The Oxford Handbook of Emotional Development 9780191889516, 9780198855903

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The Oxford Handbook of Emotional Development Daniel Dukes (ed.) et al. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/978019 8855903.001.0001 9780191889516

Online ISBN: Print ISBN:

9780198855903

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FRONT MATTER

List of Contributors  Published: January 2022

Subject: Psychology Series: Oxford Library of Psychology Collection: Oxford Handbooks Online

Yeojin Amy Ahn, Department of Psychology, University of Miami, USA Jennifer A. Bellingtier, Department of Developmental Psychology, Friedrich Schiller University Jena, Germany

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Tanya Broesch, Department of Psychology, Simon Fraser University, Canada Celia A. Brownell, Department of Psychology, University of Pittsburgh, USA Gustavo Carlo, School of Education, University of California, Irvine, USA

Anabel Castillo, Department of Psychological Sciences, University of California, Merced, USA Evgeniy Chervonenko, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne, Switzerland Zanna Clay, Department of Psychology, Durham University, UK Fabrice Clément, Cognitive Science Centre, Université de Neuchâtel, Switzerland Caitlin M. Conner, University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, Department of Psychiatry, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA Marci D. Cottingham, Department of Sociology, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands Stephanie Custode, Department of Psychology, University of Miami, USA Brenda M. S. da Silva, Institute of Psychology, Leiden University, The Netherlands Taylor N. Day, University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, Department of Psychiatry, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA Mario De Caro, Department of Philosophy, Università Roma Tre, Italy; Department of Philosophy, Tufts University, USA Kalee De France, Psychology Department, Concordia University, Canada; Queen’s University, Canada Frans B. M. de Waal, Department of Psychology, Emory University, USA p. xviii

Martin Debbané, Department of Psychology and Educational Sciences, University of Geneva, Switzerland; Research Department of Clinical, Educational, and Health Psychology, University College London, UK Linda Dell’Angela, Swiss Center for A ective Sciences, University of Geneva, Switzerland J. Logan Dicus, Department of Human Development and Family Science, University of Missouri, USA Daniel Dukes, Institute of Special Education, University of Fribourg, Switzerland; Swiss Center for A ective Sciences, University of Geneva, Switzerland Adva Eichengreen, Department of Developmental and Educational Psychology, Leiden University, The Netherlands; Center for Disability Studies, The Paul Baerwald School of Social Work and Social Welfare, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel Rebecca J. Erickson, Department of Sociology, University of Akron, USA Jenny Gibson, Centre for Research on Play in Education, Development, and Learning (PEDAL), University of Cambridge, UK Claudia M. Haase, School of Education and Social Policy, Department of Psychology, Northwestern University, USA

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Jeremy Carpendale, Department of Psychology, Simon Fraser University, Canada

Courtney A. Hagan, Department of Psychology, North Carolina State University, USA Jennifer Hahn–Holbrook, Department of Psychological Sciences, University of California, Merced, USA Amy G. Halberstadt, Department of Psychology, North Carolina State University, USA

Paul L. Harris, Graduate School of Education, Harvard University, USA Paul D. Hastings, Department of Psychology, University of California, Davis, USA Steven Hitlin, Department of Sociology & Criminology, University of Iowa, USA Emily F. Hittner, School of Education and Social Policy, Northwestern University, USA Colin Holbrook, Department of Cognitive and Information Sciences, University of California, Merced, USA Tom Hollenstein, Department of Psychology, Queen’s University, Canada Lizet Ketelaar, Dutch Foundation for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing Child, The Netherlands Yena Kim, Cognitive Psychology Unit, Institute of Psychology, Leiden University, The Netherlands p. xix

Hannah J. Kramer, Department of Psychology and Center for Mind and Brain, University of California, Davis, USA Mariska Kret, Cognitive Psychology Unit, Institute of Psychology, Leiden University, The Netherlands Kristin Hansen Lagattuta, Department of Psychology and Center for Mind and Brain, University of California, Davis, USA John Lambie, Department of Psychology and Sport Science, Faculty of Science and Engineering, Anglia Ruskin University, UK Boya Li, Department of Developmental and Educational Psychology, Leiden University, The Netherlands Je rey Liew, Department of Educational Psychology and Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences, Texas A&M University, USA Lukas D. Lopez, Department of Psychological Sciences, University of California, Merced, USA Jessica P. Lougheed, Department of Psychology, University of British Columbia Okanagan, Canada Fantasy T. Lozada, Department of Psychology, Virginia Commonwealth University, USA Juliana Lucena, Department of Linguistics, University of Pernambuco, Brazil Michael Mascolo, Department of Psychology, Merrimack College, USA Bruce Maxwell, Department of Educational Administration and Foundations, University of Montreal, Canada Carla A. Mazefsky, University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, Department of Psychiatry, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA Adriana S. Méndez Leal, Department of Psychology, University of California, Los Angeles, USA

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Sarah K. Harkness, Department of Sociology & Criminology, University of Iowa, USA

Daniel S. Messinger, Departments of Psychology, Pediatrics, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Music Engineering, University of Miami, USA Gina Mireault, Department of Psychology, Northern Vermont University—Johnson, USA

Jacquelyn Mo

tt, Department of Psychology, University of Miami, USA

Nicole L. Nelson, School of Psychology, University of Adelaide, Australia Ariele Niccoli, Department of Human Sciences, Italian University Line, Italy p. xx

Stephanie Olsen, Academy of Finland Centre of Excellence in the History of Experiences, Tampere University, Finland Reinhard Pekrun, Department of Psychology, University of Essex, Colchester, UK Joanna Peplak, Department of Psychological Science, University of California, Irvine, USA Lynn K. Perry, Department of Psychology, University of Miami, USA Aleksandra V. Petkova, Department of Psychology, University of Pittsburgh, USA Rista C. Plate, University of Pennsylvania, USA; University of Wisconsin, Madison, USA Seth D. Pollak, Department of Psychology, University of Wisconsin, Madison, USA Francisco Pons, Department of Psychology, University of Oslo, Norway Vasudevi Reddy, Department of Psychology, University of Portsmouth, UK Michaela Riediger, Department of Developmental Psychology, Friedrich Schiller University Jena, Germany Carolien Rie e, Department of Developmental and Educational Psychology, Leiden University, The Netherlands; Department of Human Media Interaction, University of Twente, The Netherlands; Department of Psychology and Human Development, University College London, UK Teresa Romero, School of Life Sciences, University of Lincoln, UK David Rudrauf, Faculty of Psychology and Education Science, Swiss Center for A ective Science, and University Center of Computer Science, University of Geneva, Switzerland Saad Sadiq, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Miami, USA Andrea C. Samson, Swiss Center for A ective Sciences, University of Geneva, Switzerland; Faculty of Psychology, Unidistance Suisse, Brig, Switzerland; Institute of Special Education, University of Fribourg, Switzerland David Sander, Swiss Center for A ective Sciences, University of Geneva, Switzerland; Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences, University of Geneva, Switzerland Mei-Ling Shyu, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Miami, USA Jennifer A. Silvers, Department of Psychology, University of California, Los Angeles, USA Peter N. Stearns, Department of History, George Mason University, USA

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Samantha G. Mitsven, Department of Psychology, University of Miami, USA

Jacquelyn E. Stephens, School of Education and Social Policy, Northwestern University, USA p. xxi

Ross A. Thompson, Department of Psychology, University of California, Davis, USA Elliot Turiel, Graduate School of Education, University of California, Berkeley, USA

Elisa Ugarte, Department of Human Ecology, University of California, Davis, USA Maria Silvia Vaccarezza, Department of Antiquity, Philosophy and History, University of Genova, Italy Amrisha Vaish, Department of Psychology, University of Virginia, USA Karen Vallgårda, Saxo Institute, University of Copenhagen, Denmark Daniel Vanello, Department of Philosophy, University of Warwick, UK Guida Veiga, Comprehensive Health Research Centre (CHRC), Departamento de Desporto e Saúde, Escola de Saúde e Desenvolvimento Humano, Universidade de Évora, Portugal Karine M. P. Viana, Department of Psychology, University of Oslo, Norway Eric A. Walle, Department of Psychological Sciences, University of California, Merced, USA Christine E. Webb, Department of Human Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University, USA Sherri C. Widen, Education, Research, & Impact, Committee for Children, USA Andrea T. Wieckowski, University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, Department of Psychiatry, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA; Virginia Tech, Department of Psychology, Blacksburg, Virginia, USA; A. J. Drexel Autism Institute, Drexel University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA Kristina Woodard, Department of Psychology, University of Wisconsin, Madison, USA Alexandra Zaharia, Faculty of Psychology, Unidistance Suisse, Switzerland; Institute of Special Education, University of Fribourg, Switzerland; Swiss Center for A ective Sciences, University of Geneva, Switzerland Anat Zaidman–Zait, Department of School Counseling and Special Education, Tel–Aviv University, Israel Imac Maria Zambrana, Department of Special Needs Education, University of Oslo, Norway Qing Zhou, Department of Psychology, University of California, Berkeley, USA p. xxii

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Jonathan H. Turner, Institute for Theoretical Social Science, University of California, Santa Barbara, USA

The Oxford Handbook of Emotional Development Daniel Dukes (ed.) et al. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/978019 8855903.001.0001 9780191889516

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9780198855903

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FRONT MATTER

Introduction: Conceptualizing and Advancing an Interdisciplinary Account of Emotional Development  https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198855903.002.0010 Published: January 2022

Subject: Psychology Series: Oxford Library of Psychology Collection: Oxford Handbooks Online

Pages xxiii–xxviii

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Time is commonly considered the fourth dimension in mathematics and physics, after length, width, and depth. Likewise, there may well be a case for considering time as the fourth dimension in the scienti c study of human nature. After behavior, cognition, and emotion, perhaps it is time, and, more speci cally, development, that can be seen as a measure and explanation of how and why we do what we do, think what we think, and feel what we feel. After all, understanding what is necessitates an understanding of what was role played by developmental researchers, whatever their discipline. Here, the focus is speci cally on emotional development, with perspectives provided from across the a ective sciences to these important questions. The collection of chapters presented in this handbook highlights important considerations for the study of emotion, development, and emotional development. Here, we consider each of these terms, and brie y examine how the integrated and multidisciplinary nature of this handbook can advance the study of emotional development.

What Is Emotion? Emotions entail relating with one’s environment on matters of personal signi cance (Barrett & Campos, 1987; Frijda, 1986). How one relates with and assigns signi cance to one’s environment varies from person to person, age to age, group to group, and generation to generation, as well as from species to species. Be they human adults or children, canines, felines, or porcupines, organisms are inherently constrained in how p. xxiv they relate with and respond to the environment. Thus, overemphasis on a singular aspect

of emotion—

be it the face, action tendency, or neuronal underpinnings—risks inadvertently diminishing or eliminating the emotional experiences of those organisms for whom such aspects of emotion may be alternatively formed or absent (Darwin, 1872/2009). While this might be a novel consideration for the psychologist, neuroscientist, or philosopher, it is likely obvious to scholars of anthropology, history, or sociology. Emotions are simultaneously speci c and variable phenomena. Each emotion has some speci c core—a common theme across occurrences of the emotion. Whether I am sad about the result of a football match, or because I forgot my wallet and cannot buy my friend a co ee, or because a loved one has died, a loss has taken place: we venture that all occurrences of sadness are inextricably linked, although certainly to di erent degrees, to loss. This essence is where a de nition of sadness, or indeed any other emotion, should begin: in psychology, the idea of “core relational themes” (Lazarus, 1991) or “recurrent adaptive situations” (Tooby & Cosmides, 1990a,b); in philosophy, the idea of “formal objects” (Teroni, 2007). Importantly, in every culture where loss exists, it is likely that some signal for the associated emotion, or at least the possibility of understanding the experience of sadness, exists. Yet, somewhat paradoxically, emotions are also inherently variable. The behavioral and cognitive consequences of discrete emotions can di er considerably across contexts and cultures (Lutz & White, 1986; Oatley, 1993), and their manifestation can even vary between and within individual organisms (Darwin, 1872/2009; Markus & Kitayama, 1991; Kuppens et al., 2009). Navigating the conceptual space circumscribed by the axes of speci city and variability has both perplexed and excited emotion researchers for centuries; the di is compounded when one considers the temporal dimension of development.

culty of such a venture

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and what will be, as well as the multideterminant factors that account for such change. This is the important

What Is Development? There is some debate among developmental researchers regarding what is meant by development. Is the term synonymous with change? To some extent, yes. Development does entail change, but only in the sense abrupt, stepwise or emergent, linear or nonlinear, but the changes from before to after are necessarily related (see Bowlby, 1969; Thelen & Smith, 1994). Thus, while paper burned to ash changes, one would not conclude that development has transpired. Development would entail the paper changing from a simple sheet into, say, a love letter, a legal contract, or a paper airplane. To say that a process, individual, culture, or species develops is not necessarily to assign lesser or greater importance to what was or will be; it can simply be to acknowledge that the phenomenon of interest changes from one point in time to another, while retaining some related aspect of its previous state or nature. Developmental researchers enjoy a unique and privileged vantage point to identify associations and variabilities between and within experiences and behaviors, to connect the shifting dots, as it were. In so p. xxv

doing, we can provide a counterpoint to the

tendency to reduce consideration of the relevant

phenomenon to a study of state, or to the assessment of one particular criterion or component. As researchers of emotional development, then, it is our task to consider how a particular emotion unfolds given the context, the individual, the group, and the timescale.

What Is Emotional Development? Having laid out our view of emotion and development, we now consider development of emotion. From a developmental perspective, the exibility of the function of emotions as adaptive organizing systems across a range of contexts (Sroufe & Waters, 1977) is of greatest consequence. As described in the previous section, a view of emotions as speci c points in time leads inextricably to the misconception that emotions are a state. Emotions emerge and they subside: they are a process, not an outcome. Thus, while it can be said that an individual experiences shame, that shame may have unfolded from overzealous anger in response to a particular transgression. Likewise, the child’s internalization of standards may result in sadness at one age manifesting as shame at a later age—with what quali es as shameful varying across cultures and historical periods. In this way, emotional experiences unfold in an organized process, take on nuance, and may even qualitatively change to another emotion. On the surface, shame is not more or less developed than anger, just as the love letter or the paper airplane are not more or less developed. Rather, such forms of being are better considered as more or less adaptive given the constraints of the context and the individual (see Bowlby, 1969; Bril, 2015). Considerations of how emotions are elicited, persist, change, and evolve are integral parts of the study of emotional development. For example, the temporal unfolding of emotion is a persistent challenge for researchers, and there are important sensitivities in framing from one discipline to another. What the neuroscientist considers a lengthy process, the historian likely deems too short to consider for study. In considering the ontogeny and elicitation of emotion, the emotion process should not be thought of as a line with a start and end point. Rather, the process can better be conceived as a looping spiral of perception, evaluation, and action serving to regulate one’s relations with the environment on matters of personal signi cance (Gross, 2015; Wiener, 1948). Moreover, it can be expected that such relational signi cance inevitably changes across people (e.g., Davidson, 1998), cultures (e.g., Briggs, 1970), historical periods (e.g., Febvre, 1938/1973), and species (e.g., Darwin, 1872/2009). Indeed, it is possible, even likely, that emotions manifest and function di erently in the newborn and the adult, as well as the bonobo and the swan, and even within groups of individuals. Thus, to say that an emotion is misses the exibility inherent in the

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that what was is related to, yet di erent from, what is, and what will be. Development can be gradual or

process. It is more valid to consider what a particular emotion is for a speci c organism, in a speci c environment, at a speci c point in time, and how the relational signi cance changes within, between, or across persons, societies, cultures, species, and time. Thus, if development concerns the study of what was and what will be to gain a better idea of what is, and if emotional development can be loosely

de ned as the study of what mattered in the past and what will matter in the future in order to better understand what matters in the present. Addressing these questions is the important role played by developmental researchers of emotion, irrespective of their discipline.

Ethos of This Handbook An important step in moving the study of emotional development forward entails the integration and synthesis of various approaches. In writing this introduction, we realize that not every researcher will agree with our characterizations of emotion, development, and emotional development. However, any meaningful discussion of these constructs must begin with a search for common ground. This introduction and, more generally, this handbook, are attempts at achieving this goal. The overarching ethos is to nudge people together from disparate research approaches and backgrounds, illustrate connections, and stimulate conversations—be they internal monologues or new collaborations. With this ethos in mind, two important decisions were taken while conceiving of and realizing this project. First and foremost, we sought to interpose and interweave di erent disciplines and perspectives. Thus, each section of the handbook consists of chapters from multiple disciplines and di erent lenses of study to encourage researchers to either stumble upon or seek out theoretical perspectives and empirical data from outside of their usual focus. Second, the chapters within each section are connected by a broader theme of research (e.g., communication and understanding, interactive contexts) rather than the canonical approach of grouping chapters based on approach or population of study (e.g., research methods, atypical development, comparative research). Oftentimes, we simply do not know how people study the same thing across disciplines, and the canonical organizational approach, by speci c topic, would have resulted in the siloing of discipline-speci c sections and been contradictory to our rst aim. In fact, it was very di

cult to

separate the chapters into sections within the handbook due to the clear connections that exist between the chapters across sections. For example, socialization is inherently linked with the broader evolutionary history of our species, the important role of communication, how people interact with one another, and long-term value systems that result. Thus, while the sections and chapters are necessarily delimited, the reader is encouraged to consider how they are interrelated. Our intent for this handbook was to take the rst step of bringing together scholars from diverse disciplines to discuss emotional development in an interdisciplinary manner. We have admittedly fallen short of this aim. Speci cally, while each section includes researchers from di erent disciplines, this volume is multidisciplinary rather than interdisciplinary. Producing a truly interdisciplinary volume would have entailed uniting researchers to celebrate similarities and di erences from each other’s discipline, spending p. xxvii time learning the strengths and weakness of other perspectives, integrating

what might apply to one’s

own discipline, and, perhaps even more ambitiously, working with people from other disciplines around a particular question or topic. While this handbook may not have actualized this ideal, it is our hope that it will serve to shift the eld’s center of gravity toward taking such a step and that the subsequent momentum can propel the study of emotional development forward.

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p. xxvi emotions concern what is signi cant or what matters, then

References Barrett, K. C., & Campos, J. J. (1987). Perspectives on emotional development: II. A functionalist approach to emotions. In J. Osofsky (Ed.), Handbook of Infant Development (2nd ed., pp. 555–578). Wiley. Google Scholar Google Preview WorldCat COPAC

Briggs, J. L. (1970). Never in anger: Portrait of an Eskimo family. Harvard University Press. Google Scholar Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Bril, B. (2015). Learning to use tools: A functional approach to action. In L. Filliettaz & S. Billett (Eds.), Francophone perspectives of learning through work (pp. 95–118). Springer. Google Scholar Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Darwin, C. (2009). The expression of emotion in man and animals. Penguin Books. (Original work published 1872) Google Scholar Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Davidson, R. J. (1998). A ective style and a ective disorders: Perspectives from a ective neuroscience. Cognition and Development, 12(3), 307–330. Google Scholar WorldCat Febvre, L. (1973). History and psychology. In P. Burke (Ed.) & K. Folca (Trans.), A new kind of history: From the writings of Febvre (pp. 1–11). Harper & Row Publishers. (Original work published 1938) Google Scholar Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Frijda, N. (1986). The emotions. Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Gross, J. J. (2015). Emotion regulation: Current status and future prospects. Psychological Inquiry, 26(1), 1–26. Google Scholar WorldCat Kuppens, P., Stouten, J., & Mesquita, B. (2009). Individual di erences in emotion components and dynamics: Introduction to the special issue. Cognition & Emotion, 23(7), 1249–1258. Google Scholar WorldCat Lazarus, R. S. (1991). Emotion and adaptation. Oxford University Press. Google Scholar Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Lutz, C., & White, G. M. (1986). The anthropology of emotions. Annual Review of Anthropology, 15, 405–436. Google Scholar WorldCat Markus, H. R., & Kitayama, S. (1991). Culture and the self: Implications for cognition, emotion, and motivation. Psychological Review, 98(2), 224. Google Scholar WorldCat Oatley, K. (1993). Social construction in emotions. In M. Lewis & J. M. Haviland (Eds.), Handbook of emotions (pp. 341–352). Guilford Press. Google Scholar Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Sroufe, L. A., & Waters, E. (1977). Attachment as an organizational construct. Child Development, 48(4), 1184–1199. Google Scholar WorldCat Teroni, F. (2007). Emotions and formal objects. Dialectica, 61(3), 395–415.

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Bowlby, J. (1969). Attachment and loss. Volume 1: Attachment. Basic Books. Google Scholar Google Preview WorldCat COPAC

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Tooby, J., & Cosmides, L. (1990b). The past explains the present: Emotional adaptations and the structure of ancestral environments. Ethology and Sociobiology, 11(4–5), 375–424. Google Scholar WorldCat p. xxviii Wiener, N. (1948). Cybernetics: Control and communication in the animal and the machine. MIT Press.

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Tooby, J., & Cosmides, L. (1990a). On the universality of human nature and the uniqueness of the individual: The role of genetics and adaptation. Journal of Personality, 58(1), 17–67. Google Scholar WorldCat

The Oxford Handbook of Emotional Development Daniel Dukes (ed.) et al. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/978019 8855903.001.0001 9780191889516

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9780198855903

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Preface  https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198855903.002.0007 Published: January 2022

Pages ix–x

Subject: Psychology Series: Oxford Library of Psychology Collection: Oxford Handbooks Online

WHILE

there is always an element of the arbitrary concerning when to date the origins of some particular

phenomenon—emotional development being a case in point—we would like to suggest the International Summer School of the A ective Sciences 2018 as the event where this writing project began. While Danny

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and Andrea cohosted the eight-day event at the magni cent Chateau de Bossey on Lake Geneva, Switzerland, Eric was one of the invited international speakers. This event gave us the opportunity to talk about emotional development with leading experts and motivated students from di erent disciplines, whether as part of the presentations and workshops, or while enjoying a nice glass of wine with dinner. Indeed, we are delighted to say that many of the speakers at that event accepted invitations to contribute to A ective Sciences who made the Summer School possible, but also the chapter authors who were there at the point of origin. Indeed, we would obviously like to thank all the chapter authors for their hard work in providing the main content of this volume, which is, as far as we know, the rst multidisciplinary handbook of emotional development. We have looked on with admiration as colleagues have continued to produce such remarkable work to a strict timeline, when there have been, perhaps, more constraints than usual on people’s time. Thanks, too, to those at Oxford University Press who were able to provide such fantastic guidance and support. In particular, we would like to thank Martin Baum, Charlotte Holloway and Janine Fisher for their wonderful professionalism and their excellent gin and tonic. We would also like to thank our families for their ongoing love and support, and particularly, this time, our children. As we have all been obliged in an act of social distancing to work from home during the COVID-19 pandemic, we have all had the opportunity to spend more time than usual with our children—playing with them, parenting them, watching them grow and (emotionally) develop. This volume is dedicated to them. p. x

Danny, Andrea, and Eric

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this volume. We would like to particularly thank not only David Sander and his team at the Swiss Center for

The Oxford Handbook of Emotional Development Daniel Dukes (ed.) et al. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/978019 8855903.001.0001 9780191889516

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9780198855903

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CHAPTER

1 Evolved to Learn: Emotions as Calibrational Adaptations  Colin Holbrook, Jennifer Hahn-Holbrook https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198855903.013.14 Published: 13 January 2022

Pages 3–17

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Abstract Emotion adaptations have evolved in response to eons of selection pressures characteristic of social and physical life over the history of our lineage. Cues relevant to these distinct selection pressures cacious behavioral responses. Selection favors

the strategic calibration of emotional processes to key contextual factors, such as tness-relevant individual, situational, and/or cultural di erences. This chapter provides an overview of empirical and theoretical work on processes by which emotion adaptations may attune to particularities of self, situation, and culture, integrating neuroscienti c, anthropological, and psychological approaches. Finally, developmental processes are discussed as themselves potential adaptations, including a broad outline of how developmental a ective scientists might test such hypotheses.

Keywords: natural selection, emotion, motivation, evolution, evolutionary development, cross-cultural di erences, individual di erences Subject: Psychology, Developmental Psychology Series: Oxford Library of Psychology Collection: Oxford Handbooks Online

Introduction IN

a seemingly deathless confusion, evolutionary perspectives on the emotions are often misunderstood as

entailing in exibility and invariance. Here, we review convergent empirical and theoretical work indicating that emotion adaptations calibrate to particularities of the situation, the self, and the socioecological environment. We also consider ways in which developmental a ective processes operative in early life also constitute evolutionary adaptations, and provide suggestions for future work integrating evolutionary and developmental approaches.

Functional Specialization and Neural Co-optation Evolutionary explanations at the level of ultimate function seek to clarify the bene ts of traits with respect to reproduction and survival, whereas proximate explanations address how traits are mechanistically engineered and implemented (Mayr, 1961; Tinbergen, 1963). Ultimately, evolutionary a ective scientists understand emotions as coordinating responses that would have, on average, e ectively addressed distinct challenges that recurrently confronted the social and physical lives of individuals in our lineage (Cosmides & Tooby, 2000; see Turner, this volume). Proximately, evolutionary a ective scientists regard emotions as nested assemblages of myriad neural and somatic components orchestrated to produce coherent responses. p. 4

According to the prevailing evolutionary meta-theory of the emotions, emotions superordinately recruit and entrain constellations of subordinate perceptual, motor, physiological, and cognitive programs into characteristic patterns (Oatley & Johnson–Laird, 1987; Nesse, 1990; Tooby & Cosmides, 2008). Specialized, complex mental functions of various types emerge, via interaction between subfunctions coalescing in the brain, into hierarchical assemblages of networks and subnetworks (H. C. Barrett, 2017; also see Gkigkitzis et al., 2017). In this integrative fashion, upon detection of relevant eliciting cues, emotions coordinate diverse processes relevant to their functional themes, including (but not limited to) attention, memory, focal goals, digestion, visual acuity, immune function, blood ow, information seeking, energy levels, inference,

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should reliably elicit relevant emotions and motivate e

posture, and so on. Importantly, no single element should be xated on as the sine qua non of an emotion. In the brain, for example, amygdala activity has been closely linked with fear, but also supports attention and motivational functions relevant to multiple other emotions, including emotions of positive valence such as lust (e.g., Adolphs, 2008; Lang & Bradley, 2013; Sander et al., 2003). ciently share signi cantly overlapping proximate mechanisms (see

Anderson, 2010). For example, Bartels and Zeki (2004) compared the activation pro les of maternal love and romantic love in response to images of either romantic partners or babies, observing comparable anterior cingulate reactivity consistent with approach motivation and attention orienting, as well as comparable activation of reward regions (e.g., striatum, ventral tegmental area). Consistent with the distinct functions of maternal versus romantic love, unique activation patterns were also observed, such as periaqueductal gray reactivity in response to infants, but not romantic partners; periaqueductal gray is thought to help mediate maternal behavior (e.g., Lonstein & Stern, 1998). Conversely, participants evinced hypothalamic reactivity to images of their partners, but not their infants, in a pattern likely related to the sexual aspect of romantic, but not maternal, love (Karama et al., 2002). Convergent neuroimaging studies likewise depict emotions as distinguishable functional assemblages of overlapping submechanisms. For example, although divergent emotions draw on common brain regions (e.g., shared cortical midline and frontal areas), a meta-analysis of 83 neuroimaging studies reported distinct activation patterns for anger, disgust, fear, sadness, and happiness (Vytal & Hamann, 2010). Stated feelings of sadness, fear, shame, anger, pride, disgust, envy, happiness, and lust aroused while in the scanner have been similarly classi ed by a machine-learning algorithm (Kassam et al., 2013). In a particularly compelling recent study, Saarimäki and colleagues (2016) induced disgust, fear, happiness, and sadness via both brief lm clips and mental imagery, and then were able to correctly classify each distinct emotion using whole-brain multivoxel pattern analysis (also see Sitaram et al., 2011). Not only were the classi cations accurate across induction modality ( lm vs. imagery) but they also generalized across individual participants, in neural signatures comprised of cortical and subcortical circuits. Subjective selfreports correlated with the extent to which the signature neural patterns were activated, suggesting a connection between emotional experience and activity in those regions. In sum, emotions appear to be p. 5

proximately

implemented via distributed assemblages of neural and somatic components identi able in

terms of holistic pro les of activation and deactivation, and including higher cortical regions sometimes regarded as distinct from emotion.

Contextual Contingency At the proximate level of analysis, because emotions are partially comprised of higher cortical mechanisms related to behavioral exibility and learning, emotion elicitors and output behaviors should be expected to display context-sensitive variation in response to local circumstances, including culturally acquired norms (see Plate et al., this volume). Ultimately, selection favors the evolution of capacities for contextually appropriate, individually and culturally contingent emotional performance. Indeed, not only is contextual variability consistent with evolutionary perspectives on the emotions, but observations of the strategic modulation of emotional responses to align with tness incentives constitute the strongest evidence of adaptive design. Research on anger and disgust provides ready illustrations of adaptive contextual variability with regard to the particular individuals involved in eliciting incidents. For example, the degree of anger triggered by transgressions has been found to be contingent on the tness costs entailed by the identity of the person harmed, such that harm in icted on the self elicits greater anger and direct aggression than does harm to acquaintances (Molho et al., 2017) or strangers (Pedersen et al., 2018), with a similar pattern of heightened

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Functionally distinct emotions can e

anger and aggression when harm befalls siblings (Lopez et al., 2021). These ndings make functional sense given the tness costs inherent to aggressive confrontation (e.g., potential physical and/or reputational harm), which de-incentivize confrontation unless outweighed by the bene ts of deterring substantial future costs (e.g., to self or kin). Anger and related inclinations toward punishment are moderated by the identity of transgressors as well as victims, such that kin or allies evoke both relatively muted feelings of modulated by contextual factors. For example, pathogenic olfactory cues associated with kin elicit less disgust than do the smells of sick strangers (Stevenson & Repacholi, 2005), and mothers nd the smell of their own babies’ feces less disgusting than the smell of other babies’ feces—even when the soiled diapers are unlabeled or mislabeled (Case et al., 2006). The tness bene ts of caring for kin o set the costs of pathogen exposure (Tybur et al., 2013; Tybur & Lieberman, 2016). Trait di erences in the ability to in ict costs (relevant to anger) or to withstand pathogens (relevant to disgust) also appear to functionally moderate responses. With regard to anger, physically strong individuals are more prone to experience anger and to resolve con icts through force (Sell et al., 2009; Archer & Thanzami, 2009; also see Fessler et al., 2014). With regard to disgust, individuals who are more vulnerable to infection (e.g., due to higher progesterone levels) have been found to be more disgust-prone and more p. 6

inclined to engage in behavioral precautions against pathogen transmission

(Conway et al., 2007;

Żelaźniewicz et al., 2016). Relatedly, disgust sensitivity appears to systematically track shifts in immune vulnerability (Fessler et al., 2005; Fleischman & Fessler, 2011). With regard to both anger and disgust, selection favored greater risk-taking in human males due to the greater variance in reproductive success among males than females, leading to higher-stakes competition—and hence larger “gambles” with regard to incurring potential costs (e.g., injury or death from combat or illness) in exchange for the chance of obtaining greater reproductive rewards (for a detailed argument, see Sparks et al., 2018). Consistent with the sex di erence in tness incentives to engage in risky behavior, men are more prone to anger and violence than women (Archer, 2004; Fessler et al., 2004; Sell et al., 2009), and a large-scale meta-analysis con rms that men are substantially less disgust-prone than women (Sparks et al., 2018), a pattern observed worldwide in a cross-cultural study spanning 30 societies (Tybur et al., 2016). Recent work on the positively valenced, prosocial emotion of elevation reveals a similar propensity to adaptively adjust to social and situational cues of the prevalence of cooperation versus exploitation. Individuals experience elevation, characterized by warm feelings (e.g., of being “uplifted”) and motivation to help others, upon witnessing exemplary acts of prosociality (e.g., Algoe & Haidt, 2009; Schnall et al., 2010; for a recent review, see Thomson & Siegel, 2017). The tendency to facultatively adjust one’s prosocial inclinations according to prevailing levels of prosociality in one’s social environment has been theorized to maximize social bene ts (i.e., through direct or indirect reciprocity, reputation enhancement, and/or inclusion in cooperative endeavors), and to minimize costs entailed by engaging in antisocial behavior in highly prosocial contexts wherein others are more likely to penalize sel sh actors (Fessler et al., 2019; see Vaish, this volume). Prosocial behavior is maladaptive when individuals are embedded in a predominantly antisocial, exploitative social environment. Hence feelings of elevation should be reduced. Consistent with this account, in a recent series of studies, participants reported signi cantly less elevation when a prosocial exemplar was depicted as being exploited by others in his community (Fessler et al., 2019). Trait di erences in expectations regarding the prosociality of others have also been reliably observed to moderate responses to witnessing prosociality, such that individuals whose experiences with others have been generally noncooperative and exploitative nd cues of prosociality less evocative of elevation, mediating diminished helping behavior (Sparks et al., 2019). Phenotypes can be calibrated by early environmental inputs to improve the t between organisms and their environments (Belsky, 1997; Bonner, 1965; Stearns et al., 2008; Wolf et al., 2007), and decades of research in both nonhuman animals and humans provide support for the developmental plasticity of a ective

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anger and heightened inclinations to forgive (McCullough et al., 2013). Pathogen disgust appears similarly

phenotypes (for reviews, see Davis et al., 2011; Hostinar & Gunnar, 2013; Lyons et al., 2010; Pechtel & Pizzagalli, 2011). For example, exposing rodent pups to frequent and unpredictable signals that they live in a dangerous environment (e.g., by administering electric shocks, forced swimming, or separation from p. 7

caregivers) causes changes in brain and endocrine vigilance systems that lead to more fearful phenotypes in adulthood (Ishikawa et al.,

2015). Similarly, humans exposed to violence or trauma in early life are more

that yielded aggregate tness bene ts in facilitating responsiveness to dangerous environments (e.g., Nesse, 1990). Much as di erences in early experience may guide the later development of emotions over the lifespan in ways that track challenges within local environments, so may cultural di erences guide the emergence of the emotions in ways that track the socioecological challenges of particular societies.

Cultural Contingency Cultural di erences in emotion are sometimes discussed as though such variation were at odds with evolutionary accounts (e.g., L. F. Barrett, 2006, 2013). In truth, culturally acquired norms and ideas should in uence emotion elicitation and output behaviors (see Broesch & Carpendale, this volume), much as the situational and individual trait determinants discussed in the preceding section have been predicted and observed to. The emotions have been hypothesized to incorporate culturally transmitted knowledge and concepts— presumably including folk emotion concepts and cultural emotion norms—to calibrate emotion elicitors, regulation tendencies, event appraisals, selection of appropriate behavioral responses, and so on (e.g., Markus & Kitayama, 1994; Tooby & Cosmides, 2008). As such, folk emotion concepts appear likely to both in uence and be in uenced by emotions which are nonetheless heritable in a panhuman sense (Fessler, 2004; Gervais & Fessler, 2016). Emotions should be anticipated to require extensive social experience to develop (e.g., to learn about local hazards or resources, modes of status striving, access to allies or mates, locally prescribed levels of cooperation; for a fuller account, see Tooby & Cosmides, 2008). Many adaptations are designed to develop di erently in responses to varying environments, according to genetically speci ed reaction norms (e.g., H. C. Barrett, 2012), raising the possibility that some variation in the expression of emotions may be due to reaction norms that are responsive to certain cultural or ecological factors varying across societies. In other words, selection is likely to have evolved conditional developmental rules of the form: Given condition X, pursue emotion variant A; given condition Y, pursue emotion variant B; and so on. Consider the American eel (Anguilla rostrata), which matures at a slower rate and to a larger size in freshwater than in saltwater (Côté et al., 2013); might particular human emotions be designed with reaction norms sensitive to di erences in factors such as collectivism, food or mate availability, population density, intragroup cooperation, intergroup con ict, disease prevalence, status hierarchy, and so on? Even should such reaction norms be identi ed, some portion of cultural variation in emotion will almost certainly be due to mismatches between ancestral environments and developmental environments that alter otherwise typical p. 8

emotion development as the byproduct outcome of a surfeit, paucity, or novel

combination of

environmental cues, rather than according to inherited reaction norms sensitive to those cues. Thus, we are not confronted by a false choice between nature and nurture, but by a set of related questions entwining both: 1) Which culturally contingent emotion phenotypes emerge due to naturally selected reaction norms— and which speci c factors are these reaction norms attuned to? 2) Which culturally contingent emotion phenotypes emerge due to byproduct e ects rather than reaction norms?

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likely to experience anxiety in adulthood (Saleh et al., 2017), a shift which may re ect an a ective strategy

3) Which emotions, if any, are essentially una ected by cultural di erences—and why? To address these open questions, a ective scientists will require far more complete and systematic descriptive data on cultural variation than currently exists. Previous cross-cultural emotion research has been conducted in a piecemeal manner which has largely overlooked small-scale societies, and is therefore cient to ascertain the actual range of human emotion phenotypes, let alone correlate them with

potentially relevant societal and ecological variables. However, in light of the close association between emotion propensity and personality traits, recent ndings concerning the cultural and environmental determinants of personality structure may provide a useful proof of concept. According to Lukaszewski and colleagues’ (2017)  socioecological complexity hypothesis, the extent to which personality traits covary in a given society should be inversely correlated with the number of niches available within that society, because selection favors phenotypic specialization during development to optimize performance within one’s social and physical environment, and personality traits are directly relevant to successful performance within di ering niches. Thus, individuals who nd themselves embedded within complex societies may pursue tness-enhancing outcomes (e.g., status seeking, alliance formation, mate nding, o spring provisioning) via a variety of niches suited to a variety of personality pro les. For example, the personality pro le of elementary school teachers may not be well suited to that of homicide detectives, or vice versa, but both niches are viable in a complex society. By contrast, within less complex societies, individuals are confronted with a more constrained set of social and material challenges, leading people to engage in a relatively homogenous range of social interactions and subsistence tasks (Gurven et al., 2009) that not only can be navigated by a less complex and varied range of personality pro les than found in postindustrial societies, but might actually be more successfully accomplished with fewer dissociations in personality structure. Indeed, Gurven and colleagues (2013) note that the emphasis on collective, consensual community decision making observed in many small-scale societies incentivizes linking traits such as extroversion with traits such as agreeableness and conscientiousness in order to improve cooperation and deter defection and attendant con icts. As hypothesized, large-scale personality survey data collected from 55 countries p. 9

varying in degree of economic development, urban living (associated with greater numbers of

social and

occupational niches), and range of economic exports (a proxy for the number of distinct occupational sectors) revealed a strong negative association between socioecological complexity and the extent of positive correlation between the “Big Five” personality dimensions, such that individuals from less complex societies evinced less distinctly dissociable personality dimensions (Lukaszewski et al., 2017). In a complementary nding derived from assessing the “Big Five” Inventory in a small-scale society low in relative socioecological complexity, the Tsimane’ hunter-horticulturalists of Bolivia appeared to possess a “Big Two” oriented around prosociality and industriousness (Gurven et al., 2013). Although admittedly these ndings regarding personality structure and niche complexity are only indirectly related to the questions posed above regarding the potential reactivity of emotions to socioecological factors, they are highly suggestive, particularly given the close link between personality and emotion. Could a similar dynamic apply to the structure of the emotions, such that socioecological environments characterized by more [less] specialized niches evoke more [less] variegated emotion categories? From an adaptationist perspective, and in line with emerging results indicating societal variation in personality structure, emotions are likely to re ect the exigencies of societal and environmental niches.

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insu

Emotion, Serial Homology, and Culture Newly evolved structures derive from and exploit the functional a ordances of older structures. For example, the limbs of whales, birds, and primates, despite their apparent physical and functional such as successive spinal vertebrae (Cartmill, 1987), an ancestral trait is duplicated with modi cation, producing either newly derived traits in place of the antecedent trait, or derived traits coincident with the conserved antecedent trait. Homology can also occur within psychological systems (Lorenz, 1958; Moore, 2013; Dehaene, 2005; Holbrook & Fessler, 2015). For example, the brain system enabling representation of metaphorical “social distance” in a

liation appears to be a serial psychological homologue that elaborates

an antecedent system originally evolved for literal spatial reasoning (Parkinson & Wheatley, 2013). Serial psychological homologues of complex traits, such as emotions, are thought to be instantiated in patterns of activation and deactivation which draw on signi cantly overlapping (but nonidentical) assemblages of bodily and neural components (Clark, 2010; Holbrook, 2016). To introduce the concept of serial emotion homologues, consider the progression from pathogen disgust to sexual disgust. Pathogen disgust appears to be the antecedent emotion adaptation (Curtis et al., 2011) and is elicited by visual (Tybur et al., 2013), olfactory (Wicker et al., 2003), or gustatory cues of the likely presence p. 10

of pathogens (DeSimone et al., 2001). Once activated, pathogen disgust motivates withdrawal from

the

eliciting stimulus (Roseman et al., 1994), physiological changes to deter contamination, such as nausea or vomiting (Rozin et al., 2008), and cognitive shifts such as enhanced memory of potential contamination sources (see Tybur et al., 2013). Sexual uid exchange and close physical contact entail risk of pathogen exposure, in addition to costs such as the expenditure of time and e ort in childrearing over alternative mating opportunities or other tness-relevant objectives. To maximize cost/bene t trade-o s in sexual behavior, selection may have repurposed elements of pathogen disgust to create a homologous sexual disgust emotion customized to deter detrimental sexual interactions (e.g., with close kin) in particular. Like pathogen disgust, sexual disgust motivates withdrawal from contact with potentially harmful bodily uids, and intense feelings of sexual disgust can even arouse nausea, presumably due to shared underlying proximate mechanisms with pathogen disgust. Similarities suggestive of common circuitry aside, sexual disgust also displays distinct capacities from pathogen disgust, including intricate mate-quality assessment algorithms which moderate the intensity of reactions, taking into account relevant variables such as genetic relatedness, availability of alternative mating options, immunological compatibility, and indirect cues of genetic quality (Tybur et al., 2013). Given the strong and enduring selection pressures related to mate choice, and the evident algorithmic sophistication of the moderators, sexual disgust appears likely to be a phylogenetic adaptation optimized over eons of selection. By contrast with phylogenetic homology, serial emotion homologues may also theoretically arise over ontogeny, as byproducts of the a ordances of antecedent emotions coupled with environmental inputs, much as visual word recognition can emerge from the reuse of object recognition mechanisms when humans are raised in literate cultures (Dehaene & Cohen, 2007). In this manner, cultural evolutionary processes might plausibly exploit the a ordances of phylogenetically evolved emotions to spawn culturebound emotions within individual lifetimes. For example, moral disgust has been found to facilitate both metaphorical and literal social distancing in response to norm violations (Cannon et al., 2011; Chapman et al., 2009; Molho et al., 2017). Moral disgust may conceivably be a developmental homologue arising via interplay between processes of deontic reasoning and extant disgust adaptations, rather than an adaptation evolved via natural selection. We raise this possibility solely for the sake of argument—moral disgust may well turn out to be an adaptation. If so, moral disgust should evince a pro le as distinguishable from sexual disgust as sexual disgust is distinguishable from pathogen disgust, indicative of an optimized t between its social function and tness-relevant moderators to improve the cost/bene t trade-o s of social distancing.

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distinctiveness, are all homologues of a common ancestral trait (Wagner, 2014). In cases of serial homology,

In this fashion, panhuman emotion adaptations may set the stage for ontogenetically emergent emotion homologues occurring in some societies, but not in others. If so, there may be societies which, due to parochial norms, institutions, socioecological specializations, or other factors, possess genuinely distinct emotion homologues which have heretofore not been recognized. These culture-bound emotions, though distinct, would resemble the antecedent emotions from which they spawned. For example, members of p. 11

and so forth. By the same token, members

of postindustrial nations may presume some emotions to be

panhuman which in actuality are evoked by experiences characteristic of modern upbringing and sociality. In either case, cross-cultural variation in the expression—or even the existence—of certain emotions would not con ict with evolutionary approaches.

Developmental Processes as Potential Adaptations Natural selection retains those developmental processes which best address the demands on reproductive tness imposed by the organism’s ecology; developmental systems may accordingly be regarded as the central units of evolution (H. C. Barrett, 2007; West–Eberhard, 2003). As the renowned biologist Leigh van Valen put it (1973), “Evolution is the control of development by ecology.” To close this chapter, we invite consideration of developmental dynamics as themselves potential adaptations. Consider, for example, the capacity for developmental processes to actively sample their environments and select a phenotypic trajectory accordingly (e.g., Oyama et al., 2001). As some phenotypic specializations may take longer to construct e ectively, early initiation of the process of specializing to particular environments carries the advantage of increasing the time available to generate a maximally adaptive phenotype. On the other hand, the developmental decision to specialize early requires a trade-o

in how long the organism is

able to sample the environment to assess what the best adaptive phenotype may be, thus increasing the risk of investing in a phenotype which in the end will be a poor t for the environment (Frankenhuis & Panchanathan, 2011). For instance, a phenotype suited to a violent world may modulate a number of threatrelevant a ective parameters related to factors such as vigilance, risk-taking, or future discounting which would be adaptive within uncertain and dangerous environments, but maladaptive in stable and safe environments (Pepper & Nettle, 2013), and vice versa. How, then, should developmental systems optimally weigh the bene ts of taking more and richer samples against the costs of delaying development of a phenotype that will be well suited to the local environment? Selection might operate on heritable settings of developmental systems which determine the frequency and duration of samples taken of the environment, or lead to weighing environmental cues di erentially (e.g., take cues of close kin mortality in early life as more or less diagnostic of the world as dangerous). Frankenhuis and Panchanathan (2011) propose the intriguing possibility that selection may favor developmental information-sampling adaptations that equip organisms to update their sampling policies on the basis of how informationally consistent the early samples are. For example, organisms whose early samples appear clear and homogenous may safely pursue a strategy of committing to a long-term phenotypic trajectory early, whereas those whose early samples are varied and heterogeneous may bene t from investing time in further sampling. p. 12

In investigating whether and to what extent developmental systems are adapted to respond to information relevant to a given emotion, thereby generating contextual variability in the elicitation and expression of phenotypic trajectories, researchers might apply the following strategy: 1) Characterize the tness challenge that the emotion theoretically addresses. 2) Take into account the typical range of physical and social environments in which the emotion would have functioned.

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some societies may experience derived yet meaningfully distinct variants of love, pride, anger, fear, disgust,

3) Identify the required design features (i.e., what endogenous and/or exogenous information would need to be considered to maximize tness), including which points in the lifespan contain relevant calibratory information, and at what developmental stage the emotion should emerge. 4) Consider the proximate mechanisms by which the emotion’s developmental process might integrate

5) Compare all of the above against evidence assessing how well the developmental process actually performs with regard to calibrating emotional outcomes. Evolutionary approaches to emotion development emphasize the force of selective design, but do not assume that all calibrational contingencies that would be adaptive actually exist, nor that all those found to exist arose as adaptations. After all, selection is often constrained by factors such as the deleterious e ects a new trait would have on existing structures, or by a lack of available structures suitable for modi cation. Conversely, sometimes a useful trait turns out to be a fortuitous byproduct of structures evolved for orthogonal reasons. By unveiling the details of how a ect programs unfold, including those factors which do or do not determine varying phenotypic outcomes, developmentalists are uniquely well positioned to test adaptationist claims (Frankenhuis et al., 2013).

Conclusion One of the hallmarks of adaptation is contextual sensitivity to individual, situational, and environmental contingencies. Indeed, when people refer to evidence that a complex adaptation has been functionally optimized, what they generally mean is that there is evidence of design for adjusting to the contingent demands of an organism’s circumstances, within the constraints imposed by existing traits and external structures (e.g., telepathy might be highly adaptive but not an available option). In short, strategic plasticity is a strong indication of adaptive design. Ironically—and well into the twenty- rst century!—some a ective scientists invert this fundamental idea, conjuring underspeci ed notions of “hardwiredness.” In another persistent misunderstanding, evidence of overlapping proximate mechanisms is often taken as p. 13

contrary to the possibility that emotions are adaptations, when in reality, evolutionary construe emotions as nested assemblages of many, often e

approaches

ciently shared, components. Finally,

developmental explanations are often framed as orthogonal or antagonistic to evolutionary explanations, despite the fact that developmental processes are themselves subject to selection, and critical for enabling adaptations to calibrate to their environments. Beyond redressing these confusions, we hope to have introduced novel questions and integrative research of use to the next generation of developmental a ective scientists.

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such factors.

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The Oxford Handbook of Emotional Development Daniel Dukes (ed.) et al. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/978019 8855903.001.0001 9780191889516

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CHAPTER

2 Changing Standards in Emotional Development: The History Factor  Peter N. Stearns https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198855903.013.17 Published: 13 January 2022

Pages 18–28

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Published: 2022

Abstract This chapter demonstrates the importance of historical changes in emotions and emotional standards. Two periods of particularly sweeping transition are assessed, particularly in Western society: the late early 20th century. Shifts in individual emotions, such as happiness, love, and grief, are joined by wider adjustments, for example in the emotional functions of the family or the importance of selfcontrol. The chapter urges the importance of dealing with change as a means of grasping contemporary emotional patterns and as the basis for assessing the nature of current adjustments.

Keywords: cultural change, happiness, love, family, grief, informalization Subject: Psychology, Developmental Psychology Series: Oxford Library of Psychology Collection: Oxford Handbooks Online

Introduction EMOTIONAL

development is, in part, a creature of history, open to signi cant alteration depending on

patterns of expertise and also the wider social context. Building some understanding of change as a key component unquestionably complicates the subject, but also opens new paths of analysis, aimed at dealing with both causes and consequences of key adjustments. This chapter will sketch two crucial patterns of change in modern Western history, with some comparative comment, while also suggesting the same historical approach for some intriguing recent developments. The goal is to show how attention to change must be built into any assessment of emotional standards. The late 18th through to the early 19th century saw two major forces for change converge in the Western world (both Western Europe and much of North America). Major shifts in values and beliefs resulted from the Enlightenment. Then, close on its heels, came the pressures of industrialization and urbanization. Initially, the impact of these twin developments on emotional standards centered in the Western world, but some similar pressures would gradually spread more widely, setting a challenging target for comparative assessment.

The Big Changes First came the huge cultural shifts associated with the Enlightenment. While a new emphasis on reason p. 19

might seem to distort emotional development, Enlightenment culture

also reevaluated a number of

emotions and actually encouraged some new displays. On the control side, new valuations of individual human dignity prompted an unprecedented attack on shame and shaming, as incompatible with proper respect. While this shift played out most obviously in the area of public punishment—in condemnations of the traditional use of public stocks to display miscreants, for example, which were largely abolished by 1850 after many centuries of use—it also applied to more personal emotional guidance. Parents were now urged to avoid shaming their children, lest this damage their self-respect, and, more gradually, teachers also became uncomfortable with excessive shaming—for example, with the use of dunce caps (Nash & Kilday, 2010; Stearns, 2017).

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18th through to the early 19th century, due to major cultural shifts plus early industrialization, and the

On the more expressive side: Enlightenment values were accompanied by an increase in the emphasis on familial love (Coontz, 2006). Attacks on the Christian idea of original sin promoted a more positive view of children—and made them, potentially, more lovable. Belief in individual freedom worked against the traditional role of parents in arranging marriage, thus freeing young people to make their own choices, based on romantic attachments. By the mid-18th century, several courts of law, for example in Switzerland, their designated spouse was unlovable. Shifts of this sort were encouraged not only by Enlightenment ideals but by the somewhat separate emergence of more romantic reading matter, associated with the rise of the novel. Finally, the Enlightenment also promoted a new interest in happiness, including a growing belief that people should try to be cheerful; and this would lead to adjustments both in individual emotional presentations (including a measurable boost to the importance of smiling) and in the standards urged on children (MacMahon, 2006). Cultural changes of this sort exercised important in uence over emotional standards, but they were increasingly supplemented by the rise of a more commercial and urban economy—the developments that would bleed into early industrialization. Urbanization almost certainly increased the interest in romantic love, and unquestionably complicated older patterns of arranged marriage. Finding a romantic and/or sexually attractive partner in the city gained new importance given the disruption of rural family ties— fairly soon, in fact, newspapers began carrying romantic wanted ads to assist middle-class migrants in nding emotionally appealing partners (Epstein, 2014). On another front, economic changes placed a new premium on education, and families who could a ord to do so, cut back on child labor in favor of this option for the future. As a result, children increasingly became an economic burden rather than an asset which, in turn, led (for some families, as early as the end of the 18th century) to smaller family size. Also, with fewer children, some parents (primarily mothers) almost certainly increased their emotional investment in the individual child (Mintz, 2004). Finally, the overall emotional ferment associated with commercial and industrial growth created both excitement and anxiety around economic life, which could easily be seen as cold and competitive. Partly in reaction, many people placed growing hopes for a family alternative, where p. 20

the crude values of industrial capitalism would be balanced by a more

serene loving atmosphere—a move

that would lead some, indeed, to see the modern family as a “haven in a heartless world” (Lasch, 1995).

