him.
It is not until the age of three that children can be witnessed to consider the actual needs and preferences of others in providing comfort - that is, to show that they understand the situation and the cause of distress and respond appropriately.
(EN: No indication is given of the age at which the fourth stage of empathy becomes evident, and I don't have sufficient knowledge to speculate.)
Empathy, or the recognition of emotion in others, plays a significant in social interactions - the decision to cooperate or refrain fro interacting with another person is largely emotional. For example, when we witness that another person is angry, we evaluate our own actions in response to their emotional distress and decide whether to act in a way that mitigates their anger.
(EN: It's been informally observed that children who "get their way" by throwing tantrums as children often grow into adults who seek to use emotions to manipulate others - the boss who signals anger or colleague who signals pain to get others to do things tnat are in their interest.)
More complex emotions such as embarrassment are also significant. To be embarrassed, a person must recognize that there is a standard of proper behavior, that they have failed to conform to it, and that others have witnessed them doing so. There is also another form of embarrassment that comes from receiving attention from others without knowing the reason why (and assuming we have done something improper to attract this attention). It is not as simple as a fear reaction to a stimulus but requires far more cognitive involvement to experience embarrassment. And further, an action undertaken to avoid embarrassment (or to avoid inflicting embarrassment on others)
The notion of self-and-other is rather complicated, recognizing our own consciousness as separate from others, meanwhile recognizing that other people have "selves" as well that are separate consciousness and perception from our own - and that we are just as much an object of their perception and an influence on our behavior as they are to our own.
(EN: The author doesn't cite Jean-Paul Sartre for this, but these notions are central to existentialism.)
There are also strong cultural influences in the perception of self from others, which are generalized as a western "individualist" and an eastern "collectivist" tendency. However, even in the most individualistic western ideologies it is still understood that the self is not entirely independent but exists with a collaborative society; and the most collectivistic eastern ideology still recognizes that the self is a distinct member of the group.
The Language of Emotions in Cooperative Action
Studies (such as Bretherton 1986) have observed that children begin to use language that describe emotions and somatic states at around 18 months of age, and the portion of the time they spend talking about emotions increases with age.
In recording dialog in the homes of three-year-olds, it was observed that they most often speak of pleasure and pain in general terms, but about 5% of emotional expressions deal with more specific issues such as anger, distress, concern, sympathy, or disgust.
It's also observed that about half of conversations of emotions were about the causes of feelings, and closer analysis demonstrates the complexity of children's emotional knowledge. At 28 months of age, children understand that there is an antecedent event - something happened to cause a person to experience an emotion - as well as the fact that other people act a certain way in response to their own emotional displays.
The same studies observe that mothers increase their own talk about internal states between 13 and 28 months, presumably responding to their children's understanding and interest in such matters - and by age 38 months, around 60% of all speech directed at the child by its mother concerns emotional and somatic states. In addition to inquiring about the child's states, mothers often teach or coach their children in displaying emotion. (EN: I suspect this is cultural to some degree, also influenced by the degree that individual mothers dote on their children.)
Talking about emotion is different to experiencing emotion - but language is the means by which we seek to understand and explore experiences. As such it is derived that children's interest in talking about the subject shows curiousness about their own mental state and that of others - which in turn defines the self and one's own place in society.
Children's Understanding of the Causes of Emotion
It's been mentioned that the language children use to explore emotion demonstrate, between the ages of two and three, they identify that emotional states have causes and that they are coached by their mothers to control and mitigate their emotional reactions.
Adult understanding of emotions generally recognize that emotions arise from desires and the degree to which the consequences of action or turn of events evokes emotional responses due to their support or frustration of desire. That is "he was disappointed because he didn't know she had been invited" suggests that the emotional reaction of disappointment comes not only from the appearance of another person who was not expected (event) but from his wish to avoid her (desire).
It's suggested that children under four years of age do not understand emotions in this way. At that age they begin to recognize their emotional states are the result of things being other than they wish them to be, but it is not until about age six that they demonstrate a consideration that other people have desires as well.