Emotional Impacts The convergence of these two major shifts—in culture, and in socioeconomic context—would have powerful e ects on emotional development. Several speci c changes can illustrate the patterns involved. Anger, for example, came in for new discussion. It is vital to note that traditional Christian culture had already generated concerns about anger, so there was a precedent for appeals for restraint. However, the growing interest in seeing the family as an emotional haven placed a new premium on seeking more explicit personal controls. Family manuals, by the early 19th century, consistently urged parents to avoid anger in the discipline of children, for this could distort their emotional development and disrupt their loving innocence. A great deal of ink was now spilled about the “ rst quarrel” of loving newlyweds. Here too, it was important to avoid damaging emotional countercurrents (Zisowitz Stearns & Stearns, 1986). Gender imagery was partly reshaped around these new concerns. Respectable women—now clearly the emotional arbiters of family life, as men increasingly worked outside the home—were held to be anger-free. A variety of sources including popular family advice now highlighted the loving wives and mothers who could emphasize the positive emotions. In fact, many women did begin to record their conscientious e ort to hold back their anger, even when they had to recognize that their natures were not quite as idyllic as the imagery called for; and this was an obvious goal in socializing daughters in the home. For boys, however,

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were in fact ruling that parental arrangements were invalid if a young person, male or female, declared that

the issue was more complex. Men, too, were expected to hold back their anger in the family context, but they needed the capacity of anger for business and public life—as a spur to attacks on social injustice and to competitive business success. So, parents were urged to teach boys to maintain domestic control while gaining the ability to channel anger in the public environment. The rise of sports, and particularly boxing, owed much to this new and complex goal in emotional socialization—for here, hopefully, was a channeling (Rotundo, 1993). Cheerfulness became an obvious goal, capable of reshaping emphases in the emotional development of children. Changes in patterns of word use told the story fairly clearly. Association of the words “cheerful” and “obedience,” virtually unknown before 1800, now increased steadily in usage, with children the obvious target. Obedience remained important for parental authority, but it now must be graced with good cheer. Also a new word, “sulky,” came into play (again with increasing usage for several decades) to describe p. 21

children who were not measuring up to the new standards—who

were obedient but reserved

(Kotchimedova, 2005). New terms also applied to uncheerful adults: “grumpy,” from the 18th century onward, and then in the 1890s, “grouch” was introduced. Another new word, “boredom,” guided a further new character goal linked to the importance of a cheerful atmosphere: people must now be instructed not to be boring (Toohey, 2011). In other words, expectations that people would present themselves as happy increased steadily. Finally, by way of speci c illustration, grief was revisited. Of course, grief had been known before in a society where child mortality rates ranged upwards of 50% of all children born, and where deaths in childbirth were common as well. However, the emotion became more poignant in the 19th century for two important reasons (Rosenblatt, 1983; Stearns, 2015). First, the whole emphasis on familial love increased the stakes when a child or a spouse passed away. Second, Enlightenment values and increasing optimism about scienti c advance introduced a growing belief that continuing high death rates ought to be reduced and a progressive society should be able to improve health and survival. A sense of guilt intruded, as a result, when premature death did occur—as in the new women’s magazines that recurrently chided mothers for their failure to keep their o spring appropriately healthy. The result was a surge in discussions of grief (including popular songs), plus major changes in funeral arrangements and cemeteries, to express sorrow more appropriately through more elaborate monuments (Stannard, 2017). Girls were o ered funeral kits for their dolls, complete with black draperies and small co

ns, so that they could train in this vital family

emotion. The point is clear: a major new social and cultural context generated signi cant shifts in emotional priorities and values, which were in turn translated into individual e orts to measure up, and into new systems for the appropriate emotional development of children—complete with new rituals and, often, a new vocabulary. Any discussion of modern emotional values should take into account the wide-ranging shifts that emerged in the late 18th to early 19th centuries in the North Atlantic world.

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mechanism par excellence; and a new word, “sissy,” was applied to boys who could not measure up

Social Class and Global Variants Of course, all this occurred amid a number of complexities, and historians of emotion have not yet sorted through all the issues involved. In addition to being explicitly gendered, the new standards most obviously also distant from any tradition of arranged marriage—did not indulge the same ideals of romantic love, seeing their choices rather as con rming a sense of community within their urban neighborhood. Sorting out class di erences concerning shifts in emotional standards is a key challenge that extends into the present. Even within the middle classes, some of the key innovations surely spread slowly and unevenly. We p. 22

can chart the process in some

cases: while shaming disciplines did decline within the family, school

settings retained a reliance on shame far longer; only toward the end of the century was there a concerted e ort to modify the most blatant practices, like the infamous dunce cap. Even where changes did occur, they might combine with interesting continuities from the past. The rise of new displays of grief, for example, did not, at this point, dislodge an older ideal of a good death: a situation where an older adult began to decline from a respiratory disease, which would last long enough for family members to pay their respects and for old animosities or slights to be repaired on all sides. Still, the evidence of signi cant changes in the goals for emotional development, whether applied to adult presentations or guiding the care of children, remains compelling. Most obviously, as the importance of the family as a production unit declined, its emotional functions expanded. In many cases, new standards would continue to generate additional innovations as the 19th century advanced. Thus, funerals became steadily more elaborate. Amid the carnage of the American Civil War, many families actively sought to retrieve the remains of fallen sons or husbands—launching a new tradition in the national military experience, and also generating a new interest in the revival of practices of embalming, which in turn entered into standard funeral practice (Gilpin Faust, 2009). On another front: the interest in cheerful, loving children helped support a striking new commitment to the celebration of children’s birthdays. Prior to the late 18th century, recognition of the birthday was con ned to the upper reaches of society, and more to adults than to the young. Growing prosperity, but above all, the new interest in singling out the individual child and providing an opportunity for mutual pleasure, highlighted the birthday as never before, on both sides of the Atlantic, from the mid-19th century onward. Parties and modest presents became increasingly common, despite some brief reservations about the dangers of encouraging self-indulgence; and by the end of the century, birthday practices, and their rationale, spread to other sectors of Western society, even prompting recognition in schools (Hak n Peck, 2000; Baselice et al., 2019; Hsiung, 2005). One nal analytical vantage point deserves attention, though it remains to be fully eshed out. The new emotional patterns that began to take hold during the 19th century responded, as we have seen, to two basic factors, overlapping in time: the cultural innovations of the Enlightenment, and the advent of early industrialization. The results should be compared to changes in other societies, later on, where similar shifts in social framework occurred in a somewhat di erent cultural context. Thus, in Japan, by the 1920s, interest in romantic love clearly advanced—re ecting similar urban experiences supplemented by some Western cultural in uence; but the individual implications of love were less sharply de ned (Jones, 2018). East Asian societies also largely bypassed the new Western distaste for shaming. Further e orts at comparative analysis, with historians joining scholars from other relevant disciplines, will improve our ability to sort out the factors involved in the changing patterns of emotional goals in the modern era.

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applied to the urban middle classes. What evidence we have suggests that working-class families—though

p. 23

A Second Set of Changes While the new emotional signals that emerged in the West in the early 19th century were particularly sweeping, and in some cases impressively durable, they did not close the books on innovation. A second century. They are less familiar than the framework that de ned 19th-century middle-class culture, but they too had important implications and consequences. Increasing levels of consumerism, new sources of expertise, and a growing commitment to informality combined, from the early decades of the 20th century, to modify some, though not all, of the emotional conventions of the Victorian age. The phenomenon of consumerism was not new, but opportunities and interests clearly expanded, spurred by improvements in advertising and by the spread of attractive outlets, like department stores. Revealingly, children became increasingly associated with consumer interests: allowances were introduced for the rst time, and doting parents now began to buy dolls and other items, even for newborns (amid some brief but abortive expressions of concern) (Zelizer, 1994; Cross, 2004). Manners shifted, though this was both cause and e ect. In what one historical sociologist has called “informalization,” young people, particularly, began to dress and even hold themselves less sti

y, while

modifying some of the 19th-century rules that had guided social relationships (Wouters, 1999, 2007). Revealingly, the more informal and commercial pattern of dating began to replace earlier courtship models (Bailey, 1988). At the same time, advanced industrial economies began to shift toward greater emphasis on the service sectors and on organizational bureaucracies; older values were reconsidered, as various kinds of social skills became more important. Contemporary social scientists documented how these adjustments a ected the standards parents urged on their children (Miller & Swanson, 1958). Finally, in terms of general developments, the sources of family and personal advice were substantially transformed by the rise of psychology, social work, and pediatric medicine. Expertise now called upon science, and the kinds of moral authorities who had guided the prescriptive literature in the 19th century were largely replaced—an obvious invitation to emphasize the importance of new knowledge over 19thcentury standards. The results of this new combination showed in two ways: rst, in several basic aspects of the overall emotional climate; and second, in approaches to a number of speci c emotions. To be sure, the earlier framework was hardly dismantled. Emphasis on happiness and cheerfulness, for instance, actually accelerated as in a growing belief that parents must take responsibility for the happiness of their o spring. The interest in loving families persisted as well.

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modern cluster of changes, largely but not exclusively in the West, began to take shape in the early 20th

p. 24

Adjustments in Emotional Standards The new components did have some sweeping e ects. Distinctions between positive and negative emotions became more pronounced: emotions that did not promote positive satisfaction and support consumer informality and smoother surface relationships (Shields & Koster, 1989; Coben, 1991). While expectations of love persisted, experts warned against being swept away by irrational passions; in the United States, a surge of college courses on marriage sought to balance emotional goals with other components of successful family life. Further, thanks in large part to new psychological research, children’s emotional fragility gained new emphasis, adding to parental responsibilities. As a speci c, the 19th-century con dence that boys should be taught to greet fear with courage now unraveled a bit, as experts urged that children of both genders needed some help in overcoming anxieties: too much emphasis on the “sti

upper lip” could

actually be destructive (Mintz, 2004). Within this framework, several speci c emotions were reevaluated in ways that measurably a ected the goals of emotional development. Jealousy won new attention, in part because of its potential and damaging intensity (Stearns, 1989). Experts called attention to the problem of sibling rivalry—urging the importance of this new term itself in the process. Toddlers must be watched and guided on the arrival of a new sibling, because they might otherwise do it damage and because, untended, jealousy could “fester” (another favorite new term in prescriptive literature) in ways that would later poison adult relationships. By the 1930s, several polls suggested that many parents had indeed been persuaded that sibling rivalry ranked high in the list of overall concerns. Anger was another new target. Children might need help in handling anger, particularly because work relationships now depended on at least a super cial friendliness that anger might disrupt; sales personnel, to take a leading example, must be able to mask annoyance with a smile (Benson, 1988; Hochschild, 2012). Revealingly, by the 1930s, the term “anger” had been replaced by the clearly unacceptable word “aggression” in American childrearing manuals. Older ideas, like the notion that boys must be taught to preserve anger as motivation, receded in this new approach—and overall, gendered distinctions in emotional development, though persisting, dropped in importance in favor of a recognition of common problems. Finally, grief was reassessed, in one of the most striking shifts in emotional goals. The emotion was newly uncomfortable: an emotional culture that downplayed intensity and emphasized the positive almost inevitably had to wonder about grief. However, there was an additional speci c as well: between 1880 and 1920, throughout the Western world, infant mortality began its revolutionary descent, reaching 5% by 1920 and continuing to drop thereafter. For the rst time in human history, most parents now did not have to expect that one or more of their o spring would die (and there were similar improvements in maternal p. 25

mortality). In a sense, though the proposition is complicated, the need for

grief began to decline. As a

result, the kind of indulgence in grief that so marked 19th-century emotional goals was dramatically reassessed. Intense grief was now seen as a burden, both on self and others. Manners books began to urge people to make sure their grief did not bother their friends and acquaintances. Prolonged grief should now be addressed by therapists. And children must now be kept away from intense grief—even barred from funerals if necessary. To be sure, the e ective revolution in grief raised many questions: what about parents whose children, against the norm, did die? Was attention to death and mortality declining in unhealthy ways? These issues would persist even as the new emotional regime itself was largely maintained (Gorer, 1965). As before, the changes in the goals for emotional development and performance more clearly a ected the middle classes than other groups, quite apart from individual personality variables, though there were some wider adjustments. Persistence of some of the earlier targets—as with love and happiness—also complicate the picture. However, a second modern transition in emotional goals and perceived problems, re ecting the

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interests were more fully reproved. Undue emotional intensity was also discouraged, in favor of greater

several changes that marked a more advanced industrial economy and the rise of new sources of expertise, does warrant attention. It set some patterns in motion that, in broad outline, continue today—as in some of the issues associated with grief and the growing informality of funerals; and it further illustrates the more general invitation to add historical factors—an awareness of change—to the e ort to grasp the nature of emotional development.

Historical inquiry, focused on change and the causes and complexities of change, is not usually considered central to the study of emotional development. Yet the connections are very real, and deserve attention, even from specialists not interested in the past for its own sake. In the rst place, historical work on emotion, like anthropological research, reminds us that current emotional patterns are not eternal. The past o ers important contrasts, providing a richer picture of emotional variety and potential; and the results clearly bear on contemporary concerns. In 2018, for example, public shaming moved back into center stage in the United States and elsewhere, with the rise of the MeToo movement (though in fact shame’s incidence had been increasing for several decades, after the long period of decline). This immediately raised questions not only about past uses of shaming but also about some of the dangers and hesitations involved in the emotion’s revival. The fact that, two centuries ago, signi cant changes began to wipe out hallowed practices such as the public stocks may or may not be of interest; however, the fact that shaming has become more complicated, its result less predictable, explicitly p. 26

informs emotional development issues today (Tracy et al., 2007). Here is an obvious example of

the

intersection between historical assessment of recent emotional change and wider interdisciplinary inquiry. For the past not only o ers contrast, it invites greater understanding of emotional patterns that have taken hold in modern times. Americans are notorious for their cheerfulness, their insistence on smiling. Assessing this impulse clearly feeds into a wider analysis of national emotional development, but it will be inherently shortchanged if it does not include evaluation of the original timing and causes of the American impulse— including the fact that foreigners were commenting on the trait by the early 19th century. Evaluation of this aspect of the national story can contribute as well to discussions of some of the downsides of resolute cheerfulness, along with the fact that it leaves many foreigners commenting on excessive friendliness or super ciality. The same assets attach even more obviously to emotional changes of more recent vintage. New kinds of e orts to constrain grief are only about a century old, and they are easy enough to explain, but assessing the consequences, including concerns about a contrast between reluctance to discuss death and a haunting fear of mortality in contemporary society, clearly build on a grasp of the intervening development as well as purely current manifestations. Here too, change continues, as in the fascinating surge in public mourning. Thus, building the historical factor into the study of emotional development contributes to a better understanding of the causes and nature of ongoing patterns, joining historical analysis to the other disciplines that seek to make sense of emotional standards. It allows us to assess the impact of overarching modern developments, like the rise of consumerism or changes in family functions; and it builds as well on the fact that key changes over the past two centuries or so are hardly random, but tend to cluster in particular periods of transition in response to wider developments in society at large. Finally, it conjoins with wider e orts to gure out the most recent set of emotional changes, as in rather novel e orts to pinpoint emotional as well as physical bullying, or to deal with new forms of envy resulting from immersion in social media.

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Historical Factors and Emotional Development

Utilizing the expanding results of work in the history of emotion opens one further opportunity, where historians can join with others in a wider assessment. Are Western societies once again engaged in a major emotional transition? We know, certainly, some factors that might be involved, even though we lack the perspective that can be applied to earlier developments like informalization. Increasing isolation is an obvious target. Since the 1960s, for a variety of reasons including further shifts in the birth rate, more and broadly, neighborhood con dence have measurably declined. These patterns would be further enhanced by the unexpected consequences of the rise of electronic games and, particularly, the emergence of social media (Fernandez & Matt, 2019). Interestingly, the sheer level of reference to many emotions began to increase, after dropping following the earlier transition: Americans became more eager to talk about their emotional experiences, as earlier concerns about privacy dropped away. However, e ective social contacts p. 27

around shared emotions may have become more

di

cult, leading not only to the growing reports about

loneliness and anxiety but also to the measurable decline of social trust that began to take hold from the later 1960s. At the same time, building on patterns that had emerged earlier in the 20th century, but now adding additional e orts to compensate for developments such as the new patterns of women’s work, many parents began devoting more time to overseeing and, in some cases, directly managing children’s emotions —particularly, apparently, in the United States (Stearns, 2003). Emotional bonds with children often increased as a result, even into early adulthood; but opportunities for more independent risk-taking and resilience may have su ered in consequence. Here was another set of factors feeding into the ongoing history of emotional development overall. It would be presumptuous to claim that we have a full understanding of the most recent trends, and it is vital to take into account, as well, the concerted e orts that have been devoted to countering some of the apparent new problems, as in the e orts of the new breed of positive psychologists (Horowitz, 2018). However, an understanding that recurrent change forms part of the framework for emotional development, and that recent speci c trends can in fact be measured against earlier transitions, sets up some of the leading targets for contemporary analysis. Historical cases, and the capacity to think historically about even recent patterns of change, o er explicit insight into leading patterns of emotional development.

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more children have spent increasing amounts of time alone; patterns of neighborhood play and, more

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Mintz, S. (2004). Huckʼs ra : A history of American childhood. Harvard University Press. Google Scholar Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Nash D. & Kilday, A.–M. (2010). Cultures of shame: Exploring crime and morality in Britain 1600–1900. Palgrave MacMillan. Google Scholar Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Rosenblatt, P. C. (1983). Bitter, bitter tears: Nineteenth-century diarists and twentieth-century grief theories. University of Minnesota Press. Google Scholar Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Rotundo, E. A., (1993). American manhood: Transformations in masculinity from the revolution to the modern era. Basic Books. Google Scholar Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Shields, S. A. & Koster, B. A. (1989). Emotional stereotyping of parents in child rearing manuals, 1915–1980. Social Psychology Quarterly, 52(1), 44–55. Google Scholar WorldCat Stannard, D. E. (Ed.). (2017). Death in America. University of Pennsylvania. Google Scholar Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Stearns, P. N. (2017). Shame: A brief history. University of Illinois Press. Google Scholar Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Stearns, P. N. (2015). Revolutions in sorrow: The American experience of death in global perspective. Routledge. Google Scholar Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Stearns, P. N. (2003). Anxious parents: A history of modern childrearing in America. New York University Press. Google Scholar Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Stearns, P. N. (1989). Jealousy: The evolution of an emotion in American history. The American Social Experience Series. New York University Press. Google Scholar Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Toohey, P. (2011). Boredom: A lively history. Yale University Press. Google Scholar Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Tracy, J. L., Robins, R. W., & Price Tangney, J. (Eds.). (2007). The self-conscious emotions: Theory and research. Guilford Press. Google Scholar Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Wouters, C. (2007). Informalization: Manners and emotions since 1890. SAGE Publications. Google Scholar Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Wouters, C. (1999). Informalisierung: Norbert Eliasʼ Zivilisationstheorie und Zivilisationsprozesse im 20. Jahrhundert. Westdeutscher Verlag. Google Scholar Google Preview WorldCat COPAC

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The Oxford Handbook of Emotional Development Daniel Dukes (ed.) et al. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/978019 8855903.001.0001 9780191889516

Online ISBN: Print ISBN:

9780198855903

Search in this book

CHAPTER

3 Why Are Humans So Emotional? An Analysis From Evolutionary Sociology  Jonathan H. Turner https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198855903.013.18 Published: 13 January 2022

Pages 29–44

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Published: 2022

Abstract Using cladistic analysis and comparative neurology, the evolution of humans’ unique capacities to be so emotional is analyzed in this chapter. Humans are, in essence, evolved great apes who, contrary to families, and in general, are not highly organized by social structures. What is true of great apes today was also true of the ancestors of great apes and the hominin ancestors of humans. As humans’ hominin ancestors sought to adapt to more open-country habitats without the protection of the forests, natural selection began to enhance emotions by enlarging subcortical areas of the hominin brain, which set into motion the evolution of new social structures for hominins and, furthermore, also set into motion selection for humans’ large neocortex, capacity for spoken language, and eventually, for culture. Human development during the infant–child phase of the life cycle now re ects these longer-term evolutionary patterns in the evolution of humans.

Keywords: development, evolution, hominins, humans, cladistics, neurology, subcortex, neocortex, speech, culture Subject: Psychology, Developmental Psychology Series: Oxford Library of Psychology Collection: Oxford Handbooks Online

Introduction WITHIN

weeks of birth, human infants can imitate the emotional gestures of their caretakers, particularly

variants of such primary emotions as anger, fear, sadness, and happiness (Emde, 1962; Ekman, 1984; Tomonaga, 1999; Subiaul, 2007; Horowitz, 2003; Gergely & Csibra, 2006). In contrast, it takes around two years of progressive babbling for infants to acquire the capacity to communicate e

ciently with spoken

words. It can be speculated that this developmental sequence in the human life cycle at the beginning of human life re ects evolutionary sequences in the long-term evolution of humans. Whatever the merits of this speculation, one important way to understand human development is to understand how emotions, large brains, speech, and culture evolved in the rst place, over millions of years of hominin (those ancestors on the human clade) evolution.

Looking Back in Time: The Power of Cladistic Analysis Humans are closely related, genetically, to contemporary great apes, sharing 99% of their genes with chimpanzees, 98% with gorillas, and 97% with orangutans. This genetic closeness means that humans and extant great apes share common ancestors, and by the analysis of their respective genomes, humans share a p. 30

last common ancestor

(LCA) with orangutans 13–16 million years ago (mya), with gorillas about 8–9 mya,

and chimpanzees about 5–6 mya. Thus, despite having evolved over the last 5 million years in somewhat di erent habitats than the great apes, the genetic closeness between humans and great apes argues that we are still great apes, at our core, and that human evolution has simply elaborated upon traits still shared with all other great apes. Cladistics will thereby give us a clear picture of what hominins, or humans’ bipedal ancestors, were like before natural selection began to alter the hominin anatomy and neuroanatomy in the evolution species along the clade to Homo sapiens.

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much popular opinion, are not highly social, do not form permanent groups, do not live in nuclear

Alexandra Maryanski’s (1986, 1987, 1992, 1993, 1995) pioneering application of cladistic analysis to extant great apes thus allows us to look back in time—millions of years ago—and “see” the basic behavioral and organizational patterns of the ancient ancestors of humans and contemporary great apes. What the data reveal is, perhaps, somewhat surprising. Table 3.1 summarizes Maryanski’s analysis, with the p. 31

reconstruction of the

last common ancestor to all great apes and humans represented in the far-right

Table 3.1 Strength of Social Ties Among Extant Species of Great Apes Species of apes Gorillas (Gorilla)

Chimpanzees (Pan)

Orangutans (Pongo)

Last common ancestor

Male–male

0

0/+

0

0*

Female–female

0

0

0

0*

Male–female

0/+

0

0

0*

Mother–daughter

0

0

0

0*

Father–daughter

0

0

0

0*

Mother–son

0

+

0

0*

Father–son

0

0

0

0*

Mother–daughter

+

+

+

+*

Father–daughter

0

0

0

0*

Mother–son

+

+

+

+*

Father–son

0

0

0

0*

Adult-to-adult ties

Adult-to-adult o spring procreation ties

Adult-to-preadolescent o spring ties

0 = no or very weak ties 0/+ = weak to moderate ties + = strong ties *

is used to denote a reconstructed social structure, in this case the likely structure of the last common ancestor to humans and extant great apes. As is evident, this structure is most like that of contemporary orangutans.

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column, denoted by a “*” in line with cladistic analysis tradition.

Table 3.1 reports data on social-tie strength among age and sex classes of extant great apes (see Maryanski, 1986, and expansions of these data in Maryanski & Turner, 1992; Turner & Maryanski, 2005, 2007; Turner, 2000, 2007, 2015, 2021). By the logic of cladistic analysis, patterns in social ties evident among all three sets of present-day great apes were present in the LCA to all great apes and, of course, to humans as an evolved great ape. By reading down the far-right column in Table 3.1, humans and contemporary great apes are friendships, and did not form permanent groups. They appear to have only one stable structure—the community of perhaps 150 individuals spread out across many square miles—within which individuals wandered about, sometimes alone, sometimes in temporary groupings, and in which lineal, crossgenerational kin ties were broken at puberty when the male and female ancestors of humans and great apes left their natal community forever. Of the three extant great apes, only orangutans live virtually full-time in the Asian forests; and hence, they are the most like the LCA of all great apes today, revealing virtually no structure beyond female-o spring ties that are broken at puberty. Thus, once the retreating forests forced some great apes into a somewhat more terrestrial habitat, natural selection was pushing for more group organization for protection against predators and for safer coordination of food gathering. Yet, natural selection would eventually come up against the natural behavioral and organizational propensities of all great apes and their ancestors: weak social ties, lack of group structures, lack of a nuclear family of parents and their o spring. These were ancient patterns installed 20–25 mya as great apes di erentiated from monkeys in forest habitats. Thus, natural selection could not reinstall bioprogrammers for strong ties or stable groups (which had probably been selected out of the great ape line in the arboreal habitat). It is for this reason that no great ape, except late hominins and humans, could live full-time in an open-country habitat. As a result, most species of great apes became extinct because of their lack of bioprogrammers for strong ties and permanent grouping (for more details on this problem for the ancestors of great apes and humans, see Maryanski & Turner, 1992; Turner, 2000, 2007; Turner & Maryanski, 2005, 2008; Turner et al., 2018; Maryanski, 2019). How, then, did humans’ great-ape-like ancestors, termed hominins, beat the odds and become increasingly able to live in more open-country habitats and, eventually, to migrate to highly diverse habitats in Africa and Eurasia? Natural selection requires something to select on if it is to move the genome of organisms in a given direction; and so, without some strong bonding bioprogrammers beyond mother–o spring bonds, selection had to blindly (by chance) hit upon another solution to the problem of forming stronger social ties and more permanent groupings among hominins. The key would be selection on subcortical areas of the hominin brain to make hominins, over several million years, more emotional and thus able to use dramatically expanded emotional capacities to begin forming strong ties and permanent groups. In turn, p. 32

increased emotional capacities would eventually allow for growth of the neocortex on top of, and

around,

the more ancient subcortex of hominins and, over time, also for the evolution of speech and, with speech, culture in the human measure.

The Evolution of Emotions and the First “Language” Natural Selection on Preadaptations Among Great Apes and Hominins A preadaptation is a trait of an organism that evolved as a byproduct of another trait that was selected for, but this preadaptation is so labelled because it may be selected upon in the future. One of the most important preadaptations available for natural selection is the capacity for language evident in all great apes. This trait was a preadaptation that was created as a byproduct of selection for visual dominance among those small rodent-like mammals that ascended the forests of Africa in the postdinosaur period around 63 mya (Szalay & Delson, 1979; Savage & Russell, 1983; Napier & Napier, 1985; Tattersall et al., 1988).

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descendants of species that were promiscuous, did not form nuclear families, formed only loose

Apparently, in converting olfactory-dominant mammals to visually dominant primates, the new association cortices around the inferior parietal lobe (see Figure 3.1), where the occipital (visual), temporal (auditory), and parietal (touch) lobes meet, led not only to vision as the dominant sense modality but also created the neurological capacity for language (Geschwind, 1965a,b, 1985; Damasio & Geschwind, 1984). It is for this reason that all young great apes can learn the rudiments of spoken language of humans from medium with which to communicate, such as American Sign Language (Gardner et al., 1989) or computer pictograms that can be typed into “sentences” (Savage–Rumbaugh & Lewin, 1994; Rumbaugh & Savage 1

Rumbaugh, 1990) . Moreover, great ape brains also have the homologue of the humans’ Wernicke’s area, just anterior of the inferior parietal lobe, that uploads all sensory inputs into the brain to be processed by the “brain’s way of thinking,” which is not linguistic, but more gestalt-based. Chimpanzees reveal the beginning of humans’ Broca’s area in the left frontal lobe, right near the Sylvian ssure where the neurology for speech production is activated. This area is sometimes called Broca’s hump (Falk, 2000) and was available in the neurology of the LCA of chimpanzees and humans for selection during hominin evolution; and as this hump grew into Broca’s area under selection late in hominin evolution, it could increasingly be the counterpoint of Wernicke’s area, downloading gestalt-based thinking into linear sequences of speech.

Figure 3.1 Areas of the Brain Under Directional Selection. Areas of the Brain Under Directional Selection. The other key preadaptations of the LCA to humans and great apes are listed in Box 3.1. All of these would be critical to the evolution of emotions, larger brains, spoken language, and culture in late hominin evolution, but for the present, let me emphasize what I see as the most important: a brain capable of experiencing and p. 33

expressing at

least the four primary emotions of happiness, anger, fear, and sadness, as well as perhaps a

few variants on these (Turner, 2000, 2008). Selection on these was to be the key to survival of hominins in more open-country habitats as climate changes depleted the forests over the last 15 million years and, thereby, forced hominins to survive in ever-more open-country habitats.

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immersion in human speech environments (Rumbaugh, 2013), and can even respond, if given a nonverbal

p. 34

Box 3.1

Preadaptations Among Humansʼ Hominin Ancestors

1. Comparatively large brain, consisting of all key structures of the human brain in subcortical areas, generating a large palette of primary emotions, and most neocortical structures of the

2. Hard-wired capacity for naturally spoken language comprehension and capacity to communicate at the level of a 3-year-old human child. 3. Low levels of physical grooming, thus increasing reliance on interpersonal means of communication by symbolic gestures carrying common meanings. 4. Community complex revolving around: (a) community as only stable unit of social organization; (b) cognitive mapping of community boundaries and its members; (c) ritualized interpersonal greetings when meeting and departing from community members; (d) capacity to see selves as objects of evaluation when interacting; and (e) incipient capacity to evaluate self from the perspective of a community of others. 5. Protracted life-history characteristics that involve long periods of nurturance of o spring, thereby setting up the capacity for o spring to have even larger, immature brains, with potentially years of mother nurturance. 6. High levels of play among young, thereby increasing capacity to role-take and adjust interpersonal responses to conspeci cs.

We know that humans generate solidarity by the interpersonal ow of positive emotions, which are read visually more than verbally (Turner, 2002; Collins, 2004). Indeed, as selection expanded the palette of primary emotions of the LCAs of hominins, natural selection worked on the preadaptation for language already present in great apes and hence the LCAs of great apes and humans. Thus, the two directions of selection were (1) on expanding the number and range of emotions and (2) on connecting the hard-wired areas that make language possible (in and around the inferior parietal lobe) to the expanding palette of emotions. The end result was what I have called the language of emotions (Turner, 2000, 2007) or, in everyday terms, “body language,” because sequences of emotions can be expressed through the eyes, face, and body countenance, thereby creating a quasi, nonverbal gestural language revolving around emotional states of individuals. The shifting gestures denoting emotional states ow much like spoken language, as sequences of nonverbal gestures communicate common meanings—just as they still do with humans today.

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human brain where thinking, decision making, and long-term memories are stored.

The key problem to be overcome by natural selection was to reduce the negative bias of primary emotions, three-quarters of which are negative in terms of enhancing solidarity in social relations. The process occurred by virtue of enlarging all of the subcortical areas in the brain, where emotions are generated, by a factor of 2 compared to chimpanzees and other great apes, controlling for body size (see Turner, 2000, 2007; Stephan, 1983; Stephan & Andy, 1969, 1977; Stephan et al., 1988; Eccles, 1989): thus, the key emotion centers, such as the amygdala (producing fear and anger), anterior

cingulate gyrus (happiness and play)

hippocampus and associated transition cortices (tagging cognitions with emotions for memory), septum (producing pleasure associated with sex), thalamus (sorting and routing sensory inputs to emotion centers and relevant cortices in the neocortex), hypothalamus (for generating body hormones and some neuroactive peptides in the brain), brainstem and overall diencephalon (generating neurotransmitters that activate body systems like the autonomic nervous system and musculoskeletal system) (see Damasio, 1994; Le Doux, 1996; Turner, 2000, 2007 for more detailed discussions). Because all of these areas are around twice as large as those in great apes, natural selection was working on the subcortex of the hominin long before the hominin neocortex grew for reasons to be enumerated shortly. This growth in the subcortex is much lower in the brain cavity and thus would not be dramatically re ected in fossilized brain craniums among hominins (in the same way that growth in the neocortex would). Nonetheless, this was the rst critical step in the evolution of humans’ eventual very high levels of emotionality. Selection rst increased the variants of primary emotions (Table 3.2; see also Turner, 2007, pp. 4–5 for list of hypothesized primary emotions by 20 top scholars working on emotions). Then it began to combine lesser to larger amounts of the primary emotions and their variants (Table 3.3), and the last stage of emotional development during brain evolution was the combination of all three negative primary emotions 2

(variants of anger, fear, sadness) into emotions that are unique to humans: shame and guilt (Table 3.4). Shame and guilt are the emotions of social control because individuals monitor and sanction themselves with these emotions or in response to the negative emotions expressed by others toward a person (Sche , 1988; Tangney & Dearing, 2002; Turner, 2007). With growth in the hippocampus, more complex and varied p. 36

emotions could now tag cognitions and, thereby, facilitate their retention in memory. Conversely, it

is

probably the hippocampus which is the structure most responsible for repression of negative emotions, especially shame and guilt, and for activating various defense mechanisms delineated in Table 3.4. Guilt and shame as triggers for activation of defense mechanisms are the last basic emotional dynamics to be p. 37

activated (Nass, 1996) in young

children. Such is the case because they are emotions that must be

activated by sanctions and by talk from caretakers about breaches to “proper” behavior (codi ed into the moral codes of symbolic culture). As infants begin to understand spoken language and move from “babble” to more articulated speech, they also begin to learn the verbal labels for the emotions that they experience as well as the evaluation of particular emotions in the “emotion culture” of a society, especially those emotions associated with moral and ideological tenets of society’s culture. In fact, a culture containing moral codes is only possible by the prior evolution of subcortical areas of the brain for enhanced emotional experiences which, with the development of speech, are then codi ed by speech acts into moral prescriptions and proscriptions. Indeed, it is the emotions attached to moral codes and to speech acts sanctioning individuals’ success or failure to meet the prescriptions of moral codes that give these codes the “teeth” or power to constrain behaviors, especially if verbal sanctions can invoke such powerful emotions as guilt and shame in individuals.

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p. 35

Primary emotions

Low intensity

Moderate intensity

High intensity

Satisfaction– happiness

Content, sanguine, serenity, gratified

Cheerful, buoyant, friendly, amiable, enjoyment

Love, joy, bliss, rapture, jubilant, gaiety, elation, delight, thrilled, exhilarated

Aversion–fear

Concern, hesitant, reluctance, shyness

Misgivings, trepidation, anxiety, scared, alarmed, unnerved, panic

Terror, horror, high anxiety

Assertion–anger

Annoyed, agitated, irritated, vexed, perturbed, nettled, rankled, piqued

Displeased, frustrated, belligerent, contentious, hostility, ire, animosity, o ended, consternation

Dislike, loathing, disgust, hate, despise, detest, hatred, seething, wrath, furious, inflamed, incensed, outrage

Disappointmentsadness

Discouraged, downcast, dispirited

Dismayed, Disheartened, glum, resigned, gloomy, woeful, pained

sorrow, heartsick, despondent, anguished, crestfallen, dejected

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Table 3.2 Variants of Primary Emotions

Table 3.3 Combinations of Primary Emotions Primary emotions

First-order elaborations

Satisfaction–happiness generate

Wonder, hopeful, relief, gratitude, pride, reverence

Satisfaction–happiness + assertion–anger

generate

Vengeance, appeased, calmed, soothed, relish, triumphant, bemused

Satisfaction–happiness + disappointment– sadness

generate

Nostalgia, yearning, hope

Aversion–fear + satisfaction–happiness

generate

Awe, reverence, veneration

Aversion–fear + assertion–anger

generate

Revulsed, repulsed, antagonism, dislike, envy

Aversion–fear + disappointment–sadness

generate

Dread, wariness

Assertion–anger + satisfaction–happiness

generate

Condescension, mollified, rudeness, placated, righteousness

Assertion–anger + aversion–fear

generate

Abhorrence, jealousy, suspiciousness

Assertion–anger + disappointment–sadness

generate

Bitterness, depression, betrayed

Disappointment–sadness + satisfaction– happiness

generate

Acceptance, moroseness, solace, melancholy

Disappointment–sadness + aversion–fear

generate

Regret, forlornness, remorseful, misery

Disappointment–sadness + assertion– anger

generate

Aggrieved, discontent, dissatisfied, unfulfilled boredom, grief, envy, sullenness

Aversion–fear

Assertion–anger

Disappointment–sadness

Table 3.4 The Structure of Shame and Guilt Emotion

Rank ordering of constituent primary emotions 1

2

3

Shame

Disappointment–sadness (at self)

Assertion–anger (at self)

Aversion–fear (at consequences for self)

Guilt

Disappointment–sadness (at self)

Aversion–fear (at consequences for self)

Assertion–anger (at self)

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Satisfaction–happiness + aversion–fear

Natural Selection on Behavioral Capacities/Propensities of Great Apes and Hominins Despite their low sociality, weak ties, and lack of permanent group formations, great apes possess a rather large suite of interpersonal skills and mechanisms for interacting. Great apes, and especially chimpanzees community, occasionally forming groups, the most consistent of which among chimpanzees are patrolling parties of males to protect the boundaries of their community, which can be many square miles (Goodall, 1986; Maryanski and Turner, 1992, pp. 16–23). Because community members must be out of touch for a time, sometimes weeks to months, they have an evolved capacity to engage in ritual greetings and departures, as well as many other interpersonal dynamics that rival those of humans today. Thus, as is evident, humans inherited from great apes the interpersonal skills necessary for high levels of attunement and social solidarity, when enhanced by emotions. Thus, natural selection did not have to enhance dramatically, if at all, the interpersonal skills of hominins. Instead, what natural selection did was supercharge hominins with more emotions, so that these emotions could be used to form stronger social ties, greater commitments, and higher levels of group solidarity that would be sustained by interpersonal capacities to role-take (Theory of Mind) or understand the dispositions of others to act in certain ways, to present oneself as an object while ascertaining the self or identity being presented by others, and to mutually read face, eye, body (and perhaps vocalizations as calls) to achieve emotional empathy with others. Group solidarity would also be perpetuated by engagement in appropriate emotion-arousing rituals promoting group harmony. These could all be done with more emotion; and I argue that strong ties gradually began to emerge and, at some point, males and females would bond more permanently because of p. 38

the emotions tied to sex in the large septum—emotions like love, commitment, caring, and loyalty—to forge a conjugal couple that would have o spring to care for and, thereby, form the nuclear family that was eventually integrated into small bands of hunter-gatherers. All this was not done through reprogramming the human genome to be group-oriented or even family oriented; rather, natural selection took a more indirect route by the principle of reprogramming emotion centers and nuclei in the subcortex to make humans the most emotional animals on earth, a feat that is just as spectacular as the large brain that would allow for culture. Indeed, it was this enhancement of emotions that drove the evolution of larger brains, spoken language, and culture.

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(humans’ closest relative), live in larger community-like structures, with individuals moving about the

Emotions, Brain Growth, Language, and Culture It would be impossible for the hominin neocortex to grow without the prior reworking of the subcortex to produce more varied and nuanced emotions with which to tag all cognitions (done by the hippocampus and they make decisions, without the capacity to tag or associate cognitions with speci c emotional reactions, and to store them in the hippocampus for a time and then in the frontal lobe for long-term memory (Damasio, 1994). For the neocortex to have grown before a larger palette of emotions had evolved to tag the cognitions stored in this larger neocortex would not have been tness-enhancing. Cognitions can only be remembered and used in decision making when tagged with emotions; and complex cognitions cannot operate without more complex a ective states with which to tag them. Thus, without the prior evolution of a more nuanced and complex palette of emotions generated in subcortical areas of the brain, the enormous protein and calorie requirements of the human brain, and especially a large neocortex, would be wasted in supporting an empty neocortex, which would thereby provide no increase in tness. It is for this reason that the hominin brain did not grow very much, if at all, for several million years (hovering around 400 cc, which is about the size of a contemporary chimpanzee brain). Then, over the last three million years, the brain increased in size to about 500 cc with Homo habilis and early Homo erectus (Holloway, 2015). I am speculating that it may have been the initial growth in subcortical areas of the brain that pushed the neocortex upward and outward, thereby enlarging the cranium that would fossilize (see Holloway, 2015 for summaries of data). Some would argue that the brain grew rapidly around 2.0 mya with Homo erectus (or ergaster), but I think that the big jump in growth was even later, probably 0.7 to 1.5 mya, about the time that Homo erectus began to move out of Arica to Eurasia and even a bit beyond. I draw this conclusion because the current data on measurements of Homo ergaster and Homo erectus are mostly in the 800 to 900 cc range, with the larger range of 925 to 1,225 cc occurring after 0.6 to 1.0 mya. However, such a conclusion is not p. 39

without

controversy, although there are no data for erectus having a brain larger than 800 cc (and most

are under that gure) until 1.6 mya. With a large palette of emotions to work with, natural selection could now grow the neocortex, with the larger palette of emotions allowing for the storage of more cognitions producing a smarter, more grouporiented, and solidary band of conspeci cs, organized by emotional attachments into nuclear families to move into open country and then to diverse niches in Africa and Eurasia. The brain began to grow up to the lower end of the human range at around 1050 cc (the average human range is 1350 cc) with late Homo erectus; and this was only possible with a larger palette of emotions that could tag cognitions and that could promote stronger social ties and group solidarities. During this period, I think, selection worked on the larynx, tongue, lips, and facial muscles (and the neurology of the brain along Broca’s area and the Sylvian ssure), allowing for ever-more speech, and with speech and a larger brain came human-like culture where arbitrary symbols in speech can denote any and all properties of the universe, and organize thoughts through the development and use of phonemes, morphemes, and syntax. In turn, speech production allowed the brain, spoken language, and culture to become part of human societies. In perhaps a rough way, the phases of birth, infancy, and early childhood re ect this evolution. Emotions are immediately activated with birth, while the brain matures, and this early activation allows for quasi language of communication with caretakers. This quasi language still constitutes the neurological platform on which spoken language is built in humans. Thus, what took millions of years to evolve along the hominin line takes only a couple of years of infant development among humans.

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transition cortices). As is now clearly understood in neurology, humans cannot remember cognitions, nor can

Conclusion I have had to tell this evolutionary history of human emotions without elaborate documentation, which can be found in many of my works (see Turner, 2000, 2002, 2007; Turner et al., 2018). More than is commonly would probably not have been possible for natural selection to install during hominin evolution had already be done during great-ape evolution in the form of the preadaptations listed in Box 3.1 and the interpersonal capacities listed in Box 3.2. Without this legacy of capacities listed in Boxes 3.1 and 3.2 and installed by natural selection over a 30 to 40 million-year period of ape evolution in the forests of Africa, it would have been impossible for natural selection to install these in such a short period of time for ground-dwelling apes over the last 5 million years. As a result, late hominins and then humans would never have evolved.

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acknowledged, emotions were the core of hominin and human evolution. Much of the heavy lifting that

Box 3.2

Inferred Behavioral Propensities of Hominins

1. Propensity to cognitively map the boundaries, membership, and social relations among members within larger, more inclusive communities rather than to form permanent local

2. Propensity to focus on face and eyes of conspeci cs for assessing emotions during episodes of interaction. 3. Capacity to mimic emotional gestures in face and body of conspeci cs (through activation of mirror neurons). 4. Capacity to role take (invoke Theory of Mind) to assess the dispositions of conspeci cs to act in particular ways. 5. Capacity to achieve emotional empathy with others during role taking. 6. Propensity to mimic responses of others while, at the same time, engage in role switching, in play activities among the young. 7. Propensity to fall into rhythmic synchronization of bodies and vocal gestures during interactions, especially when larger numbers of conspeci cs are in propinquity. 8. Propensity for collective emotional arousal during periodic gatherings of larger numbers of community members and to emit emotionally charged, ritual-like behaviors. 9. Propensity to assess reciprocities in exchanges of resources with others. 10. Propensity to calculate fairness and justice of exchanges with others and to sanction (positively or negatively) with emotional intensity those exchanges deemed to be fair or unfair. 11. Capacity to see self as an object in interactions with others and to emit gestures expressing conceptions of self and to evaluate self by role taking with others. 12. Capacity to reckon the respective status of self and others and, thereby, to respond to status di erences, particularly those di erences marking hierarchy but also those marking distinctive social categories such as age, gender, and community membership. 13. Capacity of males (only among chimpanzees) to form friendships with other males and, occasionally, with favored females as well.

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groupings.

The key breakthrough was using emotions to sidestep the problem of the LCAs of humans: the lack of strong p. 40

bioprogrammers for sociality, groupness, kinship, and strong

social ties. By enhancing emotions, where there

are discrete centers in the subcortex of the brain on which to select, the supercharging e ects of enhanced emotions on preadaptations and extant, already installed interpersonal behavioral capacities made the route to a more social great ape much easier than otherwise would have been possible. Once emotions could increased solidarity more generally among hominins, the bands composed of several nuclear families could be the structural unit organizing human societies for 98% of their time on earth. Without this increased emotionality, the hominin brain would not have grown to human proportions, where the neocortex of p. 41

humans is three times the size that of chimpanzees and, hence, the LCAs.

While in humans, the large

neocortex gets much of the press, the driver of this growth was the earlier growth in the subcortex where emotions are generated. (Evidence for this growth is that the subcortex in humans is twice the size of that in great apes, controlling for body size.) Also, without a larger and more tightly wired neocortex, spoken language would not have the culture-producing e ects that it makes possible; and thus, culture in the human measure may never have evolved on earth. So, without emotions our humanity—both biologically and socioculturally—would never have evolved. Earth might have been the land of the big, but not so smart mammals, as it was for a time before human hunting activities drove those mammals into extinction (a process still occurring at human hands for large African and Asian mammals, including the remaining great apes). Thus, before there could be big brains, spoken language, and culture, there had to be more emotions (Damasio, 1994); and it is this emotionality that is the hallmark of the human life cycle, where it is emotional attachments that bond the conjugal couple to each other and to their o spring, although females no doubt have the universal mammalian programming for mother–infant bonds. Yet, neurologically vulnerable o spring coming through the female cervix with immature brains (so they can t through the cervix) represent an enormous burden, and only an animal that had used emotions to create solidarity of the conjugal pair into a nuclear family incurs the costs of raising a young infant for years before he or she can talk and absorb culture. So, emotionality was bene cial for the longer-term evolution of the species as well because, without emotions, humans as the big-brained, speaking, writing, and culture-creating species now dominate. On a nal note, without emotions rather than bioprogrammers, humans would never have been able to construct mega or macro societies. Most mammals are kin and group oriented, but evolved great apes are only, at the biological level, oriented to community. Yet, great apes are still endowed with rather sophisticated interpersonal skills for forming and sustaining weak ties. This more macro orientation of apes, coupled with emotional enhancements installed in the human line, makes it possible to live among strangers and form solidarities where necessary. We are a very big animal but we can live like ants in societies of millions, and in two cases billions, of conspeci cs. Humans possess some very unique characteristics as mammals: We can interact with strangers; we can walk into new corporate units; and at the same time, we can form solidarities necessary to meet emotional and societal needs. There are some other very smart animals on earth—whales, dolphins, elephants, and species of birds (blackbirds, parrots, and macaws, to name a few)—that have some form of language and hence culture, that have a sense of self, that can live in fusion– ssion social structures, and that could inherit the earth if we humans die out (except for the fact that we might take the other smart and the majority of dumb animals, not forgetting the many plant life forms, with us as well during our march to extinction). Therefore, it may be that insects, bacteria, fungi, and viruses will inherit the earth—all of which live in macro or mega clusters without emotions, language, or culture, and indeed without brains at all. So, being smart and emotional is not necessarily a guarantee of species immortality (see Turner, 2021).

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pull promiscuous adults into conjugal relations, the nuclear family became possible; and once selection

p. 42

Notes Great apes do not have the capacity to articulate fine-tuned words into sentences because their larynx, tongue, lips, and associated muscles in the face are not structured for speech.

2.

A er considerable analysis and consultation with great ape researchers, I was forced to conclude that chimpanzees do not appear to experience either shame or guilt; they will respond to negative sanctions but this is simply a fear response from human caretakers, which is di erent than actually experiencing what seem to be emotions unique to humans.

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The Oxford Handbook of Emotional Development Daniel Dukes (ed.) et al. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/978019 8855903.001.0001 9780191889516

Online ISBN: Print ISBN:

9780198855903

Search in this book

CHAPTER

4 Current Challenges and Advances in Computational and Arti cial Agent Modeling for the Simulation of A ective Social Learning and Regulation of Motivated Behaviors  David Rudrauf, Andrea C. Samson, Martin Debbané https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198855903.013.19 Published: 13 January 2022

Pages 45–60

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Published: 2022

Abstract Psychological science aims at understanding the development and interplay of hidden psychological mechanisms (cognitive, a ective, and social) and their causal role in observable behaviors, both in computational models and arti cial agents derived from psychological theories allowing investigators to explore and test hypotheses through simulations. This chapter reviews and discusses current modeling challenges and advances that are relevant to the understanding and simulation of a ective social learning and the development of adaptive and motivated behaviors. The hope is that the chapter will encourage dialogue and the sharing of perspectives with developmental and clinical psychologists. The chapter emphasizes the importance of modeling the complex integration of multiple interacting mechanisms, including processes analogous to the imagination and subjective experience, in order to understand the development of appraisal, emotions, emotion regulation, and their roles in adaptive and maladaptive behaviors.

Keywords: computational modeling, active inference, artificial agents, artificial consciousness, projective consciousness model, imagination, social perspective taking, reinforcement learning, appraisal, motivated behaviors Subject: Psychology, Developmental Psychology Series: Oxford Library of Psychology Collection: Oxford Handbooks Online

Introduction ONE

central aim of psychological science is to understand the causal relationships between psychological

mechanisms (cognitive, a ective, and social) and motivated behaviors, and how they underlie adaptive and maladaptive development. Fully achieving such an aim based solely on experimental science is challenging. The speci city of the experimental manipulations and of the mechanisms underlying the generation of observable behaviors may be hard to assess, notably due to multiple confounds in experimental designs. For safety and ethical reasons, many experiments cannot be conducted. Likewise, studying complex p. 46

relationships among multiple independent and

dependent variables can become practically intractable,

all the more as one seeks to investigate the development of complex a ective social processes which both depend on and in uence behaviors. The integration and development of computational modeling approaches are part of the maturation of a scienti c eld endeavoring to quantitatively relate mechanisms and observations through generative models. Human psychology is highly complex and the application of computational modeling to it is still in its infancy, with many challenges ahead. However, it is worth investing in their development, as computational models and simulations of arti cial agents derived from psychological theories could provide new and valuable ways to explore and test hypotheses, notably by investigating the relationships between hidden internal mechanisms and overt adaptive and maladaptive symptomatic behaviors. It could eventually also help to determine conditions of clinical outcome optimization, speci cally to identify mechanisms of change in clinical interventions, leading to more precise personalized psychotherapies. This is of course a highly ambitious and challenging aim, since such psychology-inspired models should be conceived and implemented on the basis of advanced computational principles that integrate a broad range of psychological mechanisms in a variety of contexts, in order to ground their validity and relevance.

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adaptive and maladaptive contexts. It is thus relevant, though highly challenging, to develop

This chapter, and the choices of material it reviews, is based on the following considerations. Emotion development involves the development of associations between stimuli or events and a repertory of cognitive processes and a ective responses, which are growing in complexity and which tend to di erentiate over time. These associations de ne what becomes emotional or not. They at rst may be very basic and related to unconditioned stimuli or states, but throughout development, the associations become what might initially be hardwired then shapes and di erentiates itself into an articulated system which ultimately attempts to learn, from the environment, how to ful ll its needs (Panksepp, 1998). Those needs themselves are in a dynamic evolution linked to the organism’s biology and context. This process of integration of complexity and di erentiation is thus integrally tied to the development and operation of a broad realm of psychological processes, and their interactions. These relate to the components we review in the rst section: machine consciousness, imagination, reinforcement learning, appraisals, and active inference, understood as parts of a process of optimization. For instance, an infant may appraise intrinsic pleasantness and learn new associations between intrinsic pleasantness and cues of potential reward (e.g., mom arriving in the room as a promise of comfort and nutrition), whereas a 4-year-old will associate its mother with other attributes. Progressively, events will become emotionally competent and meaningful through a range of processes: more or less conscious appraisal through nonsocial and social perception, cognition, and imagination; considerations about personal signi cance, goal relevance, and coping potential in connection to prior beliefs and preferences. Likewise, these processes will modulate the motivation and elicitation of a cascade of innate and learned physiological and behavioral responses related to action tendencies, which themselves act as feedback onto the p. 47

ongoing appraisal and reappraisal

processes. Altogether, these mechanisms contribute to determine the a ective state of the individual. We thus claim that understanding and modeling emotion development cannot be fully achieved in isolation, without approaching the problem within the broader embodied psychological context of the functioning and development of a human mind in which emotion development takes place. Capturing the complexity of such a developing mind in context is ultimately a necessary condition for a fully valid conceptualization of the problem. More abstractly, that means that epistemologically, to understand the parts (e.g., emotions), we need to understand the whole (the mind), which is one of the great challenges for psychology as a scienti c discipline. Advances in arti cial agent modeling and machine consciousness, and in a wealth of computational techniques, may o er the beginning of a methodological toolkit to model such complexity quantitatively and implement simulations for model-based empirical research. Thus they warrant attention as they could become an innovative basis to approach the problem. In this chapter, we rst discuss state-of-the art computational and arti cial agent modeling principles for a ective learning and a ective computing, emphasizing the diversity and multiplicity of problems. Second, we present the principles of our Projective Consciousness Model and its extension to social cognition (Rudrauf et al., 2017, 2020, 2021; Rudrauf & Debbané, 2018), and brie y discuss how this model could illuminate the interplay of a ective social feedback, prior belief learning, and imaginary perspective taking in the development of strategies of regulation of emotional states and motivated behaviors, such as approach-avoidance and joint-attention behaviors, during early development. Note that we will often use psychological terms, such as “a ective,” in the context of modeling, without necessarily emphasizing the need to interpret them as analogies through speci c notations (e.g., the use of quotation marks or phrases such as “akin to”).

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much more complex and indirect as new categories and mechanisms of appraisals enter into play. Thus

Current Challenges and Developments in Machine Consciousness, A ective Computing, and Artificial Agent Modeling Relevant to the Simulation of Emotion Development lower-level processes such as: intelligence (cognitive, a ective, procedural); the integration and use of information within the global workspace of consciousness including, notably, capacities for imagination p. 48

(which play an essential role in the regulation of emotion and motivated behaviors); but also mechanisms of learning (of perceptual and semantic categories of appraisal, as well as of executive functioning, in relation to mechanisms of a ective reinforcement). Furthermore, appraisal mechanisms and dimensions are essential to consider, as they play a central role in the determination and elicitation of emotional states, and relate speci c a ective processes to the broader psychological context. Likewise, to model the relationships between the relevant psychological processes and observable behaviors, in order to be able to compare simulations with empirical data, it is important to develop models of arti cial agents and virtual humans embodied in simulation environments. A recent approach—active inference—o ers a promising framework to integrate these di erent components of the problem, even though it still needs developments and speci cations. In this section, we consider these components from the standpoint of computational modeling.

The Horizon of Artificial General Intelligence and Machine Consciousness for Modeling Human-Like Embodied Systems The human mind is complex, integrating many interacting cognitive and a ective processes whose interplay determines and characterizes its dynamics and development. One great challenge in modeling a human mind is thus to design algorithms based on unifying principles integrating perceptual, a ective, and symbolic processing, as well as communication (Haugeland, 1989), and rendering explicit their connections to the behavioral governance of an embodied autonomous system. The problem has been expressed as that of Arti cial General Intelligence (Goertzel, 2007) or Universal Intelligence (Legg & Hutter, 2007). Humanlevel general arti cial intelligence (AI), including human infant cognitive and emotional intelligence, and high-level transfer learning, are yet to be achieved, and the space of possible approaches is vast, be it neuroscience-inspired or psychology-inspired (see Hassabis et al., 2017). The problem has been connected to that of understanding and modeling consciousness. Models of consciousness developed over the last three decades fall into ve broad categories: global workspace models, integrated information models, internal self-models, higher-level representations, and models of attention mechanisms (see Reggia, 2013). Chella and Manzotti (2009) emphasized that the design and construction of a conscious machine should integrate explicit modeling of situatedness, embodiment, emotions and motivations, the unity of conscious integration, time consciousness, free will, and, most importantly, qualitative experience (or subjective character) (see also Manzotti & Chella, 2018). Aleksander (2005) put forth ve axioms for machine consciousness as a compound concept: 1. Presence—which should be based on mechanisms for representing the world with the organism in it, incorporating motor signals. p. 49

2.

Imagination—which relates to simulations of state trajectories sustained in the absence of sensory input.

3. Attention—which relates to mechanisms guiding (exogenously) sensors during perceptual acts and (endogenously) imaginative acts.

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Understanding and modeling emotion development entails understanding and modeling higher-level and

4. Planning—which involves the exploration of possible actions through imagination. 5. Emotion—as an evaluation of plans. One of the most critical lingering and elusive issue—sometimes referred to as the hard problem—is to (Hohwy, 2014; Revonsuo, 2006; Seth, 2015, 2018).

Emphasizing the Importance of Modeling the Imagination to Understand Emotion Regulation and Motivated Behaviors in Embodied Systems Simulating processes analogous to the imagination (Battaglia et al., 2016; Eslami et al., 2016; Rudrauf et al., 2017) is essential for human-inspired adaptive machine consciousness, both in its most abstract and most embodied aspects (Stuart, 2007; Hamrick et al., 2017). The imagination enables internal simulations over predictive models of the world in order to construct more informed and economical solutions, perform appraisal and reappraisal, based on both nonsocial and social perspective taking, and regulate emotion for decision making and action programming. In embodied systems, these mechanisms relate to the spatial framing of information, including a ective and social information, which conditions how embodied agents represent and interact with objects and others (see review in Riva, 2018; see also Rudrauf et al., 2017; Constantinescu et al., 2016).

Reinforcement Learning, Deep Learning, and Adaptive A ective Computing Reinforcement learning (RL) is a psychobiological mechanism for the maximization of future reward. It is important for learning and di erentiating complex contingencies between environmental states, a ective values, and actions (Sutton & Barto, 1998), and in that sense, relevant for emotion development. It has been widely applied in AI as a central mechanism for cybernetic optimization, including regarding embodied systems under constraints of survival and emotion development (Hassabis et al., 2017; Bach & Dayan, 2017; Moerland et al., 2016; Williams et al., 2015). Furthermore, model-based RL, associating RL to generative models, enables systems to simulate alternate expected outcomes as a function of action, and expected reward based on past experiences. It could thus help to understand and model how a ective processes connect to higher-order cognitions, including the imagination. p. 50

Advances of Deep Learning (Yamins & DiCarlo, 2016) and Deep Belief Networks (see Hinton, 2009) have o ered an e ective neuroscience-inspired framework for integrating principles of RL, capacities of pattern recognition and generalization, as well as predictive generative models, into arti cial systems (Schmidhuber, 2015; LeCun et al., 2015). They promise solutions to parts of the problem of human common-sense understanding (Denil et al., 2016). Temporal-di erence methods allow systems to compare predictions outside of direct reward, featuring properties of second-order conditioning (transitive associative learning). These approaches can integrate attentional mechanisms focusing on subparts of the appraisal and learning space, which has been considered as essential for the optimization of learning (Larochelle & Hinton, 2010). They can contribute to the scanning and integration of exteroceptive, interoceptive, and autobiographical memory information (Summer eld et al., 2006). One of the issues facing such AI approaches is to nd solutions for continual learning (i.e., learning new tasks without forgetting prior ones) (Thrun & Mitchell, 1995), in order to avoid the classical problem of catastrophic forgetting (French, 1999; Kirkpatrick et al., 2017) in which previous memories, well encoded in an arti cial neural network, are erased as the system learns new information.

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understand the role of the phenomenology of rst-person, subjective experience in biological cybernetics

Appraisal Modeling The integration of a ective learning, such as reinforcement learning into di erentiated models of machine consciousness, requires the embedding and selection of appraisal models. Cognitive evaluations (appraisals) about the personal relevance of situations adaptively prioritize and activate speci c emotional and avoidance behavior) as part of perception–action cycles (Scherer et al., 2001; Frijda, 1988; Plutchik, 1980). The analysis of compatibility with goals, desires, beliefs, and expectations is central to the appraisal process (see Ellsworth & Scherer, 2003), and impacts the triggering of a variety of positive or negative emotions. In this framework, one essential mechanism for developing adaptive emotion regulation and resilience towards stressors is the ability to reappraise situations through a ective learning (Gross, 2001; Sheppes et al., 2015; Moors et al., 2013; Kalisch et al., 2015; see also Gross, 1998; De France et al., this volume). Computational models of appraisal have ranged from input–output feedforward decision models (e.g., Ortony, 1988; Scherer, 1993; Roseman, 2001), to dynamic feedback systems with attractor states (Cunningham et al., 2013; Scherer, 2009), and integrative models such as CoMERG, EMA, and I-PEFiCADM (see Hoorn et al., 2012). They can integrate signal-processing streams and machine-learning mechanisms (e.g., for emotion recognition), and forward models of emotion expressions, as well as mechanisms of reinforcement learning (see Barros & Wermter, 2016). The architecture and mechanisms of appraisal models, including how they are updated, are thus key elements to consider when modeling emotion development.

p. 51

Embodying Algorithms Into Artificial Agents for Simulations of Behavior Once a psychologically inspired algorithm integrating machine consciousness, appraisal, and mechanisms of a ective learning is de ned, embodying the algorithm into models of arti cial agents is important in order to perform simulations of human behavior in context that can be compared to empirical data. Arti cial agents are computer programs that implement biological or psychological models in virtual or robotic systems, and can be used for simulating behaviors (from cells to humans) and for the analysis of their interactions with their physical and social environment (Luck et al., 2005; Michel et al., 2009). Multiagent modeling (e.g., with agents with a variety of roles and status such as caregivers) becomes essential when social agents are considered (Ferber & Weiss, 1999; Wooldridge, 2009). Belief–Desire–Intention (BDI) models have been in uential as a framework to de ne arti cial agents based on the operationalization of psychological concepts (George

et al., 1998): Beliefs correspond to the agent’s

understanding about the state of the world (including itself and other agents); Desires to its preferred goals and outcomes, and constitute a basis for the motivation of action; Intentions to planned actions resulting from the confrontation of Beliefs and Desires. The framework remains quite general and needs speci cations, as a multiplicity of psychological models and computational solutions can t in it at di erent levels of abstraction (Steunebrink et al., 2007; Albrecht & Stone, 2018). In the present context, BDI models imply the de nition of a model of machine consciousness, appraisal, and a ective processing that can explicitly relate Beliefs and Desires to Intentions.

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responses for the motivation of action (e.g., a challenging situation appraised as dangerous will elicit fear

Active Inference and the Free Energy Principle Active inference, which is closely related to Bayesian inference, o ers a recent approach to reformulate BDI and appraisal models in a more comprehensive psychological and computational framework, in which emotion development could be simulated. According to active inference, embodied agents (e.g., humans) go satisfy preferences held in memory about the self and the world, in a manner compatible with sensory evidence (Friston et al., 2017). It can be formalized under the free energy principle: the problem of cybernetics becomes a problem of global optimization and reduction of uncertainty, which entails free energy (FE) minimization (i.e., the reduction of a quantity related to surprise), expressing the divergence between prior expectations and sensory evidence as a function of actual or simulated actions (Friston, 2010; Seth, 2014, 2015; Hohwy, 2014; Clark, 2009; Apps & Tsakiris, 2014; Rudrauf et al., 2017). In this framework, beliefs as well as preferences are conceptualized and encoded as prior expectations (e.g., I have the belief, p. 52

that is the expectation, that there is a cat behind the door; I prefer, that is I expect that my

actions should

increase my well-being). Priors (e.g., a child’s belief that pulling the tail of a cat would be a fun, rewarding experience) are constantly updated based on the outcomes of actions and the sampling of sensory evidence. A child would experience surprise, and thus an increase in FE, when sensory evidence following pulling the tail of a cat elicits an aversive reaction (if the cat bites the child, for example), while the child’s generative model of beliefs or preferences would expect reward. FE and its temporal derivatives can be related to a ective valence (the positive or negative character of emotions) and the dynamics of complex emotions such as anxiety, hope, disappointment, and relief (Cunningham et al., 2013; Jo

ly & Coricelli, 2013; Rudrauf

& Debbané, 2018). Generally speaking, when FE increases (or is expected to), the valence of the state is negative (negative feelings); when FE decreases (or is expected to), the valence of the state is positive. Importantly, the limit of a complete absence of divergence between all expectations and sensory evidence (i.e., a FE at 0), which would imply an ideal state without any need for further active inference, is impossible to achieve in practice, given the complexity of the problem relative to the capacities of the agent. There is thus always some level of FE. The relationships between FE and a ective states can be conceived at two levels: as a momentary experience in a speci c context, and across a continuum of actual and possible experiences that are compared (e.g., through memory recall and imagination) in terms of their relative FE (with preferences for experiences with lower FE). Furthermore, FE minimization can incorporate principles of reinforcement learning in its broader epistemic framework of uncertainty reduction, which also fosters epistemic curiosity and foraging (Parr & Friston, 2017, 2019). The active inference framework o ers exible solutions for the integration of sophisticated a ective models (Rudrauf & Debbané, 2018). By incorporating interoception of bodily states in the generative model, active inference can provide a formal basis for understanding and modeling minimal selfhood (Limanowski & Blankenburg, 2013; Debbané et al., 2017; Vrticka et al., 2014), and, more generally, the development of the self as a model of expectations under Bayesian learning. The framework has recently been used to investigate the development of the di erentiation and awareness of emotions, from bodily signals and reinforcement principles (Smith et al., 2017; Smith et al., 2019).

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through cycles of perception, prediction, and action, in order to con rm or update prior expectations and

The Projective Consciousness Model: Principles of Extension to Social Perspective Taking and Inference We recently introduced the Projective Consciousness Model (PCM), which models spatial consciousness in 2018; Rudrauf & Debbané, 2018). The PCM incorporates machine consciousness and BDI principles, active p. 53

inference, and

FE minimization as described above, into a cognitive and a ective model that can be used

for simulations of behaviors, emphasizing the modeling of subjective experience and its relationships to biological cybernetics and resilience. It synthesizes the Global Workspace Theory (Baars, 1997), may be compatible with Integrated Information Theory (Tononi, 2004), and integrate appraisal mechanisms, including reappraisal (through update rules). It also builds upon concepts derived from virtual reality, conceiving of consciousness as the equivalent of a 3D game engine, which operates as a global workspace for componential perception and imagination, capable of simulating embodied real-world interaction in a virtual environment. It thus o ers a potential framework for modeling emotion development (see also Messinger et al., this volume) and its connection to motivated behaviors, in situations that may be more ecologically valid than is often the case in typical psychological experiments. The PCM relates perception, imagination, and action programming within a view-point dependent, 3dimensional subjective space in perspective, the Field of Consciousness (FoC). The geometry of the FoC, i.e., projective geometry, entails mechanisms of appraisal that are consistent with known psychophysical law (Rudrauf et al., 2020). It o ers a workspace to support the appraisal and reappraisal of multimodal sensorimotor, a ective, and social information, and the optimization of intentions in relation to beliefs and desires, across multiple appraisal dimensions (e.g., safety, pleasure, coping potential, norm compatibility). It does so through mechanisms of perspective taking, which are integral to its geometry, and frame actual perceptual and possible (anticipatory) imaginary perspectives on the world. These perspectives can be associated with a FE re ecting both divergences from preferences and epistemic uncertainty. Its minimization entails the choice of perspectives that jointly maximize preferences, satisfactions, and uncertainty reduction. In other words, the PCM integrates a model of a ective and epistemic drives, contributing to the selection of optimal perceptual-attentional, imaginary-predictive, and actionprogramming stances through perspective taking. Iterative imaginary perspective taking contributes to minimizing expected FE. The imagination acts as a method for escaping local minima of FE (e.g., by nding a better place) (see Rudrauf et al., 2017, 2020). On this basis, PCM agents can select the best overall course of action, based on prior beliefs, preferences, and simulations of action outcomes. A variety of categories of emotions can be modeled, such as hope, fear, happiness, unhappiness, surprise, relief, and disappointment (Rudrauf & Debbané, 2018). A ective dynamics can be associated with forward models of emotion expression across multiple channels, and exibly connected to models of agent bodies and action repertories in space (Rudrauf et al., 2020, 2021). The PCM is also relevant to model processes in emotion development, such as a ective social learning through social feedback. The approach could allow researchers to better understand how the environment contributes to the di erentiation of emotional experience (from pleasure versus displeasure to the more complex categories of emotional experience); and how a child may seek and bene t from social feedback, for instance in circumstances of high FE. In this perspective, the PCM can be extended to model social p. 54

perspective taking, in order to imbue agents with mechanisms of

inference about others’ a ective states

and interests, as part of their appraisal of situations (Rudrauf et al., 2020, 2021; Debbané et al., 2014). The approach takes inspiration from theories of empathy, social perspective taking, and a ective learning, with an emphasis on simulation theory (i.e., the internal simulation of others by projection of self-models) (Lamm et al., 2007); and from theories on emotion regulation and a ective social development from both cognitive-behavioral traditions (Gross, 1998; Dukes & Clément, 2019; see Clément & Dukes, this volume)

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embodied agents and its role in adaptability and resilience (Rudrauf et al., 2017, 2020, 2021; Williford et al.,

and psychodynamic traditions (Gergely & Watson, 1996; Beckes & Coan, 2011)—for example, the mentalization-based framework (Fonagy & Allison, 2014). It also relates to and generalizes models of dyadic exchanges in agents (Friston & Frith, 2015; Constant et al., 2018, 2019; Veissiere et al., 2019). FoC principles can thus be generalized to integrate generative models of self and others. Instead of only maximizing expectations and resolving uncertainty about the consequences of actions on physical objects account prosocial and intentional objects; for example, something akin to “mother,” “intentional stance,” “a ect,” and so on, integrating inferences about the perspective and expectations of other agents. A fundamental idea is that projective inferences about others’ interest under FE minimization enables more global learning about potentially relevant aspects of the world. Figure 4.1 illustrates how PCM agents can integrate a model of other agents to understand and predict their behaviors while assuming that other agents are equipped with the same general algorithm (or mind) as themselves, with potentially di erent prior beliefs and preferences. Attributions of imaginary perspectives, prior beliefs, and preferences to other agents is integrated in the agents’ global FE minimization process through simulated FoC, and updated via social feedback and contextual information (related to “a ective” and spatial dimensions). These processes allow the agents to be equipped with mechanisms analogous to Theory of Mind (ToM) and empathy. They o er a generative mechanism for joint-attention and social approach-avoidance behaviors.

Figure 4.1 PCM Overall Algorithmic Principles and Virtual and Robotic Illustrations. PCM Overall Algorithmic Principles and Virtual and Robotic Illustrations. (a) Overall algorithm. Information is integrated by combining prior beliefs and sensory evidence, and framed through a projective geometrical frame, for access and appraisal, in the FoC. FoC can be attributed to self or others. A value of FE(FoC) is associated with the current FoC and averaged with previous values as part of a cumulative process of optimization aimed at selecting alternative action plans through an imagination loop. The contribution of the current FE(FoC) to the average is weighted by the importance attributed by the agent to itself or others, depending on which agent the simulated FoC represents. The current gradient of the average FE with respect to action (in time and space) motivates behavioral tendencies of approach (if 0), and related emotion expressions. Imagined action plans are compared based on overall FE minimization in order to select the next actual action. Action outcomes from self and others feedback into the process. (b) Reverse inference. Prior beliefs about how others experience the world are updated by combining spatial orientation and emotion signals as sensory evidence. (c) Virtual agents illustration. A “son” and a “mom” are interacting. Initially, the sonʼs FE is minimized for projective transformation T1 that aims at the mom. The son then performs reverse inference about the mom, based on facial expression and orientation signals, and infers that projective transformation T2 aiming at the toy on the table minimizes her own FE. The son updates his prior interests accordingly. Projective transformation T3 now minimizes the sonʼs FE. At the end, the toy minimizes everybodyʼs FE, generating a steady and self-reinforcing state of joint attention. (d) Basic implementation in Cozmo (Anki) robots. Successive time instants are from top to bottom. Mutual perspective taking about the other robotʼs expressed interest leads Cozmo 1 and Cozmo 2 to approach and play together with cube 1 (see Rudrauf et al., 2020). We are currently working on applying the approach to investigate the possibility of modeling early a ective social development, focusing on the interactions between a ective social feedback, learning, and perspective taking, and their role in the development of strategies of emotion regulation and the motivation of adaptive and maladaptive behaviors of approach and avoidance and joint attention (see Rudrauf et al., 2020). We are currently implementing simulations in order to systematically explore the roles of early social feedback from caregivers about both objects and the self, in generating adaptive and maladaptive behaviors, over a range of social feedback and reward/punishment contingencies. Our preliminary results suggest that, in our limited simulation context, caregivers’ positive biases foster positive outcomes in child agents, by combining the bene ts of social support and exploration behaviors, leading to personal learning through direct experiences of rewards and punishment. Conversely, systematic negative biases manifesting in

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through their generative models and mechanisms of active inference, PCM agents can operate by taking into

negative social feedback about objects and the self tended to foster maladaptive avoidance behaviors, which prevented the child agent from exploring and learning by itself, in an adaptive manner.

p. 55

Conclusion manner, computational modeling and arti cial agent modeling o er a promising and potentially important method to develop and complement psychological science. They open the possibility to use systematic simulations to better understand and predict the interactions between complex mechanisms and environmental factors underlying a ective social and motivated behavior development. They are promising

p. 56

for

the mechanistic exploration of di erent trajectories of emotion development and their impact on

adaptive and maladaptive processes and behaviors, which could then be compared to empirical data crosssectionally and longitudinally, both through the simulation of the mechanisms of learning and di erentiation themselves, and through the possibility of comparing the behavioral impact of di erent competing models of a ective processing.

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Although in their infancy, and still far from adequately modeling human psychology in a comprehensive

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The Oxford Handbook of Emotional Development Daniel Dukes (ed.) et al. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/978019 8855903.001.0001 9780191889516

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CHAPTER

5 Emotional Development: A Field in Need of a (Cognitive) Revolution  Eric A. Walle, Lukas D. Lopez, Anabel Castillo https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198855903.013.16 Published: 13 January 2022

Pages 61–77

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Published: 2022

Abstract The cognitive revolution of the 1970s and 1980s brought with it an emphasis on cognitive processes involved in emotion. While a similar wave of cognitive research spread to the eld of developmental whittled down developmental processes into their most basic cognitive underpinnings, the role of cognition in emotional development remains largely underrepresented in the literature. This chapter is a clarion call to researchers to devote equal theoretical and empirical e orts to the role of cognition in emotional development. It highlights three areas of research ripe for closer examination by researchers of emotional development: appraisal, executive functioning, and inference-based learning. By linking existing research methodologies and ndings in these cognitively dominated domains with open questions relating to emotional development, the chapter highlights how this research can help spur progress in the study of emotion.

Keywords: cognition, appraisal, executive function, rational inference, statistical learning Subject: Psychology, Developmental Psychology Series: Oxford Library of Psychology Collection: Oxford Handbooks Online

Introduction EMOTIONS

are processes of managing one’s relation with their perceived environment on matters of

personal signi cance (Barrett & Campos, 1987). As such, studying their development necessitates understanding changes in how the developing individual appreciates and relates with their world. The cognitive revolution of the 1970s and 1980s infused theoretical and empirical emotion research in the adult literature, yielding a wealth of research on how di erences in individuals’ goals and their perception of the environment correspond with di erences in emotional experiences. In developmental psychology, the cognitive revolution sparked interest in the building blocks of cognition in infants and children. However, researchers of emotional development failed to make such similar conceptual and empirical progress. Thus, while much of developmental research has focused on identifying emotions in infants and young children, our understanding of how changes in constituent emotion processes (e.g., cognition, perception) impact emotional development remains limited. This chapter borrows from and extends ndings from the cognitive development literature to spark novel research on emotional development. In doing so, we aim to inspire novel ways of considering how emotion and cognition develop in tandem—in essence, providing the complementary side of a developmental coin.

p. 62

The Cognitive Revolution That Emotional Development Forgot The eld of emotional development is both old and new. Philosophers such as Aristotle, Hume, and Locke have pondered emotions and their development for centuries. Likewise, Darwin observed infants and young children (including his own) to inform his understanding of the emergence of expressive behaviors, such as blushing or tears while crying (Darwin, 1872). Interestingly, a common tension amongst the authors centered on those aspects of emotion that are innate and those that develop, and the distinction between passion (i.e., emotion) and reason (i.e., cognition).

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psychology, it did so in a relatively a ectively neutral way. While infancy research systematically

Modern empirical inquiry of emotional development took hold in the 1970s and 1980s with the research by Campos, Izard, and others (e.g., Barrett & Campos, 1987; Izard, 1978; Klinnert et al., 1983). The human infant was not merely lost in a Jamesian “blooming, buzzing confusion” (James, 1890, p. 462), but interacted with and related to the developmental context. Infants used emotions to engage with social partners (e.g., Field, 1982), sought out and used emotion to guide their interaction with the environment Tronick et al., 1978). Concurrently, the broader eld of emotion began integrating cognitive components into emotion theory (e.g., Clark & Fiske, 1982). In particular, the role of (cognitive) appraisal became central to many emotion theories (see Moors et al., 2013; Roseman & Smith, 2001). These theories emphasized the importance of how an individual perceives and appraises their environment across di erent dimensions (e.g., agency, certainty, novelty) for the elicitation of speci c emotions. In doing so, emotion researchers studying adult populations successfully bridged cognition and emotion—even naming a journal accordingly (Cognition and Emotion). However, despite the rich history of research seeking to understand the ontogeny of emotion and the leaps taken to understand adult emotion processes, the study of emotional development has struggled to keep pace. The lack of progress is clear when compared with the study of cognitive development. The cognitive revolution of the latter half of the 20th century brought forth grand theories on cognition and development (e.g., Chomsky, 1957; Gibson, 1969; Neisser, 1967). Moreover, empirical research accelerated in productivity in the 1980s with the advancement of novel methodological approaches (e.g., habituation and violation of expectation paradigms). The results were numerous breakthroughs that transformed our understanding of cognition and development. In stark relief to such headway is our understanding of basic processes of emotional development, a topic of continued study (see Pollak et al., 2019) that remains mired in constructlevel confusion (Walle & Dahl, 2020). The role of cognition in the emotion process is rmly instantiated in emotion theory and empirical research with adults; it is time for researchers of emotional development to make similar conceptual and empirical p. 63

leaps. By marrying current emotion

theory with the methodological precision of studies of cognitive

development, emotion researchers can expand our understanding of how emotional processes change across human development.

Examining the Co-development of Emotion and Cognition Cognitive processes are central to many theories of emotion and are important to consider in the study of emotional development (see Fogel et al., 1992; Lewis, 2001). Although substantial overlap is apparent when one aligns research on emotional and cognitive development (see Reschke et al., 2017), explicit research linking these domains in the developmental literature is sparse. We do not seek to relitigate whether an emotion can be deconstructed and reconstructed with its requisite pieces; emotions are greater than the sum of their parts (see Camras, 2010  Coan, 2010; Lazarus, 1991a, b). Rather, understanding the ontogeny of the component processes of emotion can elucidate the developmental interconnectedness of these processes and how they cohere to form an emergent process that, while related to its substrates, is qualitatively distinct. Below we highlight three cognitive processes likely to underlie emotional development: appraisal, executive functioning, and inference-based learning.

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(e.g., Sorce et al., 1985), and were acutely sensitive when emotional interactions were disrupted (e.g.,

The Development of Appraisal Dimensions of Emotion The role of appraisal is central to many views of emotion (see Lazarus, 1991b; Scherer et al., 2001). Conceptualizations of how many appraisal dimensions are utilized (e.g., Kitayama & Markus, 1990; Scherer, 1997; Smith & Ellsworth, 1985), how distinct dimensions cohere in the generation of speci c emotions (e.g., Scherer, 2008; Lazarus, 1991a; Scherer, 1999) in the emotion process varies. However, there is general agreement that appraisals are involved in the emotion process (see Ellsworth & Scherer, 2003; Lazarus, 1993) and empirical research indicates discrete emotions are elicited by manipulating speci c appraisal dimensions (e.g., Roseman & Evdokas, 2004). Yet, research examining the ontogeny of appraisals remains scant. Although Izard (1993) provided a harsh assessment on the rising importance placed on cognition in studying emotion processes through the lens of appraisals, other notable researchers have indicated its importance. In considering laughter, Darwin noted that “a young child if tickled by a strange man, would scream from fear” (1872, p. 186), illustrating the important role of how the child appraises the context in generating the resulting emotional experience. The p. 64

importance of developmental research has also been noted

by appraisal researchers (e.g., Roseman &

Smith, 2001). Indeed, Roseman (2001) emphasized that “appraisal-making may proceed with little or no consciousness, and it is likely that there are primitive (simple, rudimentary) versions of each appraisal … that can elicit these emotions” (p. 77). Below, we focus on two appraisal dimensions that may undergird early emotional development: agency and expectedness.

The Co-development of Emotion and Agency Attributing responsibility is essential for the elicitation of numerous emotions. Indeed, according to Roseman (2001, Table 4.4), agency di erentiates eight discrete emotions: surprise, joy, fear, anger, pride, guilt, shame, and disgust. Adults readily assign responsibility for others’ actions—there is even a classic error named in its overuse (Ross, 1977)! However, what of the young infant who cannot complete goaldirected actions: is it reasonable to expect that she can appreciate agency? Work by Woodward and colleagues has meticulously examined infants’ perception of goal-directed action (see Woodward, 2009). Findings indicate that interventions providing young infants with experience of grasping objects facilitates their appreciation of others’ reaching as goal-directed (Sommerville et al., 2005). Thus, as the infant becomes more agentic and engages with others perceived as agentic, their appreciation of agency is likely to blossom and correspond with marked changes in their emotionality (e.g., Biringen et al., 1995). Conversely, a child may misattribute agency in an emotional context. One can imagine a child believing that they are the cause of an outcome (e.g., their parent’s divorce) or that fate brought a cache of December gifts. In one of the few studies to examine children’s understanding of causal attributions and emotions, Thompson (1991) found that this appraisal dimension explained variability in emotion processing in young children. Moreover, erroneously attributing intentionality can lead children to unjustly punish an agent whose transgression was accidental (Killen et al., 2014). Extensive work by Dodge and colleagues provides insight on how misattribution of agency can result in di erent emotional responses (e.g., Dodge, 1980), as well as the long-term consequences of such misattributions (see Dodge et al., 2003). Thus, concepts such as the fundamental attribution error commonly used to make sense of adult behavior may be similarly useful for understanding seemingly irrational emotions in the developing child.

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Roseman et al., 1996; Smith & Ellsworth, 1987; Scherer, 1982), and their sequencing (e.g., Grandjean &

The Co-development of Emotion and Expectedness An adult’s wealth of experiences provides numerous examples and counterexamples to anticipate the likelihood of particular outcomes. Findings from the eld of cognitive development demonstrate infants’ propensity to detect probabilities and outcomes (e.g., Gopnik & Wellman, 2012); a skill undoubtedly relevant development researchers, is predicated on infants’ expectations for particular outcomes, and has recently been used to connect situational outcomes with emotional responses (Scott, 2017). Likewise, 20-month-old p. 65

infants who observed an agent consistently

select a statistically improbable object were more likely to

give the agent that object, demonstrating that infants appreciated the preference of the agent and completed their, statistically improbable, goal (Kushnir et al., 2010). Thus, understanding the likelihood of particular goal outcomes allows infants to anticipate and appreciate others’ emotions. More broadly, appreciating the potential for particular emotional outcomes could set the stage for enduring moral competencies. For example, Thompson (this volume) describes children’s “premoral sensibilities” of right and wrong as an emerging appraisal essential for experiencing certain moral emotions (e.g., indignation, sympathy, empathy, vengeance). Thus, an infant testing whether their parent will persist in reprimanding a previously prohibited action (e.g., Dahl & Freda, 2017, p. 165) may serve to build a degree of con dence that the act will be met with negative judgment, as well as transfer to other actions/contexts of similar relational signi cance (e.g., the destruction of property). The cultivation of such experiences in the developing child is likely fundamental to understanding emotional development.

The Role of Executive Functioning for Emotional Development Emotions and executive functioning (EF) have important roles in the manifestation of human behavior. While emotion refers to processes that regulate the self and others in the environment in relation to one’s goals (Barrett & Campos, 1987), EF refers to higher-order cognitive processes that enable us to act in a goaldirected manner (Anderson, 2002; Diamond, 2013). While cognitive processes associated with EF are plentiful, the core components include inhibitory control, working memory, and cognitive exibility (Carlson, 2005; Diamond, 2013; Zelazo et al., 1997; Welsh et al., 1991; Miyake et al., 2000). There has been a concentrated wave of studies and theoretical accounts discussing and advancing our understanding of the reciprocal relationship between emotion and higher-order cognitive processes, such as EF. EF has been associated with socioemotional development (see Riggs et al., 2006 for a review). For example, children with poorer EF exhibit more negative emotion expressions, aggressive coping strategies, and impulsive behaviors, suggesting a link between executive function and emotion (Jahromi & Stifter, 2008). Furthermore, several studies have found that EF predicts performance on false belief tasks concerning the causes and goals of others’ actions (Sabbagh et al., 2006; Carlson & Moses, 2001; for reviews, see Perner & Lang, 1999; Devine & Hughes, 2014). While prior research clearly demonstrates associations between emotions and higher-order cognitive processes, less is known regarding how emotions and EF interact (see DeFrance & Hollenstein, this volume).

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for emotional development. In fact, the violation of expectation paradigm, used widely by cognitive

Emotion, Neurological Functioning, and Executive Functioning Research from cognitive neuroscience supports the intricate bond between cognition and emotion through p. 66

shared neural mechanisms (Bell & Wolfe, 2004; Blair, 2002;

Zelazo & Cunningham, 2007; Bush et al.,

2000). Likewise, work focused on the development of emotion and cognition in early childhood has found 2012; Carlson & Wang, 2007; Ferrier et al., 2014). For example, Blankson and colleagues (2013) found that emotional control at age 3 supports cognitive control at 4 years of age. Furthermore, Rhoades et al. (2009) found that preschoolers who performed better on inhibitory control measures were rated lower on internalizing problems and higher in social skills—outcomes infused with emotion. Studies among infants complement these ndings, with emotional reactivity and regulation in infancy predicting EF at 4 years (Urasche et al., 2013). Thus, it appears that cognitive capabilities in infancy, such as attention and reactivity, correspond with later self-regulation abilities (Blair, 2002; Urasche et al., 2013). While these studies have advanced our understanding of the relationship between emotional development and cognitive development, further emotion research including complementary cognitive processes would provide a dynamic view of emotion and cognition during child development (Bell & Wolfe, 2004). Indeed, there are a variety of standardized attention and EF measurements that would be fruitful in this endeavor (Mahone, 2005; Carlson, 2005). Speci cally, some tasks require motoric inhibition, verbal inhibition, exibility between competing rules, or working-memory demands—all processes likely related to emotion regulation. Thus, the inclusion of standardized EF tasks into studies on emotional development would o er emotion researchers a peak at the intertwined nature of emotion and cognition in early childhood.

Considering “Hot” and “Cool” Contexts Given the nature of many EF studies, research on this construct has primarily been studied within relatively “cool,” decontextualized, and nonemotional contexts (Zelazo & Müller, 2002; Zelazo & Carlson, 2012), such as the regulation of arbitrary rules in a task with low stakes (Zelazo & Cunningham, 2007). For instance, in an antisaccade inhibitory control task, infants must inhibit looking to peripheral distractor cues (Holmboe et al., 2008; Johnson, 1995). Similarly, in a delayed-memory search that measures inhibitory control and working memory, infants must nd an object in one of multiple locations after a delay, and restrain from searching in locations that were previously rewarded (Diamond, 1985; Cuevas & Bell, 2010). If EF and attention skills are truly at the core of how one begins to control one’s behavior in relation to one’s goal (Cuevas et al., 2017), then these skills may inform the development of emotion regulation and the in uence of emotions on self-regulatory abilities. Rhoades et al. (2009) found that a task designed to capture children’s ability to inhibit a motor response was the best measure for predicting social-emotional development. Consequently, the ability to inhibit certain action tendencies of emotions (Frijda, 1986) may be important for socioemotional development. Contrary to cool tasks, hot EF tasks require regulation in contexts where the outcomes are of greater personal signi cance, such as completing a task to earn a desirable prize (e.g., Hongwanishkul et al., 2005; p. 67

Kerr & Zelazo, 2004). Interest in studying

executive function within “hot” motivational emotional

contexts is gaining traction in the literature. Such studies include examining the regulation of one’s own social behavior or decision making involving punishment and reward (see Bechara et al., 1999; Damasio, 1995). Relatedly, research has begun to distinguish between hot and cool EF abilities in children and adolescents (e.g., Poon, 2018; Zelazo & Carlson, 2012), further supporting the notion that these processes may be uniquely informative for emotional development. For example, Zelazo and Cunningham (2007) proposed a reciprocal relationship between emotion and EF based on the problem’s motivational signi cance (i.e., hot or cool). In this model, emotion and EFs are inseparable. Increased precision in using the term “hot” EF, e ortful control, self-regulation, or cognitive control would improve comparisons of

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instances in which emotional control and cognitive control are dynamically dependent (Blankson et al.,

“hot” and “cool” executive processes (Zhou et al., 2012) and provide clarity of their role in emotional development.

Inference-Based Learning and Emotional Development understanding of the world. A theoretical view in developmental psychology that champions this position is rationalist constructionism. From this perspective, infants use the natural co-occurrence of events in their environment to construct and support domain-general categories that help them make sense of the world (Xu, 2019). Rational constructivist approaches have traditionally been utilized when examining the development of infant causal theories (Gopnik & Wellman, 2012), knowledge of conceptual categories (Baillargeon et al., 2015), and language learning (Yurovsky et al., 2013). Only recently has this perspective been applied to the study of emotional development, such as the construction of emotion categories (Hoemann et al., 2020; Plate et al., this volume). Below we demonstrate how emotion-related information can in uence these rational learning processes to facilitate emotional development.

Statistical Learning While statistical learning is relevant for various developmental domains, it has traditionally been studied in relation to infant language development. However, there are at least two ways that infants’ propensity to learn the probable contingencies of environmental input is likely relevant for emotional development. First, infants keep track of co-occurring environmental stimuli. For example, 8-month-old infants can identify novel words by tracking the statistical regularities of various phonemes in a speech stream following only 2 minutes of auditory exposure (Sa ran et al., 1996). Likewise, infants link contingent elements of emotionrelated information, such as facial expressions, vocalizations, and goal-directed actions (e.g., Wu et al., 2017). A growing body of research indicates that infants have expectations of events likely to elicit particular emotions (see Plate et al., this volume). For example, infants have expectations for events likely to elicit joy and sadness at 12 months (Reschke, Walle, Flom et al., 2017), surprise at 18 months (Wu et al., 2018a), and p. 68

even distinct positive emotions in

the second year of life (Wu et al., 2017). Nonetheless, just as learning

the transitional probabilities of phonemes to identify words does not necessarily mean that the infant understands their meaning, the infant forming associations between emotion-related elements does not necessarily indicate that the infant appreciates their communicative or relational signi cance. Second, the communicated goal relevance inherent to emotional signals likely drives infant attention to attend to relevant contextual features (see Clément & Dukes, this volume). Recent language learning research indicates that infants actively generate e

cient contexts for statistical learning. For instance,

infant sustained attention and manipulation of objects predicts language learning outcomes (Pereira et al., 2014; Slone et al., 2018), by narrowing the amount of environmental information, and thereby simplifying the statistical learning process (Yurosky et al., 2013). So, too, do emotions in uence infant attention to their environment. For example, infants increase visual attention toward disgusting and fearful stimuli and faces expressing anger (Hoehl, 2014; LoBue & Rakison, 2013). Thus, the infant’s disposition to attend to emotionally salient objects and events may increase the likelihood that statistical regularities in the emotional environment are detected and retained. Additionally, the infant’s own emotional interest in particular objects or events may improve their receptiveness to adult input about such stimuli. Indeed, language learning is improved when parents follow in on what their infant is already attending to (e.g., Yu & Smith, 2012). Thus, the infant’s own interest in emotionally relevant stimuli may increase the likelihood that they successfully form relationally signi cant associations communicated by a caregiver.

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Human beings are often considered natural Bayesian learners, using prior experience to inform their

Rational Inferences Beyond the statistical regularities with which emotions occur in the environment, emotions communicate agents’ intentions, goals, and preferences (Reschke, Walle, & Dukes, 2017). Rational inference is a powerful tool used to infer others’ mental states (Wu et al., 2018b) and is related to reverse engineering of appraisal cognitive development to study how rational inferences correspond with emotion understanding. For example, multiple studies have shown that an agent’s repeated persistence toward a goal communicates their intention and preference (Baillargeon et al., 2015). In such paradigms, researchers go to great lengths to ensure that the experimenter remains expressively neutral—so as to remove the potential “confound” of emotion. However, a recent study compared infants’ attribution of intention to the experimenter’s actions when she was expressively neutral versus frustrated when failing to complete an action. As predicted, the ndings indicated that the experimenter’s expression of frustration heightened infants’ understanding of her goal-directed actions (Reschke et al., 2020). Infants also infer intentions and preferences from probability distributions governing the likelihood of a particular outcome (see Denison & Xu, 2019). For example, infants who observe an experimenter repeatedly select a minority object from a distribution of objects infer that the experimenter has a preference for the minority object over the majority object (Diesendruck et al., 2015; Kushnir et al., 2010; Ma & Xu, 2013; p. 69

Wellman

et al., 2016). Interestingly, many of these studies include the agent’s expression of joy following

the selections, and recent work suggests that such emotional expressions act as an additional preference cue. For example, young children expect agents to be surprised after receiving a low probability item and happier when receiving a preferred item that was improbable (Doan et al., 2018, 2020). Thus, the child integrates the present context with prior emotional experiences to generate emotional expectations, and these experiences, in turn, guide future predictions.

Considerations for Studying Emotional and Cognitive Development We have focused primarily on basic processes underlying emotional development, with an emphasis on cognitive processes likely to undergird such development. However, the potential of our perspective is broader than what we have reviewed. We conclude by pushing this perspective further in four ways.

Exploring How Processes Function and Change, Not Their Presence or Absence A particular ability or understanding need not necessarily be present or absent; rather, it can take various forms across development (see Mascolo & Fischer, 2015, 1995) and demonstrate nonlinear trajectories. Identifying the synchronous, and also heterochronous (see Fogel & Thelen, 1987), trajectories of underlying cognitive processes is crucial for understanding emotional development (see DeFrance & Hollenstein, this volume). Moreover, the presence of a cognitive ability does not necessarily mean that it can be utilized in emotional contexts. For example, while young infants may know that others have agency, it is not until 7 months that they appreciate who is blocking their goal and express anger toward the agent accordingly (Stenberg & Campos, 1990). Thus, the integration of various cognitive aspects of emotion may not necessarily be present when the capacity to appreciate each distinct ability in isolation exists. Lazarus (1991a) rightly stated that breaking down water into its atomic parts resulted in no longer studying the water molecule itself. The reverse is equally true: the mere presence of particular atoms is insu

cient to

assume the existence of the bonds required to create the molecule. Development entails the integration of more basic processes into more complex skills; so, too, is this the case for emotional development.

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dimensions (Hareli & Hess, 2010). An emerging body of research has attempted to bridge paradigms from

Contextual factors may also promote or inhibit the utilization of speci c appraisal dimensions in the emotion process. An example of this may be when a particular appraisal dimension is so overwhelmingly salient for the child as to obscure attention from other relevant dimensions, akin to the classic conservation p. 70

errors observed by Piaget

(1952). Conversely, a child may understand the certainty of particular outcomes

in the home but be less attuned to this dimension in novel or ambiguous contexts, and thus misappraise the or grammatical rule. For example, lacking a proper delineation of agency could result in an only child, who always wins at home, needlessly blaming themself when failing in contexts that, to an objective observer, are out their control. Such errors may be reasonably expected and help to explain emotional functioning of the infant and child.

Bidirectional and Interactive Influences Emotional development undoubtedly in uences the development of cognition. A visceral response to a situation, such as startling at the unexpected barking of a dog, may facilitate subsequent appraisals of threat upon future canine encounters. Changes in what is relationally signi cant to the child will necessarily change contexts from “cool” to “hot,” and the ability to regulate attention in such situations. Emotional communication may also serve an important function in communicating value to the infant, thereby increasing attention to the object and label and facilitating word learning. Moreover, various cognitive abilities likely interact with one another in the emotion process. Likewise, statistical regularities may in uence appraisal dimensions and EF. For example, a child who is told repeatedly to wait for dessert may associate their physiological state in these instances with frustration or anger, but they could also associate these feelings with goal blockage (appraisal dimension) and the need for inhibitory control (a component of EF). In this way statistical regularities in the environment may not simply add to particular emotion schemas, but also to related appraisal dimensions and EF related to coping. Viewing emotional development as intertwined with, rather than separate from or predicated by, cognitive development opens a range of research opportunities. Furthermore, while beyond the scope of this chapter, the bidirectional interaction of emotional development with other domains is similarly likely (see Camras & Witherington, 2005), such as motoric development (e.g., Campos et al., 1992), caregiver relationships (e.g., Kochanska, 2001; Laible & Thompson, 1998), and neurological functioning (e.g., Bunge et al., 2002; Johnson et al., 2014; Lewis, 2005).

Exploring Individual and Group Di erences While we have emphasized basic research examining emotional and cognitive development, this perspective is also readily amendable to exploring individual di erences. For example, selective attention to the outcome of an event (e.g., being hit by a ball on the playground) over its possible causes (e.g., intentional, accidental), in concert with poor inhibitory control (e.g., pausing to assess the context), may exacerbate a p. 71

child’s predilection to attribute hostile intent in socially ambiguous contexts and consequently respond with aggression (see Dodge, 1991, 1980). Rather than simply isolating a particular cognitive skill (e.g., behavioral inhibition), such research could shed light on ways to ameliorate problematic behavior by examining the functioning of that skill in the emotion process. This approach may also provide greater understanding of developmental and group di erences in emotion. Consider the growing acceptance that emotions di er across cultures due to varying life experiences, socialization practices, and how aspects of the environment are appraised (e.g., Markus & Kitayama, 1991), and even that distinct emotions may exist in some cultures but not others as a function of such cultural di erences (Kitayama & Markus, 1990). Why could this not also be true for the infant or the child? More concretely, comparing the emotions of a child to an adult may be as invalid as the emotional experience of a

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context. Equally, children may overgeneralize a particular dimension, as seen with overextension of a word

New Yorker with that of a person native to rural Mongolia, or a typically developing child and a child with Autism Spectrum Disorder. While there are no doubt commonalities in the emotions of each of these samples, there may also exist qualitative di erences in their emotional experiences (see Mascolo & Fischer, 1995). Understanding the underpinnings of emotions and their development can enlighten researchers to the manifold di erences of emotions across populations (see Broesch & Carpendale, this volume), et al., this volume).

The Importance and Potential for Bridging Cognitive and Emotional Development Capturing the spirit of the cognitive revolution has the potential to transform the study of emotional development and our understanding of emotion more broadly. It is laudable that cognitive development researchers have begun to explore the role of emotion in their paradigms (e.g., Doan et al., 2018; Wu et al., 2018c). The risk for emotion research, however, is that studies insu

ciently grounded in emotion theory

could lead to ndings that fail to capture the complexity of the construct. Thus, it should be the responsibility of emotion researchers to take the lead in bridging emotional and cognitive development. Researchers of emotional development are well positioned to elucidate such aspects of emotion.

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evolutionary periods (see Holbrook & Hahn–Holbrook, this volume), and even nonhuman species (see Clay

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The Oxford Handbook of Emotional Development Daniel Dukes (ed.) et al. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/978019 8855903.001.0001 9780191889516 9780198855903

Search in this book

CHAPTER

6 Statistical Learning in an Emotional World  Rista C. Plate, Kristina Woodard, Seth D. Pollak https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198855903.013.12 Published: 13 January 2022

Pages 78–92

Online ISBN: Print ISBN:

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Published: 2022

Abstract Children face myriad challenges in navigating the emotional world, including discerning the emotions of others and making predictions based on emotional cues. How well children respond to these contribution of statistical learning—a learning mechanism long used to understand knowledge acquisition in cognitive development—to emotional development. The authors propose that the statistics of socioemotional input in children’s environments guide what children learn about emotions by allowing them to attend to regularities in the structure of input they receive. Statistical learning could be a mechanism through which children’s early learning environments shape emotional development and may underlie di erences in how children extract and use emotional information.

Keywords: statistical learning, emotion, emotional development, emotional cues, learning mechanism, psychopathology, prediction Subject: Psychology, Developmental Psychology Series: Oxford Library of Psychology Collection: Oxford Handbooks Online

Introduction THE

study of child development presents a paradox: while children are generally less competent than adults,

there are domains in which young children can outperform older individuals. As children mature, they increasingly express themselves more clearly, control their bodies more skillfully, and make better judgments and decisions. Yet infants generally acquire language more e

ciently than adults, and

preschoolers can construct abstract categories and reason about causation in ways that are disproportionately advanced given their early and relatively immature cognitive development. This seeming inconsistency has been resolved by mounting empirical evidence that very young children are powerful learners, who bene t from exibility and openness to exploration, which are actually enhanced, rather than constrained, by their lack of knowledge (Gopnik et al., 2015, 2017; Walker et al., 2016; Newport, 1990). Not being overly constrained by existing knowledge allows the developing child to e

ciently track and use

associations in their environments (e.g., patterns and co-occurrences between stimuli and outcomes) to form expectations that guide behavior. Here we propose that psychological mechanisms that underlie children’s cognitive development are similarly used to promote socioemotional development. We review evidence consistent with the view that general cognitive learning principles play a role in how children make inferences about how others are feeling and use emotion-relevant information to predict behaviors. When learning about emotion, children are faced with myriad challenges. Perhaps most basically, they must p. 79

be able to surmise how a social partner is feeling. However,

this is not necessarily a straightforward task

(Barrett et al., 2019). Social partners may feel multiple emotions at once, change how they are feeling, or feel emotions that are multifaceted and complex. Social partners also convey their feelings in di erent ways, and the way an emotion is conveyed may be in uenced by the context. Other areas of emotional learning stem from this task of estimating another’s feelings. Learning involves not only recognizing cues to emotion, but also predicting how others might feel given di erent outcomes in di erent situations. Children must be able to anticipate the actions of others, and emotions often provide clues about how another will behave. If a child spills juice on the carpet, their caregiver’s emotional response may help the child predict whether they will get in trouble. Or, a social partner’s emotional response to a situation might

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challenges can in uence overall social competence and functioning. This chapter explores the

help a learner predict whether that individual might make a good friend. Here we will focus on these two tasks: identifying emotions and making predictions, though emotional development certainly involves many other skills. When emotional development proceeds well, children’s skill acquisition can seem so seamless that it could Many have argued that emotion concepts are invariant, universal, and evolutionarily constant (e.g., Ekman, 1992). However, disruptions in children’s early social environments reveal cascading e ects on children’s emotional development, including the exibility to adapt to emotions in the face of changing social contexts (Pollak & Kistler, 2002). Therefore, there is mounting evidence that our conceptions of emotion emerge through learning (e.g., Barrett, 2017), and, increasingly, research and theory are focusing on the underlying learning mechanisms through which maturational changes in emotional competence emerge (Pollak et al., 2019). Theorists have debated whether early knowledge about emotions is innate or the result of learning. Now, emerging experimental research incorporates conceptual frameworks and techniques from the eld of cognitive development to understand the role of learning in emotional development (e.g., Van de Cruys, 2017). While we expect that multiple learning mechanisms underlie emotional development (including learning through explicit instruction and using one’s own emotional experiences to understand others), here we focus on the application of one particular learning mechanism—statistical learning—to the domain of emotion. We focus on the construct of statistical learning because this type of mechanism is likely to allow learners to sort through vast and complex input (e.g., in language, naïve physics). Therefore, statistical learning might be particularly well suited to making sense of the multifaceted, varied, and uncertain emotional input that characterizes the social world. Additionally, we have a robust understanding of how statistical learning supports cognitive development, which a ords access to established methods and theoretical frameworks with which we can begin to ask questions about its application to emotional development.

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appear that little in the way of complex learning is even necessary for rudimentary emotion understanding.

p. 80

Statistical Learning Guides Meaning Extraction Learning refers to knowledge or skills that one gains through experience. Learning allows individuals to gather information about their world, and individuals use what they learn to direct action. Children must they must discern who will care for their needs, how to make and maintain friendships, what might make others upset, and how to respond to the myriad complex emotions that social partners can, and do, convey. To tackle these, and many other learning challenges, children take advantage of powerful approaches, including supervised learning (i.e., receiving direct instruction or feedback) and unsupervised learning (i.e., learning in the absence of direct instruction or feedback) (Love, 2002). Supervised learning plays an important role in socioemotional development, including school-based curricula to teach social, emotional, and communication skills (e.g., Durlak et al., 2011). For instance, children’s storybooks may draw attention to and label how characters are feeling, and adults might provide labels for emotions in order to guide children’s understanding of nonverbal interpersonal interactions (Gordon, 1991; Pollak & Thoits, 1989). Child-focused materials (e.g., books, toys), parent–child interactions, and school settings are replete with examples of supervised emotion teaching and learning, and parental sca olding of emotional content is associated with increases in prosocial behavior in toddlers and young children (Brownell et al., 2013; Drummond et al., 2014; Gross et al., 2015). Yet, supervised learning requires time, resources, and direct instruction. For example, in order to learn about sadness via supervised learning, a child might need to be explicitly exposed to, and guided through, instances of sadness-inducing situations, with facial cues to sadness labeled and described by a sca olding social partner. Additionally, while this sort of pedagogy can promote learning, it can come at the cost of children discovering new ideas or possibilities through their own exploration (Bonawitz et al., 2011). As such, unsupervised learning, which happens without explicit instruction, might be a useful tool to help children learn in domains in which there is a large amount of varying information. However, relatively little attention has been devoted to understanding the role of unsupervised learning, including statistical learning, in emotional development. The term “statistical learning” refers to tracking relations between stimuli, for instance tracking that frowns and crying often occur together. Notably though, statistical learning extends beyond operant conditioning in which stimuli and outcomes are paired to attention to the overall statistical composition of a sample (e.g., Altvater–Mackensen et al., 2017; Maye et al., 2002; Xu & Garcia, 2008). Statistical learning is described as “modality-, domain-, and speciesgeneral” (Aslin, 2017), meaning that the system is not specialized for a certain class of stimuli. For example, while the majority of research on statistical learning focuses on language acquisition (e.g., infants use of

p. 81

statistical

co-occurrences between sounds distinguishes words from nonwords; Sa ran et al., 1996),

statistical learning supports learning of other types of input as well (e.g., patterns of shapes; Kirkham et al., 2002). Statistical learning of streams of input can occur—and be enhanced—when the input is emotional (Everaert et al., 2020). Recently, computational accounts are emerging as another way to formalize how children’s use of statistical evidence translates to knowledge, expectations, and behavior in emotional development (see Rudrauf et al., this volume); many of these accounts are predicated upon a developing child rst recognizing associations or patterns of social input. The emotional input in one’s environment could vary along numerous dimensions including the emotions being conveyed, the number of emoters available and their expressive style, the predictive power of emotion cues, and how well the emotions match the context. We propose that statistical learning helps children organize and integrate this information. Given that statistical learning allows for extraction of meaningful information in multifaceted, noisy learning situations, it may be particularly well suited for the complexity of emotional content.