Details are given of a few experiments and observational studies that support these conclusions.
Understanding the Masking of Emotion
From a very early age, children are coached to manage their emotional behaviors - which is to say that they are taught to hide or suppress their emotions and act as if they are not experiencing them. By adult life, it is quite common for people to portray a positive our neutral emotional state regardless of how they feel inside.
Conscious modulation of emotions is necessary for cooperative action. Children learn at a very early age that if they express certain emotions, their parents will react in a certain way, which is contrary to their desires.
It is a fairly common scenario for a child, even into adolescence and adulthood, to pretend to be sick to avoid going to school or work - but it is also quite common for a child who is sick to pretend to be well in order to get permission to go outside an play. And in the schoolyard, children hide their emotions of sadness and anger from bullies because they are aware that demonstrating their emotion will only encourage further antagonism.
Another experiment (Saarni 1984) was done with children of various ages: they were told that they were going to get a present, and were then given an age-inappropriate toy (a "baby toy"), and filmed to document their reaction. In general, children under the age of six were unrestrained in demonstrating their disappointment, but between the ages of six and ten there was an increasing tendency to mask their disappointment and express appreciation for the gift, which was more pronounced in girls than in boys.
Another experiment is presented in which children were read a story designed to invoke sadness - half of the group was told to resist feeling sad and the other half encouraged to let their emotions hold sway. Again, it was found that older children were better than younger, and girls better than boys, in suppressing their emotional response.
As an aside, the same experiment also included a memory test, and found that children who controlled their emotions were better at recalling specific details of the story than those who did not control their emotions.
Another observation contrasts eastern and western cultural perspectives on emotions: Japanese mothers expect their children to suppress their emotions earlier than American mothers. This corresponds with the cultural perspective of the Japanese, which maintains that emotions are more controllable and less desirable than the American perspective. It is also suggested that this is the reason that Japanese people, even into adulthood, have difficulty dealing with strong emotions.
There is some covalence on the reason that children do not begin to mask emotion until age six. Some suggest it is beyond the bounds of their cognitive abilities, but others suggest it is because parents tend to tolerate emotional display and children are not expected to behave themselves until an age at which they begin attending school (five or six years of age), as teachers are less prone to pander to or even tolerate emotional outbursts than parents.
This leads neatly to the point that in social environments, it is necessary to suppress emotions in order to cooperate - in essence, to suck it up and go along with the demands of others. However, complete abandonment of self-interest is seldom productive, but accepting a compromised outcome for the sake of accommodating the desires of others is very similar to concealing disappointment at an unsuitable gift.
In essence, negotiating the outcomes of a cooperative effort involves a willingness to accept a lesser degree of success than desired in order to gain cooperation by offering the other party some measure of success at their goals.
Ambivalence
Ambivalence, by definition, is experiencing two conflicting emotions at the same time. The ability to sort out feelings of ambivalence is rather a complex process that requires a high degree of self-awareness and understanding of the causes of emotion.
Children as young as one year demonstrate the experience of ambivalence (a child that alternately wants the attention of its mother then tries to physically push her away) but it is not until the age of ten that children begin to express their understanding of conflicting emotions.
When asked to describe the emotions they would experience in a scenario that includes one element that should evoke happiness and another that should evoke disappointment, most young children chose one emotion or the other. Even when questioned about their choice, they expressed that a person cannot experience two different emotions at the same time. Slightly older children separated the elements of the scenario to indicate they would be happy about one and sad about the other, but could not seem to reconcile how the combination of the two would make them feel. It is not until later (average of 11.3 years of age) that children express the feeling of mixed emotions - to be happy and sad at once because of the concurrence of opposing events.
The authors assert that ambivalence is the final step in having the emotional wiring necessary to social cooperation - to see that achieving partial success will result in a mixed emotional state, and to express that an outcome that is neither entirely positive nor entirely negative as acceptable.