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acquire an incredible amount of information in order to successfully navigate the social world. For instance,

Statistical Distribution of Emotion Input Influences Emotion Categories Adults and children perceive facial emotions categorically (e.g., Cheal & Rutherford, 2011; Etco

& Magee,

facial con gurations of one emotion to another. However, perceivers see facial con gurations that cross an emotion boundary (e.g., between happy and angry) as more di erent from each other compared to facial con gurations that are within an emotion boundary (e.g., two angry faces) even if the perceptual change is the same (Calder et al., 1996; Pollak & Kistler, 2002). Perceiving emotions categorically serves a social function: one needs to decide how to respond when faced with a social partner conveying an emotion. Having a perceived boundary between emotion categories provides a convenient shortcut for determining how to act. Yet, little is understood about how learning and statistical information may in uence these categories. Typically developing infants see a large amount of facial input in the rst three months of life, but this input is primarily provided by a relatively small number of individuals, suggesting that conceptions of emotion are generated and generalized from a small sample (Jayaraman et al., 2015). Emotions, when being conveyed by social agents, are also noisy. Emoters are individualized in their emotive style. For example, emoters may vary in the intensity of emotions conveyed such that some individuals are highly expressive and others are more muted in how they express emotions. Additionally, some emoters regularly convey certain emotions more than others. Expressive style also varies based on context: emoters will behave p. 82

di erently if interacting in a library versus at a

party, or at home versus out with strangers, and how

emotional cues are produced can be in uenced by the cultural context (Niedenthal et al., 2017). There may even be instances when emoters seem stochastic or random. One example might be if the emoter has information that the perceiver does not, such as the emoter concealing upsetting information and therefore acting sad during a seemingly happy occasion. As described above, emoters in uence the type of emotion input that children see; however, environments also in uence or constrain the availability and type of emotion input. For example, infants’ acquisition of motor abilities facilitates a new visual perspective (see Smith et al., 2018 for a review). Whereas infants see a lot of faces in their rst three months of life, facial content is drastically reduced when infants begin to crawl. For crawling infants, objects comprise a larger amount of their visual input instead of faces. Additionally, di erent early experiences and environments in uence what input children see. For instance, children with a history of physical abuse encounter more anger expressions from caregivers than children who have not experienced abuse (Plate et al., 2019). These variations in input constitute the emotional statistics that learners encounter: emotions varying according to frequency (e.g., the amount and types of emotions learners see), intensity (e.g., whether emotions are muted or more expressive), and predictability (e.g., how well emotional content predicts other information in the environment). Using experimental approaches to manipulate these factors in the lab, we can unpack how the statistical features in uence emotion learning. One question that researchers have addressed is how the frequency of emotions encountered in uences individuals’ emotion categorization. In one series of experiments, the frequency of emotional information conveyed was manipulated to test whether the statistical distribution of emotional input would in uence the placement of the boundary between emotion categories (Plate et al., 2019). Participants were asked to categorize faces as being either “upset” or “calm.” The faces were sampled from a continuum of facial morphs between neutral and angry. Critically, some participants saw more angry faces, some saw more neutral faces, and some saw faces that were equally distributed across anger and neutral. Both school-age children and adults adjusted their emotion categories based on the frequency of the input. Those exposed to more angry faces increased their threshold for categorizing a face as angry (therefore narrowing their

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1992). There are linear and continuous perceptual muscular changes that occur as an emoter goes from

category of anger). Those exposed to more calm faces decreased their threshold for categorizing a face as angry. These shifts in categorization occurred through exposure, with no feedback given to participants about their responses. Children overall had more variability in their categorization choices, providing evidence that their emotion categories are less established compared to those of adults. More broadly, how frequent or common an emotion appears in one’s environment in uences the observer’s conception of that early experience that di ers according to emotional input. For example, having experienced maltreatment from a caregiver changes how young children discriminate salient emotions (e.g., anger; Pollak & Kistler, 2002). Taken together, this research illustrates one way—attention to the statistical features (e.g., frequency)—in which statistical learning in uences emotional development. p. 83

In addition to categorizing emotions, children can track information about emoters across contexts to learn more about the emoter’s desires and emotional display rules. For example, when 7- to 10-year-olds were presented with illustrated stories that showed a character acting one way in front of their social partner (social context) and another way behind their back (nonsocial context), children were able to infer display rules in the situation. They interpreted the expression in the nonsocial context to represent what the emoter felt and the reaction in the social context as how the expresser wanted to display that emotion (Wu & Schulz, 2020). In sum, the statistical distribution of emotion input in uences children’s ability to track individual di erences in expressivity, categorize emotions, and uncover social display rules.

Statistical Learning and Prediction One powerful statistical learning approach that children use is Bayesian learning. Bayesian learners track statistical information and use that information to make rational inferences about their environment (Gopnik & Wellman, 1994; Gopnik & Bonawitz, 2015; Xu & Kushnir, 2013). These inferences take into consideration prior probabilities and current constraints on the hypothesis space given the context (Perfors et al., 2011). The Bayesian learning approach has been used in other areas of child development to explain young children’s ability to infer causes of failed actions (Gweon & Schulz, 2011) and uncover the preferences of others (Kushnir et al., 2010). More recently, researchers have begun to focus more on how emotional development is also driven by this learning because emotion learning involves recognizing di erent cues to emotion and making predictions based on those cues. Here we review research that provides evidence for how children use emotional input in their environments to make predictions, such as predicting what preceded a social agent’s action, new events based on how reliable a social agent’s a ective cues are, and how a social agent will feel in di erent situations. In considering the interplay between statistical learning and prediction in the emotion domain, we raise the possibility that these could be dissociable, albeit related, aspects of emotion development. To illustrate, a child may notice the co-occurrence of two stimuli, such as a parent scowling when they are doing laundry. However, we might wonder when the child can predict the behavior (doing laundry) from the facial cue alone (scowling) or vice versa. Children show early forms of using the emotions of others to make predictions through social referencing. In the classic visual cli

paradigm, infants who observe their mother indicating joy will crawl across a

transparent surface suspended above the ground (Sorce et al., 1985). However, they will not cross if their mother indicates fear. Infants similarly use a ective auditory cues to make predictions about which toys would be safe to play with (Mumme et al., 1996) and about what actions to try themselves (Patzwald et al., 2018). Further, infants seek out emotional information from potential informants when assessing novel p. 84

environments (Moses et al., 2001), suggesting

that infants are using emotional cues to make predictions

about how to best interact with their surroundings.

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emotion (Levari et al., 2018). As a result, individual di erences in emotion categories may be in uenced by

As children get older, they use a ective input to make predictions about what preceded a social agent’s action. For example, children predicted that a vocalization of “deliciousness” (e.g., an “mmm” sound) was caused by cake, while a vocalization of “adorableness” (e.g., an “aww” sound) was caused by seeing a smiling infant (Wu et al., 2017). Therefore, children attended to the emotional information in an environment to understand the larger context of a social partner’s experiences. Children can also use context. Children may look to the emotional reliability of a social partner to predict whether that partner’s a ective cues will be useful in new situations. When 4- and 5-year-old children heard speakers use emotional prosody that was incongruent with what was being said, children were unlikely to use that speaker’s emotional prosody on a future trial. Speci cally, if a speaker said “My dog ran away” in a positive (incongruent) intonation, children ignored the prosody of that speaker later on. They did not use negative intonation of the speaker saying “Look at the ball” to infer it was a de ated ball, and instead attended equally to a regular and de ated ball (Thacker, 2018). Taken together, these experiments demonstrate how children track the content of emotional input and use co-occurrences to extract rich emotional information. Another prediction that children make from statistical information is about how a social agent will feel. Infants are able to match an actor’s facial cues to an emotion-eliciting event, even distinguishing withinvalence emotions (Ruba et al., 2019). Ten-month-old infants expect positive emotional reactions in response to achieving a goal (Skerry & Spelke 2014), and 12-month-olds are surprised by incongruent reactions to events, such as positive reactions to negative events (Reschke et al., 2017). Toddlers also take into account contextual factors and the emoter’s epistemic state when making emotion-related predictions (Scott, 2017; Wu et al., 2018). In a set of studies with older children, participants viewed the likelihood of receiving a particular type of gumball from a machine and used that probability of receiving a desired or rare outcome to predict the magnitude of another’s feelings. If a gumball machine contained almost entirely black gumballs and an actor gets a red gumball, 7-year-old children inferred that they were more surprised by this event than by getting a red gumball when red and black gumballs were equally likely (Doan et al., 2018). Five- and 6-yearold children can also predict that less likely positive events make individuals happier than more likely positive events. However, 4-year-old children are unable to make these predictions, despite being able to infer the quality of the outcome (e.g., that an unlikely good event is better than a likely good event; Doan et al., 2020; see also Asaba et al., 2019). It is possible that using the statistical information to infer the quality of an event might be a separate skill from using that information to predict an emotion or behavior. Additional support for this possibility comes from a modi ed Sally–Anne task, where a character that children have seen, Sally, leaves the room while another character, Anne, hides Sally’s toy. Sally returns to the room either angry (implying she saw Anne p. 85

hide

her toy and is upset) or happy (implying that she did not see Anne hide her toy). Four-year-old

children knew whether Sally saw Anne hide her toy, but were unable to use this knowledge to predict Sally’s action (e.g., whether Sally would look for her toy where Anne hid it, or where Sally placed the toy originally) until age 5 (Wu et al., 2018). These ndings suggest that knowledge about an emotion state is not the only skill necessary for prediction about emotion behaviors. One critical issue in the application of statistical learning to the emotion domain, as illustrated by the aforementioned research, is how and whether to distinguish between the role of statistical learning to extract information versus making predictions based on that information. Individuals may have intact statistical learning processes but de cits in using the statistical information to make predictions (Gomot & Wicker, 2012; Haebig et al., 2017), as might be the case for 4-year-old children in the Sally–Anne task: they extracted the correct information but did not translate that information into an accurate prediction (though see Reschke et al., 2017 for a discussion on how these skills may have some basis in infancy). Such skills may be di

cult to distinguish in stable environments but may become dissociable in a changing environment

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emotional behavior at one time point to predict the emotional informativeness of an individual in a di erent

(Sa ran, 2018), particularly when the probabilistic relation between action and outcome is not deterministic. This dissociation could explain whether di erences in emotion-related skills stem from the use of statistics or in applying those statistics predictively.

Statistical learning may have implications for understanding how typical emotional development could get disrupted, and what interventions could be helpful. There is some evidence that associative learning—a subtype of statistical learning in which speci c stimuli are paired probabilistically (i.e., pairing action A with outcome A 70% of the time and pairing action A with outcome B 30% of the time)—is impaired in children with a history of maltreatment. Speci cally, children with a history of adversity have di

culty using such

statistical associations to predict opportunities for reward (Hanson et al., 2017). Additionally, maltreated adolescents are slower to use observed co-occurrences to form speci c associations and have di

culty

updating these associations after contingencies change (Harms et al., 2018). De cits in associative learning can both be predicted by the extent of early life stress (Harms et al., 2018) and predictive of later di

culties in

social functioning (i.e., behavioral problems; Hanson et al., 2017). How individuals track and update statistical input to make sense of the emotional world may also be relevant for understanding mechanisms underlying symptoms of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). The way in which individuals with ASD use statistical patterns to generate and update predictions provides insight into potential disruptions in the p. 86

learning process (Van de Cruys et al., 2013, 2014). Speci cally, there is evidence to individuals with ASD establish rigid initial expectations and have di

suggest that

culty discerning when to update those

expectations versus when to ignore noise in uncertain, not deterministic, environments. Statistical learning may also have implications for interventions, given its potential role in the development of di erences in emotion perception and associative learning across populations. One intervention task that relies on associative learning is the modi ed visual probe or “Dot Probe” task (Bar–Haim et al., 2007; Fox et al., 2001; MacLeod et al., 2002; Mogg & Bradley, 1998). In this task (often referred to as attention bias modi cation), a contingency is made between a visual probe (e.g., an asterisk) and a threat-neutral stimulus that is presented alongside a threat-relevant stimulus (e.g., an angry face). The success of this intervention hinges on the learner’s ability to track and respond to this statistical association (Bar–Haim, 2010; Grafton et al., 2014). Indeed, statistical learning ability (as measured by the ability to track nonemotion visual associations) predicted treatment outcome in patients with social anxiety disorder who underwent attention bias modi cation (Alon et al., 2019). Understanding the relation between statistical learning and intervention e

cacy could promote identi cation of individuals who would be best suited (or,

alternatively, poorly suited) for attention bias modi cation as a treatment option.

Future Directions in the Application of Statistical Learning to Emotional Development Discrimination among di erent emotion expressions does not imply that children have learned all there is to know about those emotions. Therefore, while statistical learning might help learners extract emotion information, it is less clear how that information is imbued with meaning. Consider an analogy to language: language learners must rst extract units from speech streams (i.e., words), but then they must critically pair words with objects (or actions, etc.). Similarly, emotion learners must attach meaning to emotional content to inform interpersonal functioning. One way that learners might attach meaning to emotional content is through their own emotional experiences. How infants and children experience emotions themselves likely interacts with the environmental, statistical cues they observe (Walle et al., 2012).

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Statistical Learning and Implications for Adaptive Behavior

Another critical issue in the application of statistical learning to the emotion domain is how learners balance stability (e.g., having stable emotion categories) and exibility (e.g., adapting to emotional content in a particular environment). Through statistical learning, children acquire probabilistic information from the environment, allowing them to infer meaning and make predictions about how other social beings in the environment might act. Therefore, rather than facilitating the formation of simple

associations,

statistical learning in uences complex emotion concepts. Thus, we might be interested in how the statistics of a learner’s environment results in stable emotion concepts. For instance, we might ask questions such as whether learners need to be exposed to a certain type (e.g., particular emotions) or amount (e.g., how much emotional content is observed) of input. Alternatively, type and amount of input may not matter as much as the level of statistical variability across emoters or contexts. Certainly, this process could also be in uenced by the salience of the stimuli (e.g., highly intense emotional response) or the salience to the learner (e.g., if a parent’s angry voice is predictive of corporal punishment). In addition, but related, is the question of how much exibility learners maintain in their ability to update emotion representations based on statistical input of present (or future) environments in comparison to their previous experience. In the language domain, prior experience can interfere with the statistical learning of new information (Endress & Langus, 2017; Siegelman et al., 2018). Yet, children and adult learners remain nimble in their ability to update emotion category information (Plate et al., 2019). Additional exibility in emotion categories may be necessary to adapt to situational or cultural norms or when transitioning between environments with very di erent emotional input. This exibility may also underlie an individual’s ability to become more emotionally similar to their host group when visiting a new culture (De Leersnyder et al., 2011). Flexibility must be balanced with stability in emotion categories. For example, if a child reared with an abusive caregiver is moved to a foster home, then the emotional input of their surroundings may change signi cantly and being able to exibly update these categories could be bene cial. However, maintaining some stability could be useful to avoid being overly in uenced by single instances of skewed input—such as when a child encounters a caregiver having a bad day. Very little is known about how learners navigate the balance between stability and exibility, and what balance of stability and exibility is associated with social competence in the real world.

Conclusion Taken together, there is increasing evidence of the role of statistical learning in emotional development, speci cally in how children categorize emotions, reconcile emotions across contexts, and use emotional content to make predictions. This new perspective, which focuses on the role of learning underlying emotional development, has the potential to explain the mechanisms of change that inform how children acquire and update emotion understanding, and the mechanisms underlying socioemotional di

culties.

This intersection of cognitive and emotional development promises adding a fruitful interdisciplinary perspective to the eld of emotion.

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The Oxford Handbook of Emotional Development Daniel Dukes (ed.) et al. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/978019 8855903.001.0001 9780191889516 9780198855903

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CHAPTER

7 Emotion Regulation Across the Life Span  Michaela Riediger, Jennifer A. Bellingtier https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198855903.013.6 Published: 13 January 2022

Pages 93–109

Online ISBN: Print ISBN:

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Published: 2022

Abstract Emotion regulation—the ability to control emotional experiences and expressions—is essential for positive adaption across the life span. Individual and contextual factors contribute to emotiongenetic dispositions and neurobiological vulnerabilities. Contextual factors involve opportunities to learn about and practice emotion regulation. In infancy and childhood, the family is especially important for assisting in regulating and teaching about emotions. During adolescence, physiological and socioemotional changes can contribute to transient instability in emotion regulation. Throughout adulthood, favorable average well-being trajectories co-occur with increases in prohedonic motivation. Emotion-regulation abilities are maintained into old age, but toward the end of life, stressors may overtax individuals’ emotion-regulation capacity. This chapter reviews key developmental theories and empirical ndings on emotion regulation in childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. It also highlights shortcomings and gaps in the available knowledge and points toward future research directions.

Keywords: emotion regulation, development, life span, emotion-regulation motivation, emotionregulation strategies, emotion-regulation e ectiveness, infancy and childhood, adolescence, adulthood Subject: Psychology, Developmental Psychology Series: Oxford Library of Psychology Collection: Oxford Handbooks Online

Introduction EMOTION

regulation—the ability to modify or maintain the duration, intensity, or nature of emotional

experiences and expressions (e.g., Gross, 1999)—is considered a hallmark of socioemotional competence. Numerous studies demonstrate associations between emotion regulation and developmental adjustment in all phases of the life span. These include a broad array of developmental outcomes, with emotion-regulation competencies predicting, for example, more prosocial behavior, better academic achievements, and fewer internalizing and externalizing problems in childhood and adolescence (Aldao et al., 2010; Compas et al., 2017; Jacobs & Gross, 2014; Lonigan et al., 2017; Schäfer et al., 2017), and improved well-being, health, relationships, and work success throughout adulthood (e.g., Doerwald et al., 2016; Kotsou et al., 2011). Indeed, some scholars view the inability to recognize and regulate emotions in early life as a common origin for a wide range of physical and mental health problems in later life phases (Crowell et al., 2015). Emotion regulation not only contributes to developmental adaptation, it is also a developmental phenomenon itself. Variations exist both between and within di erent age groups in the strategies, e ectiveness, and motivations for emotion regulation. Understanding its life-span development is thus paramount. So far, however, developmental investigations have zoomed into speci c life phases, with little cross-talk between research on di erent age groups. In this chapter, we aim to integrate the available evidence from a life-span perspective moving from infancy and childhood, via adolescence, to adulthood p. 94

and old age. For each developmental period, we review key ndings

on developmental trajectories of

emotion regulation and factors in uencing it. We conclude by giving an outlook on important future research directions.

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regulation variance between and within di erent age groups. Individual factors include, for example,

Infancy and Childhood Particularly in the early years of life, emotion regulation is often interpersonal, that is, it involves, or is supported by, another person (see also Méndez Leal & Silvers, this volume). Parents and other caregivers physiological needs, providing tactile and verbal soothing, and playing with or distracting the child (Kiel & Kalomiris, 2015). While infants initially primarily communicate their emotions via crying and directing their gaze toward their caregivers, language development later allows children to also incorporate gestures and speech (Konishi et al., 2018). Caregivers’ sensitive responding helps to regulate children’s emotions and is also implicated in children’s developing abilities to regulate their own emotions (Morris et al., 2017). Sensitive responding is characterized by perceiving and correctly interpreting children’s signals and situation, by promptly reacting in a manner that addresses their momentary emotion-regulation needs, and tailoring the response to their developmental status (see also Rudrauf et al., this volume). As children get older and spend increasing time outside of their homes, teachers and peers become additional sources of interpersonal regulation and can help shape the development of emotion-regulation competencies (Martin & Ochsner, 2016; Taxer & Gross, 2018). Although support by interaction partners plays an important role for emotion regulation early in life, intrapersonal (i.e., self-initiated) emotion regulation is already evident in infancy and gains in importance throughout childhood. In infancy, for example, intrapersonal emotion regulation is evident in infants’ use of gaze aversion and self-soothing (e.g., sucking and rocking). These early attempts at regulation are primarily re exive and automatic responses to the environment. Advances in motor control soon allow for more deliberate means of intrapersonal emotion regulation such as distraction via playing with one’s ngers or toes (Kim et al., 2014). Throughout childhood, developments in the frontal lobe, coinciding with advancements in executive functioning needed for goal-directed action, allow for children to exercise more deliberate control over their own emotion regulation (Holodynski et al., 2013) and to introduce more cognitive strategies such as reappraising a problem in a more positive light or distracting one’s attention from it (Zimmer–Gembeck & Skinner, 2016; see also Méndez Leal & Silvers, this volume). Overall, as individuals move through childhood, emotion regulation typically becomes more active and less avoidant (Eschenbeck et al., 2018), cognitive strategies (e.g., attentional distraction) become more prominent whereas behavioral strategies (e.g., self-soothing thumb sucking) decrease (Zimmer–Gembeck p. 95

& Skinner, 2016), and regulation shifts from primarily interpersonal (e.g., parental support) to more intrapersonal and self-directed (Rawana et al., 2014). Children normally develop an increasing repertoire of strategies and gain experience in their e ectiveness in various situations and contexts (Levine et al., 2013). As in all other life phases, there are substantial interindividual di erences during infancy and childhood in emotion-regulation abilities and their developmental trajectories. Both individual and contextual factors contribute to these di erences. Individual factors include individuals’ temperament, broadly speaking, such as their physiological arousal level and emotional responsivity. Contextual factors involve opportunities for children to acquire knowledge about emotions and emotion-regulation strategies and to practice emotionregulation skills. The family context is particularly relevant in this regard.

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provide interpersonal emotional regulation in a variety of ways including satisfying the child’s basic

Importance of the Family Context Attachment A secure bond between parent and child has long been understood as critical for the healthy development of children and their parents. Children’s di

cult temperament (due, for example, to genetic predispositions or

neurobiological de cits) can result in an increased risk of attachment problems (e.g., Viddal et al., 2017), particularly when co-occurring with low parental responsivity. Parental behaviors also in uence attachment development; for example, securely as compared to insecurely attached children have mothers who, on average, are better able to identify their children’s emotions. This, in turn, facilitates sensitive responding as discussed above, and e ective emotion-regulation coaching on the part of the parent. In consequence, securely attached children are more likely to discuss their negative emotions with their parents (Waters et al., 2010), and are better able, on average, to generate their own emotion-regulation strategies when confronting negative emotions (Ştefan et al., 2017). A recent meta-analysis found that securely attached children experience less negative and more positive a ect in a variety of contexts (Cooke et al., 2019), suggesting that they experience a more temperate emotional climate. Furthermore, securely attached children were better able to regulate their emotions, to make use of cognitive regulation strategies, and to recruit interpersonal support for emotion regulation, whereas insecure attachment was associated with a lower ability to regulate emotions (see Stephens et al., this volume). However, in their review of the extant literature, Zimmer–Gembeck and colleagues (2017) noted that the majority of e ect sizes regarding associations between attachment and self-regulation are in the small to moderate range, that securely attached children do not always di er from their less securely attached peers, and that more longitudinal research is necessary to support conclusions that secure attachment facilitates the improvement of emotion-regulation abilities.

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Parenting Parents and other caregivers, including teachers, serve as models and coaches of emotion regulation; their reactions and responses to negative events help to shape the emotional reactions and regulation of their children (Morris et al., 2017; see also Rudrauf et al., this volume). The Tripartite Model of Family In uence (Morris et al., 2007) maintains that family members serve as models of emotion regulation through their responses to their own emotions, but also can coach children in regulation by helping them to label and appropriately express their emotions, suggesting suitable strategies for managing these emotions, and encouraging children’s own e orts in emotion regulation. Parents who respond to children’s emotions with harsh criticism or dismissive attitudes suggest that their children’s emotions are not valid and should be suppressed. Fortunately, positive parenting practices, such as creating a warm environment by increased use of positive a ect and emotional responsiveness, can be taught and encouraged (Warwar & Ellison, 2019), and priming parents to use these techniques predicts higher enthusiasm and persistence in response to their children’s frustration (Loop & Roskam, 2016). Additionally, parental emotion coaching can help to ameliorate the association between negative peer relationships at school and children’s perceptions of their own social competence (Buckholdt et al., 2016). Parents who respond sensitively to their children’s emotions, and allow children to express their emotions related to the negative peer encounters, can help children to successfully cope with these types of relationships. Research suggests that positive parenting may be especially important when children experience positive emotions only rarely (Wu et al., 2017) or are genetically more susceptible to regulation di

culties (Li et al., 2016). On the other hand, harsh

nonsupportive parenting may be especially detrimental for children who tend to experience negative emotions frequently (Morris et al., 2007).

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emotion regulation (Cassidy, 1994). Attachment development is shaped by the characteristics of both the

In sum, caregivers play an important role in interpersonal emotion regulation during infancy and childhood (provided their reactions are appropriate given the child’s momentary needs and developmental status), and in shaping the emotional awareness and regulatory skills of children. Throughout childhood, intrapersonal emotion regulation gains in importance, and developmental gains are associated with transitions to the use of less avoidant and more cognitive emotion-regulation strategies. Secure attachment di erences and vulnerabilities in children moderate the impact of attachment and parenting on emotion regulation.

Adolescence Adolescence is the transition period between childhood and adulthood (Casey, 2015). It starts with the beginning of pubertal transformations toward sexual maturity and legally ends with attaining the age of p. 97

majority. Typically developing individuals improve

their emotion-regulatory capability during

adolescence. This is re ected in average increases in the understanding of emotional situations and a broadening and sophistication of the repertoire of regulatory strategies (for reviews, see Rawana et al., 2014; Zimmer–Gembeck & Skinner, 2016). For example, adolescents become more likely to use planned problem solving (i.e., engage in deliberate e orts to analyze and alter a di

cult situation) and cognitive

strategies such as positive self-talk and reappraisal to deal with stressors (see also De France & Hollenstein, this volume). Adolescent improvement in emotion regulation, however, is not necessarily linear. For many adolescents, there seems to be a period of temporarily lowered emotion-regulation capacity. For example, a temporary rise in the use of potentially maladaptive regulation strategies such as cognitive escape (i.e., avoiding thoughts about undesirable situations), rumination, verbal aggression, or venting has been observed during early adolescence (for reviews, see Rawana et al., 2014; Zimmer–Gembeck & Skinner, 2016). Characteristics of adolescent-typical emotional experiences further the idea that emotion-regulation capacity might be temporarily dampened: On average, and compared to children and adults, adolescents are more emotionally reactive, experience negative a ect more frequently, and uctuate more in their emotional experiences (for an overview, see Riediger & Klipker, 2014). Furthermore, there is an adolescence-typical increase in the prevalence of adjustment di

culties characterized by emotional dysregulation, such as internalizing (e.g.,

depression) and externalizing (e.g., aggressiveness) problems (Lee et al., 2014). Also, the temporary rise during adolescence in average sensation seeking, impulsive, and risky behaviors—re ected, for example, in the adolescent-speci c peak of accident-caused fatalities and deviant behaviors—has been interpreted as an indicator of a transient period of reduced self-control (Weiss et al., 2015).

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is associated with a warmer emotional home climate and better regulation skills in children. Individual

Neurobiological Accounts of Adolescence-Specific Transient Decline in Emotion Control Various researchers maintain that the apparent average temporary decline in emotion-regulation capacity in adolescence is related to neurobiological maturation (e.g., Casey, 2015; Ernst, 2014; Shulman et al., 2016). enhanced sensitivity of synaptic information transmission, and increased myelination of axons. As a result, the brain can function increasingly e

ciently, and the connectivity between brain areas improves. Not all

brain regions and circuits, however, mature at the same time and pace. Thus, a temporary maturational imbalance may occur between brain regions which has been linked to adolescent self-regulation. Respective models di er in their speci c assumptions (for model comparisons, see Casey, 2015; Shulman et al., 2016), but converge on the following idea: At least two brain systems (and their interaction) are assumed critical p. 98

for adolescents’ self-control—a subcortical system subserving a ective

experience and a prefrontal

system subserving cognitive control (i.e., the ability to employ mental resources in a goal-directed manner, which is necessary for voluntary emotion regulation). These models also maintain that neurobiological maturation yields a transitory disjunction, with a temporarily relatively more in uential a ective system and a temporarily relatively less in uential cognitive-control system on adolescents’ experience and behavior. This is assumed to yield increased susceptibility to seek and experience intense a ective experiences at a time when the cognitive-control capacity has not yet equally matured and, hence, temporary di

culties in emotion regulation.

These assumptions receive preliminary support from primate and human postmortem and neuroimaging studies that found evidence of di erential maturational timing of prefrontal and subcortical areas during adolescence (e.g., Crone & Dahl, 2012). Whether these neurobiological developments indeed map onto adolescents’ self-regulation capacity (as assumed by these models), however, remains to be shown empirically (Ahmed et al., 2015). Also, di erences between adolescents in their neurobiological maturation and the potential role of the timing and tempo of pubertal changes in this regard, are not yet understood (Goddings et al., 2019). Furthermore, various authors have criticized these neurobiological accounts as re ecting simpli ed conceptions of adolescent development of emotion regulation (e.g., Pfeifer & Allen, 2012, 2016). Nevertheless, the current state of research in this eld warrants the conclusion that neurophysiological maturation needs to be considered to adequately understand adolescent development of emotion regulation. Many questions, however, still remain open. Moreover, neurobiological maturation is not the only factor that in uences adolescents’ emotion regulation. Additional psychosocial in uences should be considered as well, as discussed next.

Psychosocial Aspects of Emotion Regulation in Adolescence Emotional Challenges Tackling the developmental tasks of adolescence (such as developing one’s own identity, establishing and maintaining social relationships independent from one’s parents and other adults, or developing goals for one’s future) increases the probability of encountering emotionally challenging situations. These derive from, among other things, increased potential for con ict with parents, greater sensitivity to positive or negative interactions with peers, rst romantic experiences, and growing engagement with fundamental aspects of one’s own and others’ existences, identities, and futures. Adaptation to pubertal body changes is also emotionally challenging, as are the associated and increasingly demanding social expectations to not only look, but also behave, like an adult (for an overview, see Riediger & Klipker, 2014). Temporary increases in adolescents’ emotionality may thus not only re ect neurobiological changes, but also an intensi cation of emotional challenges, which, in turn, likely requires the re nement of emotion-regulation skills.

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Adolescent brain development is characterized, for example, by elimination of unused neural connections,

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Emotion-Regulation Motivation In addition to being confronted with emotional challenges, adolescents occasionally also look for them proactively. Examples are counterhedonic wishes to maintain or enhance negative a ect or to dampen positive a ect. Although prohedonic orientation prevails in adolescents’ emotion-regulation motivation, 2015; Riediger et al., 2009, 2014) and is consistent with accounts of increased sensation seeking. In addition, by exposing adolescents to situations where they have to deal with negative emotional experiences, occasional contrahedonic motivation could also be helpful in re ning emotion-regulation competence and tackling other developmental tasks of adolescence (e.g., establishing emotional autonomy or a

rming

one’s sense of identity).

Emotion-Regulation Socialization Contextual in uences continue to shape emotion-regulation development beyond childhood. Adolescents’ growing autonomy increases the respective importance of extrafamilial in uences, such as peers or social media, but parents and interactions within families maintain signi cance through observation learning, emotional climate, and parenting practices. Parenting styles, however, need adjustment to adolescents’ higher cognitive and self-regulation competencies and their increased need for autonomy. While direct interventions such as soothing or directive instructions about speci c occasions are e ective for younger children, indirect in uences, such as talking more generally about possible emotion-regulation strategies from a meta-perspective, are better suited for adolescents (Morris et al., 2017). Balancing adolescents’ opposing needs for autonomy on the one hand and for guidance on the other is a constant challenge for parents. Imbalance in either direction can have disadvantageous e ects on adolescents’ emotion-regulation development and, consequently, their socioemotional adaptation. Excessive dependence of adolescents on their parents, for example, has been proposed as a risk factor for internalizing problems, while lack or refusal of parental emotional guidance has been associated with a higher risk for externalizing problems (for an overview, see Riediger & Klipker, 2014). In short, emotion-regulation competences typically improve in adolescence, but not necessarily in a linear manner. Neurobiological maturation has been linked to the adolescence-typical transient decline in emotion-regulation capacity. Psychosocial aspects that further shape adolescent emotion-regulation development include adolescence-speci c emotional challenges, emotion-regulation motivation, and emotion socialization.

Adulthood Legally, individuals reach adulthood with the age of majority, which in most countries is between 18 and 21 p. 100

years of age. Economic independence and the assumption of adult

responsibilities, however, may only

occur later as economic circumstances and cultural norms in many industrialized countries encourage a phase of exploration and education in the early 20s (Arnett, 2015). Middle adulthood is often conceptualized to begin around 35 to 40 years of age, and older adulthood, around 60 to 65 years of age, although individuals’ subjective perceptions of their aging may vary (e.g., Bellingtier & Neupert, 2019; Bellingtier et al., 2017). Most of the available studies on adult emotion regulation compare younger and older adults cross-sectionally. Less is known about emotion regulation in middle age and about within-person change in emotion regulation as adults grow older. Findings of average age-related stability or increases in well-being into early old age sparked increased interest in adult emotion regulation. Ambulatory assessments (e.g., via smartphones) of emotional

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occasional contrahedonic motivation is reported more frequently by adolescents than adults (Riediger,

experiences, as they spontaneously occur in participants’ natural life contexts, typically nd that older as compared to younger adults report, on average, more positive and less negative daily a ective experiences (for a review, see Riediger & Rauers, 2014). For many individuals, well-being appears to decline only towards the end of life (e.g., Gerstorf et al., 2016, 2018). The positive trajectory of emotional well-being into old age seems at odds with aging-associated cognitive, social, and physical decline that starts much earlier. “stability-despite-loss paradox” of adult well-being (Kunzmann & Wrosch, 2015) derives from increases across adulthood in both the motivation to regulate emotional states and the competence to do so. These ideas have been in uential, and adult improvement in emotion regulation is sometimes asserted as a wellestablished fact. However, the extant empirical literature (reviewed below) reveals a more nuanced picture.

A ect-Regulation Motivation Socioemotional selectivity theory (SST; Carstensen, 2006) proposes that awareness of one’s shortening lifetime shifts motivational priorities throughout adulthood: Whereas young adults prioritize futureoriented over present-oriented goals, the reverse is expected for older adults who perceive their time horizons as increasingly limited. The theory postulates that with older age, adults are increasingly motivated to optimize their a ective experiences in the here and now. This claim is in line with ndings of an age-related increase from adolescence to old age in self-reported everyday prohedonic motivation (wanting to maintain or enhance positive, or to dampen negative experiences; Riediger et al., 2009, 2014). Corresponding patterns have also emerged with behavioral indicators of a ect-regulatory preferences, such as older, as compared to younger, adults’ higher preferences to listen to positive, low-arousal music in a ectively relevant situations (Cohrdes et al., 2017). Research on the so-called age-related positivity e ect in a ective information processing also aligns with the proposal of adult shifts in a ect-regulation motivation.

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Age-Related Positivity E ect in A ective Information Processing When exposed to experimental emotional stimuli (e.g., pictures or videos varying in valence) without further instructions, older adults, on average, preferentially attend to and remember positive over negative information compared to younger individuals (e.g., meta-analyses by Reed et al., 2014). This phenomenon has been interpreted as being due to older adults’ strategic deployment of attention to protect their a ective well-being. Supporting this account are ndings that the positivity e ect does not emerge when older adults’ cognitive resource capacity is constrained (e.g., Bruno et al., 2014; Mather & Knight, 2005). Older adults’ preferential attention to positive information thus seems to require resources, which is consistent with the idea that it re ects an e ortful emotion-regulation strategy. Also in line with this is the observed absence of age-related positivity e ects when other personally relevant goals (e.g., achievement or health) might be momentarily more important than emotion regulation (English & Carstensen, 2015; Reed et al., 2014). Profound di erences between the employed paradigms and typical real-life engagement with a ective information have been noted as a potential limitation of this line of research (e.g., Kunzmann & Isaacowitz, 2017). Indeed, in eye-tracking research, an interesting discrepancy in ndings emerged when the ecological validity of the setting was enhanced. The age-related positivity e ect, typically found for participants’ gaze behavior toward a ective stimuli in standard experimental settings, could not be replicated when participants freely interacted with a naturalistic emotional environment (Isaacowitz et al., 2015). Findings from a study on adult age di erences in empathic accuracy, however, indirectly suggest that age-related positivity e ects might also emerge in naturalistic interactions (Blanke et al., 2015). Here, empathic accuracy (i.e., correctly inferring other persons’ thoughts and feelings) was lower among older empathizers

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Several researchers (e.g., Blanchard–Fields, 2007; Carstensen, 2006; Charles, 2010) theorized that this

for unknown interaction partners’ negative versus positive thoughts and feelings, whereas no such valence e ect was evident for younger adults’ empathic accuracy.

Use and E ectiveness of Emotion-Regulation Strategies Across Adulthood positivity e ect of attentional deployment. Arguing that aging-related losses in cognitive resource capacity a ect the e

ciency of di erent emotion-regulation strategies, they theorized that older adults should

tailor their emotion-regulation attempts accordingly (e.g., tone down resource-demanding strategies such as cognitive reappraisal in favor of less resource-demanding strategies such as avoiding situations that p. 102

elicit undesired emotions). A recent systematic review of studies employing a wide

range of self-report

and experimental measurement approaches, however, concluded that the available evidence does not indicate any systematic adult age di erences in the use of emotion-regulation strategies (Allen & Windsor, 2019). Studies using experience sampling also did not provide systematic support for age-related di erences in the emotion-regulation strategies that people use in their daily lives (Benson et al., 2019; Eldesouky & English, 2018). Furthermore, the often-claimed improvement of emotion-regulation competence into old age is also not well supported empirically. Several researchers scrutinized the available evidence by means of systematic review and meta-analysis. Their consensus was that, although most self-report studies indeed nd older adults to describe themselves, on average, as in better control of their feelings than younger adults (Doerwald et al., 2016), experimental studies yield diverse patterns of ndings and do not indicate systematic adult age di erences in the ability to regulate emotions according to instruction (e.g., metaanalysis in Brady et al., 2018; systematic review in Doerwald et al., 2016). A potential shortcoming of these studies is their limited ecological validity (Kunzmann & Isaacowitz, 2017), but studies on reactions to a ect-eliciting events in real life similarly yielded a heterogeneous pattern, with various moderators in uencing adult age di erences in emotional responsivity (Bellingtier & Neupert, 2018; Charles et al., 2009; Wrzus et al., 2015). The remarkable heterogeneity of ndings indicates that emotion regulation across adulthood is likely too complex to be straightforwardly re ected in stable age-group di erences, regardless of context. The strength and vulnerability integration model (e.g., Charles & Luong, 2013), for example, maintains that highly arousing and complex contexts should render successful emotion regulation increasingly di

cult

with older age as relevant resources, such as neurobiologically determined cognitive functions (e.g., processing speed, memory span) or exibility to recuperate from physiological arousal, decline. In less demanding situations, however, and given the age-related increase in prohedonic a ect-regulation motivation, older adults’ emotion-regulation success should be comparable to (or even better than) that of younger individuals. Supporting evidence includes, for example, ndings that adult age di erences in a ective stress reactivity vary with stressor complexity. Comparable or lower a ective responses were observed among older as compared to younger adults in reaction to mild stressors, whereas a ective reactivity to complex stressors was enhanced among older adults relative to younger participants (e.g., Birditt, 2014; Wrzus et al., 2013). To summarize, the available evidence points to adult age di erences in emotion-regulation motivation, but not in emotion-regulation strategy use and e ectiveness. Prohedonic motivation to optimize one’s emotional well-being is more pronounced among older adults than among younger adults, as is preferential attention to positive over negative information in laboratory contexts. Age-comparative ndings on the use and e ectiveness of emotion-regulation strategies, however, do not support any overarching adult age di erences in emotion-regulation competence. Together, enhanced prohedonic a ect-regulation motivation and maintained emotion-regulation capacity might contribute to the “stability-despite-loss

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Urry and Gross (2010) proposed that adult changes in emotion-regulation strategy use extend beyond the

p. 103

paradox” of a ective well-being

into young old age. Terminal decline in well-being prior to death, in

contrast, might result from an increased likelihood that stressors encountered in the nal phase of life overtax the remaining emotion-regulation capacity.

There is ample evidence demonstrating the importance of emotion regulation for developmental adaptation in all phases of the life span and across diverse life domains (e.g., social relations, mental health, academic or professional achievements). However, the e ectiveness, motivations, and means for emotion regulation vary across age groups. Developmental investigations address these di erences, but typically focus on one particular life phase in isolation. By adopting a life-span perspective, we have mapped the key developments and in uencing factors for emotion regulation across the entire life span from infancy to old age. The reviewed research demonstrates that internal and external factors interact to shape development of emotion regulation throughout life, although the relative importance of individual aspects varies across di erent ages. Internal factors include, among others, changes in neurobiological structures and functions, cognitive capacity, and motivational preferences for in uencing momentary emotional states. External factors involve contextual in uences, such as family and peers that mold the social learning of emotion regulation, and the nature and complexity of encountered emotional challenges. The extant research suggests that—although there is potential for gains and losses in emotion-regulation capacity throughout the entire life span—the normative life-span trajectory of emotion regulation depicts a pattern of average re nement in the early phases of life followed by average stability throughout most of adulthood.

Future Directions Much of the research reviewed in this chapter derived from an interest in typical (average) developmental pathways of emotion-regulation development. Individual di erences within age groups, and their in uencing factors, however, have been relatively unexplored. Also, and depending on the speci c research question at hand, chronological age may not always be the best approximation of individuals’ developmental status. In adolescence, for example, more attention should be paid to the role of pubertal timing, status, and tempo for the development of emotion regulation. Middle adulthood is the least wellresearched life period, and more rigorously investigating emotion-regulation development in that phase is an important undertaking for future research. In addition, future research should aim to address methodological limitations of the currently available research (see Lougheed, this volume). For example, p. 104

more longitudinal evidence is necessary to portray developmental changes within persons over

time, also

considering the possibility of nonlinear trends in development, such as temporary perturbations or deviations from growth trajectories. Multimethodological designs would be desirable to overcome the shortcomings associated with the prevailing dominance of self-report approaches or lab-based experimental designs with limited ecological validity. Finally, understanding the life-span development of emotion regulation would bene t from deepening the conceptual and methodological exchange between researchers investigating emotion regulation in di erent phases of life.

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Conclusion

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The Oxford Handbook of Emotional Development Daniel Dukes (ed.) et al. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/978019 8855903.001.0001 9780191889516

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CHAPTER

8 The Development of Cognitive Reappraisal for Regulating Emotions: Infancy to Adolescence  Kalee De France, Tom Hollenstein https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198855903.013.5 Published: 13 January 2022

Pages 110–126

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Published: 2022

Abstract Cognitive reappraisal—or altering the emotional impact of a situation by changing the way an individual thinks about it—is strongly associated with many indicators of well-being, such as mood, as well as decreased experience and expression of negative a ect. Moreover, the ability to change emotion-related cognitions, achieved via reappraisal, is one of the main determinants of improvement across most psychopathologies. Despite the depth of knowledge re ecting the bene ts of reappraisal, there remains a lack of both theory and evidence to explain how this complex emotionregulation strategy develops. The objective of this chapter is to outline the developmental trajectory of reappraisal by identifying the social and cognitive components necessary for the successful development and use of reappraisal, as well as the maturation of these components from infancy through adolescence.

Keywords: cognitive reappraisal, emotional impact, indicators of well-being, emotion-related cognition, physiological health, optimism, life satisfaction, emotion-regulation strategy Subject: Psychology, Developmental Psychology Series: Oxford Library of Psychology Collection: Oxford Handbooks Online

Introduction COGNITIVE

reappraisal is an emotion-regulation strategy that involves altering the emotional impact of a

situation by changing its appraisal (Gross, 2002). Reappraisal use is strongly associated with many indicators of well-being, such as greater physiological health, optimism, life satisfaction, and active attempts to repair negative mood, as well as lower experience and expression of depressed mood and negative a ect (Gullone et al., 2010; Haga et al., 2009; Troy et al., 2013). Moreover, the ability to change emotion-related cognitions, achieved via reappraisal, is one of the main components of many mental health therapies and treatment programs, as well as one of the key determinants of improvement across most psychopathologies (Cristea et al., 2012). Although the e ectiveness and bene ts of reappraisal are well documented, there is limited understanding of children’s capacity for reappraisal and how this ability develops. Reappraisal may require greater experience or cognitive capacities as the ability to use reappraisal is unstable or undeveloped as late as 9 years old (DeCicco et al., 2012, 2014). Moreover, the e ectiveness of reappraisal in regulating emotion continues to increase as youth progress through adolescence (McRae et al., 2012b). However, while several recent studies have examined the neural correlates of reappraisal development (e.g., Buhle et al., 2014; De Cicco et al., 2014; McRae et al., 2012b), scant attention has been paid to the cognitive components of reappraisal that coincide with this neurodevelopment, leaving gaps in our understanding of how and when this important regulatory skill develops. p. 111

The objective of this chapter is to outline the typical developmental trajectory of reappraisal by identifying the cognitive components essential for the implementation of reappraisal that may account for di erences in how much youth can rely on reappraisal to manage their emotional experiences. In the next section, we brie y provide a background of reappraisal as an emotion regulation strategy. Then, we will identify key

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increased physiological health, optimism, life satisfaction, and more active attempts to repair negative

capacities that underlie reappraisal processes. The remainder of the chapter will consider the development of these capacities and of reappraisal in early childhood, mid to late childhood, and adolescence.

What is Reappraisal? appraisal theories of emotion. From the perspective of appraisal theories, emotions arise due to the subjective interpretation, or appraisal, of an event’s meaning or signi cance (Broekens et al., 2008; Siemer et al., 2007). Thus, the nature of that appraisal determines the valence and intensity of the emotion that is generated (Roseman & Smith, 2001; van Reekum, 2000). Moreover, cognitions are su

cient to generate

emotional responses (Izard, 1993), and various emotions are associated with speci c and distinct patterns of appraisal (Ellsworth & Scherer, 2003; Gratch et al., 2015; Roseman & Smith, 2001). While initial emotion generation may be linked to appraisals of a triggering event, most appraisal theories view appraisal as a process that unfolds over time and that involves the modi cation of original appraisals in a cyclical progression of appraisal and reappraisal (Sander et al., 2005; Smith & Lazarus, 1990). This restructuring of the original appraisal is key to the successful implementation of cognitive reappraisal as an emotion regulation strategy; changing the appraisal of an event can e ectively in uence the ensuing intensity of an emotional experience (Gross, 1998; Ochsner et al., 2002). For this reason, cognitive reappraisal is central to many models of emotion regulation, most notably Gross’ process model (Gross & John, 2013).

Reappraisal: Essential Components Due to footings in appraisal theory and associations with regulatory success and well-being, reappraisal has become one of the most well-researched mechanisms for regulating emotions (Suri et al., 2015). However, reappraisal use may not be equally bene cial across the lifespan (De France & Hollenstein, 2019; see Riediger & Bellingtier, this volume). Children as old as 9 years are unable to use reappraisal, adolescents implement reappraisal signi cantly less than adults, and the ability to successfully use reappraisal p. 112

increases dramatically as youth age into adulthood (De Cicco et al., 2012,

2014; McRae et al., 2012). These

ndings suggest that di erences in emotion regulation strategy use across development may be due largely, in part, to the maturation of underlying cognitive abilities (Dahl, 2003; Steinberg, 2005). In particular, the ability to successfully implement reappraisal may be contingent on the development of two key cognitive skills: executive functioning (EF) and theory of mind (ToM). See Walle & Bellingtier, this volume, for a more extensive review of the cognitive processes involved in emotion development and regulation. First, EF components of working memory, attention shifting, and inhibitory control (Miyake et al., 2000) are key mechanisms of successful reappraisal. Working memory is required to simultaneously hold and evaluate multiple appraisals of the cause, signi cance, and potential outcomes of the emotion-eliciting event and to x the desired appraisal in mind (Ochsner & Gross, 2008). Moreover, shifting and inhibition are also evident as individuals transition from the original to the new appraisal, inhibit thoughts not conducive to the chosen appraisal, and monitor the success of a shift in a ective states (McRae et al., 2012; Ochsner & Gross, 2008). In a large meta-analysis of neuroimaging studies, reappraisal was associated with brain areas activated by EF processes (e.g., dorsolateral and dorsomedial prefrontal/anterior cingulate areas; Messina et al., 2015). Moreover, greater reappraisal ability is predicted by greater shifting (Malooly et al., 2013) and working memory ability (Pe et al., 2013). Thus, EF shows consistent associations with reappraisal. Yet the degree to which EF is necessary and/or su

cient for reappraisal is not yet clear.

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Reappraisal’s e ectiveness to modulate emotional experiences has been explained largely by cognitive

The second key component of e ective reappraisal involves ToM, or the understanding that other people have di erent thoughts, beliefs, and desires than ourselves (Wellman et al., 2001). Developing alternative appraisals requires representing various mental states of the self and others as an individual considers di erent possible emotional states or rethinks the intentions of others (Ochsner et al., 2004, 2009; McRae et al., 2012). Moreover, a key component of reappraisal is perspective taking (Webb et al., 2012), anticipating McRae et al., 2012). For example, initial annoyance with someone who bumps into you may be reappraised with realization that the person was visually impaired. Although experimental evidence of ToM-reappraisal associations in typically developing populations is lacking, individuals with autism spectrum disorder show that de cits in ToM are associated with less reappraisal use and reappraisal self-e

cacy (Samson et al.,

2012). Thus, while the connection between ToM and reappraisal makes theoretical sense, empirical testing of this premise is limited. Due to the range of cognitive skills underlying successful reappraisal, implementing and bene tting from reappraisal use may be particularly di

cult during earlier developmental periods when youth have yet to

master these advanced skills. The following section will review the developmental trajectories of EF and ToM from infancy through adolescence, to evaluate how these skills may map onto the development of reappraisal use.

p. 113

Developmental Periods Early Childhood (Age 0 to 5 Years) In the rst years of life, emotion regulation is primarily externally imposed by caregivers through soothing behaviors and avoidance of emotionally eliciting events (Zeman et al., 2006). However, even in their infancy, babies develop the ability to disengage from emotionally arousing events, reach for caregivers for comfort, self-soothe, and avoid or depart from unpleasant stimuli (Field, 1981; Thompson & Goodman, 2009). While children in this developmental period are unable to independently implement reappraisal, they are developing foundational skills that are necessary for later cognitive functioning used in reappraisal.

Executive Functioning Infants as young as 8 months of age begin to show successful performance on EF tasks (Diamond, 2006), and these skills continue to improve during the rst year of life as children become able to hold information in mind for increasing periods of time, inhibit prepotent responses, and shift thinking to re ect changes in the environment (Bell & Adams, 1999; Diamond, 2006). Inhibition may be the rst of these skills to develop, however, infants require coaching and prompting from caregivers to display and practice these skills and these abilities are not consistently employed (Kochanska, 2002). As children reach preschool age, they begin to demonstrate an ability to use inhibition independently. Three-year-olds show great di

culty using

inhibition to override prepotent responses; however, by 4.5 years old, children can successfully complete tasks that require this skill (Hughes, 1998). Working memory and shifting also show signi cant improvements during this period. Working memory emerges during the second year of life; however, children display signi cant improvement of this skill during the preschool years (Best & Miller, 2010; Carlson, 2005; Romine & Reynolds, 2005). Moreover, because shifting requires an ability to maintain a response in working memory while also inhibiting the activation of that response in order to activate a new one, the ability to successfully use shifting requires functional inhibition and working-memory skills (Best & Miller, 2010). As a result, shifting is less developed than inhibition and working memory during this developmental period. However, while children tend to

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others’ mental states, and actively considering how others are a ected (Galinsky & Moskowitz, 2000;

perseverate and are unable to use shifting by age 3, by the age of 5 they can consistently demonstrate this ability (Carlson, 2005).

Theory of Mind abilities (Carlson & Moses, 2001; Devine & Hughes, 2014; Sabbagh et al., 2013). Until 3 years old, children are p. 114

typically considered unable to

distinguish between knowledge only they are privy to and what is known

by others (for exceptions see Buttelmann et al., 2009; Onishi & Baillargeon, 2005). Therefore, they cannot identify alternate perspectives as they believe that everyone holds the same beliefs as they do. In particular, children seem to have greater di

culty identifying what someone may not know or may not desire (known

as false beliefs and desires), as opposed to what someone does know or does desire (Apperly et al., 2011). For example, a child may easily identify what a character knows or believes to be true, if it is indeed true, but may have more di

culty understanding what a character believes to be true if it is not consistent with what

is actually true. However, by age 5, most children reach the ceiling on these basic ToM tasks and can easily identify that others may hold di erent beliefs and, therefore, have di erent perspectives and experiences (Wellman et al., 2001). Thus, while children under the age of 5 may be capable of implementing the EF skills required to develop alternate appraisals of a situation, their lack of ability to understand the emotional experiences of another individual may hinder the likelihood that they can use forms of reappraisal that involve taking the perspective of others.

Reappraisal Consistent with most aspects of cognitive development, EF and ToM develop in ts and starts (Hartelman et al., 1998). Indeed, these complex cognitive abilities initially require contextual support and ideal circumstances in order to be successfully executed. Therefore, while reappraisal use may not be reliably available to children during this developmental period, it may be possible for children under the age of 5 to use reappraisal under ideal circumstances and with speci c supports. Unfortunately, research into reappraisal use during this period is lacking. Initial investigations concluded that children between the ages of 5 and 9 could not successfully implement reappraisal (DeCicco et al., 2012, 2014); however, a signi cant barrier in assessing reappraisal use among young children, and especially toddlers, is that it may be unreasonable to expect them to clearly articulate their emotion regulation strategy use during an interview-style assessment (Cole et al., 2004). Moreover, traditional tasks may be overly taxing for toddlers’ early cognitive skills as they may have great di

culty holding interpretations in

working memory (Hua et al., 2015). See Lougheed, this volume and Messinger et al., this volume for further discussion regarding the measurement of emotions and emotional development. To circumvent this barrier, alternative assessment modalities have been implemented, including caregiver reports (e.g., Eisenberg et al., 1993), coded behavioral responses (e.g., Stansbury & Sigman, 2000), and neurophysiological assessments (e.g., Hua et al., 2015). According to these assessments, young children are able to implement reappraisal when guided by a caregiver (Stansbury & Sigman, 2000) or when given reminders of alternate appraisals to ease reliance on working memory (Hua et al., 2015). Therefore, reappraisal during this early developmental period may be possible, but may be much more likely to occur under supportive circumstances and with caregiver assistance.

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The signi cant improvements in EF during this developmental period facilitate the emergence of ToM

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Middle Childhood (Age 5 to Early Adolescence) During middle childhood, peer relationships become more salient, which may create a motivation to utilize EF skills to inhibit prepotent emotional responses, develop empathy for others, identify alternative perspectives, understand others’ emotional experience, and, as a result, reappraise to manage their

Executive Functioning By middle childhood, EF skills are more easily assessed and manipulated as methodological barriers, such as di

culties verbalizing mental states and a limited understanding of instructions, are somewhat resolved

(Best et al., 2009). Hence, EF tasks can vary much more widely and assessments of cognitive skills can be more successful. Signi cant improvements in inhibition occur between ages 5 to 8 (Romine & Reynolds, 2005), assessed by motor, oculomotor, and simple-response inhibition tasks (e.g., Klenberg et al., 2001; Luna et al., 2004; Simpson & Riggs, 2005). Working memory for simple tasks peaks around age 6 (Luciana & Nelson, 1998) but continues to develop into adolescence when assessed by more complex tasks. Finally, the ability to shift across simple sets is evident by age 4; however, as the shifting tasks become more complex, further improvement is observed throughout middle childhood (e.g., Huizinga & van der Molen, 2007). Thus, by mid-childhood, EF tasks in which children originally required external supports and ideal contexts become easy to implement independently, while more challenging tasks still require external supports and ideal circumstances.

Theory of Mind Recent studies have begun to focus on developmental di erences in ToM beyond early childhood (Apperly et al., 2011; Devine & Hughes, 2013; Miller, 2012). Although preschoolers can pass simple false-belief tasks, children as old as 9 years are only beginning to e ectively use ToM skills to explain the behaviour of others (Lecce et al., 2014), such as judging a person’s beliefs about others’ intentions, or using mental-state terms to describe social behaviour (Lecce et al., 2014; Miller, 2009; Pillow, 1993). Therefore, ToM skills may require considerably more development in order to solve problems, make decisions, and understand the intentions of others as a means to regulate emotions at this age.

Reappraisal Overall, the signi cant cognitive skill developments during middle childhood allow children to respond to emotional experiences in a more thoughtful and careful manner, and to be less impulsive and more strategic in how they manage their emotions (Thompson & Goodman, 2009), which likely underlie advances in reappraisal. By ages 9 to 10, youth report using reappraisal (de Veld et al., 2012); however, although they may implement reappraisal more successfully than younger children (DeCicco et al., 2014), this p. 116

implementation may not result in successful reductions in emotional

arousal (de Veld et al., 2012).

Therefore, although preadolescent children are capable of demonstrating EF, ToM, and reappraisal abilities independently and successfully, they may still have di

culty actually using reappraisal when experiencing

strong emotions or under heavy cognitive load. Because preadolescent children may require external supports or ideal circumstances to engage in successful reappraisal, this age period is likely critical for reappraisal development. Through socialization and practice, youth may be able to enhance reappraisal skills prior to the emotional tumult of adolescence.

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emotions and facilitate friendships.

Adolescence Adolescence is characterized by extraordinary biological, cognitive, psychological, and social transitions (Lerner & Galambos, 1998) which come with emotional challenges (Hollenstein & Lougheed, 2013). The abundance of novel emotional experiences demands greater regulatory skills; however, they must develop Fortunately, continued EF and ToM maturation may further enhance reappraisal skills.

Executive Functioning Adolescent EF skill development advances various aspects of cognition, problem solving, and self-control of behavior and emotion (Thompson & Goodman, 2009). Rather than developing new skills, these improvements consist mainly of re nements in speed and accuracy (Best et al., 2009), both of which are necessary for e

cient processing of emotional information to implement cognitive change. These

re nements may be necessary to e ectively reappraise despite competing cognitive demands or emotionally charged situations. Inhibition skills during demanding tasks continue to improve into adulthood. After mastering simpler tasks in middle childhood (Best et al., 2009), stop-signal and anker task mastery peaks around age 15, while more di

cult stroop task performance improves until age 21 (Huizinga et al., 2006). Therefore, inhibition

skills gradually mature throughout adolescence and into adulthood (Leon–Carrion et al., 2004). This pattern of gradual re nement and increased complexity also applies to working memory abilities. While working memory skills for simple tasks tend to peak in middle childhood, more complex tasks evoke signi cant di erences until age 16 (Luciana et al., 2005) or even further into adulthood (Luciana & Nelson, 1998). These ndings suggest that re nements to working memory abilities may continue to develop into adulthood. Finally, shifting, which is typically the last of the three EF skills to develop, shows the most drastic improvements up through age 6 (Best & Miller, 2010). However, when shifting analyses include shift cost, or the di erence in response time between original trials and trials that involve a shift in rules, signi cant improvements occur between childhood and adolescence (Davidson et al., 2006; Huizinga et al., 2006). p. 117

While the switch-cost accuracy scores tend to plateau in adolescence, switch-cost reaction times

actually

increase until adulthood as older participants slow down their responses on shift trials to ensure accuracy (Davidson et al., 2006). This trade-o

in favor of accuracy may be re ective of a combined maturation of

overall EF abilities. Older participants maximize their inhibitory advantage by inhibiting the previous sorting criteria, holding multiple goals in mind (both speed and accuracy), and e

ciently shifting from one

set of sorting rules to another. While adolescents are capable of each of these processes, contextual demands and the di

culty of implementing these complex cognitive skills during heightened emotional

arousal may limit how well they can execute them.

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these with less external support from caregiver modeling, coaching, and guidance (Steinberg, 2005).

Theory of Mind Partly due to continued advances in EF, ToM continues to develop and becomes more sophisticated throughout adolescence and even into adulthood (Apperly et al., 2011; Dumontheil et al., 2010). As individuals reach late adolescence, they tend to make fewer ToM errors, and respond more quickly during used in natural settings to aid in decision making and actions, most ToM tasks only assess the participant’s ability to represent the mental state of another (Dumontheil et al., 2010). ToM tasks which require participants to use information to problem solve and make decisions also increases the likelihood that even adults will struggle to succeed on the task. In one study, a large proportion of child, adolescent, and even adult participants failed a computerized task (Dumontheil et al., 2010), consistent with results from a reallife version of the same task (Keysar et al., 2000, 2003). For example, in a task implemented by Keysar and colleagues (2003), participants were asked to move speci c objects in a large grid based on the perspective of a confederate, rather than their own perspective. Despite clearly understanding the instructions, even adult participants frequently failed the task. Therefore, while ToM is more advanced in adolescence, improvements may continue well into adulthood. Across adolescence and into adulthood, performance on ToM tasks may re ect more stable individual di erences in perspective taking, or perhaps di erences in the rate of its development. Unfortunately, this research has yet to be done. Nonetheless, the ability to apply ToM within an emotionally charged situation likely increases with age, thus enhancing the availability of reappraisal as a regulation strategy.

Reappraisal In addition to EF and ToM, adolescents show marked improvements in logical reasoning and information processing, as well as abstract, multidimensional, and hypothetical thinking (Steinberg, 2005). Adolescents also demonstrate a surge in their capacity for self-evaluation, re ection, and rumination (Perfect & Schwartz, 2002; Keating, 1990). The culmination of these cognitive advances facilitates the use of reappraisal, as adolescents have an easier time managing multiple sources or interpretations of information and processing this information abstractly and hypothetically. The trajectory of reappraisal advancement, however, remains largely unclear. Some studies have found that p. 118

reappraisal is stable across adolescence (Gullone et al., 2010),

and even across early adolescent, young-

adult, and older-adult cohorts (De France & Hollenstein, 2019). Conversely, other studies have documented signi cant age-related di erences in reappraisal during adolescence (Garnefski & Kraaij, 2006), and between adolescence and adulthood (Zimmerman & Iwanski, 2014). This discrepancy may be largely due to the ways in which reappraisal use is assessed: accounts that reappraisal use remains consistent have relied on self-reports assessing whether participants feel that they rely on reappraisal (e.g., De France & Hollenstein, 2019), while accounts of age di erences in reappraisal use have used more extensive examinations of reappraisal, such as asking participants how they think they would respond to speci c situations (Zimmerman & Iwanski, 2014), or assessing emotional intensity after reappraising distressing images (Silvers et al., 2012). While adolescents may presume that they use reappraisal as much as adults, they may actually implement reappraisal less, and with less success, during real or imagined emotionally evocative situations. Indeed, even among adults, self-report reappraisal use and actual reappraisal ability are only moderately correlated (McRae et al., 2012b). This nding is in line with EF and ToM developments during adolescence: adolescents may be fully capable of reappraisal, but contextual demands and the di

culty of implementing the

orchestration of cognitive skills necessary may limit how likely they are to rely on it, and how well they can execute it (McRae et al., 2012 a, b). As EF and ToM develop more fully, adolescents may come to increase their reliance on reappraisal and be able to implement it during a wider range of situational complexity.

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ToM tasks, than their younger counterparts (Apperly at al., 2011). However, while ToM skills are typically

Indeed, data from adolescents suggests that executive functioning is signi cantly associated with higher levels of cognitive restructuring abilities and reappraisal use during this age (Andreotti et al., 2013; Wante et al., 2017). While evidence on the link between ToM and reappraisal use during adolescence is limited, results suggest that adults with lower ToM also report signi cantly less reappraisal, and lower perceptions of reappraisal self-e

cacy (Samson et al., 2012). Thus, it is likely that this is true in adolescence as well. cult to implement during complex, emotionally charged

situations, and this may be compounded for younger adolescents who are still developing and re ning the cognitive skills needed for reappraisal use (McRae et al., 2012a). These nascent reappraisers may continue to require external support, such as reminders and instructions (McRae et al., 2012) and sca olded opportunities to practice reappraisal use during increasingly challenging emotional situations.

Future Directions Despite promising evidence regarding the developmental components necessary for reappraisal use, a great deal is left unknown about how and why reappraisal develops, particularly given the wide range of p. 119

individual di erences that emerge in reappraisal use

and skill level. This nascency provides ample

opportunity for future research focusing on these and other questions related to reappraisal development. The following section will focus on highlighting three key questions that we believe may prove fruitful in future reappraisal research. First, what is the trajectory of reappraisal development? Developmental studies of reappraisal use have typically shown that adults display higher levels of reliance on reappraisal to manage their emotional experiences when compared to their younger counterparts (Zimmermann & Iwanski, 2014). These ndings have allowed for assumptions to be made about the general upward trajectories of reliance on reappraisal over time. However, like most signi cant developmental changes (Hartelman et al., 1998), the path to adult levels of reappraisal use may be paved with considerable individual di erences and the aforementioned nonlinear, “ ts and starts” pattern of growth. Future studies that are able to make use of extensive longitudinal designs may be able to capture not only when signi cant growth in reappraisal use occurs, but also the pattern of these changes over time, and the identi cation of subgroups that di erentiate between individuals who demonstrate signi cant improvements from those who do not. These longitudinal assessments, while intensive, will provide essential and foundational contributions to our understanding of how and why regulation develops. Second, which factors contribute to whether reappraisal use is successful or not? Despite being praised for its associations with well-being, reappraisal does not always lead to a successful reduction of negative emotion (Lam et al., 2009). Thus far, evidence has suggested that reappraisal use can be rendered ine ective because of both individual di erence factors (i.e., de cits in executive functioning skills; Malooly et al., 2013; Pe et al., 2013) as well as larger contextual factors (i.e., socioeconomic status; Troy et al., 2017). For example, nascent results suggest that reappraisal’s e ectiveness may be contingent on how controllable individuals perceive their environment and their emotions to be (Troy et al., 2013), in that less controllable emotional events may increase the likelihood of gaining success from reappraisal use. However, the research investigating this claim, along with the abundance of other individual and contextual factors that may be at play, is scant, and much is still left unknown about why and how reappraisal becomes not only a strategy that can be implemented, but a successful one. Future research that is able to focus on further delineating which (and to what extent) individual di erence and contextual factors contribute to reappraisal implementation resulting in successful regulation would be a valuable contribution to the eld. Third, do di erent forms or subsets of reappraisal display di erential developmental timing and trajectories? The current chapter spoke to a broad conceptualization of reappraisal that does not distinguish

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In summary, reappraisal use is likely more di

between the various possible subcategories of rethinking an emotional event. Many empirical studies of reappraisal do not evaluate the di erent subsections of possible reappraisal use and, as a result, it is largely left up to participants to determine what form of reappraisal they use. For example, reappraisal can broadly p. 120

be categorized into one of two categories: (1)

upregulating positive emotions, or trying to focus attention

on feeling more positive; and (2) downregulating negative emotions, such as trying to feel less angry or sad negative ones is associated with di erential neurological activity, physiological arousal patterns, goals, and outcomes (see McRae et al., 2012 for a review). To further complicate matters, even more delineations can be made. Shiota and Levenson (2009) also consider a third form of reappraisal termed “detached reappraisal,” which involves focusing solely on the nonemotional components of the event in an attempt to reduce general emotionality. While these di erential forms of reappraisal may follow similar developmental paths, the fact that they focus on such di erent aspects of the emotional event, with potentially di ering reliance on social and emotional perspectives and information, means they may actually represent distinct developmental trends and timelines. In summary, while the current chapter sought to begin a discussion of how the various components of reappraisal develop and integrate over time, we are in no way suggesting that the discussion is over. Given that reappraisal seems strongly linked to regulatory success, mental health, and general well-being, we feel that further research into how and why reappraisal develops is an essential next step for future emotion regulation research.

Conclusion While reappraisal rst emerges in childhood, the ability to use this complex skill may continue to develop into adulthood and may require external supports to be successfully implemented even during adolescence. Here, we considered the development of necessary cognitive mechanisms as a way to begin sketching a model of reappraisal development. There are many important future directions that may meaningfully contribute to our understanding of burgeoning reappraisal skills. First, while we have delineated the core cognitive underpinnings of reappraisal, it is also important to consider socialization factors that enhance or inhibit reappraisal to explain individual di erences in its development. Second, while we considered reappraisal as a single strategy, there may be subtypes of reappraisal (e.g., distancing, reframing), as well as speci c components of reappraisal (Uusberg et al., 2019), that develop at di erent rates or as a result of di ering mechanisms (Moreira & Silvers, 2018). Third, longitudinal examinations of reappraisal in youth are strikingly rare and are the only way to really establish the developmental trajectory of this important regulatory skill (see De France, 2019). While we have embarked on this important research in our own lab, it is even more important that the next generation of researchers begin to track and understand this important regulatory skill. Ultimately, by understanding the development of reappraisal, we can begin to in uence its course, and reduce the necessity of remedial instructions of how to reappraise via therapy in adolescence and adulthood.

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(McRae et al., 2012). Even this simple distinction between moving towards positive emotions or away from

p. 121

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The Oxford Handbook of Emotional Development Daniel Dukes (ed.) et al. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/978019 8855903.001.0001 9780191889516

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CHAPTER

9 The Emotional Expressions and Emotion Perception in Nonhuman Primates  Yena Kim, Mariska Kret https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198855903.013.20 Published: 13 January 2022

Pages 129–145

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Published: 2022

Abstract The expression of emotions and their recognition in conspeci cs are pivotal to social life. As Darwin postulated in his pioneering book The expression of the emotions in man and animals, many homologous to those of other animals. Intriguingly, despite this early work, scientists have been skeptical about the feasibility of studying emotions in nonhumans and, therefore, the study of their emotional expressions has been limited. However, recent technological advances in neuroscience, genetics, and ne-scale behavioral analyses enable researchers to investigate human emotions in direct comparison with other animals. Throughout this chapter, the authors provide convincing evidence that nonhuman primates produce and recognize conspeci c emotional expressions. Some of them, especially the bared-teeth display, are used in multiple contexts, suggesting cognitively sophisticated functions. The exible use of emotional expressions seems to be tightly linked to species sociality, such as level of tolerance.

Keywords: emotional expression, emotion perception, evolution, primates, sociality Subject: Psychology, Developmental Psychology Series: Oxford Library of Psychology Collection: Oxford Handbooks Online

Adaptive Functions of Emotional Expressions and Emotion Perception FOR

decades, the concept of emotion has long been the subject of considerable debate due to di ering

de nitions adopted across disciplines, ranging from functional (Anderson & Adolphs, 2014) to cognitive and socioconstructive (Barrett et al., 2007; Lazarus, 1991) accounts. Although the nature of emotion and to what extent we should attribute animal behavior to an emotion are still debatable (de Waal, 2011); there is a wide consensus that the ability to communicate internal emotional states is critical for social species. In this chapter, we focus on expressions of emotion and how these are perceived by conspeci cs. We employ a broad de nition of how emotional expressions are operationalized, which reads as follows: Any change in the face, body, or voice that is in principle perceivable by conspeci cs (via visual, auditory, or olfactory channels) and that results from an altered mental state triggered by biologically relevant stimuli (e.g., a snake, an emotional conspeci c) (Kret et al., 2019). Adopting this operational de nition has two advantages. First, it allows the inclusion of both explicit expressions resulting from muscle activity and implicit emotion-induced changes such as piloerection and pupil size. Second, it facilitates a direct comparison between human and nonhuman primates and incorporates literature on both primatology and psychology, circumventing terminological discrepancies. p. 130

Primates are characterized by their gregariousness and highly developed sociocognitive capacities (Dunbar, 2003; Kappeler & van Schaik, 2002). Properly regulating behaviors in response to internal and external social stimuli is therefore critical for individuals within groups to maintain stable social relationships (Kret & Ploeger, 2015). Preston and de Waal (2002) have proposed an autonomous neural mechanism—the Perception–Action Model (PAS)—as a core mechanism which enables emotional state matching with others (de Waal & Preston, 2017; Preston & de Waal, 2002). The ability to match one’s own emotional state with that of another is adaptive from both a kin and nonkin’s perspective, since it allows mothers to better accommodate the needs of their o spring and unrelated group members to prepare a ght or ight response in anticipation of potential threats (Preston & de Waal, 2002; Frijda, 2016). This autonomous

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morphological features and functions of emotional expressions characterized in humans are

neural mechanism is presumed to be widespread in all animal taxa, but its complexity and the level of cognitive control presumably varies widely across species. Given the complex nature of primate sociality, primates are expected to have evolved enhanced emotion communication capacities (de Waal & Preston, 2017; Gruber & Sievers, 2019; see Clay et al., this volume).

Emotional expressions have evolved for various reasons. Some expressions, such as pupil dilation, may have evolved due to perceptual bene ts (Mathôt, 2018), but without obvious social selective pressure, although in humans and chimpanzees these emotional cues might be picked up by others and in uence their emotional state (Kret et al., 2013, 2014; for a review, see Kret, 2015). Other explicit emotional signals, such as facial or vocal expressions, often show key similairities in closely related species due to homology (Andrew, 1963; Preuschoft and van Hoo , 1995). However, speci c forms and functions of such expressions are known to vary depending on socioecological conditions to which a species has adapted (for a review, see Waller and Micheletta, 2013). Facial communication, by means of facial muscle movements, is more prominently found in diurnal than nocturnal species and in those living in large rather than in simple social groups, where close proximity or face-to-face communication is more likely to occur (Dobson, 2009a; Smuts et al., 2008). Parr and her colleagues have summarized some of the existing hypotheses describing physical and socioecological conditions that constrain or favor a species’ communicative repertoire (Parr et al., 2015). For example, body size constrains the length and frequency of vocalization, as well as facial mobility for facial expressions. Larger animals, compared to smaller animals, produce lower-frequency vocalizations as well as longer calls (Ey et al., 2007) and have more variable facial movements (Dobson, 2009a). These physical boundaries of expressions are tightly linked to species’ capability of perceiving variable signals (Kiltie, 2000). p. 131

Social complexity is not only correlated with a species’ general or sociocognitive capacities, but it is also known to predict the complexity of its communicative repertoire (Dunbar, 1993; Freeberg et al., 2012; Schmidt & Cohn, 2001). For example, species living in large groups have more varied communicative repertoires than those living in small groups (McComb & Semple, 2005). Moreover, tolerant species, compared to despotic species, are likely to have more variable and exible communicative repertoires, since an error in expressing submissive signals can lead to a higher risk in species with a steep hierarchy (Ciani et al., 2012; Dobson, 2012; Maestripieri, 1999; Parr et al., 2005; Preuschoft & van Hoo , 1995; Rebout et al., 2020). For example, one such species, rhesus macaques, compared to Tonkean macaques (a tolerant species), use bared-teeth displays more unidirectionally from lower-ranking to higher-ranking individuals to display submission (Beisner & McCowan, 2014; Thierry et al., 1989). Moreover, the number of facial displays in the genus Macaca is found to be larger in tolerant species than despotic species (Preuschoft & van Hoo , 1995). The aforementioned studies have increased general knowledge about species’ communicative repertoires. However, the link between species’ sociality and their capacity of emotion communication has been mostly left untouched. Few studies have thus far compared closely related species in terms of emotional expression (Beisner & McCowan, 2014; Flack & de Waal, 2007; Preuschoft, 1995; Preuschoft & van Hoo , 1995). If emotional expression and emotion perception are indeed tightly linked to a species’ communicative repertoire, then we may hypothesize that the complexity of, and the sensitivity to, emotions are directly linked to a species’ social characteristics. For example, highly tolerant species living in complex social groups may have higher exibility and variability in expressing emotions, as well as higher sensitivity to detect emotional expressions (Parr et al., 2005; Waller & Micheletta, 2013). However, without testing this

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Socioecological Constraints on Emotion Communication

possibility in combination with di erent emotional expressions and by comparing di erent species directly with each other under the same conditions, the existence of such species’ di erences remains speculative.

Behavioral Studies of Emotional Expression in Nonhuman Primates corresponding functions in human and nonhuman animals (Darwin, 1872). Ekman later experimentally tested the universality of emotional expressions across di erent cultural populations in humans and suggested that some emotions are basic and have discrete evolutionary functions which constitute a set of fundamental human emotional states important to regulate social life (Ekman, 1992). Although the classi cation of discrete emotions and their scalability are controversial (Anderson & Adolphs, 2014; p. 132

Barrett, 1998; Devidze et al., 2006; McNaughton & Corr, 2004; Pfa

et al.,

2005; Russell, 1980, 2003), the

dominant view is that there are at least some emotions including, for instance, disgust, which are expressed similarly across di erent cultures (e.g., Izard, 1994) and are present in nonhuman primates (e.g., Berridge, 2000). In this section, we discuss several emotional expressions that have been most widely described in the nonhuman primate literature, and discuss their communicative value. Among the di erent expressions of emotion, fear-induced responses have received most attention in both human and nonhuman primate emotion research (Cook & Mineka, 1989, 1990; LoBue & DeLoache, 2008; Weiss et al., 2015). Interestingly, most behavioral research on how primates respond to fear-inducing external stimuli, such as predators, has focused on vocalizations, in terms of linguistic properties, such as referential signaling (Seyfarth et al., 1980). However, the detection of a fear-inducing stimulus often provokes facial expressions (Parr et al., 2005). These facial expressions fundamentally share universal morphological and physiological characteristics which function to increase sensory vigilance, such as increased eye aperture and ared nostrils (Susskind et al., 2008). A growing number of studies on fear in primates, ranging from a phylogenetic analysis of facial movements to several cognitive and neuroimaging experiments (Cook & Mineka, 1989, 1990; Kalin et al., 2001, 2004; LoBue & DeLoache, 2008; Preuschoft & van Hoo , 1995; Weiss et al., 2015), have indeed supported the view that the expression and perception of fear have evolutionary origins in a predatory defense mechanism which later served a social function, such as tension reduction or con ict avoidance (Öhman, 1986, 2009). For example, naïve primates, when exposed to snake-related objects, exhibit avoiding behaviors (Weiss et al., 2015). These seemingly innate behavioral responses associated with snakes also become informative to other conspeci c members (Cook & Mineka, 1990). The responses to social threat in primates show similar behavioral patterns to those observed in response to snakes, and the amygdala is known to mediate both predator-related and social threat-related fear responses (for a review, see Öhman, 2009). Therefore, the expression of fear is expected to be highly conserved across species and to have a conspicuous communicative signal. Given the space available for this chapter, we con ne our discussion to the visual domain. The bared-teeth display is one of the most frequently observed facial expressions in nonhuman primates, regardless of social structure or complexity, and most often in response to fear or aggression (marmosets: Stevenson & Poole, 1976; several species of macaques: de Waal & Luttrell, 1985; Thierry et al, 1989; mandrills: Bout & Thierry, 2005; orangutans: Liebal et al., 2006; chimpanzees: Waller & Dunbar, 2005; bonobos: de Waal, 1988). Although there are morphological similarities in the bared-teeth display across species, the frequency and function of its usage, as well as the contexts in which it is expressed, are known to vary. In some species, this expression has been ritualized to express subordinance (Flack & de Waal, 2007; Maestripieri & Wallen, 1997), benign intentions (Waller & Dunbar, 2005), and even a

liation and

friendship (Bout & Thierry, 2005), which seem to be linked to sociocognitive characteristics, such as tolerance (Dobson, 2012; Thierry et al., 2000). In humans, it has been ritualized into the social smile (Van Hoo , 1972), with multiple social purposes (Martin et al., 2017). Although the involved facial muscles can

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More than a century ago, Darwin proposed the evolutionary continuity of emotional expressions and

p. 133

vary slightly across contexts, using a similar expression

in multiple contexts suggests behavioral

exibility and perhaps even the existence of a cognitive capacity for top–down control of emotional expressions (Kret et al., 2019). Unlike the emotional expressions that have evolved in life-threatening situations, the expression of positive critical to an individual’s survival and therefore more susceptible to variation over the course of evolution (Fredrickson, 1998; Tooby & Cosmides, 1990). Nonetheless, one of the positive emotional expressions—the relaxed open-mouth display or play face—considered to be homologous to human laughter, has been widely reported across many nonhuman primate species (Davila–Ross et al., 2008, 2015; Palagi, 2006; Pellis & Pellis, 1996; Van Hoo , 1972; Van Hoo

& Preuschoft, 2003; Waller & Dunbar, 2005). The relaxed open-

mouth display is mostly observed in a play context, such as tickle play (Bard et al., 2014; Palagi, 2008), wrestling (Maestripieri & Ross, 2004; Petit et al., 2008), or ritualized play ghting (Palagi et al., 2007; Palagi & Mancini, 2011). Although it is unclear whether the relaxed open-mouth display is highly conserved across species due to some physical or physiological functions, it is generally acknowledged that it originates from the ritualized play bite, signaling nonaggressive intent (Parr et al., 2015; Poole, 1978; Van Hoo , 1972), and has been reported across mammalian species (Henry & Herrero, 1974; Pal, 2010; Poole, 1978). Infant chimpanzees as young as 4 weeks of age engage in tickle play which often accompanies this expression (Bard et al., 2014). Due to the reciprocal nature of play interactions, developing immatures learn how to signal and read play intentions from facial and bodily expressions (Burghardt, 2005; Fagen, 1993; Pellis & Pellis, 1996). Through practice, youngsters become competent in decoding cooperative or competitive signals from interaction partners, a critical skill in social living (Pellis & Pellis, 2017). In humans, positive emotions such as joy, interest, contentment, and love, are suggested to build an individual’s physical and cognitive capacities by broadening the momentary thought–action repertoire (Broaden-and-Build Model of Positive Emotions: Fredrickson, 1998). Similarly, a study in nonhuman primates has shown that species’ involvement in social play correlates with the relative volume of the amygdala and hypothalamus (Lewis & Barton, 2006). This indicates that producing and processing emotional signals during play are adaptive for the development of sociocognitive skills (see Zaharia et al., this volume; Veiga et al., this volume). Humans laugh not only during social play, but also in daily conversations and even without a social partner (e.g., reading comics, watching a comedy, thinking about something funny). Laughing without a social partner may re ect their genuine emotional state (see Mireault, this volume). Interestingly, similar to the social smile, laughter in humans also serves more cognitively sophisticated functions, such as signaling friendly intentions to a stranger (for a review, see Gervais & Wilson, 2005). It would be interesting to investigate whether the relaxed open-mouth display in nonhuman primates similarly occurs exclusively during solo play or also outside of the play context, and whether this relates to sociality. Similar to fear-induced facial expressions, the expression of disgust also has an adaptive function to inhibit sensory exposure, and therefore is commonly considered to be conserved across species (Susskind et al., p. 134

2008). Interestingly, humans make

disgusted facial expressions even in socially immoral contexts which

are similar to expressions following, for instance, the smell of rotten food. It has therefore been suggested that the expression of moral disgust originates from the same behavioral mechanism to avoid biological contaminants (Chapman et al., 2009). However, only a couple of studies thus far have investigated the expression of disgust, and its communicative value in nonhuman primates has rarely been explored (Berridge, 2000; Steiner & Glaser, 1984), In one study by Berridge (2000), researchers gave infants of humans, rats, and multiple species of nonhuman primates di erent tastes. One of these substances had a bitter taste, and the resulting facial expression was strikingly similar across species. Sarabian and her colleagues explored the disgust response in multiple species of nonhuman primates (Sarabian et al., 2017, 2018; Sarabian & MacIntosh, 2015). In their studies, the primates not only sensed potential biological

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emotions is presumed to be less likely to have a speci c pattern of behavioral reactions, since it is less

contaminants through visual cues, but also through olfactory and tactile cues. Furthermore, certain nonhuman primates were able to discriminate parasite-infected individuals from olfactory cues and adjust their grooming behavior accordingly (Poirotte et al., 2017). However, how primates express aversion, and whether these putative expressions are perceived by others, should be further examined.

documented, except in a few great ape species (e.g., bulging lips in chimpanzees and lip press in bonobos: van Hoo , 1971; de Waal, 1988), perhaps due to the lack of conspicuity in the expression of these emotions, or the large variability within or across species. Anger-related emotional expressions are often termed as agonistic or aggressive displays without descriptions of emotional states. Aggressive displays have been generally described in terms of an individual’s exaggerated bodily expressions, rather than the facial expressions (Nishida et al., 1999). Since body size often correlates with physical strength, nonhuman primates often show exaggerated body movements with hair erection or use of objects, such as branches, to appear more threatening (Fessler & Gervais, 2010; Nishida et al., 1999). Furthermore, sexually isomorphic species living in small groups with lower levels of agonistic interactions, such as gibbons, may rely more on other behavioral signals, such as vocalizations, to signal aggressive intent (Raemaekers et al., 1984). Therefore, it is likely that the communicative signal of anger takes many di erent behavioral forms across and within species (Andersson, 1980). There have been many anecdotal reports of nonhuman primates showing grief or sadness about the death of conspeci cs, especially of their o spring. The most frequently reported behavior is the prolonged carrying of a dead infant which is often accompanied by inspection and grooming, and sometimes cannibalism (Anderson, 2016; Gonçalves & Biro, 2018; Watson & Matsuzawa, 2018). It is too early to draw conclusions on whether there are highly conserved facial or other behavioral features within or across primate species in expressing grief or sadness. However, it is noteworthy that responding to other’s distress or grief is considered to be closely linked to empathy (Preston & de Waal, 2002; see Clay et al., this volume). Therefore, p. 135

further comparative studies on these putative emotional expressions and perception of them should follow, with a view to enriching our understanding of the origins of human hyper cooperativeness and prosociality.

Experimental Studies of Emotion Perception in Nonhuman Primates There are far fewer studies concerning the perception of emotional expressions in nonhuman primates than there are concerning how those emotions are expressed. Although it is possible to infer how nonhuman primates perceive emotional expressions by analyzing subsequent behaviors of the recipient, only controlled experiments can address the speci c nature of the mechanisms underlying emotion perception (e.g., the capacity to categorize emotional expressions, the sensitivity to graded or variable signals of emotions, the role of expression modality on emotion perception). There have been a number of experimental approaches to investigating emotion perception in nonhuman primates, ranging from touchscreen-based tasks, such as matching-to-sample and dot-probe tasks, to eye-tracking studies (Kano & Tomonaga, 2010b; Kret et al., 2016; Parr & Heintz, 2009; van Berlo et al., 2020). Whereas the matchingto-sample task is widely used to test nonhuman primates’ ability to categorize emotional expressions, dotprobe and eye-tracking tasks have been used to test attentional biases toward emotional expressions. Studies using the matching-to-sample and similar paradigms have found that nonhuman primates can reliably discriminate and categorize images of conspeci c emotional expressions (chimpanzees: Kano et al., 2008; Parr, 2001, 2003, 2004; Parr et al., 1998, 2008, 2009; crested macaques: Micheletta et al., 2015; tufted capuchin monkeys: Calcutt et al., 2017; for a review, see Nieuwburg et al., 2021). It is noteworthy that whereas tolerant species, such as crested macaques, showed error patterns in uenced by functional

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The speci c characteristics of the facial expression of anger in nonhuman primates are not well

similarities of facial expressions, chimpanzees, a despotic species, showed error patterns in uenced by facial feature similarities (Micheletta et al., 2015; Parr et al., 1998). These results indicate that a species’ tolerance may predict their capacity to decode facial expressions, but this assertion warrants further investigation.

produced concordant results in rhesus macaques, showing that bared-teeth displays (a negative expression in this species) captured attention faster than neutral expressions. In contrast, positive facial expressions did not capture macaques’ attention (Lacreuse et al., 2013; Parr et al., 2013). Studies on great apes using the dot-probe paradigm have produced mixed results. Whereas bonobos showed an attentional bias toward emotional scenes compared to neutral scenes (Kret et al., 2016; van Berlo et al., 2020), chimpanzees did not (Kret et al., 2018; Wilson & Tomonaga, 2018). It is unclear whether this discrepancy can be explained by the species’ di erent sociality or methodological di erences (e.g., the use of color versus monotone pictures, or p. 136

face

and isolated body pictures versus rich emotional scenes) between these four studies. To test whether

a species’ sociality accounts for the di erence in the attentional bias toward emotions, it would be necessary to measure this in closely related but socially di erent species, such as chimpanzees, bonobos, and humans, with either a set of systematically well-controlled stimuli or a very large stimulus set where low-level di erences between unique stimuli are averaged out within the di erent emotional conditions they constitute (e.g., Kret et al., 2016). Similar to the dot-probe task, eye-tracking methodology can further elucidate whether the animal is drawn toward, or avoids looking at, certain emotional expressions. For example, rhesus macaques preferred to look at neutral faces over aggressive faces when they were in a stressful condition, but displayed an opposite tendency when they were in an enriched condition (Bethell et al., 2012). Studies on chimpanzees and orangutans have shown the apes’ sustained attention toward negative emotional expressions compared to positive and neutral expressions (Kano & Tomonaga, 2010a; Pritsch et al., 2017). Although further work is necessary, the likely explanation of the di erence between them would be related to the steepness of hierarchy, as attending to negative expressions in rhesus macaques may elicit substantial stress compared to chimpanzees and orangutans. There have been a number of experimental studies investigating neural and physiological mechanisms underlying emotion processing in nonhuman primates. Similar to the ndings in humans, studies in chimpanzees have shown brain lateralization when processing emotional expressions (Parr & Hopkins, 2000) and speci c event-related potential (ERP) waveforms elicited by a ective pictures (Hirata et al., 2013). Moreover, peripheral temperature changes, such as nasal temperature drop, were also found in nonhuman primates when processing negative emotional expressions (Dezecache et al., 2017; Kano et al., 2016; Nakayama et al., 2005). In nonhuman primates, the neuropeptide hormone oxytocin also seems to modulate the sensitivity to emotional expressions and regulate emotional behaviors (Chang & Platt, 2014; Crockford et al., 2013; Dal Monte et al., 2014; Parr et al., 2013, 2018). Genetic variation of oxytocin and vasopressin receptor genes found in chimpanzees and bonobos further suggests that behavioral and perceptual di erences in these species are closely linked to their genetic and physiological di erences (Staes et al., 2014). Therefore, it is most parsimonious to assume that there is evolutionary continuity in both emotional behaviors and their processing in humans and nonhuman primates.

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The dot-probe task, a reliable paradigm to test implicit attentional biases (van Rooijen et al., 2017), has also

Discussion and Future Directions In this chapter, we aimed to shed light on the socioecological selective pressures that have shaped emotion communication by reviewing the literature on emotional expression and emotion perception in nonhuman p. 137

is largely in uenced

by these pressures. In particular, social complexity and tolerance seem to be

positively correlated with the variability and complexity of species’ emotion communication (Dobson, 2009b, 2012; Rebout et al., 2020; Thierry et al., 1989; Preuschoft & van Hoo , 1995). However, throughout the review, we have encountered more limitations than concrete empirical ndings to link emotions and species’ socioecological characteristics in the nonhuman primate emotion literature. In this section, we discuss the preliminary results from which we draw our conclusions, and further outline the limitations and, most importantly, possible future directions of research. First, some of the facial expressions of emotions, such as bared-teeth and open-mouth displays, are conserved across primate species in terms of morphological characteristics. However, the frequency, exibility, and function of expressions vary in relation to species’ social characteristics. With the exception of a few studies (Dobson, 2012; Thierry et al., 2000), there is a lack of systematic investigation of emotional expressions across closely related species. Moreover, comparative studies on the contexts in which these are expressed in relation to species sociality are virtually absent. It is of critical importance that this gap is addressed, since the expression of emotions in multiple contexts with various functions will likely reveal species’ capacities to use and decode emotional signals, as well as the evolutionary trajectory that shaped species’ sociality. Second, observational studies have shown that nonhuman primates are, in general, able to express and recognize emotions. However, unlike observational studies, experimental studies on emotion perception in nonhuman primates are scarce. In particular, we do not know whether certain species are more sensitive than others to particular modalities, a particular valence or intensity of emotional cues, and whether this can be explained by their speci c sociality. Since di erent methodologies often lead to di erent results, even in the same species, it has to be noted that experimental stimuli should be prepared and presented under ecologically valid, yet controlled conditions. Third, studies of emotional expressions and perception in nonhuman primates mostly concern facial expressions. Studies in humans, however, have shown that people can be as good at recognizing bodily expressions of emotion as they are at recognizing facial expressions (De Gelder, 2009; Kret et al., 2013). In this regard, studying the expression and perception of emotions through di erent modalities with regard to species’ sociality and their environment (e.g., dense forest or open savannah) could help construct a comprehensive evolutionary framework of emotion. Finally, studies on the perception of subtle emotional cues have almost never been explored in nonhuman primates. For example, only one study has tested the perception of pupil size in humans and chimpanzees (Kret et al., 2014). A growing body of research in humans suggests that these subtle emotional cues (e.g., pupil size, blushing, tears during sadness or laughter, signs of sweating or goosebumps) play a signi cant role in cooperative decision making and social bonding (Behrens & Kret, 2019; Prochazkova et al., 2019, 2021; for a review, see Prochazkova & Kret, 2017). Therefore, studying the expression and perception of these subtle emotional cues would provide a promising avenue for future emotion research.

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primates. Indeed, a handful of studies suggest that the way species produce and use emotional expressions

p. 138

Conclusion In broad terms, species’ sociality is tightly interconnected with perception, cognition, communication, and behavior (Dobson, 2009b; Dunbar, 1993; Freeberg et al., 2012; Kano et al., 2018). We therefore presume a determine the exibility and complexity in expressing and perceiving emotions. Speci cally, we predict that species living in complex and tolerant social environments have higher exibility and variability in expressing emotions, as well as higher sensitivity to detect emotional expressions in their group mates. We encourage future studies to test this hypothesis in closely related but socially distinct species, such as chimpanzees and bonobos. Studying their expression and perception of emotional expressions would ll the gap between species’ sociality and emotional capacities, and thereby help to construct a full evolutionary picture of emotions.

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link with emotional capacities, too. Here, we suggest that species’ social complexity and level of tolerance

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The Oxford Handbook of Emotional Development Daniel Dukes (ed.) et al. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/978019 8855903.001.0001 9780191889516 9780198855903

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CHAPTER

10 Historicizing Emotional Development  Karen Vallgårda, Stephanie Olsen https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198855903.013.25 Published: 13 January 2022

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Abstract This chapter argues that emotions are biocultural and historically contingent phenomena. Our emotional experience is inextricably linked to the words we use to describe our emotions, to the values challenges the idea that we can meaningfully speak of “emotional development” in historical contexts in which “emotions” were not yet invented, and introduces the concept of “formation” as a historically sensitive alternative. This concept helps us grasp the historicity of growth and change in collectives, as well as in individuals’ a ective lives. Emotional formation is the process through which codes of emotions are learned and imparted, often unwittingly, through discourse and practice. In order to demonstrate the methodological utility of the concept, the chapter then exempli es processes of emotional formation in children and youth in two di erent historical and geographical contexts.

Keywords: emotional formation, historical contingency, emotions history, children and youth, happiness surveys, First World War, childrenʼs voices. Subject: Psychology, Developmental Psychology Series: Oxford Library of Psychology Collection: Oxford Handbooks Online

Historical Emotions THIS

chapter o ers a historical perspective on emotions and suggests that historical insights might push

emotion researchers working on contemporary subjects to confront certain basic assumptions about what emotions are, how they are formed, and how they are changed. Over the past decades, scholars have begun to e ectively historicize the emotions, showing that the words, practices, and moral values attached to emotions have varied markedly over time and across di erent sociocultural and geographical contexts. Historians of emotions have come to the conclusion that these variations do not merely re ect shifting understandings of, or attitudes to, a set of basic universal emotions (Ekman, 1999). Rather, because verbal and embodied languages are fundamentally intertwined with emotional experience, emotions are themselves eminently historical. This means that we cannot unproblematically translate emotion labels or embodied expressions by humans in the past into contemporary emotion words; something is always lost or altered in such translations. While all humans have the capacity to feel emotions, the speci c repertoire of emotions is variable. As a growing number of historians, anthropologists, psychologists, and neuroscientists have argued (Reddy, 2001; White, 2005; Scheer, 2012; Boddice, 2017; Rosaldo, 1984; Vallgårda et al., 2015; Barrett, 2017), emotional experience cannot be disentangled from the words we use to describe our emotions, nor from the embodied cultural codes of comportment and expression. This raises important questions about how we approach emotions even in contemporary societies, and calls for a reconsideration of the concept of emotional development. The historical and anthropological perspectives establish that the processes that the concept of emotional development purports to designate are themselves historically contingent. p. 147

Emotional experience is connected to language, emotional prescriptions and prohibitions, cultural practices, ethics and morality, social patterns, economic structures, and political systems, as well as to individuals’ positions within the social world they inhabit. As these entangled dynamics change over time and space, so does the emotional make-up of individuals and collectivities. For scholars of emotion, this is a

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we attach to them, and to the embodied cultural codes of comportment and expression. The chapter

crucial insight; failing to recognize the radical historicity of emotions risks leaving unchallenged the assumption that all human emotional life, past or present, is ultimately reducible to the contemporary Western categories of emotion. Our proposition is that if we wish to understand how human emotions are shaped and change over time—individually as well as collectively—emotional formation is a better analytical concept than terms such as emotional development or emotional socialization. We rst explain the elucidate this new concept with empirical examples from historical and contemporary societies. The aim is to inspire more historically and culturally sensitive studies of human emotional life.

The Cultural and Historical Contingency of Emotions The register of emotions, which can be felt and expressed, changes markedly throughout history and across cultures. This is something historians and anthropologists of emotions have long been aware of, as they have documented the variability of emotional lives and cultures through case studies and historical analyses (e.g., Abu–Lughod & Lutz, 1990; Reddy, 1997, 2001; White, 2005; Eustace, 2008; Vallgårda, 2013; Boddice, 2018). As historian Thomas Dixon has demonstrated, “emotion” is itself a relatively novel concept. Prior to the birth of psychology as a discipline, which has developed its own tighter de nitions of emotion and a ect, the vocabulary describing what is today colloquially described as “emotions” included unstable terms such as a ects, appetites, drives, sensibilities, feelings, and passions, each of which referred to di erent, though related, states of mind and body and world, and each of which had its own conceptual history. The concept of emotion, Dixon suggests, in a sense simpli ed a richer and more complex understanding of human nature and the intricate connections between body and mind (Dixon, 2003, pp. 1– 25). It is not simply that our intellectual understanding of the phenomenon of emotion has changed over time, however. Some of the emotions that humans reported in earlier societies have disappeared, while others have entered our emotional repertoires fairly recently. For example, as historian Ute Frevert has pointed out, the feeling of acedia known in the Middle Ages to be caused by demons, involving feelings akin to melancholia and apathy, and which could cause fever and pain in the limbs, has been lost to modern p. 148

humanity. A contemporary parallel is depression, a mental health condition

de ned by diagnostic

practices, which comes bundled with certain emotional states, carries a degree of stigma, and is associated with a host of therapeutic and medical interventions. While acedia and depression bear certain similarities, they also di er in crucial respects, and it is unlikely that they feel or felt the same way (Frevert, 2011). This is because the ways in which humans label, interpret, and handle emotions are not distinct from, but integral to, emotional experiences. Moreover, historians have shown that although many speci c emotion signi ers —such as sympathy, love, fear, or pain—have survived over time, these words do not necessarily mean the same thing today as they did in the past. For example, what we commonly understand by “love” in contemporary English would not help us to understand historical concepts in other languages and in other periods that tend to get too easily translated as “love.” Even “love” in English in the early modern period denoted a phenomenon quite di erent from the contemporary word. Love was a religious, political, social, and familial feeling in a cultural context, where the self was conceived of as social, and where practices of love were circumscribed by status. “Falling” in love—or amour d’inclination—was generally frowned upon at the start of a relationship, at least among elites (Boddice, 2019, p. 103; Eustace, 2008, pp. 107–150; Reddy, 2012; Jaeger, 1999). Emotional structures also vary between di erent contemporaneous cultures, and emotion signi ers do not always assess the ne-grained distinctions of analogous concepts in other languages, either living or dead. Anthropologist Michelle Rosaldo was one of the rst to address this issue. Based on her eldwork among Ilongot headhunters in the Philippines, Rosaldo argued that the feeling of guilt is nonexistent in Ilongot

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historicity of emotions, and then move on to explain the concept of emotional formation. Finally, we seek to

culture. While Ilongot emotional culture does include something akin to shame, this emotion is also di erent from its European or North American supposed equivalents. Shame in the Western world, she argued, has to do with the regulation of a problematic inner self; but such a notion of a distinct inner self does not prevail in Ilongot culture. “In short, Ilongot ‘shame’ is not a sentinel assigned to keep insides from coming out. It is, instead, a feeling of considered weight that can look forward to, inhibit, or replace displays p. 143) If this is the case, the question becomes whether it even makes sense to approach these two forms of shame as diversities of the same emotion, or whether the cross-cultural testimonies impel us to acknowledge instead the cultural contingency of shame, and perhaps, more generally of emotion. For Rosaldo, as well as for other anthropologists and historians writing after her, the answer was clear: the di erences were not merely a matter of dissimilar vocabularies describing the same emotional states; the words described di erent, culturally speci c emotions (Rosaldo, 1984). Hence, cross-cultural emotional translations will invariably result in semantic displacements and inaccuracies. Building on a similar line of thought, anthropologist Geo rey M. White suggested the concept of “emotive institutions” to identify the “socially situated discursive practices that variously evoke, represent, and transform emotional experience.” For White, emotions hinged not merely on concepts, but also on p. 149

embodied practices—both

of which were culturally formed. He added that “emotive institutions are not

simply institutionalized occasions for the expression of scripted emotions, but rather constitute points of articulation between embodied feeling, cultural models of emotion, and socially organized activities” (White, 2005, p. 248). While few scholars initially picked up White’s concept, his understanding of how emotions are made and recon gured has become the dominant conceptualization within the disciplines of history and anthropology (e.g., Scheer, 2012; Vallgårda, 2017; Kounine, 2017; Sullivan, 2016). The general consensus within these elds is that emotions are essentially culturally speci c and that the emotional lives of human beings are consequently subject to change over time. It is noteworthy that a growing number of psychologists and neuroscientists have also begun to provide the basis for substantiating the claim of human cultural emotional variability (Barrett, 2017; Fridlund, 2017). As psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett has phrased it in her recent book, “[Emotions] are not universal but vary from culture to culture. They are not triggered; you create them. They emerge as a combination of the physical properties of your body, a exible brain that wires itself to whatever environment it develops in, and your culture and upbringing, which provide that environment. Emotions are real, but not in the objective sense that molecules or neurons are real. They are real in the same sense that money is real—that is, hardly an illusion, but a product of human agreement.” (Barrett, 2017, p. xii) Historian of emotions Rob Boddice is one of the scholars keen to bring these new “biocultural” psychological theories together with the methodological tools that historians have developed. Historians, Boddice points out, are particularly well equipped to carve out the changing patterns of emotion over time as well as to analyze the complicated relationships between individual emotional life and the sociocultural milieu (Boddice, 2019). The insights from historians, anthropologists, and bioculturally minded psychologists also have important implications for the concept of emotional development as an analytical tool or descriptive category. If emotional development is a historically and culturally contingent concept, to apply it to contexts in which it was entirely unfamiliar implies a risk of approaching our subjects from an unintentionally Eurocentric and presentist perspective. Moreover, the concept is not particularly useful as a tool to identify the deep and intimate connections between individuals’ emotions and their social worlds. Emotional formation, we argue, is better suited to help us grasp the cultural variability and historicity of growth and change in collectives, as well as in individuals’ emotional lives.

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of ‘anger’ and activity characteristically born at times of con ict and perceived inequality.” (Rosaldo, 1983,

Emotional Formation The concept of emotional formation was developed together with Kristine Alexander, based on many years of experience with the history of emotions and speci cally with the study of how emotions are shaped in p. 150

we found that humans have

always been invested in shaping the emotions and emotional comportment

among children and youth, and also that children and youth have actively participated in these processes of shaping and being shaped. However, the emotional prescriptions and prohibitions have varied markedly from one context to the next (Olsen, 2014, 2015; Vallgårda, 2014; Alexander, 2017). Emotional formation as a concept designates, on the one hand, the emotional codes that structure a given society, culture, or subculture, and on the other hand, the processes through which humans learn and adapt these codes. As such, the concept entails a dynamic. That dynamic is indispensable because the structures exist only in process and through the activities of individuals and collectives. At the same time, it is through emotional formation that feeling subjects come into being (for a somewhat similar understanding, see Reddy & Vanello, this volume). Emotional formation is ongoing through the life span of an individual and internally di erentiated according to the speci c sociomaterial context. It is also historically variable. This means that the kind of emotional behavior that is viable and acceptable in the bedroom, for example, is di erent from that which is viable and acceptable in the supermarket, or in the church at a funeral. It also means that the processes through which codes are imparted, adopted, and altered vary across contexts, such as a classroom, a movie theatre, or social media. They also vary over time. We usually know how to feel and communicate our feelings in di erent contexts, but this knowledge is neither universal nor ahistorical; rather it is learned through emotional formation. The notion of emotional formation bears a resemblance to other concepts that point to social and cultural aspects of emotional life, yet also di ers from these in important ways. Unlike “emotional socialization,” which generally relies on a clear distinction between social factors and “biological underpinnings” (see e.g., Zahn–Waxler, 2010), for example, “emotional formation” articulates the recognition that the formation of emotional capacities and experiences is a biocultural and eminently historical process. Whereas emotional socialization or emotional education often refers to a process in which individuals are inculcated with particular, preexisting emotion norms, usually through top–down processes, emotional formation suggests that the individual feeling subject is continually shaped and reshaped in the process, in which all members of a society actively, though mostly unwittingly, take part. As such, “emotional formation” suggests a much more encompassing and powerful process than “emotional socialization.” Emotional formation as a concept furthermore works in tandem with the concept of emotional frontier. When we feel as though our “instincts” have failed, or when we encounter an unfamiliar emotional formation, we might experience what we term an emotional frontier (see Olsen & Vallgårda, this volume). The following sections provide two distinct examples—one contemporary and the other historical—from di erent geographical locations, that demonstrate how researchers can empirically analyze instances of emotional formation.

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childhood and youth in di erent global contexts (Vallgårda, Alexander & Olsen, 2015). Through our work,

p. 151

Example 1: Emotional Formation Through the Monitoring of WellBeing The rst example is taken from public elementary schools in Denmark, where the physical and emotional individual meetings with school nurses. Karen Vallgårda and Caroline Nyvang have analyzed this process as a historically speci c instance of emotional formation in which the children participate actively (Vallgårda & Nyvang, 2018). Partway into the school year, rst graders are handed a questionnaire to be completed at home. Speci cally, they are asked to give information about their eating and sleeping habits, regularity of physical activity, and the nature of their social relationships. Since few of the pupils have learned how to write, they instead have to check boxes under images that illustrate di erent kinds of food, games, and so on. Most importantly, the children are asked to evaluate how happy they are in general, as well as at di erent times of the day (i.e., in the morning, in class, during recess, and in after-school care). To do this, they are asked to check one of four boxes under smiley faces that go from “unhappy” to “very happy.” Recalling the colors of a tra

c

light, the unhappy smiley is red whereas the very happy smiley is green. Once pupils have lled in the forms, they hand them back to teachers, who pass them on to the nurse, who refers to them during individual meetings with the children. While this is a well-intended e ort to track various risk factors, unhappiness, or neglect at an early stage, and hence to enable supportive interventions, the survey is much more than a neutral check. Our contention is not simply that the answers may be misleading because children consciously or subconsciously give the answers that they think are expected of them instead of answering truthfully (and most scholars are aware of this caveat), but rather, that the very activity of answering the questionnaires becomes part of a process of emotional formation. By encouraging the children to interpret their own emotions through a xed set of value-laden categories, the questionnaire invites the children to become conscious of and monitor how their own emotional life relates to an overall and somewhat ambiguous emotional norm. In other words, the questionnaire does not merely allow for children to express stable or already known emotions; it also helps to con gure each child’s emotions. As such, the child is formed as a feeling subject in a culturally speci c manner. “Happiness” is what is measured. The children are not asked about feelings such as jealousy, grief, irritation, sadness, longing, or indignation. The emotion that is relevant—so children are implicitly told—is happiness, and this is an emotion that can be measured on a scale from less to more. By decoding and answering the questionnaires, the children learn that it is best to be happy at all hours of the day. There will p. 152

hardly be a child

who does not appreciate that consistently checking the unhappy box would be

problematic and might cause alarm among the adult authorities. The monitoring, in other words, mediates and reinforces what we call a happiness imperative which might paradoxically have rather unhappy consequences. This instance of emotional formation is but a small example of cultural processes that take place on a much grander scale (Stearns, 2019; Stearns, this volume). The ideal of happiness is a culturally and historically speci c one. As Jeanne Tsai and Bokuyng Park have argued, attitudes toward happiness vary signi cantly between cultural contexts, and “American contexts value excitement and other high-arousal positive states more and calm and other low-arousal positive states less than Chinese contexts” (Tsai & Park, 2014, p. 1). Even in the Western world, the happy child is, in the words of historian Peter Stearns “a novel historical artifact” (Stearns, 2010; see also Stearns, this volume). In the United States, the cultural celebration of the happy child exploded in the 1920s, when improved standards of living and a general optimism about the future—particularly in the middle class— stimulated an understanding that the next generation were to be happier than the previous one. As the

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well-being of the pupils is monitored at regular intervals through the use of questionnaires and follow-up

century progressed, the ideal of the happy child spread throughout American society. According to Stearns, di erent factors helped spur this development: new psychologies and pedagogical theories about the child’s innocent nature, falling birth rates, a general focus on cheerfulness, and a consumer culture with marketing techniques promising to make children happy (Stearns, 2010).

the responsibility of ensuring their children’s happiness and importantly also for children themselves, expected to perform happiness. Urged critically to assess their own feelings, children might feel guilt or shame if they realized they could not honor the ideal. The happiness norm might even have played a role in relation to the growing prevalence of depression among children: “The obvious fact is that, with the happiness emphasis, it became much more di

cult to be a sad kid or to go through periods of sadness—the

emotion did not correspond to adult expectations or, probably, to the de nitions children themselves internalized about what a proper childhood was all about.” (Stearns, 2010, p. 181) That the happiness imperative might have unhappy consequences (see also Ahmed, 2010, p. 2) also seems true in the contemporary Danish context. Although the Danes consistently score highly in national happiness surveys, a rapidly increasing number of children and youth are diagnosed with depression and 1

anxiety disorder, and a growing number of youth report experiencing “stress.” Indeed, such tendencies seem to characterize many societies in the Global North cherishing the ideal of happiness. Not only might the idealization of the happy child cause “negative” emotions to be categorized as problematic or unhealthy, the internalized expectation of personal happiness might in itself be a stress factor. If you are unhappy, the happiness imperative may make you doubly unhappy. Clearly, the lling in of questionnaires is far from the only situation in which children are subjected to an emotional formation that emphasizes the capacity for happiness. The ideal is encouraged through multiple p. 153

familial and societal channels, including pop

music, social media, and happiness indexes (Ahmed, 2010;

Boddice, 2019, pp. 169–174). What is important is that this formation is neither universal nor ahistorical. It is culturally and politically contingent, and carries speci c implications for our understanding of the child or young person and his or her emotions.

Example 2: Emotional Formation in Wartime The second example concerns the emotional formation of children in the British Empire in the era of the First World War (Olsen, 2020). Speci cally, it concerns a set of feelings and actions surrounding a particular construction of “patriotism” in schools in the region of Melbourne, Australia. The Jephcott Essays were written by 12- to 14-year-old children. The theme of their essays was “Patriotism in War and in Peace.” The essays show how children internalized messages about how to feel about the war and patriotism from teachers and wider society and culture. To a large extent, the students fashioned themselves as patriotic beacons of hope, or at least wrote what they thought their teachers would want to hear and what would win them prizes. Reading for intention is tricky, but these sources do give us the child’s voice in the process of collective emotional formation. Those voices echo many of the messages found in the Victorian School Paper, published by school authorities, which these students would have had to read (and even memorize) regularly in the classroom. Children enumerated concrete examples of how to be patriotic. They knitted, gardened, collected and sold leeches, raised money for school patriotic funds, and visited soldiers. They also showed “their patriotism by 2

denying themselves picture shows, sweats [sweets], and luxuries.” Children’s own special contributions as patriots, as distinct from those of adults, were frequently reiterated, as in this 13-year-old girl’s essay: “We children can be patriots by doing our work, both at home and at school, honestly and well. When we do this

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The happiness norm was not unequivocally positive, however; it could be a burden for parents charged with

we are being good citizens, and so we are helping our country, and at the same time we are learning to be 3

good men and women, so that we may help.”

In this way, students tied the emotional training they were receiving during the war in school regarding love of country with their future roles as citizens. Another 13-year-old writes: “As children we can show our 4

laws of our country when we grow up.” Obedience or conformity was in evidence as emotional practice in the writing of these essays, as well as being signaled by the writers as the self-conscious end of education. In these students’ essays, the gallant e orts of the soldiers are stressed, as are their own important roles in the war, and their even more important future roles in peacetime. These peacetime roles included temperance, loving peace, hard work, and the support of the Empire and/or their country. p. 154

Fault lines in this wartime emotional formation were sometimes evident. One student argued that, “the Germans also should get some credit for being so brave, as to hold out against such odds.” This opinion was immediately suppressed in the form of a big red X from the teacher. The cultivation of fellow-feeling with the enemy was not permitted; the student’s emotional formation clearly did not match up to the emotional 5

prescription. Many children held the view in their essays that patriotism was not just a wartime slogan, but 6

a lifelong commitment and self-sacri ce. Others were critical of showy wartime patriotism, and contrasted 7

this with “true” patriotism.

On the whole, these children expressed well-de ned and orthodox views on patriotism, war and peace, and the distinct roles they had to play to ensure a hopeful future. Most messages for children during and after the war provided coherent, straightforward descriptions of sacri ce, victory, and patriotism, whether to the Empire and/or to the nation. The majority of these essays were on target, their feelings matching up, through the enaction of prescriptive emotional practices, to what was expected of them. In large part, they successfully crossed the emotional frontiers of wartime school and informal education. As a collective emotional practice, the task of writing about patriotism and hope for the future constituted a politically charged process of emotional formation.

Conclusion We have argued that “emotional development” should not be viewed as a universal process, following the same pattern across time and place, but rather as a value-laden and culturally embedded concept that privileges a particular situated and normative understanding of human emotional life. Instead, we have introduced emotional formation as a theoretical concept and a methodological tool that might help us grasp the growth and change of emotional life at the individual or collective level in a historically and culturally sensitive manner. What is important to note is that emotional formation is not a process we can ever escape; we are all always invariably engaged in producing and reproducing codes of emotion. We cannot stop the emotional formation that takes place when we describe, monitor, or evaluate our a ective states according to general social standards. However, the concept of emotional formation—rather than simply emotional development—might help us to examine critically cultural truths and norms (such as those relating to happiness or patriotism) that might otherwise seem natural and uncontestable.

Notes 1.

Videnskab.dk: https://videnskab.dk/kultur-samfund/derfor-bliver-flere-unge-stressede. Tre gange så mange børn og unge får diagnosen angst eller depression. Politiken, 6, februar 2018; Derfor bliver flere unge stressede (2017).

2.

PROV, Unit 100/1177 (Bessie Shannon, Tallangatta).

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patriotism by obeying our teachers and keeping the rules of the school, and this will teach us to keep the

p. 155

  PROV, Unit 100/1177 (Zita A Lord, Mitta Mitta).

4.

PROV, Unit 100/1177 (Percy Pepper).

5.

PROV, Unit 100/1177 (Zita A Lord, Mitta Mitta).

6.

PROV, Unit 100/1177 (Shirley OʼLeary, Tallangatta).

7.

PROV, Unit 100/1177 (Connell Morgan).

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3.

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The Oxford Handbook of Emotional Development Daniel Dukes (ed.) et al. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/978019 8855903.001.0001 9780191889516

Online ISBN: Print ISBN:

9780198855903

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CHAPTER

11 Developmental Changes in Emotion Understanding During Middle Childhood  Hannah J. Kramer, Kristin Hansen Lagattuta https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198855903.013.24 Published: 13 January 2022

Pages 157–173

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Published: 2022

Abstract In contrast to extensive research on the emergence of emotion understanding during early childhood, less work has focused on improvement and expansion in how children reason about emotions during children’s awareness that emotions can arise from the interplay of multiple contextual and cognitive sources that cross time and situation. They also consider potential mechanisms of conceptual change. What becomes abundantly clear is that emotion understanding is not “achieved” by 3 to 5 years of age: There continues to be substantial development through middle childhood into adulthood, with even adults exhibiting shortfalls in emotion cognition. The authors hope to inspire further empirical inquiries into the protracted developmental timetable for understanding the complexity of human emotion.

Keywords: emotion, development, social cognition, emotion understanding, causal reasoning Subject: Psychology, Developmental Psychology Series: Oxford Library of Psychology Collection: Oxford Handbooks Online

Introduction CHILDREN

and adults are motivated to understand emotions (Lagattuta & Wellman, 2002; Schumann et al.,

2014). We spend substantial time discerning how someone is feeling (e.g., Is that person sad or angry?) as well as determining the causes (e.g., Why are they feeling that way?) and consequences (e.g., What will this person do next?) of emotions. We do this for good reason. For example, identifying that someone is angry informs you to avoid that person or perhaps devise a mitigation plan. Knowing the factors that elicited shame or regret could prevent one from making the same mistake in the future. Appreciating that emotions are, in part, shaped by beliefs and thoughts aids in perspective taking and managing emotions. At the same time, responding sensitively to another person’s emotions strengthens and broadens social networks. Motivation alone, however, is not su

cient for making people accurate emotion evaluators and perspective

takers. Building the cognitive toolbox needed to understand emotional experiences in self and others takes an extended period of time to develop. Indeed, adults experience di

culty interpreting, predicting,

explaining, and managing emotions (Epley & Caruso, 2009; Wilson et al., 1989; Wilson & Gilbert, 2005). When watching another person (target) describe negative and positive events, participants’ ratings of the target’s in-the-moment emotions only moderately correlate with the target’s self-reported in-thep. 158

moment emotions (Zaki et al., 2008), with trained

researchers also having di

culty identifying how a

person feels (Castro et al., 2018). In addition, adults’ egocentric perspective (i.e., how they are currently feeling) clouds their accuracy when judging how someone else feels or would emotionally respond to a particular stimulus or event (Epley et al., 2004; Kruger et al., 2005; Van Boven et al., 2013). Even parents from nonclinical populations cannot set aside their own emotional experiences when evaluating their children’s feelings: Parents’ self-reported emotions bias how they rate their children’s worry, happiness, and optimism (Lagattuta et al., 2012; López-Pérez & Wilson, 2015). We raise these adult shortcomings to emphasize the immense challenge of understanding emotions. We de ne emotion understanding broadly to encompass the ability to interpret, label, and categorize emotions, as well as knowledge about causes and consequences of emotions. Although on the surface these

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middle childhood. In this chapter, the authors examine gains between 5 and 12 years of age in

components may seem basic, human emotions are dauntingly complex—even emotion scientists with decades of training and research are still pursuing the answers to the most fundamental questions (e.g., What causes a particular emotion?). Thus, it is surprising that developmental research on emotion cognition has focused on a narrow time window from infancy to 5 years of age, largely neglecting to consider what comes next (see Lagattuta et al., 2015; Lagattuta & Kramer, 2021). Despite several achievements during early Lagattuta & Thompson, 2007; Saarni, 1999; Thompson & Lagattuta, 2006), these advances do not approximate the depth and breadth of mature emotion knowledge. Here, we review some of the more sophisticated forms of emotion understanding that develop between 5 and 12 years of age, with a particular emphasis on causal reasoning about emotions. We rst consider children’s improving ability to integrate multiple factors both within (e.g., contextual features) and outside the current situation (e.g., mental states, past experiences) to predict or explain how a person feels. We then highlight the conundrum of recognizing that mental states can also have inverse relations with emotional reactions (e.g., anticipating a positive future makes a person more vulnerable to disappointment). We close with ideas for future directions, including identifying developmental mechanisms and expanding the scope of how we measure emotion cognition across a wide age range.

Learning to Identify and Integrate Multiple Emotion Causes Children’s earliest (and perhaps most persistent) knowledge about causes of emotions, emerging between 2 and 4 years of age, is their ability to pair prototypical situations with basic emotions; for example, getting presents elicits happiness, losing a valued object causes sadness (see Harris, 2010). Although this script-like understanding provides a core foundation, it falls short when trying to predict or explain why a speci c p. 159

person

could have an atypical emotional reaction or why di erent individuals in the same situation could

vary in the type or intensity of their emotions (Gnepp, 1983, 1989). To do this, children must learn to identify and incorporate multiple potential emotion elicitors in the current context as well as consider characteristics of the individual (e.g., mental states, prior experiences) that may alter the meaning and signi cance of the present situation. Take for example, the case of mixed emotions. It is not uncommon for a single event to elicit more than one emotion in the same person. For instance, attending a sleep-away camp for the rst time could engender feelings of anxiety (e.g., from being away from one’s parents) and excitement (e.g., getting to go on fun adventures). Until about the ages of 10 to 12, however, children do not consistently acknowledge that people can experience two emotions at the same time (Donaldson & Westerman, 1986; Larsen et al., 2007). Encouraging children to think about the situation further by asking a secondary emotion prompt (e.g., Could she be feeling another way here too?) reveals some competence in 6- to 7-year-olds (Lagattuta, 2005). Only more extreme experimental sca olding—having children reason about a creature with two heads— uncovers that 4- to 5-year-olds have some appreciation that a single situation could give rise to simultaneous mixed emotions, at least when each brain can feel di erently (Kestenbaum & Gelman, 1995). This growing competency in spontaneously recognizing the potential for mixed emotions closely parallels age-related improvements between 4 and 10 years in understanding that a situation can be open to multiple interpretations (Gopnik & Rosati, 2001; Lagattuta, Sayfan, et al., 2010; Lagattuta et al., 2015; Lalonde & Chandler, 2002), as well as evoke varying emotions in a diverse group of people (Lagattuta et al., 2019). To understand how someone feels, an individual must not only consider objective features of the current environment, but also several other contributing factors. By the ages of 6 to 8 years, children recognize that emotions should correspond with people’s knowledge states, even when those beliefs mismatch reality. For example, Harris and colleagues (1989) found that the majority of 6- to 7-year-olds, compared to a minority of 4- to 5-year-olds, predicted that characters’ emotions (e.g., happiness) would derive from their belief

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childhood (for reviews, see Camras & Shuster, 2013; Denham, 1998; Harris et al., 2016; Lagattuta, 2014a;

about the apparent content of a container (e.g., candy) as opposed to its actual hidden contents (e.g., rocks). Similarly, Bradmetz and Schneider (1999) reported that children younger than 6 years struggled to understand that Little Red Riding Hood would feel unafraid talking with her apparent grandmother (in actuality, the wolf in disguise) even though they understood she falsely believed it was her grandmother (see also Ronfard & Harris, 2014). Several studies have documented this developmental lag between based emotions (Harris et al., 2014; but see Scott, 2017, for evidence that 20-month-olds attend di erently to surprise expressions that match versus mismatch the situation). It is also not until 6 to 8 years of age that children recognize that someone can induce a false belief in others about his or her feelings (e.g., individuals can feel disappointed on the inside but keep a smile on their face; Pons et al., 2004; Wellman & Liu, 2004). p. 160

Even outside of false-belief contexts, there is growth between the ages 4

and 8 years in recognizing that

people can di er in their emotional responses to the same situation if they hold di erent beliefs and everyday knowledge about the world (Sayfan & Lagattuta, 2008). Between the ages of 3 and 10 years, children also develop conceptual understanding that emotions can be caused by factors outside of current situations or people’s beliefs (whether true or false) about those outcomes. Indeed, they begin to understand that minds can trigger emotions, even in the absence of an eliciting present event (for a review, see Lagattuta, 2014). For example, 3- to 4-year-olds can explain present emotions as caused by thinking or being reminded about a past event (e.g., thinking about a hurt pet) when that character displays a negative emotion that is incongruent with the here and now (e.g., feeling sad when seeing a toy). It is not until 5 to 6 years of age, however, that children consistently attribute situation-congruent negative emotions or positive emotions to thinking about the past, with adults still doing so more frequently than children (Lagattuta & Wellman, 2001; Lagattuta et al., 1997). Similar agerelated changes appear for future-oriented thinking: Children increasingly predict and explain people’s emotions as caused by thinking about what will or might happen next between 3 and 7 years and from childhood to adulthood (Lagattuta, 2005, 2007). Taken together, children will look beyond the current situation for emotion causes when they are able to recognize that features of the present scene cannot su

ciently explain someone’s emotions.

Past emotional experiences not only elicit emotional reactions when we actively think about these prior episodes, but they also signi cantly bias how we later feel, think, and make decisions with the future in mind (Gilbert & Wilson, 2007; Karniol & Ross, 1996; Lerner et al., 2015). To test this understanding from a developmental perspective, Lagattuta and Sayfan (2013) presented 4- to 10-year-olds and adults with illustrated scenarios, each featuring a distinctive perpetrator (e.g., red-haired boy) who caused a focal character to feel positively (P) or negatively (N) at two time points in di ering orders (NN, PP, NP, PN). Many days later, the focal character sees the perpetrator again, and participants predicted the focal character’s emotion (worried or happy; including intensity), thought (whether the perpetrator would do something good or something bad next; including likelihood), and decision (whether to approach or avoid the perpetrator; including proximity). Four- to 5-year-olds, as with older children and adults, evidenced the ability to attend to both the frequency and sequence of past events: They attributed more intensely positive emotions, more optimistic thinking, and more proximal approach decisions when characters saw the same perpetrator who had caused PP more than NP more than PN more than NN pasts. Still, distinctions among past types (i.e., NN, PP, NP, PN) dramatically increased within childhood and from childhood to adulthood, revealing expanding recognition of the ways in which past episodes impact a ective responding over place and time (see also Lagattuta et al., 2018). Prior emotional experiences not only in uence future a ective reactions to agents or situations directly tied to the past, but they also shape how individuals feel, think, and make decisions in more generalized, indirect contexts (Dunsmoor & Murphy, 2015; Strack & Deutsch, 2004). Lagattuta and Kramer (2021) examined 4- to p. 161

10-year-olds’ and adults’ reasoning about emotion generalization—that people’s prior emotional

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understanding of false belief (that the mind can misrepresent reality) and the ability to attribute belief-

experiences with one individual (e.g., a red-haired boy) will bias their future a ective responses to unfamiliar, yet similar-looking agents (e.g., another boy with red hair). When the focal character encountered a new, “never met before” individual who shared similarity with the past perpetrator, 4- to 5year-olds rejected the relevance of past event information and instead attributed equally positive emotions, thoughts, and decisions regardless of past history. Although 6- to 7-year-olds showed some appreciation worried seeing someone who looked similar to a perpetrator who had previously harmed them twice versus helped them twice), even 8- to 10-year-olds expected stricter boundaries to emotion generalization than did adults. Notably, in much simpler scenarios featuring only a single negative past event, 5-year-olds can evidence some basic awareness of emotion generalization (Lagattuta et al., 1997; Lagattuta 2007). Part of what limits children’s appreciation for the wide scope of emotion generalization is that such an understanding requires recognition that people cannot fully control their minds: We do not always choose what we think about or how we feel. Studies have shown improvement between 4 and 10 years of age, as well as between childhood and adulthood, in understanding that thoughts and emotions can be uncontrollable, intrusive, unwanted, di

cult to suppress, and disruptive to thinking and problem solving (Amsterlaw et al.,

2009; Brandone & Klimek, 2018; Flavell & Green, 1999; Ford, Lwi, et al., 2018; Harris et al., 1981; Lagattuta et al., 1997). From childhood to adulthood, individuals also increasingly appreciate the powerful impact of thinking on emotions. Eight- to 10-year-olds and adults expect thinking to cause more intense emotion changes than do 3- to 7-year-olds, and older children more often endorse mental reframing and cognitive distraction as coping strategies than do younger children (Bamford & Lagattuta, 2012; Flavell, et al., 2001; Lagattuta et al., 1997; Lara et al., 2019; Sayfan & Lagattuta, 2009).

Recognizing Inverse Relations Between Mental States and Emotions Perhaps one of the most complex and later-developing advances in children’s causal understanding of emotions involves their ability to recognize that there can be inverse relations between valenced mental states (e.g., desires, thoughts, counterfactuals) and emotional reactions. That is, once children grasp that getting what you want feels good, how long does it take them to realize that ful lling a desire can elicit negative emotions? Relatedly, after learning that thinking negatively leads to feeling worse, at what age do children recognize that there can be emotional bene ts to being pessimistic or pondering worse alternative outcomes? Starting around 2 to 3 years of age, children expect others to feel good when their desires are ful lled and bad when their desires are blocked (Wellman & Woolley, 1990; Thompson, this volume), with some research p. 162

suggesting that infants as young

as 10 months are visually sensitive to whether people’s emotional

expressions match (versus mismatch) goal-ful llment status (Reschke et al., 2017; Skerry & Spelke, 2014). Children’s reliance on desires for predicting emotions during early childhood is highly robust. Four- to 6year-olds even judge that someone who breaks rules and harms other people (but got what he or she wanted) will feel good—the so-called “happy victimizer” phenomenon (see Arsenio, 2014; Turiel, this volume). In the previous section, we suggested that this di

culty derived from young children’s limited

awareness of mixed emotions. There is something else going on here too. For children to judge that someone who gets what they want (by breaking a rule or by ignoring the needs of another person) feels bad or that someone who inhibits getting what they want (to follow the rule or to come to the aid of another person) feels good, children have to go against their early-learned, dominant theory that there is a direct relation between desire ful llment and emotions. Between the ages of 4 and 10 years, children more frequently endorse these opposite, or inverse, relations between desires and emotions. These changes in emotion judgments coincide with greater consideration of additional causes of emotions such as rules and

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that minds generalize from past emotional episodes (e.g., they predicted that people would feel more

future consequences to self and others (Lagattuta, 2005; Lagattuta & Kramer, in press; Lagattuta, Nucci, et al., 2010; Weller & Lagattuta, 2013, 2014). As reviewed previously, by 4 to 5 years of age, children understand that thinking positively feels better than thinking negatively (Bamford & Lagattuta, 2012; Harris, 2010; Lagattuta et al., 1997) and these intuitions t between thinking and feeling inverses: Unexpected losses elicit stronger negative emotions than expected losses, and unexpected gains cause an emotional boost compared to expected gains (Sweeny et al., 2016; Sweeny & Shepperd, 2010). Lara and colleagues (2019) presented 4- to 10-year-olds and adults with vignettes featuring characters who di ered in their expectations (e.g., high versus low) for the future (e.g., whether they would win a ra

e). Participants predicted and explained how characters would feel after three

outcomes: positive outcomes (e.g., they win), negative outcomes (e.g., they lose), and attenuated outcomes (e.g., they get a token prize). By 6 to 7 years, children understood the bene ts of low expectations after something bad happened, and by 8 to 10 years following attenuated outcomes. No child age group, however, endorsed the adult perspective that unexpected gains feel better than expected gains. Rather, 4- to 10-yearolds judged that high-expectation characters would continue to have the emotional advantage after positive outcomes (i.e., getting what you expected feels extra good). Moreover, with increasing age, individuals more often referenced prior expectations as causing these emotions (see Asaba et al., 2019 for evidence of earlier insights). Intriguingly, older children and adults also experience a greater impact of prior expectations on later a ective states compared to younger children (Lara et al., 2021). Counterfactual thinking—considering how things could have been worse (downward counterfactual) or better (upward counterfactual)—also has an inverse relation to emotional well-being. Downward counterfactuals (negative thoughts) lead to more positive emotions (relief), and upward counterfactuals (positive thoughts) create negative feelings (regret; Byrne, 2006; Roese, 1997). Although children start to p. 163

reason appropriately about counterfactuals by the ages of 3 or 4 years (Harris et al., 1996; Perner

et al.,

2004), there is a signi cant lag in their ability to connect counterfactual thinking to emotions (Lara et al., 2021). Children fail to identify, until they are 8 to 10 years of age, when someone will experience regret and relief, with knowledge about regret developing earlier than awareness of relief (McCormack & Feeney, 2015; Payir & Guttentag, 2019; Weisberg & Beck, 2010). In applied settings, even 12-year-olds do not spontaneously o er, as frequently as do adults, emotion regulation strategies that capitalize on counterfactual thinking (e.g., telling someone that they could think about how an outcome could have been worse when they are unhappy with how something turned out; Payir & Guttentag, 2016). Thus, as with reasoning about inverse desire–emotion connections (e.g., desire ful llment can feel bad) and expectation– emotion connections (e.g., positive expectations can cause greater disappointment), there is a protracted timetable for recognizing the potential for inverse causal relations between what someone is thinking about and how they are feeling (e.g., thinking about an alternative negative outcome can feel good). Developmental improvements in this causal knowledge may facilitate more complex and varied ways for children to reappraise, re ect on, and cope with negative events (Ochsner & Gross, 2005; Thompson, 2011).

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with reality (Carver et al., 2010). Once time progresses and outcomes are known, however, this relation

Developmental Mechanisms and Future Directions Bolstering our claim that part of what improves with age is children’s ability to incorporate and manipulate multiple pieces of information into their emotion judgments (e.g., consider both the current outcome and inhibitory control) more frequently provide coherent mental state judgments (i.e., they anticipate that someone thinking positively will feel happy and approach the situation; they anticipate that someone thinking negatively will feel worried and avoid the situation; Lagattuta et al., 2016). Higher executive function is also related to improved ability to integrate characters’ emotional past experiences when judging how they will think, feel, and make decisions about the future (Lagattuta et al., 2018). Not exclusive to emotions, 4- to 10-year-olds and adults with more advanced executive function skills also exhibit stronger knowledge that past experiences can bias interpretations of ambiguous events (Kennedy et al., 2015; Lagattuta, Sayfan, et al., 2010, Lagattuta et al., 2014). Still, additional research on the links between executive function and emotion understanding are needed, especially studies following a longitudinal design. Such inquiries, however, require measures that capture variability in executive function and emotion understanding across wide age ranges. Thus, we encourage the continued creation of such tasks (e.g., Kramer et al., 2015; Lagattuta et al., 2011). Experimentally manipulating the extent to which a task guides children’s attention to factors beyond the p. 164

current event would also be revealing. Recent studies have found that

4- to 10-year-olds’ and adults’

visual attention to task stimuli (assessed via eye tracking) predicts their verbal judgments during emotion understanding tasks. For example, when both negative and positive past events are presented, children and adults who spend proportionally more time looking at the negative information also provide more negative emotion, thought, and decision forecasts (Lagattuta & Kramer, 2021; Lagattuta & Sayfan, 2013). Furthermore, children as young as 4 to 5 years can use top–down control to direct their visual attention to positive emotional faces (which goes against their baseline tendency to look longer at negative emotional expressions) when instructed to do so (Lagattuta & Kramer, 2017). Potentially, then, providing children with explicit directions of where to look and what to consider during emotion understanding tasks (e.g., look at the characters’ prior expectations; look at how the victim feels; look at how their past experiences are di erent) could uncover earlier knowledge. In suggesting these strategies, we are not claiming that age-related improvements in emotion cognition during middle childhood are driven exclusively by growing skills in attention, working memory, and inhibitory control. Indeed, although executive function contributes to causal reasoning about emotions, age remains a signi cant predictor (see Lagattuta et al., 2016, 2018). Thus, it is entirely possible that by telling children to pay attention to speci c information, they will utilize it, but their interpretations of the meaning and value of that information may still di er from that of adults. Case in point, Lagattuta and Kramer (2021a) documented that 4- to 5-year-olds looked at past event information as much as older age groups during an emotion generalization task, but these children decided that characters’ life experiences with another agent were irrelevant when meeting someone new. In addition to assessing mechanisms of change, there are several other advanced emotion concepts that would be intriguing to assess from a developmental perspective. For example, young adults tend to overestimate the duration and intensity of their reactions to future events (Wilson & Gilbert, 2005). Little work has examined whether a ective forecasting presents an equivalent challenge across the life span (Kramer & Lagattuta, 2018; Nielson et al., 2008). Two studies suggest that preschoolers overestimate the impact of future negative events (Gautam et al., 2017; Kopp et al., 2017), but neither study included participants over the age of 5 years old. Still, there are clues to suggest that a ective forecasting may be similar from early childhood to adulthood. For example, 3- to 13-year-olds and young adults are equally likely to (incorrectly) rely on their current desires when predicting what they will want in the future (Atance

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the person’s prior expectations), children and adults with better executive function (working memory,

& Meltzo , 2006; Kramer et al., 2017; Mahy, 2015). Parallel studies using a wider age range of participants should be conducted to explore developmental di erences and continuities in predicting future emotional reactions. More broadly, it would be helpful to examine the development of other biases and heuristics that children forecasting errors in adults—focalism (i.e., adults focus on a given outcome without considering other factors that will also shape emotions; Wilson et al., 2000) and immune neglect (i.e., adults are unaware of p. 165

their capacity to adjust to negative circumstances; Gilbert et al., 1998)—would also likely

in uence

children’s forecasts. As well, when inferring what someone else is feeling, adults engage in satis cing—they search for an answer that is “good enough.” Thus, because people start with how they are currently feeling (or imagine they would feel), they often do not adjust far enough away from their own emotions because the unadjusted guess feels accurate (Epley et al., 2004). Researchers could create age-appropriate tasks to better understand whether children are also engaging in satis cing, or if they simply do not appreciate that they could keep searching for an answer. Perhaps when comparing children’s and adults’ willingness to go beyond what initially feels right, adults are making a more egregious perspective-taking error than children because they actually know better that emotions can be caused by multiple, interacting internal and external factors. Expanding research to measure children’s and adults’ understanding of other a ective states (e.g., desires, preferences) is also needed. Although a person’s emotions are often driven by the ful llment or blockage of a desire, goal, or preference, children’s developing knowledge about the properties of precipitating mental states and the resulting emotion(s) can be distinct. Indeed, as we mentioned earlier, one key aspect of emotion understanding is categorization. As with any “understanding” of emotion, categorization can be investigated in more basic (e.g., separating happy from sad faces; grouping emotions by valence) or complex ways (e.g., categorizing a ective states by their frequency, time duration, relation to decision making). As an initial step, we tested whether 8- to 10-year-olds and adults believe that emotions, desires, and preferences di er in their time course. Children and adults judged that emotions and desires last for a shorter time duration than preferences, with adults evaluating self-conscious emotions as longer-lasting than basic emotions (Kramer et al., 2019). Exploring how children and adults categorize a ective states along di erent dimensions parallels work on people’s understanding of the distinctions among cognitive mental states (e.g., guess, know, remember; Johnson & Wellman, 1980) and di erences in children’s use of discrete emotions (see Widen & Nelson, this volume). More generally, future research tapping more complex, yet everyday aspects of emotions should be conducted to assess advances in reasoning about emotions. Finally, although we have already highlighted some of the age-related improvements in knowledge about emotion regulation, more research is needed to understand connections between individual di erences in emotion understanding and successful regulation of a ective states (see also De France & Hollenstein, this volume). For example, children’s knowledge of hidden emotions (i.e., expressing emotions that mismatch internal feelings) correlates with their ability to suppress negative emotions when receiving a disappointing gift (Garner & Power, 1996; Hudson & Jacques, 2014; Kromm et al., 2015). Five- to 10-year-olds who exhibit stronger knowledge that reframing negative outcomes more positively can improve emotions (third-person measure), have parents higher in self-reported optimism (Bamford & Lagattuta, 2012). Researchers could investigate age-related di erences in connections between other aspects of emotion knowledge (e.g., awareness of expectation–emotion connections; Lara et al., 2019) and their implementation of related p. 166

strategies (e.g., their ability to brace for feedback; Sweeny,

2018). There is also mounting evidence that

people’s beliefs about emotional states in uence mental health (Ford & Gross, 2019). For example, individuals (10 years and older) who view emotions as more controllable report lower levels of depression than those who view emotions as uncontrollable (Ford, Lwi, et al., 2018). Moreover, adults who are more

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and adults exhibit when engaging in a ective perspective taking. For example, two of the causes of a ective

accepting (versus judgmental) of their emotions have better mental health (Ford, Lam, et al., 2018). These and other connections between variability in emotion cognition and children’s and adults’ mental health should be explored.

Between the ages of 5 and 12 years, children’s social and cognitive lives greatly expand—they spend more time interacting with peers, take on new challenges (e.g., learning to read), enter new settings (e.g., formal schooling), and increasingly introspect on who they are and what they think and feel (Collins & Russell, 1991; Huston & Ripke, 2006; Samero

& Haith, 1996). Throughout these everyday challenges, children

increasingly learn about the causes of emotions. They move from viewing external situations as the primary driver of feelings to recognizing additional, interacting variables that enhance explanatory power (e.g., life experiences, beliefs, thoughts, expectations for the future). Said another way, children’s beliefs about emotions increasingly match the complex ways people actually experience a ective states. These improvements are partially attributable to growth in executive function skills that enable children to consider multiple components at once. Having the ability to attend to and manipulate several causal factors when evaluating emotions is not su

cient, however, if a child’s intuitive theory about how to integrate and

prioritize that information has not also been updated. Several open questions remain regarding advances in children’s emotion understanding. In particular, it may be helpful to return to our de nition of emotion understanding—the ability to interpret, label, and categorize emotions, as well as knowledge about causes and consequences of emotions. As we have emphasized throughout this chapter, each of these components can be conceived in their simplest form (i.e., concepts about which even infants display early insights) and increase in complexity to a highly sophisticated level (i.e., concepts about which there may not be consensus in late childhood or even adulthood as to the “correct” answer). In discussing these more intricate aspects of emotion understanding, we hope that we have ignited enthusiasm for further discoveries in the development of emotion cognition after 5 years of age.

Acknowledgments We thank Karen Hjortsvang Lara for helpful feedback and Kelsey Davinson for assistance in organizing relevant research articles.

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Conclusion

p. 167

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The Oxford Handbook of Emotional Development Daniel Dukes (ed.) et al. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/978019 8855903.001.0001 9780191889516

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9780198855903

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CHAPTER

12 Di erentiation and Language Acquisition in Children’s Understanding of Emotion  Sherri C. Widen, Nicole L. Nelson https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198855903.013.23 Published: 13 January 2022

Pages 174–187

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Published: 2022

Abstract This chapter provides evidence of two processes that contribute to the acquisition of emotion categories (represented by their labels). The rst is a process in which children gradually di erentiate categories, while also learning to link the various components of emotion (e.g., causes, consequences, behaviors, facial expressions, labels) until their taxonomy closely resembles the taxonomy of the adults with whom they interact. For example, children gradually learn that some bad feelings are caused by a loss, result in tears, and are called sad, whereas others are caused by danger, result in the desire to ee, and are called scared. The second process supports the rst. It is a process of elimination which enables children to quickly map novel emotion components to novel emotion categories and to begin to acquire a new emotion category.

Keywords: emotion categories, di erentiation, process of elimination, facial expressions, language acquisition, fast mapping Subject: Psychology, Developmental Psychology Series: Oxford Library of Psychology Collection: Oxford Handbooks Online

Introduction ACQUIRING

an adult taxonomy of emotions is a long, complex process. We describe the roles of emotion

category di erentiation and language acquisition in this process. Infants and young children divide the domain of emotions into two broad, valence-based categories (feels good vs. feels bad). Over the course of several years, children gradually di erentiate within these broad categories, adding categories like “sadness” and “fear.” While di erentiating these categories, children must also learn to link a variety of emotion components—situational information, behaviors, facial expressions, and emotion labels—to their emerging emotion categories. One way that children learn to di erentiate emotion categories is via a process of elimination. For example, if a child is familiar with the concept of sadness and observes an unfamiliar, negative emotional behavior (e.g., someone eeing), they may initially associate this behavior with their broad category of sadness. However, if an adult says “I am scared,” the child can begin to di erentiate their broad sadness category into narrower, more adult-like ones, while simultaneously adding emotion components to their emerging fear category (e.g., danger is linked to running away and the label “scared”). In this scenario, children’s use of an elimination strategy may underlie their di erentiation p. 175

of emotion concepts, allowing them to move from valence-based to speci c categories. (For other perspectives on the development of emotion understanding, see Clément & Dukes, Ketelaar et al., Viana et al., this volume.)

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an early, valence-based (i.e., feels good vs. feels bad) emotion understanding into more discrete

Development of Childrenʼs Understanding of Emotion Children’s understanding of emotion develops gradually throughout childhood and even into adolescence and adulthood. Although children begin using emotion words as early as 18 months (Bretherton et al., 1981), emotions and emotion words in terms of valence (feels good vs. feels bad; Ruba et al., 2019; Widen, 2013, 2016; Widen & Russell, 2003, 2008a, 2008b). For infants and toddlers, anger, fear, sadness, embarrassment, shame, and so on are all part of one category (feels bad); happiness, excitement, calmness, and so on are a part of another (feels good). The developmental challenge is to di erentiate within these broad valencebased categories until the adult taxonomy of emotions is acquired. This process of di erentiation begins when children begin to link the various components of emotion concepts to one another (causes, consequences, behaviors, facial expressions, labels, etc.; Widen, 2013, 2016, Widen & Russell, 2004, 2008). Through this process, children learn that some negative emotions are caused by a loss (sadness) whereas others result in aggression (anger; Widen, 2013). Thus, infants can understand a parent’s facial expression, behavior, and vocalizations as positive or negative, and use that information to decide whether to approach (positive emotion) or withdraw (negative emotion) from a novel situation (Klinnert et al., 1986; Moses et al., 2001; Walden & Kim, 2005). This valence-based understanding is still the basis of emotion-label understanding at age 2. For example, when 2-year-olds were asked to sort facial expressions into and out of an angry category (presented as an “angry box”), they excluded happiness expressions but included all the negative expressions (Russell & Widen, 2002a; Widen & Russell, 2008). This valence-based pattern occurs on other sorting tasks (Bullock & Russell, 1984, 1985) and when children are asked to freely label facial expressions (Widen & Russell, 2003). This broad negative emotion category begins to narrow as children get older. Children aged 3 years and older were less likely to include sadness expressions in the angry box, and about half of children up to 6 years excluded the fear expressions; at all ages (2–7 years), children included the disgust expression as often as the anger expression, indicating that they had not yet di erentiated these two expressions (Russell & Widen, 2002a). The same gradual narrowing of the negative emotion category is observed on other tasks such as free labeling facial expressions and emotion situations (Widen & Russell, 2003, 2008, 2010). p. 176

Di erentiation follows a predictable pattern (Figure 12.1). When children are asked to freely label facial expressions, for example, the youngest children (2-year-olds) use only happy (Labeling Level 1). As age increases, children begin to use other emotion labels in a systematic order: At Labeling Level 2, children add either angry or sad; at Labeling Level 3, they use all three labels; at Labeling Level 4 they add either scared or surprised; at Labeling Level 5 they use all ve labels; and at Labeling Level 6, children add disgust (Widen, 2013, 2017a, 2017b; Widen & Russell, 2003). Similar patterns are observed when children label emotional situations (Widen & Russell, 2010), postures (Nelson & Russell, 2011), are tested in languages other than English (Arabic, French), and are tested in other cultures (Palestinian: Kayyal et al., 2021; French Canadian: Massarani et al., 2011). Whether this pattern of emotion-label acquisition emerges for children who are neuroatypical remains to be seen. There are a number of factors that in uence the emotion categories and labels that children, adolescents, and even adults acquire or use. The order in which children acquire emotion categories and labels for “basic” emotions is determined, in part, by the emotion categories that are included in the labeling task. When both “basic” and social emotions such as embarrassment, compassion, and shame are included, embarrassment is added before disgust (Widen & Russell, 2010). When older children are included, slightly more than half of 6- to 7-year-olds label an expression of pride as proud and only half of 9-year-olds label the disgust face as disgusted (Widen, 2013; Widen & Russell, 2013; for more on emotion understanding in middle childhood, see Kramer & Lagattuta, this volume). Even in adolescence, emotion-word knowledge is

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their understanding of these words is very di erent from that of adults. Initially, children understand

increasing and emotion categories such as disgust and shame continue to be re ned (Baron-Cohen et al., 2010; Widen et al., 2015). Also, in adults, education level a ects the labels used for facial expressions: p. 177

participants who had attended university were more likely to use the expected emotion label for fear and disgust facial expressions and less likely to do

so for anger facial expressions than those who had not

attended university (Trau er et al., 2013).

The Di erentiation Model (Widen 2017; Widen & Russell, 2003). The Di erentiation Model (Widen 2017; Widen & Russell, 2003). Reproduced from Sherri C. Widen, Childrenʼs interpretation of facial expressions: The long path from valence-based to specific discrete categories. Emotion Review, 5(1), 72–77. https://doi.org/10.1177/1754073912451492 Copyright 2013, SAGE Publications Shows the progression of children (age 2–9 years) from using only one emotion label to using six emotion labels. Thus, the components of emotion categories (e.g., causes, consequences, behaviors, facial expressions, vocalizations) unfold over time and in a predictable sequence. Children bring all the components together like pieces of a puzzle to decide how another is feeling. Indeed, in day-to-day experience, it would be rare for a child to see only a facial expression or only the cause of an emotion. The component that is most helpful to children in helping them make that decision varies from emotion to emotion. The cause may be the rst component for some emotions, consequences for others, and labels for yet others. That is, there is no one component that serves as the toe-hold for the di erentiation of all emotion categories. For example, although facial expressions are an externally observable component of emotions, it is not the component that children rst associate with most speci c emotion categories (Balconi & Carrera, 2007; Camras & Allison, 1985; Nelson et al., 2013; Russell & Widen, 2002b; Smith & Walden, 1999; Widen & Russell, 2004a, 2010). Instead, when given the label or consequence, even 3-year-olds were better able to describe the causes of an emotion than when given a facial expression (Widen & Russell, 2004).

Mechanisms of Di erentiation What drives children’s emotion-concept di erentiation and acquisition of such a broad range of emotion components? Parents may directly instruct children in emotion words and concepts, although analyses of parental statements indicates that only around 3% of parental utterances include an emotion term (Lagattuta & Wellman, 2002), making this an unlikely mechanism driving emotion-concept di erentiation. A more likely candidate driving this process lies in one way children commonly learn about new categorical information—using a process of elimination. Children’s ability to use a process of elimination to quickly learn about new categories has been demonstrated in a variety of ways and was rst illustrated in relation to children’s developing understanding of color categories (Carey & Bartlett, 1978). Children were presented with several cards, each a di erent color. Some cards showed known colors (e.g., blue, brown, red) and one was an unknown color (olive green). Children were asked to nd the “chromium one.” Sixty-three percent of 3-year-olds successfully matched the novel label chromium with the novel olive green color, showing that they could acquire novel categories even when not explicitly instructed to link the novel label with the novel object. (Also in this volume, Plate et al. propose statistical learning as a mechanism that supports the development of emotion understanding.) Since Carey and Bartlett’s (1978) seminal study, children’s ability to use a process of elimination to re ne categorical information has been demonstrated in a variety of ways. Children can use a process of elimination to learn about concretely visible categories like colors, actions, animals, and objects (Au & p. 178

Glusman, 1990; Au & Markman, 1987;

Baldwin et al., 1996; Bialystok et al., 2010; Graham et al., 2010;

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Figure 12.1

Grassman et al., 2009; Halberda, 2006; Haryu et al., 2011; Jaswal & Hansen, 2006; Markman, 1990; Markman & Wachtel, 1988; Waxman et al., 2009). Extending this work, recent research has shown that children can use this same strategy to learn about abstract kinds of information, such as verbally provided facts and adjectives (Diesendruck & Deblinger–Tangi, 2014; Diesendruck et al., 2006; Diesendruck & Markson, 2011; Waxman & Booth, 2000; Waxman et al., 2009; Waxman & Markow, 1998).

ability to use this strategy to acquire and re ne categorical information for both concrete and abstract information, it seems likely that children use this process to acquire and re ne emotion concepts and their components. Indeed, a line of research has demonstrated that children excel at using this strategy to learn about emotion components, both learning about novel emotion categories (e.g., a ctitious emotion category of pax) and also re ning and modifying their existing emotion categories (adding new expressions 1

to known emotion categories like fear).

Creation of New Emotion Categories Early work examining whether children could use a process of elimination to acquire new emotion categories borrowed heavily from Carey and Bartlett’s (1979) testing paradigm. For example, Nelson and colleagues presented children with pictures of three facial expressions in which two were familiar (happy and sad) and the third was novel (a nonemotional, pu ed-cheeks expression) (see Figure 12.2). As early as 2 p. 179

years of age,

children selected the novel face when asked to nd the person feeling pax, rather than either

of the known faces (Nelson & Russell, 2016a), indicating that children had used a process of elimination to acquire a new emotion category.

Figure 12.2 Example of Expression Array. Example of Expression Array. Includes two familiar expressions (le and right: sadness and happiness) and one novel expression (center: pu ed cheeks). Subsequent studies demonstrated that children’s ability to link new emotion components to an emotion concept using a process of elimination was exible: children can link a label to one of several faces and can link a face to one of several labels, indicating that children’s learning is not bound by whether the emotion component they acquire is concrete (an image) or abstract (a verbal label) (Nelson & Russell, 2016b). Finally, children’s tendency to use a process of elimination was not due to demand characteristics of the testing paradigm—children were con dent in selecting no face when asked about a familiar expression that was not presented. For example, when asked “Do you see someone who is happy?” and no happy face was presented, 92% of children correctly responded “no” (Nelson & Russell, 2016a, Study 1c). However, these same children selected the novel expression when asked if they saw someone who was pax, suggesting that children’s use of a process of elimination when learning about emotion components does not simply result in nonsensical, forced responses, but is a tactic children apply when they encounter ambiguous information. In addition, when children in these studies encountered the novel expression in a subsequent task, they successfully labeled the expression as pax, indicating that they had internalized the label, matched it to a particular expression, and could spontaneously generate it. Finally, when asked to de ne what the label pax meant, 58% of children referenced some sort of emotion label (e.g., feeling sad and nervous at the same time), meaning they viewed the expression as emotional and had attempted to link emotional information to the expression (Nelson & Russell, 2016a).

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Given the ubiquity of children’s use of a process of elimination to learn about new categories, as well as their

Building Expression Category Groups Although we generally imagine that emotion categories like happiness or anger include a single expected facial expression, in reality, a variety of di erent expressions are generally associated with an emotion category. For example, we readily associate happiness with smiling expressions, with and without teeth, or ability to use a process of elimination to build adult-like emotion categories must also be able to generate emotion concepts which include multiple expression components, re ecting the complexity of emotioncategory structure we see in daily life. Recent work has shown that children can do just this. Across several testing trials, 2- to 7-year-olds were presented with arrays of expressions, including some familiar ones like happy and sad, and one that was unfamiliar (Figure 12.3). Across trials, the unfamiliar expressions varied, but all contained an “o-shaped” mouth component (Nelson et al., 2018). Children over 4 years were able to distill the common component of the novel expressions, linking them to a novel category (in this case, pax). In a subsequent task, children p. 180

went on to apply the novel category label pax to a new face with an “o”

component to which they had not

been previously exposed. Ultimately, a process of elimination can be used by children as young as 4 years to rapidly and accurately generate emotion categories that are variable and include a series of related expressions.

Figure 12.3 Example of Three Expression Arrays. Example of Three Expression Arrays. Each includes two familiar expressions (le and center: happiness and sadness) and a di erent novel expression (right).

Rapidly Building Novel Categories Children’s use of a process of elimination to acquire novel words and concepts has been demonstrated to occur even with only one or two exposures to a novel word—a process called fast-mapping (e.g., Spiegel & Halberda, 2011; Woodward et al., 1994). This process allows children to acquire novel labels and concepts e

ciently, even if an adult did not explicitly link the novel concept and word for them.

Similarly, if children are to be able to acquire emotion concepts using a process of elimination, they must be able to do so rapidly and accurately. This ability allows children to acquire knowledge about new emotion components, even if these components inconsistently occur in daily interactions with others and are not explicitly highlighted by an adult. In a recent study, 8- to 9-year-olds and adults were presented with pairs of expressions. In some pairs, all expressions were familiar; but in other pairs, one of the expressions was novel (the pu ed-cheeks expression). Participants selected the expression that matched the emotion in a p. 181

spoken sentence (i.e., “Who feels happy?”) as rapidly

as possible. Participants selected either the face on

the left or the right via a button press, and their reaction times, accuracy, and visual attention (measured via an eye-tracker) were all recorded Nelson, N.L. & Mondloch, C.J. (in prep). Children’s visual attention to novel expressions. Although neither children nor adults had been told that there would be novel expressions presented, 90% of children accurately selected the novel expression when asked for the rst time “Who feels pax?”, whereas only 50% of adults did so. In addition, children’s reaction times were half that of adults (1100 ms. vs. 2000 ms), meaning children were signi cantly faster and more accurate in associating the novel expression with a novel label than adults were. Overall, these data suggest that children nd the process of acquiring novel emotional information unsurprising, and readily and rapidly acquire novel emotional information, whereas adults do not. Perhaps this is because adults nd learning new emotional components unusual.

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with and without the eye crinkles associated with a Duchenne marker (Duchenne, 1862/1990). Children’s

Summary Although it is likely that there are a variety of processes associated with children’s acquisition of novel emotional information (e.g., cognitive maturation, language development, exposure to others’ expressions), here we present empirical evidence that a process of elimination is a viable strategy for children are able to use a process of elimination to rapidly link novel emotion components like faces and labels, can recall and generate that label when encountering the component later, and begin to link emotional information to the components spontaneously, even after having been exposed to the face and label only a handful of times. Curiously, children’s use of a process of elimination to link the components of emotion concepts increased between 2 and 10 years, meaning that it is not the case that children in this study failed to understand the task or were using an immature emotion-learning strategy suitable only to preschoolers. Rather, we believe that using a process of elimination to accumulate emotion knowledge is a strategy that is serving children of all ages well in daily life, and they sensibly apply it in a variety of situations.

Modifying Existing Emotion Categories The earliest examples of these studies showed that children used a process of elimination to link novel emotion components to ctitious emotional categories like pax, a category to which children presumably have no preexisting associations linked. However, research supporting the Di erentiation Model presents clear evidence that children not only acquire new emotion categories throughout childhood, but they also modify existing categories, adding in additional components and reorganizing the category structures into p. 182

which the components are incorporated (Maassarani et al., 2014;

Widen, 2013; Widen & Russell, 2004,

2003, 2010). Recent studies have shown that children were indeed able to rapidly modify their existing emotion categories using an elimination strategy. When presented with an array of both familiar (happy, sad, angry, and surprised) and unfamiliar (the novel, pu ed-cheeks) facial expressions, children readily matched the novel, pu ed-cheeks expression to familiar emotion labels for which the expected expression was not present in the array. Children have been shown to do this when asked if any of the expressions was afraid (Nelson & Russell, 2016a, Study 2a), jealous (Nelson & Russell, 2016a, Study 2b), and proud (Nelson, 2011). In subsequent tasks, children went on to spontaneously label the expression with the label they were already familiar with, and the majority provided correct de nitions of the label they were asked about (e.g., de ning jealousy as “to want something that someone else has but you don’t have”). Thus, children appear similarly skilled at using a process of elimination to modify their existing emotion categories as they are to generate new emotion categories.

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children to link a variety of aspects related to emotion concepts. The totality of these studies indicate that

Children Use a Process of Elimination to Link a Variety of Cues to Emotion Categories One of the most interesting aspects of the data supporting the Di erentiation Model is the variability in the components is uneven across childhood. There is no one age at which children learn about components—for some emotion categories, children link the behavioral causes to the emotion category in preschool; but for other emotion categories, the behavioral cause will not be linked until late childhood. This variability suggests that children’s emotion-component learning is uneven, and perhaps linked to the emotion components they happen to encounter in daily experiences. Thus, for the process of elimination to be useful to children in re ning their emotion concepts, they must be able to link a variety of components together, and not just faces and labels. Recent research has shown that preschoolers (2 to 4 years of age) can link situational causes of familiar emotions, such as “thinking there is a monster in the closet” (which would normally be associated with feeling fearful), to a novel expression, providing evidence that children are able to link a range of emotion components together using a process of elimination (Nelson, 2012). In addition, although no emotion labels were provided for the situational cause or the novel facial expression, more than half of children (and 80% of 4-year-olds) went on to spontaneously label the expression as fear when they next encountered it, meaning that children successfully linked a variety of known and novel emotion components, and used their experiences within the study to modify the familiar emotion category of fear.

p. 183

Conclusion Across a variety of studies, research on children’s emotion-component acquisition demonstrates that children rst begin with broad emotion categories of positive and negative valence (Widen, 2013). As children encounter new emotion information, they alter their valance-based categories, di erentiating these categories into more narrow concepts, following the predictable patterns outlined in the Di erentiation Model (Widen, 2013; Widen & Russell, 2004, 2003). Children’s categories show particularly clear narrowing when they learn emotion-category labels, likely because these labels help them to begin to organize their emerging emotion concepts (Widen, 2013; Widen & Russell, 2003). Children have also been shown to be skilled at incorporating a variety of other emotion components into their emerging emotion concepts, including emotional expressions, situations that can cause someone to feel an emotion, and behavioral responses that can accompany emotion (Nelson et al., 2013; Nelson & Mondloch, 2019; Nelson & Russell, 2011; Widen, 2013; Widen & Russell, 2004, 2010). However, children’s acquisition of these emotion components is prolonged, developing slowly across childhood (Widen, 2013). In addition, the components children acquire varies with the emotion concept. This curious pattern could have several causes, including the fact that: (1) children’s emotion concepts are continuously being re ned and reorganized throughout childhood; and (2) children do not encounter (or may not successfully attend to) all types of emotion components for all their emotion concepts. So, why do children demonstrate this unique pattern of emotion-category di erentiation? One possibility is that when children encounter a novel emotional component, they must determine whether the component is associated with a known emotion concept or whether it is part of a novel emotion concept they have yet to acquire. We suggest the most likely way that children do this is by using a process of elimination (DiGirolamo & Russell, 2017; Nelson & Russell, 2016a,b). By comparing a novel emotion component they have encountered in daily life (e.g., a novel facial expression) against the facial expressions they are already

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emotion components that children link to their emotion categories, and the fact that the acquisition of

familiar with, children can determine whether the information they have encountered should be added to an existing emotion category or whether they should create a novel emotion category. Children’s use of a process of elimination would also explain why their earliest and most clear access to di erentiated emotion concepts (i.e., demonstrating knowledge beyond simple positive and negative 2008a,b), which can serve to organize their concepts. If children organize their emerging emotion concepts based on emotion labels, then when they hear a novel emotion label, they can attend to salient features of the environment to begin to link additional emotion components (e.g., facial expressions, vocal intonation, situational causes, behavioral reactions) associated with the new emotion concept to the label. This process would privilege children’s acquisition of visible, unique events with the highest predictive power, meaning p. 184

that the emotion

components children learn would be uneven, depending on the components most

commonly associated with the emotions they are encountering in their interactions with others. Over time, children could further improve their emotion categories, adding additional components or re ning an overly broad category into more speci c categories as experience dictates. Given the infrequent occurrence of emotional components witnessed in daily life (e.g., Reisenzein et al., 2013), children would need to acquire the components rapidly and after only a few exposures. We argue that a system whereby children acquire knowledge about emotion components, and build and reorganize their emotion concepts, can be adequately supported by the use of a process of elimination. In fact, the use of this strategy would essentially predict the pattern of emotion-component acquisition observed across a variety of studies of children’s emotion knowledge (Maassarani et al., 2014; Widen & Russell, 2008a, 2010; Widen, 2013) as well as the patterns elucidated by the Di erentiation Model (Widen, 2013; Widen & Russell, 2013). Thus, we argue that children’s acquisition of emotion concepts and components, rather than being driven by an internal or innate understanding of “basic” emotions, is instead propelled by the developmentally consistent use of an elimination strategy and the steady learning of complex emotion concepts.

Note 1.

In the lab, we labeled the line of research examining the process of elimination strategies and emotion-category learning the “Chromium” studies, in honor of Carey and Bartlett.

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categories) stems from their acquisition of emotion labels (Russell & Widen, 2002a,b; Widen & Russell,

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The Oxford Handbook of Emotional Development Daniel Dukes (ed.) et al. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/978019 8855903.001.0001 9780191889516

Online ISBN: Print ISBN:

9780198855903

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CHAPTER

13 The Social, Cognitive, and A ective Power of Humor in Infancy  Gina Mireault https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198855903.013.22 Published: 13 January 2022

Pages 188–200

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Published: 2022

Abstract Within 6 weeks after birth, the endogenous smile comes under infants’ voluntary control, serving as strong social currency between infants and others within their environment. Shortly after, by just 4 understanding of the world? For example, by 5 months, infants appear to perceive the di erence between absurd and ordinary events, and seemingly interpret absurd events as comical all by themselves, without relying on cues from others. By 6 months, infants give the impression of employing fake laughter that can goad others into play; and by 8 months, they appear capable of simple acts of deception that underlie teasing. This chapter investigates what early humor creation and perception reveal about infants’ knowledge of the social and physical world, and explores the social, emotional, and cognitive power of humor in infancy.

Keywords: infants, humor, laughter, smiling, incongruity, social, emotional, cognitive, teasing, violation of expectation Subject: Psychology, Developmental Psychology Series: Oxford Library of Psychology Collection: Oxford Handbooks Online

Introduction AN

infant’s rst smiles, built of purely endogenous re ex, appear in momentary ashes across their face,

whether awake or asleep. These rst smiles are indiscriminate, unrelated to external events in the environment (Sroufe & Wunsch, 1972; Wol , 1963), and speak not of an infant’s joyful temperament, social proclivity, or later potential for wit. Therefore, it is somewhat surprising that what begins as a relatively meaningless re ex—smiling—soon becomes a powerful means for infants’ social-emotional engagement, as well as a metric of their cognitive understanding of the world. What is clear is that smiling appears rst, without any requisite precipitants; an infant’s understanding of events that evoke it appears later. Thus, when it comes to smiling, nature appears to have put the proverbial cart before the horse. Like other endogenous re exes (e.g., sucking, grasping), smiling comes under most infants’ voluntary control by about 6 weeks of age (Wol , 1963). Infants are now more likely to smile at external stimuli, like faces, as well as when hearing the universal, gliding pitch of motherese (Mireault et al., 2012a; Soderling, 1959). These voluntary smiles propel infants out of the neonatal period where they were at the mercy of their re exes and into the dynamic social world. Darwin (1872/1965) rst recognized the power of smiling as a social currency between infants and caregivers (p. 364), engaging them in simple yet powerful interactions that begin to establish the relationships critical for infants’ survival. Infants’ dependency needs are so constant and demanding in the neonatal period that their voluntary smiles are a well-timed psychological balm for weary caregivers, particularly as they discover their ability to elicit them. p. 189

As pleasing as infants’ smiles are, something more provocative occurs just 8 to 10 weeks later: infants’ laugh. This unmistakable emotion-laden vocalization appears long before language, and serves as one of nonverbal infants’ rst and few potent communicative signals. Adult listeners quickly and e ortlessly identify laughter (Lima et al., 2019), which speaks of its social value. But what does infant laughter mean?

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months, infants laugh. But why? And what, if anything, does laughter tell us about infants’

Have they acquired some knowledge about the absurd that allows them to experience and express amusement? Or is laughter an unsophisticated response, which would explain infants’ access to it? These questions and their answers are still being investigated (Mireault et al., 2017). To begin, it is helpful to understand how laughter is produced. Laughter is a nonverbal vocalization, despite little voluntary facial motor control, can produce it. Laughter has more to do with the breath than the mechanisms involved in speech (Scott, 2013), which, when coupled with an inability to sit upright in the 1

rst 6 months, may explain why infants laugh more like chimps (i.e., on the inhale and exhale) rather than like human children and adults (i.e., primarily on the exhale; Sauter et al., 2018). Thus, laughter does not by itself reveal much about infants’ social or cognitive capacities. To know what infants know depends in part upon the type of laughter involved.

Involuntary and Voluntary Laughter Laughter can be involuntary (also called “spontaneous”) or voluntary (Lavan et al., 2016). The distinction is important, both in terms of what is communicated and in terms of understanding infants’ social and cognitive savvy (Bryant & Aktipis, 2014; Vouloumanos & Bryant, 2019). Involuntary laughter does not require motor control, and is the rst type to emerge at about 4 months of age when helpless belly laughs come online (Mireault & Reddy, 2016). Involuntary laughter sounds more “animalistic,” genuine, and emotive, and is di

cult to control or produce on demand (Scott, 2013). It involves the subcortical brain

structures associated with the basic emotions (Wattendorf et al., 2013; Wild et al., 2003) that humans share with other mammals (Panksepp, 2005a). Voluntary laughter, on the other hand, is produced by the motor system that governs speech (Scott, 2013), and so is exclusive to humans (Bryant & Aktipis, 2014). It sounds more like speech, is under one’s control, and is used as a tool in social interactions. Evidence shows that infants begin using this social tool as early as 6 months of age (Mireault, 2012), just as they acquire the motor control necessary to babble consonants and imitate speech sounds (Bryant et al., 2018), and perhaps not coincidentally, once they are able to sit upright (i.e., consistent with bipedalism theory; Provine, 2016). Thus, involuntary laughter reveals an a ective state, while voluntary laughter reveals a social agenda (Scott et al., 2014). Reddy (2008) identi ed six types of laughter apparent in 8-month-olds, four of which can reasonably be p. 190

classi ed as involuntary (joy/exuberance, screaming/helpless) or

voluntary (fake/arti cial, polite). For

example, 8-month-olds will laugh with increasingly diminished enthusiasm (“polite laugh”) when peeka-boo is no longer amusing, signaling perhaps that they would like to continue the interaction but not that particular game (Reddy, 2008). Similarly, they will “fake laugh” when excluded from others’ laughter or as an out-of-the-blue invitation to play. The fake laugh could be construed as a very simple act of deception to in uence others, an indication of infants’ rudimentary Theory of Mind, which may begin to develop with the onset of volitional laughter (Bryant & Aktipis, 2014; Reddy, 2008). In previous work, we found that parents were able to describe speci c incidences tting the criteria for both types of voluntary laughter in their 6-month-olds, revealing infants’ social awareness (Mireault, 2012). Scott (2019a) describes voluntary laughter as a “giving away of laughter” to one’s social partner to maintain a social connection (or, by contrast, withholding laughter as a way to withdraw support or signal distrust or nona

liation). By 6

months, infants appear to be in on this social game. Importantly, multiple studies demonstrate that unlike involuntary laughter, which is gripped with emotion, voluntary laughter is not related to humor (Provine, 2004). Thus, voluntary laughter can reveal what infants know about social behavior, while involuntary laughter can reveal what kinds of stimuli they nd funny. In this way, both can expose infants’ cognitive sophistication.

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meaning that the tongue, jaw, soft palate, and lips have little to do with it (Scott, 2013). Thus infants,

Laughter Versus Humor: The Social Versus the Cognitive Although laughter can signal amusement associated with humor, laughter and humor are not synonymous (Provine, 2004). Laughter is possible without humor, and vice versa. This is perhaps the biggest The theories for why we laugh versus why we nd something humorous are distinct, but when combined, o er insight into infants’ social and cognitive processes.

The Social One theory is that laughter is a purely social response that was installed by nature and, in fact, has nothing to do with humor. This theory applies to both involuntary and voluntary laughter (Bryant & Aktipis, 2014) and has several key ndings to support it. First, laughter appears universally at about 4 months of age, suggesting it has important survival value to nonverbal infants (Darwin, 1872/1965; Panksepp, 2000). Second, laughter is shared with other mammals, including nonhuman primates and rats (Davila–Ross et al., p. 191

2011; Panksepp, 2005b), where it is linked to play, tickling, and social interaction,

requiring a level of

cognitive sophistication well below that which is necessary to decipher a joke (Pien & Rothbart, 1980). Third, all mammals are equipped with the same ancient brain regions that drive emotionally-relevant involuntary vocalizations (e.g., screaming in pain or laughing in play; Panskepp, 2005a; Scott, 2019b). Fourth, multiple studies have con rmed that the primary prerequisite for laughter is the company of at least one other person. Provine and Fischer (1989) famously found that adults are 30 times more likely to laugh when they are with other people. Those same studies show that laughter typically follows nonhumorous banal comments (e.g., “I’m going to be late!”, “What a day!”). Similarly, and with regard to infants, LaFrance (2011) reported that 10-month-olds are more likely to smile when with others, suggesting that the smile is primarily of social import. Fifth, laughter is contagious (Provine, 1992). It quickly spreads in social groups, especially when individuals are familiar to each other; but even strangers will “catch” each other’s laughter, which swiftly and unmistakably conveys allegiance, alliance, and agreement (Dezecache & Dunbar, 2012).

The Cognitive A competing theory argues that laughter primarily re ects the underlying amusement that accompanies humor perception, and is the byproduct of some cognitive action. In support of this idea is the observation that humans—and infants in particular—spend considerable time with others, yet little of that time laughing (Mireault et al., 2017). Thus, the social environment itself does not explain all laughter. Two popular cognitive explanations of humor are Incongruity Resolution Theory (McGhee & Chapman, 1980; Ritchie, 1999) and Benign Violation Theory (Warren & McGraw, 2016). Both have signi cant implications for infants’ cognitive abilities relevant to humor perception. Incongruity Resolution Theory posits that humor results when an event violates one’s expectations and is subsequently explained or “resolved” (McGhee & Chapman, 1980). There is ample evidence that infants detect incongruity starting as early as 3.5 months of age (Baillargeon, 1994, 1998; Baillargeon et al., 1985), notably at about the same age when they begin to laugh. For example, infants show surprise when objects penetrate a solid barrier, defy gravity, or change trajectories after traveling in a speci c direction (Spelke et al., 1992), revealing their expectations about the behavior of objects according to natural laws (Baillargeon, 1991; Baillargeon et al., 2012; Dan et al., 2001; Spelke & Van de Walle, 1993). Remarkably, these kinds of incongruities are not resolvable and infants, like adults, do not laugh at them but instead show surprise or puzzlement. Infants have yet to be credited with the capacity to resolve incongruous events. Alternatively, we might think they need not resolve incongruous events at all, but instead can pick up on humor by observing what others are

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misunderstanding regarding laughter: that is, laughter is not necessarily about nding something funny.

laughing at. However, we found that 5-month-old infants assessed incongruous events (experimenter wearing a red ball as a clown nose) as humorous, independent of their parents’ a ect (Mireault et al., 2015). Therefore, infants did not rely on social-emotional cues from parents to appraise an event as funny, nor p. 192

were they imitating or “catching”

laughter from their parents, who were instructed to remain neutral. In

addition, infants laughed signi cantly less at ordinary events (experimenter playing with a red ball), do it? One way is to appraise the incongruity as nonthreatening (Warren & McGraw, 2016). Consistent with Benign Violation Theory (Warren & McGraw, 2016), the Arousal–Safety hypothesis proposes that infants laugh only after assessing a novel and arousing stimulus as nonharmful (Rothbart, 1973). Similarly, Hoicka (2014) proposed that humor perception requires an incongruity to be embedded within a “playful frame,” which would establish the event as nonthreatening. For example, play ghting is “benign” and “nonharmful” because of the playful context. However, the irresolvable “magical” incongruities studied by Baillargeon and others are nonharmful, yet infants do not laugh at them. Thus, the criterion of a benign violation seems insu

cient to account for infant humor.

Another way is to infer the intentionality of the joker. In a series of clever experiments, Hoicka and Gattis (2008) showed that toddlers respond di erently to the same incongruous event (e.g., pretending to pour tea into a shoe) depending on whether it is presented as intentional (“Ha ha!”) versus accidental (“Uh oh!”). They are more likely to copy the former and correct the latter. This suggests toddlers’ humor perception depends, at least in part, on whether the incongruity was produced on purpose. Some studies have shown that infants can infer intention. For example, Reddy (2015) cites three areas in which infants in their rst year demonstrate an understanding of others’ intentions, including 2-month-olds’ tendency to adjust their posture and x their gaze on a social partner in anticipation of being picked up. Thus, an infant may observe a caregiver putting a sock on their nose and interpret the event as funny because the infant can infer the caregiver meant to do this. When infants show surprise at irresolvable incongruities that violate natural laws (e.g., defying gravity), researchers infer that infants have some expectations about how objects typically behave (Baillargeon, 1994, 1998). By that same logic, infants may laugh at resolvable incongruities that violate social behavior (e.g., wearing a cup as a hat; Mireault et al., 2014) because they have some expectations about how people typically behave. Therefore, an infant may nd a caregiver wearing a sock on their nose amusing because it violates the ordinary use of socks and/or it violates the ordinary behavior of caregivers. This, combined with the harmless, playful, and/or intentional social context of the behavior, may bring infants to nd these violations funny. Piaget (1961) famously proposed that infants actively process events to learn about, remember, and make sense of them. Given the plethora of research showing infants develop expectations about the physical environment (Baillargeon, et al., 2012; Dan et al., 2001; Spelke & Van de Walle, 1993), it would be entirely consistent to propose that infants similarly develop expectations about social and behavioral norms (Mireault & Reddy, 2016). In fact, it is violations of social behavior that most often capture young infants’ attention and elicit their laughter (Mireault et al., 2012a). In a naturalistic, longitudinal study of infant humor perception and p. 193

creation from 3 to 12 months, we found parents

usually employed “clowning” to elicit their infants’

laughter (Mireault et al., 2012a). Reddy (2001) employed the term “clowning” in reference to the nonverbal, physical “jokes” used by circus clowns, including silly faces and voices, odd self-decoration, and so on. In our study, parental smiling was often su

cient to elicit 3-month-olds’ smiles, but by 6 months, infants

mostly required parents to “clown” (Mireault et al., 2012a). It is possible that in that short amount of time, from 3 to 6 months, infants develop expectations about social behavior that make these “wild but safe” behavioral aberrations funny. That same study discovered that parents paired clowning with smiling and

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showing they discriminated between event types. But if infants can resolve incongruous events, how do they

laughing 65% of the time, partly explaining why infants do not interpret such extreme behavior as frightening or simply surprising. Unlike Wol ’s (1963) or Sroufe and Wunsch’s (1972) early searches for speci c stimuli that amuse infants, clowning encompasses broad categories of behavioral violations, not speci c stimuli aimed at one of the speci c events in a stimulus–response fashion. Most startling is that infants adopted clowning to create humorous interactions through the rst year, adding to their repertoire as they gained voluntary motor control over their bodies (Mireault et al., 2012a). Reddy (2001) described 11 types of behavioral perturbations used by infants to make others laugh: odd body movements (e.g., squashing head into neck); odd faces (e.g., screwing up the face); odd or loud sounds (e.g., shrieks); extreme actions (e.g., rattling headboard of bed); acting absurd (e.g., patting mother on head); exposing normally hidden body parts (e.g., lifting shirt to show navel); violating norms (e.g., teasing with deliberate noncompliance); violating others’ constructions (e.g., knocking over a tower built by a sibling or otherwise disrupting others’ intended actions); imitating others’ odd actions (e.g., imitating grandma’s snoring); odd self-decoration (e.g., wearing a cup as a hat); and acting regressively (e.g., spitting out food). Despite infants’ odd behavior beginning as a function of poor motor control, we observed that parents responded to 3-month-olds’ odd faces and sounds with smiles and laughs, or with clowning (Mireault et al., 2012a). However, by 5 months, infants had su

cient motor control to create e ective humorous exchanges

with their parents. More than 40% of infants that age could produce absurd behaviors (e.g., holds up smelly feet; Mireault et al., 2012a). By 6 months, infants had expanded their clowning repertoires to include seven of Reddy’s (2001) 11 categories. That infants increasingly use clowning in the second half of the rst year suggests an emerging understanding of what others will nd amusing, and again points to a rudimentary basis for a Theory of Mind (Reddy & Mireault, 2015). Such bids to make others laugh are not seen in children and adults with autism spectrum disorder, in which social cognition is impaired (see Conner et al., this volume; Reddy et al., 2002). Importantly, interactions involving clowning also provide infants with the opportunity to resolve incongruity in the ways mentioned previously. They can assess the behavior as safe based on parental a ect (Mireault et al., 2012a) or based on its repetitive nature, which, as Rothbart (1973) proposed, allows the p. 194

infant to judge an event

as nonharmful. An additional possibility is that a repeated act of clowning may

allow the infant to resolve parents’ absurd behavior as intentional (Mireault & Reddy, 2020; Mireault et al., 2017). Finally, behavioral repetition is itself a violation of social behavior, and may either increase or reveal the infant’s social savvy.

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senses. Clowning allows for in nite novel variations and shows that infants do not simply learn to laugh at

The Social and the Cognitive Although theories of laughter and humor appear to reside in separate social and cognitive spheres, their combination provides insight on infants’ social cognition. Additional evidence for infants’ emerging social cognition comes from research on voluntary laughter. Scott found that voluntary laughter involves the parts motivations; Scott et al., 2014, p. 3). When adults listen to voluntary laughs, brain areas involved in thinking are activated; however, when they listen to involuntary laughter, brain areas involved in processing sound are activated, as revealed in a study using functional magnetic resonance imaging (Scott et al., 2014). Although this nding is yet to be replicated in infants, Vouloumanos and Bryant (2019) found that 5month-olds can di erentiate co-laughter among friends versus strangers, and therefore might be able to use laughter to assess the nature of a social relationship. These infants could also match video clips of friends versus strangers with audio clips of co-laughter between friends versus strangers, respectively. Therefore, consistent with the notion that voluntary laughter requires an assessment of the social partner or context, infants may be deciphering their caregivers’ intentions during bouts of play clowning in which there is a rich exchange of laughter (Scott et al., 2014). Furthermore, when caregivers’ novel absurd behavior results in infants’ laughter, caregivers are likely to repeat their actions, promoting the development of infants’ expectations about events, social partners, and their e ect on both (Rothbart, 1973). By the second half of the rst year, infants exhibit a more sophisticated behavior: teasing. Teasing often involves infants playing with a “newly developed skill or social agreement” (Reddy & Mireault, 2015, p. R22). For example, a 12-month-old may use the new word “mama” while smiling coyly at their father. Reddy (2015) reports observations of two longitudinal studies supporting the argument that teasing begins by about 8 months of age. The most common forms of teasing in infants are: (1) o er and withdrawal of objects (e.g., willingly o ering a toy, then whipping it back), exhibited in 25% of 8-month-olds and nearly 100% of 11-month-olds; (2) provocative noncompliance (e.g., deliberately disobeying a caregiver’s directive, while looking intently at the caregiver’s face), exhibited in approximately 66% of 8-month-olds and 100% of 11-month-olds; and (3) disrupting others’ actions (e.g., gleefully working against a caregiver who is attempting to vacuum), exhibited in approximately 33% of 8-month-olds and more than 50% of 11month-olds. Infants also exhibited other types of teasing including false request/refusal (e.g., repeatedly p. 195

requesting and then refusing

a cup of juice as a form of play), playfully harming another (e.g., watchfully

biting another’s body), and approaching/withdrawing oneself (e.g., deliberately refusing another’s kiss until the moment of departure). Teasing requires predicting the actions and expectations of the other person, revealing infants’ awareness of others’ minds (see Reddy & Vanello, this volume). To trick someone, after all, requires knowing they can be tricked and predicting what their likely response will be. Teasing provides a route for infants to explore the minds of others by playing with their reactions and expectations (Reddy & Mireault, 2015). Given the roles of both cognitive and social factors in the laughter response, we set out to determine whether one or the other is more salient for laughter and humor in the rst year (Mireault et al., 2017). As a partial replication of an earlier study with 6-month-olds (Mireault et al., 2014), we conducted longitudinal studies on two samples of infants at 4, 6, and 8 months old, and at 5, 6, and 7 months old. Infants were shown ordinary events and absurd iterations of those events in randomized repeated-measures designs. Parental a ect (laugh or neutral) was manipulated to determine its in uence on infants’ interpretation of events, and heart rate was measured to corroborate infants’ facial expressions. At 4 months, parents’ a ect was more salient than any given event, with infants attending to their laughing parents instead of the events at which parents laughed. This pattern changed by 5 months (and was maintained at 6 months), at which point infants independently appraised absurd events as humorous, smiling and laughing despite their parents’ neutrality, and suggesting that cognitive factors came into play in humor perception. These

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of the brain engaged in “mentalizing” (i.e., trying to decipher someone else’s intentions, thoughts, and

results point to the importance of social cues for 4-month-olds who have just begun to laugh, and to the importance of cognitive features in humor perception by 5 months. Such ndings closely parallel those of Sternberg and Campos (1990) who, studying anger, found that infants whose arms were restrained shifted their gaze from their arms at 4 months to the person restraining their arms by 7 months, suggesting that infants develop the means/ends to understanding after 4 months of age and can exhibit directed anger

Developmental A ordances of Infant Laughter and Humor Scott (2019a) noted that laughter “does a lot of the emotional work” between social partners, and Reddy (1991) described laughter and humor as “an important part of the experience of interacting with babies in any extended and secure relationship” (p. 143), suggesting this a ective power may support the development of infants’ critical bonds with caregivers. Humorous exchanges between partners tend to p. 196

involve emotional synchronicity and mutual responsiveness centered around positive a ect (Mireault et al., 2012b), criteria that are not unlike those needed for secure attachment (Ainsworth, 1979). Among adults, humor has been linked to emotional intimacy, empathy, relationship satisfaction, trust, and perceived closeness (Cann et al., 2008; Fraley & Aron 2004; Hampes, 1992, 1999, 2001), all of which are relevant to attachment (Mireault et al., 2012b; Mireault & Reddy, 2016). Very little research has directly examined the relationship between humor and attachment in infants speci cally. However, we found that 6-month-olds who smiled and laughed less (i.e., low “trait humor”) had higher attachment security at one year (Mireault et al., 2012b). One explanation could be that the parents of the infants who exhibited less smiling and laughing might have worked harder to coax their infants’ positive a ect, creating a dynamic that inadvertently worked to the bene t of attachment; alternatively, infants may have used smiling and laughing to capture the attention of less engaged parents (Mireault et al., 2012b). In either case, infant temperamental smiling and laughing appears to function as part of the attachment equation (Mireault & Reddy, 2016). In addition, laughter and humor provide a powerful medium for joint attention and a ect sharing between infants and caregivers in the rst year (Loizou, 2005; Mireault et al., 2014). Other studies show infants raised in conditions of deprivation without adequate positive social interactions rarely smile or laugh (Cohn & Tronick 1983; Nelson et al., 2014; Spitz, 1946). Finally, laughter is accompanied by the release of endorphins that promote social bonding in larger groups (Dezecache & Dunbar 2012; Panksepp, 2000; Siviy & Panksepp, 2011), such that it serves a naturallysupported social function. In addition to the social-emotional a ordances, laughter and humor may support and/or be supported by cognitive gains. To perceive the humorous, infants must quickly detect novelty, recognize incongruity, access their memory, and assess the context (Mireault & Reddy, 2016). Detecting novelty requires that infants compare their experience to their memory of everyday observations (Baillargeon, 1994, 1998); converting the novelty to humor requires resolving it, assessing the event as benign, and/or the context as playful. Importantly, humorous exchanges provided by caregivers tend to be tted to infants’ capacities, providing a developmentally tailored cognitive and social experience almost guaranteeing its enrichment value (Rothbart, 1973). Relatedly, some theorists (Panksepp, 2000; Provine, 2004) have argued that a cognitive byproduct of tickling is the di erentiation of self from others, as laughter only results from tickling that comes from an external source. The social and cognitive processes and bene ts that underlie laughter and humor are di

cult to

disentangle. That nature preserved and prioritized these mechanisms early in the rst year of life suggests that both provide rich social and cognitive a ordances across the rst year and beyond.

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toward an appropriate target.

Note

Note that humans are not the only species to laugh (Davila–Ross et al., 2011; Panksepp, 2005b). 1.

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p. 197

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The Oxford Handbook of Emotional Development Daniel Dukes (ed.) et al. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/978019 8855903.001.0001 9780191889516

Online ISBN: Print ISBN:

9780198855903

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CHAPTER

14 Neuroscienti c Approaches to the Study of Self and Social Emotion Regulation During Development  Adriana S. Méndez Leal, Jennifer A. Silvers https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198855903.013.7 Published: 13 January 2022

Pages 201–218

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Published: 2022

Abstract Emotion regulation is a critical skill that promotes physical and mental health across the life span. This chapter describes the neural networks that underlie emotion regulation, and explores how these self-regulation and social regulation. While developmental theories suggest that parents socially regulate their children’s emotions so as to sca old burgeoning self-regulation abilities, little neuroscience work has considered the development of self-regulation and social regulation together. This chapter addresses this gap in the literature by describing what is known about the neurodevelopment of self-regulation and social regulation of emotions separately, and by discussing how they might inform one another. Given that little developmental neuroimaging research has examined social regulation, we draw inferences from adjacent research areas including social regulation of stress physiology. Finally, we provide suggestions for future developmental neuroscience work on self and social emotion regulation.

Keywords: emotion, regulation, social, neurodevelopment, sensitive periods Subject: Psychology, Developmental Psychology Series: Oxford Library of Psychology Collection: Oxford Handbooks Online

Introduction EMOTION

regulation is a critical component of healthy social and emotional development. Broadly de ned as

the top-down modulation of emotional responses, emotion-regulation capabilities develop incrementally throughout childhood and adolescence (Gross, 1998; e.g., Silvers et al., 2012). While emotion-regulation ability, use, and strategy choice vary greatly between individuals, di

culties in emotion regulation have

been associated with psychopathology in childhood and beyond, pointing to a need for this skill set in healthy emotional development (Stewart et al., 2013; McRae, 2013; Guassi Moreira et al., 2017; Suri et al., 2018; Heleniak et al., 2016; McLaughlin et al., 2015). Likewise, research suggests exible emotionregulation repertoires may improve mental health, social competence, and learning outcomes in children, indicating that understanding trajectories of emotion-regulation development may inform treatment and prevention (Davis, 2016; Davis & Levine, 2013; Eisenberg et al., 2001, 1993; Eisenberg et al., 2010; Quiñones– Camacho & Davis, 2019). These ndings are echoed in adolescents and young adults, where improving emotion-regulation ability and strategy choice can reduce mood disorder symptoms (e.g., Morris et al., 2015). p. 202

Over the last two decades, neuroscienti c research has begun to explore the neural networks underlying the development of various features of emotion regulation during childhood and adolescence (e.g., McRae et al., 2012; Silvers et al., 2017b). However, the majority of this work has focused on self-regulation of emotions in nonsocial contexts, despite the fact that emotion regulation in children rarely takes place in a social vacuum, and converging behavioral evidence suggests caregivers and peers exert crucial in uences on social and emotional development (for a sample review, see Morris et al., 2007). Indeed, notions about the role of social regulation in emotional development form the backbone of in uential theories on attachment and social support (Ainsworth, 1978; Thelen & Smith, 1994; Vaux, 1988).

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networks develop during childhood and adolescence. We consider two forms of emotion regulation:

This chapter reviews the development of implicit and explicit self-regulation of emotion (de ned below) and of the neural networks that underlie these capabilities. Additionally, we describe recent ndings detailing how these networks may be a ected by social in uences as children develop, with parents being particularly in uential during childhood and peer in uences playing an increasingly important role during adolescence. Lastly, we suggest avenues for future research that may illuminate the role of the social While recent cognitive neuroscience accounts (e.g., Reeck et al., 2016; Zaki & Williams, 2013) di erentiate between social regulation (deliberate in uence on emotions) and social modulation (incidental in uence on emotions) in adults, this distinction has been underexplored in developmental populations, in part because the majority of developmental work has examined incidental social regulation. Because de nitions of social regulation in development are still emerging, in this chapter we conceptualize both deliberate and incidental emotional modi cation as forms of social regulation.

Self-Regulation of Emotion The study of self-regulation of emotion has typically divided regulatory strategies into two primary categories: explicit and implicit emotion regulation. Implicit regulation is comprised of emotion-regulation strategies that do not require explicit cognitive e ort, and may even be unconscious (Braunstein et al., 2017; Etkin et al., 2015; Gyurak et al., 2011; Koole & Rothermund, 2011), though recent taxonomies of emotion regulation have sought to distinguish between consciousness and e ort (Braunstein et al., 2017). This branch of self-regulation includes habituation (reduced responsivity due to repeated exposure) and reversal learning (adjusting learned associations in accordance with changing reward or punishment contingencies), although speci c manifestations of implicit regulation can vary widely (Cools et al., 2002; Rankin et al., 2009). Explicit emotion-regulation strategies, by contrast, are conscious and intentional attempts to change one’s emotional experience (Braunstein et al., 2017; Gyurak et al., 2011)—though emerging evidence p. 203

suggests that explicit regulatory strategies may become more automatic and

perhaps even implicit after

repeated practice (Denny & Ochsner, 2014). Common examples of explicit emotion regulation include utilizing selective attention (distraction and attentional control), situation selection (avoiding dysregulating or emotionally stimulating situations), and suppression (reducing behavioral and emotional responses to a situation) to change emotional experience or behavior (Gross, 1998; Gyurak et al., 2011). Cognitive reappraisal—another tactic that requires deliberately reinterpreting the meaning of a stimulus so as to change its emotional impact—is the most commonly investigated explicit emotion-regulation tactic in the neuroscienti c literature, both because it is highly feasible to examine in neuroimaging contexts and because it is a common component of therapeutic interventions (Gross, 1998; Buhle et al., 2014; Beck, 2005). In the following sections, we review how implicit and explicit emotion regulation develop in children and adolescents, with a particular focus on the role of cortical–subcortical interactions, which have been implicated in both forms of self-regulation (Casey et al., 2019).

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environment in both self-regulation and broader social and emotional neurodevelopmental processes.

Implicit Emotion Regulation During Development The ability to employ implicit emotion-regulation strategies emerges gradually across development (Crone & Steinbeis, 2017; Crone et al., 2016; Kim & Richardson, 2010). Functional magnetic resonance imaging and instructed task-driven contexts. Examples of uninstructed regulation experiments include fear extinction paradigms (e.g., Phelps et al., 2004; see Fullana et al., 2018 for a recent meta-analysis), while instructed paradigms may entail labeling or responding to emotional stimuli without the expressed purpose of regulating emotion (see Lieberman et al., 2007; Lee et al., 2019 for examples of each of these). Across varied contexts, age has been shown to predict changes in how the amygdala—the brain region most commonly implicated in the detection and appraisal of emotional stimuli—responds to a ective content (Tottenham et al., 2009). Several studies have observed age-related decreases in amygdala reactivity, although the e ects di er depending on speci c study design features (Guyer et al., 2008; Hare et al., 2008; Silvers et al., 2017b; Telzer et al., 2015). During implicit regulation in adults, reactivity in the amygdala is thought to be suppressed by the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC), a cortical region associated with self-referential thinking, reward processing, and emotional learning (Barbas, 1995; Crone et al., 2016; Denny et al., 2012; Hare et al., 2009; Kim et al., 2003; Milad & Quirk, 2002; Phelps et al., 2004). Negative functional connectivity (inverse coupling) between the vmPFC and the amygdala has been associated with p. 204

age-related improvements in behavioral emotion regulation and with better mental

health outcomes,

providing further evidence that vmPFC–amygdala dynamics underlie implicit emotion regulation (Swartz, Carrasco, et al., 2014; Wu et al., 2016; Fowler et al., 2017). Functional connectivity between the vmPFC and the amygdala during a ective tasks changes over the course of childhood, and these changes appear to occur in tandem with the development of emotionalregulation abilities. Young children demonstrate positive vmPFC–amygdala functional connectivity, perhaps re ecting the fact that they are typically unable to e ectively and independently employ implicit regulation. By contrast, adolescents demonstrate negative functional connectivity (the adult phenotype), and the strength of this negative connectivity steadily grows into young adulthood, suggesting that this changing connectivity is linked to improved implicit self-regulation (Gee et al., 2013; Swartz, Carrasco, et al., 2014; Wu et al., 2016). Recent longitudinal work combining task-based and resting-state assessments of vmPFC–amygdala connectivity suggests that age-related changes in regulatory circuits are experiencedependent, pointing to potential mechanisms for future intervention (Gabard–Durnam et al., 2016). The importance of these networks is emphasized in the clinical literature: disruptions in vmPFC–amygdala functional connectivity development have been consistently associated with internalizing symptoms and psychopathology in children and adolescents, and have been found to mediate interactions between stressreactive rumination and depression (Fowler et al., 2017; Guyer, Lau, et al., 2008; Swartz et al., 2014; Wolf & Herringa, 2016; although see Gold et al., 2016 for the opposite pattern in connectivity). These ndings suggest that developmental changes in vmPFC–amygdala connectivity are critical to the development of implicit emotion regulation and mental health.

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(fMRI) studies have evaluated the neural underpinnings of implicit emotion regulation in both uninstructed

Explicit Emotion Regulation During Development Like implicit emotion regulation, the development of explicit emotion regulation appears to be associated with increasing cortical regulation of the amygdala as children age. The cortical regions thought to most dorsolateral (dlPFC) prefrontal cortex. The vlPFC and dlPFC are involved in behavioral inhibition and planning, and are broadly implicated in cognitive-control processes, which improve linearly across development (Casey et al., 2005; Luna et al., 2010). The dmPFC is associated with theory of mind and social inferences, and has been linked to executive control and introspective emotional re ection (Olsson & Ochnser, 2007; Petrides, 2005; Satpute et al., 2013; Zaki et al., 2009; Zaki & Ochsner, 2012). Dozens of prior neuroimaging studies in adults have implicated this suite of dorsal and lateral prefrontal regions in the p. 205

explicit regulation of emotion, most commonly in the context of cognitive reappraisal (see Buhle, Silvers et al., 2014 for a comprehensive review). More recently, a series of fMRI studies have examined neurodevelopmental changes in activation and connectivity in this circuit in the context of cognitive reappraisal. As in the case of implicit regulation, explicit emotion-regulation abilities (commonly assessed with cognitive reappraisal) develop dramatically across childhood and adolescence (although depending on the regulatory strategy, this process may not be entirely linear; see Riediger & Bellingtier, this volume). While children and adolescents display equivalent levels of emotional reactivity to negatively valenced stimuli, the ability to e ectively self-regulate emotional responses using reappraisal improves signi cantly over the course of adolescence (Silvers et al., 2012). Paralleling these behavioral ndings, deploying reappraisal fails to regulate amygdala responses in childhood but begins to become e ective in adolescence (Dougherty et al., 2015; Silvers et al., 2017a). Investigation of explicit regulation across middle childhood and adolescence has produced a mixed characterization of how circuits underlying these functions (particularly vlPFC– amygdala connectivity) change during development (e.g., McRae et al., 2012; Pitskel et al., 2014). However, one recent study conducted in a relatively large sample suggests that age-related improvements in explicit regulation ability are likely produced by changes in communication between the vlPFC and the amygdala, as adolescents display increased negative functional connectivity during reappraisal as they age (Silvers et al., 2017a). This e ect was associated with behavioral improvements in reappraisal, and appeared to be supported by vmPFC–amygdala connectivity in individuals, though the signi cance of such connectivity in this context is unknown (Silvers et al., 2017a). Similarly, adolescents who display disrupted patterns of vlPFC-amygdala connectivity during social evaluation and emotion regulation report greater anxiety and negative emotionality, while adolescents with better cognitive control display more mature functional connectivity phenotypes (Guyer, Lau, et al., 2008; Davis et al., 2019). These ndings highlight the important role of increased prefrontal regulation of amygdala responses in the development of explicit emotion regulation, although future work in larger samples and in younger children may prove illuminating. Independent cognitive reappraisal does not begin to emerge until around age 10, perhaps because executive functioning and theory of mind abilities that may support cognitive reappraisal (and rely on similar circuits) are not fully developed before this age (see De France & Hollenstein, this volume). Preliminary ndings from a pilot study of guided cognitive reappraisal in elementary school-aged children suggest that they can employ this strategy to limit negative emotional responses in guided contexts, but neuroimaging work in a second sample showed increased vmPFC and amygdala activation during this task (in contrast with adult ndings), which could re ect developmental di erences in reappraisal approach or ability. These results demonstrate the need to examine these emotional behaviors across development, and to continue to explore the e ects of social sca olding on behavioral and neural manifestations of emotion regulation in childhood (Dougherty et al., 2015).

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directly support explicit regulation include the dorsomedial (dmPFC), ventrolateral (vlPFC), and

p. 206

Social Modulation of Emotion Regulation Across Neurodevelopment While neuroscienti c investigation of the social regulation of emotions during childhood and adolescence is still nascent, biopsychosocial evidence suggests that social tuning of emotion regulation falls into three interacts with child temperament to promote the development of neural circuits underpinning emotion regulation (Callaghan & Tottenham, 2016; Gee, 2016). Parental presence during childhood also dampens stress responses during fear learning, in a process often described as “social bu ering” (Callaghan & Tottenham, 2016; Gee, 2016; Gunnar & Hostinar, 2015). Peers play an increasingly important role in emotional processes as children become adolescents, although more work is needed to establish a direct relationship between peer in uence and circuits underlying emotion regulation in teenagers. By adulthood, romantic partners are thought to be the primary social modulators of emotional processes (see Stephens et al., this volume), although evidence for these e ects is mixed in populations of di erent ages and genders (Ditzen et al., 2007; Heinrichs et al., 2003; Kirschbaum et al., 1995). Emerging evidence collected during childhood and adolescence suggests that both parent- and peergenerated social-bu ering e ects interact with neural networks implicated in self-regulation of emotion, especially with the mPFC–amygdala circuits thought to underlie implicit emotion regulation (reviewed in Tottenham, 2015). While romantic relationships become increasingly important later in adolescence, this review focuses on the factors thought to be most essential to social and emotional neurodevelopment prior to initiation of romantic partnerships (Collins et al., 2008). Rather, we detail cross-species evidence for a sensitive period for parental entrainment of emotional circuits during childhood, and ongoing work detailing possible modulation of emotion by peers during adolescence.

Parental Modulation of Emotion Regulation Circuits During Childhood During childhood, the presence of a parent provides a bu er against stress and fear, and plays a key role in emotional learning by communicating threat information and facilitating early exploration (Tottenham, 2015). These e ects are thought to act in part through parental regulation of the hypothalamic-pituitaryadrenal (HPA) axis, which coordinates stress responses (often measured using cortisol) throughout the life span and appears to be modulated by social support (Gunnar & Hostinar, 2015). In addition to reducing p. 207

cortisol stress responses in children, parental presence

is believed to sca old the development of

circuitry implicated in implicit emotion regulation. Converging cross-species neurobiological research from rodents, nonhuman primates, and humans suggests that the presence of a caregiver entrains mPFC–amygdala circuitry during childhood, in what is thought to be a sensitive period—a developmental phase marked by heightened plasticity and susceptibility to environmental in uences—for the development of this network (for relevant reviews, see Callaghan & Tottenham, 2016; Gee, 2016). Behavioral evidence suggests young children are not able to e ectively employ implicit regulation without parental sca olding (Lunkenheimer et al., 2011). This parental sca olding e ect is thought to be instantiated through two primary biological mechanisms (Callaghan & Tottenham, 2016). First, caregiver presence attenuates HPA reactivity in response to threatening or stressful stimuli (Doom et al., 2015; Hostinar et al., 2015; Moriceau & Sullivan, 2006). Second, parental cues appear to induce implicit regulation of emotion in children and promote inverse functional connectivity between the vmPFC and the amygdala (Gee et al., 2014). This is true in both typically developing and in anxious children (Conner et al., 2012). Notably, similar ndings have also been reported in adult romantic partnerships, with women experiencing reduced threat-related hypothalamus, insula, and superior temporal sulcus activation in the presence of their spouses, particularly in couples with high relationship quality (Coan et al., 2006). These ndings support developmental theories that argue that parental

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primary developmental stages (Gunnar & Hostinar, 2015; Gee, 2016). During childhood, parental care

availability engages mPFC regulation of the amygdala to sca old emotional development (Gee, 2016; Tottenham, 2015), both in humans and other, nonhuman, mammalian species (see Callaghan & Tottenham, 2016 for a comprehensive review). In typically developing youth, parental bu ering e ects observed in childhood largely disappear by middle childhood, suggesting that childhood is a sensitive period for parental in uence (Callaghan & Tottenham, 2016; Hostinar et al., 2015). These developmental e ects appear to be driven primarily by the onset of puberty, rather than by chronological age: young adolescents in early stages of puberty still display reduced stress responses in the presence of parents, and teens in mid to late puberty demonstrate no such bu ering e ects (Doom et al., 2017). Similarly, parental presence fails to promote inverse mPFC–amygdala coupling in adolescents, perhaps indicating parents are less important for sca olding functional connectivity underlying emotional regulation after the childhood sensitive period closes (Gee et al., 2014). Although these ndings point to reduced parental in uence on biological factors implicated in emotion regulation in later development, older adolescents and young adults still appear to model their parent’s neurobehavioral emotional pro les during implicit regulation. For example, parental recruitment of the amygdala, vlPFC, and dmPFC (alongside regions associated with mentalizing, including the superior temporal sulcus and temporoparietal junction) during a ect labeling predicts greater adolescent emotional competence, suggesting that parents’ emotional competencies continue to be linked to their children’s p. 208

emotional competencies, even in adolescence (Telzer et al., 2014).

Additionally, parents continue to

assist in regulating their children’s emotions throughout adolescence (although to a decreasing extent), with high-quality parent-child relationships consistently predicting well-being, and stressful parenting predicting increased depression (Greenberg et al., 1983). This parental regulation of emotions may be particularly important for adolescents who display a high degree of internalizing symptoms (Mercado et al., 2019). Notably, in adolescent girls, the connection between parent-child relationship quality and child depression is moderated by neural sensitivity to social rejection in the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, such that high neural sensitivity and a stressful parent–child relationship predict the worst depression outcomes, and high neural sensitivity and high relationship quality predicts the best (Rudolph et al., 2018). Similarly, maternal presence has been shown to increase activity in the ventral striatum, a key brain region involved in evaluating rewards, when teens select safe choices during risk-taking (Guassi Moreira & Telzer, 2018). These ndings suggest that although the amygdala becomes increasingly less sensitive to parental in uence during adolescence, parents’ presence may still actively modulate other neural circuits during teen development. Examinations of behavioral and brain development in children who have experienced parental deprivation further underscore the signi cance of parents in emotion-regulation development. Children raised in institutions, and therefore without consistent, quality caregiving, display impairments in emotion regulation and a drastic increase in risk for psychopathology (Bos et al., 2011; Tottenham et al., 2010). Additionally, these children display increased amygdala volume (linked in this population to poorer emotion regulation and increased anxiety), precocious maturation of mPFC–amygdala functional connectivity, and blunted parental bu ering e ects on mPFC–amygdala connectivity with their adoptive parents, suggesting that the sensitive period for parental sca olding of regulatory development may close in the absence of consistent caregiving (Callaghan & Tottenham, 2016; Callaghan et al., 2019; Gee et al., 2013; Tottenham et al., 2010). However, one recent study reported that previously institutionalized children vary signi cantly in their tendency to demonstrate parental bu ering e ects and that this variability has important implications for attachment security and anxiety (Callaghan, Gee, et al., 2019). These ndings highlight the ongoing importance of caregiver presence during neurodevelopment and suggest a potential mechanism for the neural embedding of high-quality familial relationships that promote resilience in a ected populations (McLaughlin et al., 2012; VanTieghem & Tottenham, 2018).

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adolescence. For example, parental dampening of cortisol stress responses diminishes signi cantly after

Peer E ects on Neurodevelopment and Emotion Regulation During Adolescence While parental stress bu ering is relatively consistent during childhood, peer bu ering appears to be less p. 209

e ective during this period. For example, children do

not display di erential cortisol responses in the

bu er against stress for adolescents, although peer in uences on stress responses and emotion regulation during adolescence appear to vary across di erent contexts and samples, with peers sometimes bu ering and sometimes heightening negative emotional experiences (Adams et al., 2011; Calhoun et al., 2014; Doom et al., 2017; Peters et al., 2011; Stewart et al., 2013). For example, the presence of close friends who possess positive relationship traits increases HPA axis regulation in response to social stressors, while close friends that encourage co-rumination appear to increase stress responses (Calhoun et al., 2014; Stewart et al., 2013). Other recent work has suggested that the presence of peers may actually increase HPA reactivity in response to social stress in adolescents—a stark contrast to work examining parental in uences on stress responses in childhood (Doom et al., 2017). These ndings may be indicative of an increase in sensitivity to negative peer dynamics in adolescence: for example, self-conscious emotion and autonomic arousal in response to peer evaluation is heightened in adolescents (compared to younger children and young adults) (Somerville et al., 2013). However, the e ects of peer relationships on HPA axis reactivity in particular appear to depend on a number of individual and contextual factors including gender and social-network characteristics (e.g., network size, amount of peer interaction) (Morin–Major et al., 2016; Rus & Tiemensma, 2017). Peer e ects on neural circuits have not been investigated during explicit self-regulation paradigms in adolescents. However, preliminary evidence from adjacent elds suggests that self-regulation may be impacted by peer in uence. For example, adolescents who believe peers are watching them display heightened embarrassment, increased mPFC activity, and altered ventral striatum–mPFC connectivity relative to adults and younger children, which may re ect altered adolescent self-monitoring in the presence of peers (Somerville et al., 2013). Anxious adolescents display heightened amygdala activity during anticipated evaluation by peers they did not want to engage with, and disrupted (positive) vlPFC–amygdala functional connectivity during the same task, unlike typically developing youth (Guyer, Lau, et al., 2008). Peers also appear to in uence how adolescents process and respond to risks and rewards, such that peer presence induces greater risk-taking and increased striatal responsivity, although it does not appear to impact performance or activity in cognitive control regions (mPFC or the insula) during a behavioral inhibition task (Smith et al., 2018). These e ects may vary across social contexts: unlike adults, adolescents display reduced behavioral cognitive control in response to positive social cues when expecting a reward in the presence of peers as compared to when they are alone or do not receive social cues (Breiner et al., 2018). These data broadly suggest that peer presence may in uence assessment of social rewards at the behavioral and neural level in adolescents, but not adults (e.g., Chein et al., 2011).

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presence of peers as compared to strangers (Doom et al., 2017). Conversely, friends can be an e ective

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Towards an Integrated Study of Regulatory Development in Social Contexts A review of the extant research points to several important gaps in the literature. While behavioral research neuroscienti c and biopsychosocial research on social factors impacting emotion regulation during development has focused on parental, and speci cally maternal, regulatory e ects, particularly in the context of parental deprivation. The role of secondary (and other) caregivers during childhood on the development of emotion-regulation networks has not yet been well described. Likewise, the impact of peer in uence on emotion-regulation circuits during adolescence (after the proposed sensitive periods for parental in uence may have closed) is underexplored. While a few studies have examined parent-child relationship quality as a mechanism for emotional trait transmission across generations (e.g., Telzer et al., 2014), the e ects of caregiver or peer relationship quality on the neurobiological underpinnings of emotional-regulation development is still poorly understood (although HPA axis modulation and friendship quality and style have been evaluated during childhood and adolescence; e.g., Calhoun et al., 2014; Stewart et al., 2013). Additionally, some researchers have found cultural e ects on developmental trajectories of emotion regulation (including physiological correlates) and on parental regulation of child and adolescent emotions, suggesting further exploration of societal and cultural variations may provide insight into the development of these behaviors and circuits (Bowie et al., 2013; Grabell et al., 2015; Morelen et al., 2012). Work investigating the role of parental in uences on social bu ering and neurodevelopment of selfregulation has primarily focused on implicit, and not explicit, self-regulation (although a large body of literature has explored how family-context variables predict both forms of behavioral regulation in children; see Morris et al., 2007 for a helpful review). This fact precludes us from drawing strong conclusions about how social context might impact deliberate control of emotions during development (although some investigation of peer in uence on cognitive control in emotional contexts has been conducted in adolescents; e.g. Breiner et al., 2018). Neuroscienti c investigation of both implicit and explicit regulation in various social environments may also provide insight into how these circuits function day to day. Longitudinal work (with a focus on temporal dynamics of emotion processes; see Lougheed, this volume) would be particularly helpful in tracking trajectories of self-regulation in social contexts and de ning possible sensitive periods for social in uences. Some studies have examined longitudinal e ects of early life stress on emotion regulation, underlying circuits, and later outcomes (e.g., Kim et al., 2013), but continued work in varying contexts and ages might enhance our understanding.

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The emerging literature reviewed in this chapter points to the need for socially-informed investigation of emotion-regulation neurodevelopment, and reveals pathways for continued exploration. Future work should continue to examine the mechanisms by which social experiences are biologically embedded, and assess the various ways in which social contexts in uence internal emotional computations and later psychobiological outcomes.

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has established the importance of social bu ering in emotional development, the majority of

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The Oxford Handbook of Emotional Development Daniel Dukes (ed.) et al. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/978019 8855903.001.0001 9780191889516 9780198855903

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CHAPTER

15 Emotion Development in Autism  Caitlin M. Conner, Andrea T. Wieckowski, Taylor N. Day, Carla A. Mazefsky https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198855903.013.11 Published: 13 January 2022

Pages 219–233

Online ISBN: Print ISBN:

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Published: 2022

Abstract From the earliest descriptions, children with autism have been described as presenting with di erences in emotional expression and regulation. However, autism spectrum disorder (ASD) investigate the emotional impairments observed in individuals with ASD across the life span, including how it contributes to a range of poor outcomes. Atypical emotion development can be used to di erentiate those at risk for ASD from typically developing children. Research has also identi ed di erences in emotional awareness, expression, recognition, and regulation among children and adults with ASD. Priority areas for future research, such as longitudinal studies of emotion dysregulation beginning in early childhood; development of interventions targeting emotion awareness, recognition, and expression; and study and treatment of emotion dysregulation among adults, will be discussed.

Keywords: autism spectrum disorder, emotional development, emotion awareness, emotion recognition, emotion expression, emotion regulation Subject: Psychology, Developmental Psychology Series: Oxford Library of Psychology Collection: Oxford Handbooks Online

Emotion in Autism Spectrum Disorder AUTISM

spectrum disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder that a ects up to 1 in 59 individuals (Xu

et al., 2018). ASD is diagnosed based on behavioral criteria that include de cits in social communication and social reciprocity, stereotyped and repetitive interests and behaviors, and sensory di erences. Nonetheless, children with autism have also been described as presenting with di erences in emotional expression and regulation since the disorder was rst described (Kanner, 1943). Delays and impairments in emotional development are evident as early as infancy and toddlerhood in those who are eventually diagnosed with ASD. Early emotion dysregulation may contribute to delays in the age of ASD diagnosis because behavioral and emotional symptoms (e.g., tantrums, irritability) are not components of the Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders: Fifth edition (DSM5: American Psychiatric Association, 2013) diagnostic criteria for ASD. Yet, these emotional di erences are often what prompt parents to seek initial mental health or developmental evaluations (Chandler et al., 2016; Soke et al., 2018). Although emotion dysregulation in early childhood is not unique to ASD, early emotional di erences in both positive and negative a ect are prominent enough that they can be used to di erentiate children with ASD from typically developing children and children with other developmental delays (Garon et al., 2016; Macari et al., 2017). By as early as 12 months of age, there are documented di erences in their range of positive and negative facial expressions and the frequency at which toddlers with ASD share warm, joyful smiles with others relative to toddlers without ASD (Macari et al., 2017). At the group level, toddlers at elevated risk for p. 220

ASD by virtue of having an older sibling

with ASD, as well as those with a con rmed diagnosis of ASD,

have greater negative emotionality than typically developing toddlers (Garon et al., 2016; Macari et al., 2017). Collectively, the present literature indicates that young children with ASD demonstrate concurring atypical emotional arousal (i.e., lower positive a ect, higher negative a ect) and reduced emotion regulation.

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diagnostic criteria do not include these emotional di erences. More recently, research has begun to

Interestingly, however, early intervention approaches rarely directly address emotional functioning. Some evidence-based programs emphasize using parental or clinician a ect to engage the child (e.g., Early Start Denver Model), and some curriculums describe the importance of emotional self-regulation in their theoretical foundations (e.g., Joint Attention, Symbolic Play, Engagement, and Regulation (JASPER) model; Social Communication, Emotional Regulation, and Transactional Support (SCERTS) model). However, the measurement of emotional processes. For example, a recent review highlighted that no clinical trials of early intervention programs for autism have measured emotion regulation as an outcome (Beck et al., 2020). This represents a signi cant gap in early intervention services, and is an especially noteworthy omission given that promoting healthy emotional development early in life could lessen later emotional challenges and co-occurring psychiatric diagnoses. There is a growing body of evidence indicating that aberrant emotional development in ASD is associated with a range of poor outcomes, such as greater social and communication de cits, lower academic and vocational achievement, and co-occurring psychiatric conditions (for review, see Cai et al., 2018; Costa et al., 2017). Poor outcomes for adults with ASD, such as high rates of unemployment and underemployment, limited independence from families, and poor quality of life, may be at least partly due to impaired emotion development (Mazefsky & White, 2014). Therefore, improving the eld’s understanding of emotional development and emotional experiences of individuals with ASD, as well as how to most e ectively intervene on emotional awareness and regulation de cits, are vital areas for further research and attention. In the following sections, we summarize considerations regarding the socialization of emotion, as well as research on key components of emotional development including emotional awareness, emotional expression and recognition, and emotion regulation in ASD.

Emotion Development and Socialization The majority of the research on emotional presentation in early childhood in ASD has focused on characterizing the child’s expression and regulation of emotion, but emotional development is thought to p. 221

be heavily shaped by how others respond to their

emotions during this formative period of development

(see Messinger et al., this volume). Emotion regulation research in typically developing youth has stressed the important role that caregivers play in the development of emotion regulation strategies in children (Eisenberg et al., 1998). The early years of a child’s life may be particularly important in learning and consciously choosing emotion regulation strategies to use in a situation (Cole et al., 1994). Parents act as models and actively instruct their children in how to respond to their emotions in emotion socialization practices (Eisenberg et al., 1998). For example, parents can teach their child to suppress or minimize emotions that they or their culture perceive as negative, such as anger or sadness. In ASD, the caregiver’s role is likely complicated since individuals with ASD struggle with emotional expression and recognizing the emotions of others, and may either not seek comfort at all or seek it in atypical ways from the caregiver when in distress (Cole et al., 1994) (see Méndez Leal & Silvers, this volume). As noted below, emotion expression may also be incongruent with internal experiences. These di erences may have cascading e ects on how caregivers respond to their child with ASD, and ultimately how children with ASD learn to express and manage emotion. Across several observational studies of interactions between caregivers and youth with ASD from toddlerhood to middle childhood, it seems that caregivers (generally mothers) use a variety of emotion coregulation strategies with their children with ASD. However, when compared to parents of typically developing youth, caregivers use simpler, less verbal emotion co-regulation strategies, such as physically comforting their child (for review, see Cibralic et al., 2019). Other conclusions stemming from observational research studies using interaction tasks include a lack of synchrony between caregiver and child emotions,

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outcomes measured focus on core symptoms, intellectual ability, and adaptive behavior, with no

and a tendency for mothers of children with ASD to change their emotional engagement strategies more quickly in order to try to maintain positive engagement with their child (Cibralic et al., 2019). Less research has focused on how other important adults, such as teachers, respond to the emotional expressions of children with ASD. Further, this research has virtually ignored how atypical, unclear, or incongruent emotional expression impacts the socialization of emotion. Future research should continue to examine with siblings, peers, teachers), using methods beyond coding of observable displays of a ect (see Riediger & Bellingtier, this volume; Stephens et al., this volume).

Emotion Awareness Alexithymia or de cits in emotional awareness—de ned as the inability to notice, describe, and distinguish between emotions—was originally studied in relationship to psychosomatic disorders (for review, see p. 222

Taylor et al., 2016). Emotion awareness de cits

have been linked to various psychiatric disorders,

including post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety disorders, personality disorders, substance abuse disorders, depression, and eating disorders. De cits in emotion awareness also predict decreased responses to interventions to treat these conditions (Taylor et al., 2016). Di erences in emotion awareness have been observed across the life span among those on the autism spectrum (Berthoz & Hill, 2005; Gri

n et al., 2016; Milosavljevic et al., 2016). Whereas emotion awareness

impairment is thought to a ect 10% of the overall population, studies of adults with ASD have indicated a markedly higher prevalence of 40–50% (Berthoz & Hill, 2005). Bird and colleagues (2010), among others, have posited that emotion awareness impairments account for some characteristics traditionally conceptualized as core ASD impairments, such as de cits in empathic responses and de cits in recognizing others’ emotions. Outside of ASD, di

culty with interoception, or the ability to sense one’s own bodily sensations, has been

identi ed as a potential cause of emotion awareness de cits (Mul et al., 2018). Hat eld et al. (2019) posited that a global integration de cit of interoception is at play in ASD as well, consistent with di

culties

integrating external sensory input (leading to sensory hyposensitivity or hypersensitivity) in ASD. Furthermore, this viewpoint is in accordance with the variation seen in ASD regarding di

culties noticing

hunger and thirst and simultaneously integrating multiple paths of sensory input (e.g., sound and tactile; Noel et al., 2018). Complicating these theories is the nding that some individuals with ASD score highly on subjective measures of awareness of bodily sensations (interoceptive sensibility), while also scoring low on measures of interoceptive accuracy (objective measures of bodily awareness, such as heartbeat-reporting tasks). This disparity may account for heightened emotional symptoms in ASD, such as anxiety, as well as di

culty verbally labelling emotions (Gar nkel et al., 2016). Previous studies have shown that high

awareness of bodily sensations is associated with anxiety and somatic complaints in typically developing children and adolescents (Rie e et al., 2008). Perhaps overawareness of bodily sensations, associated with the sensory di erences seen in ASD, is a driver of increased emotional di

culties.

Overall, there is much need for future research on emotion awareness in ASD, including how poor emotion awareness is related to core ASD symptoms such as social de cits, a ective empathy, and sensory di erences, and potential intervention pathways to improve impaired emotion awareness in ASD. It will be important for future studies to utilize multiple methods, including self-report and physiological and neural markers, as an inherent challenge of this work is the very fact that alexithymia may impact one’s ability to accurately self-re ect. Gaigg and colleagues (2018) argued that interventions that focus on building awareness of internal emotional cues, such as mindfulness-based interventions, may be particularly helpful

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emotion socialization in older childhood and beyond, as well as in the contexts of other relationships (e.g.,

for individuals with ASD who struggle with emotional awareness. Technology could also be used to build awareness of physical sensations through methods like biofeedback (DuBois et al., 2016).

p. 223

Emotion Expression and Emotion Recognition appropriate to the situation, is critical for success in social interactions (see Clément & Dukes, this volume). While emotion recognition and emotion expression skills emerge early in life (Field & Walden, 1982), individuals with ASD experience more di

culty with both emotion recognition and emotion expression

compared to their typically developing peers early in development. Even as young as 3 years of age, children with ASD show less response to others’ facial expressions than their typically developing peers (Scambler et al., 2007). The di

culties with facial emotion recognition appear early in childhood (Rump et al., 2009) and

have been shown to be associated with everyday social functioning. In a meta-analysis, Trevisan and Birmingham (2016) found that emotion recognition ability in individuals with ASD is positively associated with social functioning, and negatively associated with ASD symptoms, suggesting that impairment in emotion recognition ability may hinder social interactions. Impaired emotion recognition also likely a ects an individual’s ability to bene t from emotion socialization from caregivers and others in their environment (Cole et al., 1994). While some studies nd no di erences in the ability of individuals with ASD to recognize others’ basic emotional expressions (e.g., Castelli, 2005), literature reviews and meta-analyses have generally reported de cits in facial emotion recognition in individuals with ASD compared to controls (see Harms et al., 2010; Uljarevic & Hamilton, 2013). In one such meta-analysis of facial emotion recognition, Lozier and colleagues (2014) found that individuals with ASD show facial emotion recognition de cits across di erent expressions, and that the magnitude of the observed de cits increases with age, but is not accounted for by cognitive ability. A large limitation in the current eld is the wide range of stimuli used to evaluate facial emotion recognition, likely contributing to the discrepant results. In addition, a majority of the studies have focused on evaluating recognition of visual cues of emotion, limiting our understanding of emotion recognition using other modalities, as well as multisensory emotion recognition as is experienced in everyday interactions. The few studies that investigated recognition of emotion using other modalities, beyond visual cues of emotion, found diverging results. While some studies indicate impairment across modalities for adults with ASD (e.g., Philip et al., 2010), others found impairment for children with ASD in some modalities (i.e., visual or tone of voice) but not in others (i.e., verbal content or combined modalities) (Lindner & Rosén, 2006). More recently, research has also focused on investigating the mechanisms behind the impairment. A systematic review by Black et al. (2017) found evidence from both eye-tracking and electroencephalogram (EEG) studies that suggests atypical attentional and cognitive processes for p. 224

emotional faces in individuals with ASD. This is an emerging area however, and more research

is needed

to understand the factors and mechanisms behind emotion recognition impairments. With regard to emotion expression, while there are some inconsistent ndings, several studies indicate that children with ASD show less spontaneous expression of emotion (e.g., Capps et al., 1993). In addition, individuals with ASD have been found to show expressive incoherence, or mismatch, between their expression of emotion and their behaviors or experiences (e.g., Costa et al., 2017), and their facial expressions of emotion are often described as inappropriate, atypical, or ambiguous (Brewer et al., 2016; Faso et al., 2014). In a recent meta-analysis of facial emotion expression in ASD, Trevisan and colleagues (2018) found that the expressions made by individuals with ASD are briefer, occur less frequently, are seen as lower in quality and accuracy, and are less likely to be shared with others or mimicked. However, participants with ASD do not show impairment in the intensity of emotion expression, or reaction time of expression onset. IQ and age moderate the di erences found, with older individuals with higher IQ being

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Recognition of nonverbally expressed emotion, as well as spontaneous expression of emotion that is

better able to produce facial emotion expressions. In addition, setting played an important role, with individuals with ASD naturally producing expressions di erently from controls, but showing less impairment when asked to express emotions in a laboratory setting. This nding emphasizes the importance of evaluating facial emotion recognition and expression in natural settings. Much less is known about the mechanisms contributing to atypical facial expression, and there has been an overemphasis on voice). The development and use of objective methods for measuring facial expressions of emotion, such as applying machine-learning methods to automate emotion recognition software that can rapidly code an individual’s facial expressions, is needed. Interventions have been developed to address emotion recognition impairment in individuals with ASD, and a smaller but growing number of interventions target emotion expression de cits. A large portion of these training programs are computer-based. While several studies show promising results, there are many methodological limitations, and the results indicate poor generalization and maintenance of skills (e.g., Kouo & Egel, 2016). In a systematic review of the generalizability of ndings from randomized controlled trials on a wide range of emotion recognition training programs for individuals with ASD, Berggren and colleagues (2018) found that, while existing programs are promising in improving emotion recognition, the extent to which such training generalizes to daily social life is still unknown.

Emotion Regulation Emotion regulation is de ned as the ability to modify one’s arousal level and emotional state to achieve goal-directed behaviors (Gross & Thompson, 2006). Emotion regulation is thought to contribute to a range p. 225

of psychiatric conditions (Mazefsky

et al., 2013). Impairment in emotion regulation is common in

individuals with ASD and is evident early (Mazefsky & White, 2014). Evidence from behavioral paradigms suggests that young children with ASD utilize less e

cacious and more rudimentary strategies to regulate

their emotions; speci cally, children with ASD (ages 2–6 years) demonstrated greater resignation, avoidance, and vocal/physical venting, as well as fewer communicative strategies, than their typical peers in response to frustration tasks (Gulsrud et al., 2010; Jahromi et al., 2012; Nuske et al., 2017). Nuske and colleagues (2017) posited that perhaps caregivers respond to their child’s developmental level, and that youth with ASD are developmentally delayed, rather than atypical, in terms of emotion regulation strategy use. Reliance on cross-sectional methods has limited the ability to make conclusions about trajectories of emotion regulation development. However, the literature on older children, adolescents, and adults with ASD suggests that emotion regulation is often atypical. As many as 62.2% of youth with ASD in a large USA sample (n=1,800) present with clinically elevated degrees of emotion regulation impairment (e.g., one standard deviation above the typically developing mean) compared to 13.3% of general child and adolescent populations (n=1,000) (Mazefsky, 2019). Others have found that more than half (52%) of youth with ASD have emotion dysregulation scores two standard deviations higher than the mean (Samson et al., 2014). Overall, there is now substantial evidence for common and interfering emotion dysregulation in ASD. Several potential mechanisms have been proposed to explain the high rates of impaired emotion regulation in ASD, in addition to the potential for di erences in the socialization of emotion development as described earlier. However, there currently exists limited empirical support for these mechanisms (Mazefsky & White, 2014). Core ASD symptoms such as di

culties reading social cues, poor perspective taking and problem

solving, and lower response inhibition may in uence the development of impaired emotion regulation (Mazefsky & White, 2014; Samson et al., 2014). Other features associated with ASD, such as slow processing speed and di erences in attentional processes, are also potential in uences (Mazefsky et al., 2013). ASD symptom severity is also associated with emotion regulation impairment (Samson et al., 2014), which could indicate that such impairment is inherent in ASD (Mazefsky & White, 2014). Di erences in neural structures

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the visual domain despite emotion expression being multimodal (e.g., through body language, tone of

and networks may contribute to emotion regulation impairment; the amygdala and its connections to the prefrontal cortex, insula, and striatal cortex have been connected to emotion regulation impairment (for review, see Mazefsky et al., 2013). Additionally, heightened baseline physiological arousal observed in some with ASD has been similarly posited to contribute (Mazefsky & White, 2014).

ASD tend to rely upon strategies that are traditionally considered maladaptive (e.g., avoidance and denial) and less upon “adaptive” strategies like reappraisal, use fewer strategies, and are less exible in their usage of emotion regulation strategies. Using less adaptive emotion regulation strategies has been crosssectionally associated with heightened depression, aggression, and anxiety, as well as problem behaviors p. 226

such as meltdowns, self-injury, and aggression (for review, see

Cai et al., 2018). Research has also linked

emotion regulation impairment in ASD to other distal outcomes, including serving as a barrier to academic success and post-secondary outcomes (White et al., 2016) and increasing the risk of inpatient psychiatric hospitalizations (Righi et al., 2018), police contact, emergency room visits for behavioral/psychiatric concerns, and suicidal ideation (Conner et al., 2021). Again, most studies have been cross-sectional, so very little is known about the actual course of how problems develop and their causal mechanisms. Further, while an individual’s context (available supports and interventions, family systems, etc.) likely interacts with their self-regulatory capabilities to impact outcomes, contextual factors have been largely ignored in the autism emotion regulation literature to date. Several interventions have been developed for impaired emotion regulation in ASD and have some emerging evidence supporting their e

cacy. The Stress and Anger Management Program for 5- to 7-year-olds with

ASD and emotion regulation impairments is a group-based cognitive behavior therapy (CBT) intervention that was found to improve emotion regulation when compared to a waitlist sample (Scarpa & Reyes, 2011). A 10-session CBT intervention for 8- to 12-year-olds with ASD, called the Secret Agent Society—Operation Regulation (SAS-OR), has been found to improve emotion regulation di

culties compared to a waitlist

control condition (Thomson et al., 2015; Weiss et al., 2018). An intensive outpatient program targeting emotion regulation impairment in a group format with CBT, applied behavior analysis, and mindfulness techniques improved behavioral outcomes, with reduced aggressive behavior, depression, and anxiety symptoms (Sha er et al., 2019). Two pilot studies have treated emotion regulation in adolescents and adults. A modi ed version of mindfulness-based cognitive therapy for young adults with ASD was found to be feasible and reduced emotion regulation impairment (Conner & White, 2018). For adolescents with ASD, a mindfulness-based intervention called the Emotion Awareness and Skills Enhancement (EASE) program was found to reduce emotion regulation impairment (Conner et al., 2019). While these interventions show promise, more research on larger samples, with randomization to an active comparison condition and longterm follow-up, is needed. Studies of e

cacy and dissemination and implementation into community

practice are also vitally needed. Further, most published research has been single-arm, proof-of-concept trials or has used a waitlist control, so the body of evidence is relatively weak. Essentially nothing is known about individual factors that impact response to treatment in order to support personalization of treatments, which are undoubtably important given the heterogeneity in autism. Future directions for research on emotion regulation in ASD include incorporating multiple levels of analysis to determine the source of emotion regulation impairments in ASD, evaluation of the time course and outcomes of emotion regulation impairment, investigation of how other emotion-related de cits (emotion awareness and emotion recognition) play a role in emotion regulation, and the development of personalized interventions to address emotion regulation impairment across the entire autism spectrum and life span.

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Studies concerning the use of speci c emotion regulation strategies in ASD have found that individuals with

p. 227

Future Directions Emotion research in ASD has grown in the past 20 years. However, there remains limited understanding of how emotion awareness, recognition, expression, and regulation a ect one another, social functioning, and require more research and subsequent dissemination. Moving the eld of a ective science in ASD forward requires attention to several methodological limitations of current work and speci c challenges related to the study of emotion within the context of ASD. Multimethod approaches are needed, with developmentally appropriate measures validated in ASD. Selfreport has provided some valuable insight into emotion in ASD but is not a viable method for the full autism spectrum. Behavioral coding of facial expressions, vocal responses, and other behaviors is complicated by the di erences in emotion expressions seen in ASD. Similarly, self-soothing behaviors for those with ASD, such as stimming, can look like emotional distress (Mazefsky et al., 2013). Furthermore, questionnaires and interviews have been mostly developed for typically developing populations and may function di erently in ASD, with self-report validity vulnerable to emotion awareness de cits and other-reporter accounts potentially biased by di erences in emotion expression and recognition (Mazefsky et al., 2013). At present, there are few measures of emotional experiences that were speci cally developed and validated for ASD. One measure that was developed for youth with ASD and validated in both large ASD and general youth samples is the Emotion Dysregulation Inventory (Mazefsky et al., 2018). Other measures—such as the Levels of Emotional Awareness Scale (Lane et al., 1990), which uses written vignettes to capture emotional responses and can account for di

culties in emotion awareness (Cai et al., 2018)—have been adopted for use in ASD

and are promising. Developmental and language-based confounds are also a challenge for studies of emotion development in ASD. Developmental age and receptive and expressive language levels need to be accounted for, and designs that incorporate multiple control groups (e.g., language-matched and agematched) would be ideal when feasible. Lastly, it will be important to measure how other people respond to and shape the emotional development of children with ASD, both in the early childhood period and beyond. Research on emotion development should be approached as a bidirectional, dynamic process similar to social development. There have been few studies to date to characterize trajectories of emotional development in ASD. Garon and colleagues (2016) examined the relationship between positive a ect at 12 months and subsequent emotion regulation and ASD symptomatology. They found that parent report of lower-trait positive a ect predicted greater di

culty with emotion regulation at 24 months, which in turn predicted greater severity of ASD

symptoms at 36 months among children at high genetic risk (i.e., there was an indirect e ect between p. 228

positive a ect and ASD symptoms). Emerging evidence suggests that di

culties with emotion regulation

and emotional/behavioral problems persist from preschool to early elementary ages (Berkovits et al., 2017; Chandler et al., 2016). Future longitudinal studies should focus on how di erences in emotion awareness, recognition, and expression interact in youth with ASD and contribute to downstream social and psychiatric concerns. Importantly, there is an increasing interest in better characterizing emotional development in ASD to elucidate early manifestations of emotion dysregulation and the emergence of co-occurring psychiatric conditions (Mazefsky et al., 2013). Recent estimates from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention indicate that the large majority of 4-year-olds with ASD have associated emotional and behavioral problems, and that 95% of children with ASD have at least one co-occurring condition by age 8 (e.g., anxiety, depression, tantrums, sleep di

culties) (Soke et al., 2018). Poor emotion regulation has been

theorized as a mechanism underlying these high rates of co-occurring psychiatric conditions (Mazefsky et al., 2013).

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outcomes in daily living. Interventions targeting facets of emotional development are largely nascent and

Intervention studies in ASD suggest that emotion dysregulation is tractable (Gulsrud et al., 2010; Scarpa & Reyes, 2011). Thus, it may be possible to prevent, or at least reduce the burden associated with co-occurring emotional and behavioral problems in ASD by shifting greater attention to targeting emotion development and regulation in early intervention programs (Croen et al., 2006; Madden et al., 2017; Herring et al., 2006; Nuske et al., 2018). Additionally, future research into other modalities of emotion recognition beyond visual should also incorporate consideration of di erent means of communicating a ect to others (Berggren et al., 2018). It may be fruitful to incorporate technology to better mimic the multifaceted and multimodal nature of emotion. For example, computer training interventions can use more naturalistic situations to train individuals in simultaneous visual and auditory strategies for emotion recognition. Emotional expression intervention can likewise include facial emotional expression alongside tone of voice. In sum, the concept that emotional development is a critical area of study for autism has become more widely accepted. Likewise, there is increasing evidence for delayed, atypical, or impaired emotional awareness, recognition, expression, and regulation in ASD. Unfortunately, evidence-based interventions targeting these aspects of emotional development are either currently nonexistent or lacking in evidence base. Better delineation of the mechanisms underlying emotional delays and di erences in ASD may support more targeted intervention e orts. Further, research following individuals across the life span, especially in adults, is needed. Thus, while much progress has been made in the past two decades in understanding emotional development in individuals with ASD, and especially appreciating the importance of work in this area, much work remains.

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modalities (i.e., looking at another person’s facial expressions) are needed; studies of emotional expression

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16 Hearing Loss and Young Children’s Development of Emotional Competence: The Role of Parenting  Lizet Ketelaar, John Lambie, Boya Li, Adva Eichengreen, Anat Zaidman-Zait, Carolien Rie e https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198855903.013.10 Published: 13 January 2022

Pages 234–246

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Published: 2022

Abstract Hearing loss can have a signi cant impact on children’s development. It can diminish children’s ability to perceive and produce spoken language, which has been studied extensively. However, to the social environment. Interestingly, there is little research on this. In this chapter, the authors begin by discussing the development of four aspects of emotional competence (emotion awareness, empathy, Theory of Mind, and the ability to express moral emotions) and their link to young children’s hearing loss. Parents are a huge part of young children’s social environment and therefore play an important role in the development of emotional competence in their children. The second part of the chapter discusses challenges that parents of children with hearing loss may encounter, for example with regard to parent–child interaction and parenting stress. The chapter ends with a discussion of clinical implications.

Keywords: emotional competence, emotion awareness, empathy, Theory of Mind, moral emotions, emotion validation, emotion communication, parenting stress, hearing loss, cochlear implant Subject: Psychology, Developmental Psychology Series: Oxford Library of Psychology Collection: Oxford Handbooks Online

Introduction WITH

a prevalence of around 1 per 1,000 newborns, many children are born with permanent bilateral hearing

loss (HL) each year, half of whom have a severe (61–90 dB) or profound (>90 dB) HL. The neonatal hearing screening program, now implemented in many Western countries, enables early diagnosis of congenital HL and o ers the possibility of early intervention. Today’s intervention strategies, at least for young children with severe to profound HL born in Western countries, usually involve implanting an electronic device called a cochlear implant (CI) in the cochlea. This device enables the perception of sounds and speech for individuals who do not bene t from conventional acoustic hearing aids (HAs), which merely amplify sounds. Access to family-centered early intervention, which, in addition to tting children with CIs or HAs, includes speech and language therapy for the child and support for the family, is advocated in an international consensus statement (Moeller et al., 2013) and is common practice in Western countries. Despite access to early intervention, individuals with HL of all ages are more likely to experience social and mental-health problems compared with their hearing peers. For example, in comparison to hearing children, children with HL show more behavior problems, more often experience symptoms of depression p. 235

and/or anxiety, and have

more di

culties with peer relations (for reviews, see Stevenson et al., 2015;

Theunissen et al., 2014). Traditionally, the main focus of research among children with HL has been about the impact of language development on psychosocial well-being. However, language issues cannot solely account for psychosocial problems directly (Netten et al., 2015a). In hearing individuals, a lack of emotional competence is an important factor in the development of these social and mental-health problems (Southam–Gerow & Kendall, 2002). Thus, the question that arises is which underlying factors mediate the impact of having HL on these children’s development of emotional competence? In this chapter, we rst discuss the development of some key aspects of emotional competence (i.e., emotion awareness, empathy, theory of mind, and the ability to express moral emotions) in young children with HL, and how these are related to their social functioning and mental health. Next, one of the most important mediating factors is

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hearing loss can also negatively a ect children’s socioemotional development because it limits access

discussed: the role that parents play in their children’s development of emotional competence, and how parents of children with HL face unique challenges that may negatively impact their parenting practices. Finally, clinical implications of the ndings presented in this chapter are discussed.

Acquiring emotional competence over time seems to happen e ortlessly for most typically developing hearing children. However, it takes a well-oiled machine for emotional skills to develop in an ageappropriate manner. This becomes clear when considering children with HL. Here, we discuss four key aspects of emotional competence which prove to be challenging in the emotional development of children with HL and which may account for the problems these children face in their social life. Children’s emotion awareness refers to their ability to attend to and report their own emotions. It is essential for adaptive emotion regulation and communication, because it signals what is important to the child. In other words, it draws the child’s attention to speci c elements in the (social) environment that then elicit these feelings. In addition, knowing what kind of emotion a child is feeling (e.g., sad, angry, guilty) also reveals what they actually want to achieve. Sadness re ects that one needs some time to deal with loss; anger is felt when a goal is blocked and one feels that something can be done about it; and guilt shows the acknowledgment of having trespassed a social norm (Frijda, 1986). Emotion awareness plays a signi cant role in the development of children’s social competence (Payton et al., 2000; Smith et al., 2011) and in their p. 236

mental health (Rie e &

De Rooij, 2012; Zeman et al., 2002), and seems less well-developed in children

with HL (Rie e, 2012). Another core emotional skill which relates to social functioning is empathy. Empathy is often referred to as the “social glue” in human relationships, in the sense that it prompts people to help and not harm each other, and thus promotes social relationships (Baron–Cohen & Wheelwright, 2004; Eisenberg & Miller, 1987; Jolli e & Farrington, 2006). It has been argued that the predisposition to experience empathy is innate, evidenced by newborns’ re exive crying in response to another infant’s crying sounds. A number of studies showed that infants’ distress reactions to another infant’s crying were stronger than their distress reactions to a variety of other sounds (McDonald & Messinger, 2011). This phenomenon is known as emotional contagion, which denotes the a ective component of empathy. Although emotional contagion helps to identify the other person’s emotion, it may prevent one from reacting with appropriate social responses, such as comforting or sharing, if it results in high levels of personal distress. In order not to become overly distressed when witnessing the negative emotion of the other person, children need to distinguish between themselves and others, and be able to regulate their own arousal level. A small number of studies assessed a ective empathy in children with HL. In these studies, children’s empathic responses to an experimenter who pretended to experience a negative feeling (e.g., pain upon hurting her nger) were observed. No di erences were found between young children with HL and hearing children (Dirks et al., 2017; Ketelaar et al., 2013). However, empathy involves not only an a ective but also a cognitive component. The cognitive component of empathy denotes the ability to understand the other person’s emotional experience (McDonald & Messinger, 2011). In the literature, cognitive empathy is often used interchangeably with Theory of Mind (ToM). Yet, our understanding of ToM is the ability to attribute mental states to others (Ketelaar et al., 2012), which includes, but is not limited to, the ability to attribute emotions (see Reddy & Vanello, this volume, for their view on ToM). ToM is essential to understand and predict other people’s (emotional) behavior, and to coordinate one’s responses accordingly. In typically developing hearing children, gains in ToM can be seen from the age of 3 years onward. A large number of studies among children with HL (e.g.,

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Emotional Competence and Its Relation to Social Functioning and Mental Health in Young Children With Hearing Loss

Ketelaar et al., 2012; Peterson & Siegal, 2000; Terwogt & Rie e, 2004; Woolfe et al., 2002) demonstrate a signi cantly delayed development of ToM in this population. To our knowledge, only one study examined cognitive empathy in adolescents with HL. The outcomes suggest lower levels of cognitive empathy in these adolescents compared with peers without HL (Netten et al., 2015b).

called moral emotions such as shame, guilt, and pride alert us when we have hurt someone’s feelings, violated a norm, or done something exceptionally well (Tangney et al., 2007). Moral emotions urge people to behave appropriately (i.e., according to the norms and values of the group or society at large) (see Thompson, this volume, for a comprehensive view on moral development). Children who display these p. 237

emotions are deemed more socially competent (Stearns & Parrott, 2012) and show lower

levels of

aggression and delinquent behavior (Broekhof et al., 2018; Dahamat Azam et al., 2019). Moral emotions are acquired through social learning (see Clément & Dukes, this volume; Liew & Zhou, this volume). In order to experience a moral emotion, children need to be aware of the prevailing standards and to be able to judge their behavior according to those standards. Already at the preschool age, children with a CI can be observed to express less shame/guilt than their hearing peers following staged emotion-evoking events such as failure on a mastery task or breaking another person’s toy. In addition, these children also showed less signs of pride than hearing children when they succeeded on a mastery task (Ketelaar et al., 2015). These ndings may be explained by a ToM de cit. Dampened expression of moral emotions, even in the presence of overt feedback on the child’s performance by the experimenter, may re ect lack of a sense of what is generally regarded as reprehensible or admirable to others (i.e., a failure to correctly attribute mental states). A study on shame and guilt in adolescents with HL con rmed lower levels of these emotions still at this age (Broekhof et al., 2017), suggesting that the delay in the early years is not something children with HL can easily overcome. In those early years in particular, parents play a crucial role in the development of their children’s emotional competence. This will be discussed in the next section.

The Role of Parenting: Parental Emotion Coaching In early childhood, parents provide a central context within which children learn to understand and regulate their emotions (Cole et al., 2004; see also Riediger & Bellingtier, this volume). Parental emotion coaching is a communication style characterized by parental validation of the child’s emotions (as explained below), and a belief that the child’s negative emotions are an opportunity for teaching or intimacy (Gottman et al., 1996). The contrary to e ective coaching is “parental emotion dismissing,” which is characterized by parental invalidation of the child’s emotions and a belief that the child’s negative emotions are harmful and the parent’s job is to change these emotions as quickly as possible (Gottman et al., 1996). Emotion validation is the accurate and nonjudgmental communicative reference to another’s emotion or feeling (Linehan, 1993; Lambie & Lindberg, 2016). This process involves a knowledgeable other (e.g., a parent) nding a way to direct the child’s attention to the child’s own emotion or feeling in a way that helps the child both conceptualize/symbolize the emotion and “own” the emotion as a normal part of their experiential landscape (Rogers, 1959). For example, verbal emotion validation might be (said in an accepting way): “It looks like you are very angry”; “You seem to feel guilty” (Ginott, 1965). The caregiver p. 238

could nonverbally match the child’s facial expression (but

it is important this is done in a “marked” or

exaggerated way, as Fonagy et al. (2002) point out, so the child knows it is their own emotion, and not the caregiver’s emotion, that is being referred to); or the caregiver could “copy” the behavioral manifestation of the child’s feeling state without directly copying the child’s actions (e.g., the caregiver nodding his head up and down or blowing his cheeks out with a timing and intensity that matches the child enjoying banging their hand on the table; Stern, 1985).

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In addition to empathy and ToM, it is also people’s moral sense that guides their social behavior. The so-

The ipside of this is emotional invalidation, in which the child’s emotion is rejected in some way or incorrectly labeled—“Don’t be angry”; “You’re not really sad”—or there is a failure to attune to, or accept, the child’s feelings. This may lead the child to become alienated from their true feelings (Rogers, 1959), and therefore to have poorer emotion awareness (Linehan, 1993).

emotion awareness (Stegge & Meerum Terwogt, 2007), emotion expression (Eisenberg et al., 2001), emotion regulation (e.g., Cole et al., 2009; Fivush et al., 2009), and empathy (e.g., Taylor et al., 2013); whereas unsupportive reactions, such as minimizing the child’s experience, punishing the child for expressing emotions, or becoming distressed themselves, have all been found to be related to higher levels of negative emotionality and reduced coping ability in children (Eisenberg et al., 1999; Lunkenheimer et al., 2007).

Parental Emotion Coaching and Parenting Stress Among Parents of Children With Hearing Loss Parents have to learn to adapt to the special needs of their child with HL. The great majority (approximately 90–95%) of parents of children with HL have no HL themselves (Mitchell & Karchmer, 2004). This means that many parents may have to familiarize themselves with sign language—a language which is grammatically and syntactically very di erent from spoken language, and therefore hard to master—in order to e ectively communicate with their children. If parents opt to have their child with HL tted with a CI, most children will eventually use spoken language as their rst language. Still, many children with CI (in particular those implanted after age 2 years) do not reach age-equivalent spoken-language skills even after years of CI use (Ganek et al., 2012) and despite parents’ best e orts. The fact that the hearing status of the child di ers from that of the parents presents a signi cant barrier to e ective communication (Quittner et al., 2004). Therefore, it is not surprising that the quality and quantity of parents’ speech input diminish when communicating with infants with HL, compared with hearing infants (Barker et al., 2009; Lam & Kitamura, 2010). This could hamper parents’ ability to validate their p. 239

children’s emotions. It is harder for parents to communicate to their child that they

have tuned into their

emotions when the communication, verbal or signed, is not uent. Besides, parents and their children with HL spend less time in joint engagement (i.e., they share less coordinated attention for an object or event; Cejas et al., 2014). In addition, parental focus on improving the child’s language or communication (Loots & Devise, 2003), and limited conversations about emotions or moral norms (Barker et al., 2009), diminishes the emotional dimension in parent–child communication. This too presents a challenge, as emotion validation requires the parent drawing the child’s attention to the child’s own feeling state. Furthermore, in order to communicate emotion validation in a way that normalizes the child’s experiences and prevents them from feeling di erent or isolated by their own feelings, hearing parents of children with HL need to recognize and empathize with HL-related experiences with which they are not familiar from their own history. Also, it should be noted that parents of children with HL may wish to see their child as completely “normal,” in the sense of not being di erent from children without HL. This, however, could lead to invalidation of the feelings the child has related to their HL; for example, the parent smiling or trying to cheer up their child who is sad due to social di

culties, without acknowledging the child’s emotion

(Eichengreen & Hoo en, 2020). The quality of interactions between hearing parents and their child with HL is not only hampered by the communication barriers but is also a ected by parenting stress (Abdin, 1992; Coyl et al., 2002). In addition to the stressors that are common among parents of children with a disability, parents of children with HL experience unique stressors; for example, frustrations regarding handling the CI or HA devices, and having

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Overall, e ective and supportive emotion-related parent practices are positively associated with children’s

to be a language teacher for their child (Quittner et al., 2010; Zaidman–Zait, 2007). According to the Developmental System Model (Guralnick, 2005), stressors associated with parenting a child with a disability can threaten various patterns of interactions within families. Parenting stress taxes the psychological resources of parents including their own emotion-regulation capacities, which are fundamental to the organization and coordination of parenting behaviors, the shaping of their responses, and the activating of consistently been linked to negative developmental outcomes, including emotional competence, in both children with HL and hearing children (Crnic & Low, 2002; Hintermair, 2006).

Clinical Implications Taken together, the overview in this chapter shows that children with HL have to deal with a unique set of challenges that can hamper the development of their emotional competence (e.g., Ketelaar et al., 2012, 2015; Netten et al., 2015b; Rie e, 2012), which in turn a ects their social functioning and mental health (Barker et al., 2009; Stevenson et al., 2015; Theunissen et al., 2014). Even in today’s world, with access to modern p. 240

technology and support, these challenges remain. Parents of children with HL (as well as

teachers, other

professionals, and peers) need to be aware that these children have to make more of an e ort to perceive and understand spoken language, and that they are likely to miss parts of communicative interactions. Once a child has a hearing device, responds to sounds, and starts to communicate in spoken language, people can mistakenly think that the child is no longer hard of hearing. Yet, most of the time the surroundings are not optimal for the child to hear well: background noises, a bad acoustic environment, people talking simultaneously or from a distance or while facing another direction, can all diminish the sound quality and thus compromise children’s ability to understand spoken language. This in turn will cause miscommunication or even social withdrawal when children feel that they cannot participate fully (Punch & Hyde, 2011). This chapter also addresses the important role parents play in the development of emotional competence in their children with HL. Parents themselves face unique challenges due to communication issues (Quittner et al., 2004) and parenting stress (Quittner et al., 2010; Zaidman–Zait, 2008), which likely have a negative impact on their ability to validate their child’s emotions and, in turn, negatively a ect their child’s emotion development. Fortunately, at least in Western countries, most parents have access to family-centered early intervention to support them in promoting their child’s communicative and emotional development in a variety of ways (Moeller et al., 2013). A number of speci c things can be done to further help parents promote emotional competence in their children with HL. For example, interventions exist that speci cally aim to increase parents’ mental discourse with their children with HL during daily routines (e.g., meals, shared book reading), which in turn should promote these children’s ToM development (Ziv et al., 2013). In addition, nonverbal techniques for emotion validation exist (Fonagy et al., 2002; Stern, 1985) and can be taught (Lambie & Lindberg, 2016). Furthermore, psychoeducation may be applied to teach parents that they should validate their children’s negative feelings rather than trying to “ x” them (Faber & Mazlish, 2002). Finally, studies within the resiliency framework stress the vital role of sociocultural contexts, from community facilities to larger social structures, in enabling hearing parents to understand and support their children with HL. In particular, providing children with HL and their parents with the optimal circumstances for language learning—which may include access to sign language—and facilitating contact with other children with HL and their families, as well as with adult role models with HL, is highly recommended (Lytle et al., 2011; Moeller et al., 2013) and can promote emotional competence.

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attention and motivation to support their children’s developmental abilities. Indeed, parenting stress has

Limitations and Conclusions In this chapter, ndings have been described as if they were applicable to all young children with HL. However, it should be noted that the population of children with HL is inherently heterogeneous. In most of the studies referred to in this chapter, e orts were

made to keep some factors constant and to examine

the in uence of others. For example, almost all participants with HL were born to hearing parents, had no apparent additional disabilities, had a HL which was either congenital or acquired prelingually (i.e., before the age of 2 years), and had received their hearing device(s) at least before the age of 3 years. Some researchers looked at subgroups within their sample of children with HL and identi ed risk and protective factors (e.g., type of education, type of hearing device) related to these children’s emotion development (Broekhof et al., 2018; Rie e et al., 2018). This endorses the notion that generalizations to the whole population of children with HL, especially to those with concomitant disabilities, should be made with caution. Another critical note is the fact that most studies discussed in this chapter compared group means of children with HL and their hearing peers, which entails the risk of stigmatizing the clinical group when the group mean di ers. However, not every child with HL falls behind their hearing peers. Moreover, a di erent pattern of development does not necessarily imply an impairment. Possibly, a qualitatively di erent development better supports the daily reality that children with HL in a hearing world face—a notion which may challenge our traditional de nition of resilience (Young et al., 2011). Despite these limitations, the overview presented in this chapter shows the critical role of children’s access to their social environment for their emotion socialization. Note that the children with HL in the studies mentioned here had no known additional disabilities. Therefore, in theory, these children could have developed similarly to their hearing peers, if they had had equal access to their surroundings (e.g., with regard to language input, joint engagement, emotion validation). The fact that they do not develop similarly to their hearing peers clearly signals that a lot of work lies ahead, both in terms of necessary research to get a better grasp of the relationships between the parent and child factors discussed in this chapter, and in terms of what can be done to support children with HL and their parents in order to achieve more favorable outcomes.

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The Oxford Handbook of Emotional Development Daniel Dukes (ed.) et al. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/978019 8855903.001.0001 9780191889516

Online ISBN: Print ISBN:

9780198855903

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CHAPTER

17 Emotional Engagement and Social Understanding in Early Development  Vasudevi Reddy, Daniel Vanello https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198855903.013.26 Published: 13 January 2022

Pages 249–260

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Published: 2022

Abstract This chapter argues that the emotions are a constitutive part of the development of social understanding and therefore that it is deeply problematic to conceptualize emotion as psychologically argue that emotion should not be seen as an “independent variable” in the development of social understanding. Emotions conceived more broadly as vitality a ects are inevitable qualities of all actions and are categorically di erent from what are typically called “mental states.” Further, others’ emotions are rarely experienced in a spectatorial manner; they are more typically experienced in participation and involvement. The tendency to conceive of emotions as independent variables in the development of social understanding is an unfortunate instantiation of the traditional division in psychology between cognition, conation, and a ection. The thrust of this chapter is a challenge to this traditional division in the development of social understanding.

Keywords: emotion, a ect, social understanding, infant development, engagement Subject: Psychology, Developmental Psychology Series: Oxford Library of Psychology Collection: Oxford Handbooks Online

Introduction IN

recent years, the study of the development of social understanding has tended to conceptualize emotion 1

or a ectivity as distinct from social understanding in di erent ways. From the early days of research in children’s social cognition, emotions have been conceptualized as another set of mental states that the child needs to grasp and understand theoretically. For instance, children’s predictions about story characters’ emotional reactions are reported to already, by 3 and 5 years of age, show a “theory-like conception of mind in predicting emotional reactions … the emotional impact of a situation dependent not on its objective features but on the beliefs and desires that are brought to it” (Harris et al., 1989). Epistemic mental states and emotions are placed on the same level, both part of the “theory of mind” that the preschool child is constructing in order to explain or predict actions. “Emotion knowledge” and “theory of mind” are seen as “separate but related constructs,” with earlier false-belief understanding facilitating emotion recognition and subsequently predicting emotion knowledge in disadvantaged children (Seidenfeld et al., 2014). “Theory of mind” has also been linked to identifying self-conscious emotions in children with autism (Heerey et al., 2003), emotion understanding (independent of intelligence and executive function) in children in foster care (Pears & Fisher, 2005), and emotion recognition in schizophrenia (Bruene, 2005). While the separate measurement of emotion knowledge and knowledge of other mental states might be p. 250

useful for a variety of reasons—including to show their

relatedness—we may well be engaging in a

category mistake if we take them as separate but structurally equivalent. This common tendency to make a division between emotion and the development of social understanding is problematic. Why? As we will argue in the next section, emotions in the sense of “vitality a ects” (rather than in the sense of the more typically conceived categorical a ects; Stern, 1985, 2010), are ubiquitous and pervasive, characterizing all our actions, interactions, and understandings, and cannot be limited only to speci c states that need to be explicitly conceptualized, theorized, and recognized in themselves or others. Linked to this separation has been the tendency to think of the process of social understanding as individual deduction or imagination, fueled largely by data gleaned spectatorially, even when within interaction.

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separate from the emergence of our understanding of persons as subjects. In other words, the authors

William James, for instance, spoke of the knower as an actor, and “in the game” rather than a “mere onlooker” (1878), a concern re ected in methods of “participant observation” and philosophies of ethnographic methods and more recently in neuroscience (Schilbach et al., 2013). The tendency in both “theory theory” and simulation (or its modern incarnation, mirror system) approaches has been to place the perceiver e ectively in the position of observer of others (see Leudar & Costall, 2006; Gallagher, 2001; relational—that is, the data itself is relational data—and that our (i.e., scienti c) understanding of emotions is key to understanding connection and relation in development and to avoiding this spectatorial trap (Hobson, 1993; Reddy, 1996). The tendency to separate emotions from the development of social understanding is part of a deeper tendency to conceive of emotions and cognitions as two independently speci able entities. Although this might be a justi able approach in some cases, in the study of the development of social understanding it is often an unquestioned assumption that portrays social understanding as a form of cognition. The subtlety of human emotional relations—and how they constitute our personal being as well as how they constitute our relations to other persons—will remain unexplored if we do not think of emotions in a di erent way. To understand the claim that we want to make regarding the relation between emotion and cognition in the development of social understanding, it will prove helpful to compare it with another claim made in the psychology of emotions—appraisal theory. Psychologists such as Lazarus (1991), Scherer (1984), and Frijda (1986) argue that emotions are composed of distinct components interacting in a speci c way. Although components di er between theories, they share the view that an emotion starts with the appraisal of a situation in relation to one’s goals, which then sets in motion other components such as physiological arousal and action tendencies. In virtue of being composed by an element of appraisal, appraisal theorists view emotions as being, in part, cognitive. It might therefore seem that their claim is also a challenge to the dichotomy between emotion and cognition. However, their challenge goes only one way—that is, against the idea that emotions are noncognitive; it keeps intact the idea that the cognitive component of emotions, namely appraisal, can exist in isolation from emotions. In this sense, their claim is not a challenge to the p. 251

emotion and cognition dichotomy. In contrast, we argue that from a developmental

perspective, social

understanding cannot be understood as a cognitive process in separation from emotion. We speak here not of abstractable understandings (such as a philosopher might insist upon), independent of situational meanings and persons, but of the understandings of mind which are not separate from situational meanings and persons (see for instance, discussion on awareness of attention, Reddy, 2008). It is in this sense that emotion is a constitutive part of the development of social understanding. As Parkinson argues, emotions are spread out not only in time, but also between people, situations, a ordances, and psychological processes; “journeying to the centre of emotions” in appraisals is not the answer (Parkinson, 2013). For this same reason, our claim di ers from two other approaches that attempt to challenge the emotion– cognition dichotomy. First, Zajonc (1980) reacted against the prevalent idea of his time that a ect is postcognitive in one’s preferential judgments. By contrast, he argued that a ect precedes the cognitive processes, leading to preferential judgments, and is therefore at the foundation of one’s preferences. Although Zajonc’s work was pivotal in the attempt to bring a ect back to the center stage of questions about cognition, it nevertheless still conceives of a ect and cognition as in principle separable. Second, our claim also di ers from recent arguments emphasizing the interconnectedness of emotion understanding and cognitive abilities such as understanding others’ goals in development (Reschke et al., 2017): these arguments also view the cognitive component in the development of social understanding as theoretically separate from emotions.

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Reddy, 2008). We argue, in contrast, that the perception and understanding of other persons is inescapably

Emotional Engagement and Vitality A ects In his The interpersonal world of the infant (1985), Daniel Stern introduced the notion of “vitality a ects,” distinguishing it from the more familiar notion of “categorical a ects.” Categorical a ects re ect a vitality a ects is best captured by adopting a further, threefold distinction between our understanding of the what of an action, its why, and its how (Rochat et al., 2013). The what refers to the type of action involved, say, grabbing a bottle; the why refers to the intention of the action, say, to drink from it; the how concerns the style of the action, say grabbing the bottle abruptly or delicately. Vitality a ects refer to the how of actions. To be sure, this threefold distinction is arti cial since, in experiencing someone’s action, the three dimensions are intertwined. Indeed, one lesson to be learned from Stern’s insight is that apprehending the what and the why of an action must involve apprehending the action’s how. Stern argues that a crucial dimension of the infant’s experience of the mother is the infant’s experiencing of the how of her actions, often addressed to the infant, including “how the mother picks up the baby, folds the diapers, p. 252

grooms her hair or the baby’s hair, reaches for a bottle,

unbuttons her blouse” (Stern, 1985). At the same

time, Stern argues that we should not think of vitality a ects simply in terms of the perceived qualities of others’ actions, but also of the a ective quality of the experience of one’s own actions. The experience of grabbing a bottle in an aggressive manner has a di erent a ective quality—both for the doer and the perceiver—from grabbing a bottle in a gentle manner. The infant, then, experiences vitality a ects both in the sense of experiencing the how of the mother’s actions and in the sense of experiencing the a ective quality of their own manner of carrying out an action. Vitality a ects for Stern are changing patterns of energy, tempo, or vitality that give form to every action (Stern, 1985); they capture the energy, the vitality of living movement. Jumping out of a chair versus getting up out of a chair captures, for instance, an a ect. There is no clear language for vitality a ects within psychology or indeed within ordinary usage in the languages with which we might be familiar. Music on the other hand (western classical music for instance) has terms precisely to capture this shifting vitality (Stern, 1985). The how applies not only to actions which we would not normally classify as emotional but also, interestingly, to expressions of the typical categorical a ects. A slowly widening smile and a sudden grin are both the same categorical a ect, but are completely di erent, not only in terms of what each seems to express but of what each does to the person to which they are directed. This is where the arti ciality of the threefold distinction above becomes salient. The how of actions in everyday life continually a ects the viewer and in uences the sense that is made of actions (i.e., the what and the why). In recent empirical work on understanding goal-directed action, the how of actions is sometimes captured by describing movement dynamics—time pro le, force, space, and direction (Di Cesare et al., 2014). However, vitality a ects are experienced holistically and may not necessarily be reduced to these four components. The concepts of vitality forms and contours of actions have been more recently used to explain a number of ndings about infancy. The nding that within 3 months of birth, infants prefer the same sort of contingent responsive style in strangers as they are already accustomed to from their mothers, speaks to the importance of rhythm (Bigelow & Rochat, 2006). Also testifying to this, and more explicitly, is evidence that infants adopt and participate in very di erent sorts of rhythmic patterns while interacting with their mothers than with their fathers (Feldman, 2003), and evidence that cardiac rhythms between mothers and their infants become coordinated during periods of a ective synchrony (Feldman et al., 2011). The rhythmic exchanges between infant and mother are emotional in kind. Feldman herself relies on the work of Edward Tronick (1989) who argues that we should understand the coordinated interaction between infant and mother as a form of emotional communication. Tronick convincingly describes the interaction between infant and mother as involving moments of breaking and checking and re-engaging. For instance, the

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conception of a ects as discrete mental states such as happiness, anger, joy, fear, and so on. The concept of

infant might detach from the interaction when the arousal is too high, in an attempt to regulate their arousal, and only after some time attempt to re-initiate the interaction with their mother. If the mother p. 253

understands this,

her response will be to wait until the infant wants to reinitiate the interaction, instead

of, say, imposing herself on the infant (Field, 1978, 1992; Gratier, 1999). If the mother waits and then responds happily at the infant’s attempt to reinitiate social interaction, the infant will in turn respond Feldman is interested in, and they clearly involve shared emotional moments between the infant and the mother. In adults, the coordination and synchronization of rhythms is hugely important in indexing warmth, empathy, attraction (Welkowitz & Kuc, 1973; Ja e & Festein, 1970) and sensitivity (Hane et al., 2003). We know from many studies that musical tempo a ects mood in adults and that the tempo of touching a ects infant mood (Brazelton, 1986). Rhythm also communicates clearer categorical a ects—for instance, sadness by slow tempos, a narrow frequency range, a slow rate of articulation, and decreases in pitch (Scherer, 1995), and anger and fear by increased frequency and amplitude (Bresin & Friberg, 2011). It makes little sense not to consider tempo and rhythm as a ective phenomena. Recent research exploring physiological synchronies in interpersonal relations has begun to show not only the pervasiveness and subtlety of emotional engagements, but also how little we know as yet about these processes. Physiological linkages with a partner may be valuable but also destabilize the linked individual— showing that people are more physiologically vulnerable to social in uence than previously thought (Thorson & West, 2018). The subtle interplay of being and perceiving can be seen in studies showing that high empathizers pay a price—they have a stronger bias toward negative emotional states than low empathizers (Chikovani et al., 2015). Physiological coordination in a couple (e.g., of respiration) is related to the dynamics of daily life (Ferrer & Helm, 2013), showing the importance of relatedness not usually thought of as “emotional.” The interrelatedness of “being” is striking from early childhood, as can be seen even in synchronous patterns of cortisol secretion in mother–child dyads (Williams et al., 2013). Stern’s notion of vitality a ects plays a major role in the way we should conceive of the development of social understanding. Although he does not labor this point, the perception of vitality a ects in others’ actions is intertwined with the experience of a response, also imbued with vitality a ects, toward them. The a ective perception of others, in other words, involves the a ective response toward them. The intertwined response and perception set o

an interplay of vitality a ects between infant and other which constitutes

the developing understanding of actions. Crucially, the idea is that infant social understanding is primarily a matter of grasping the manner in which particular actions are performed (i.e., the how), and grasping the particular way in which actions are performed is part of the infant’s developing understanding of the what and why of actions. The ease with which these a ective qualities in others are picked up and absorbed by infants, and the extent to which they in uence developmental directions and preferences, points clearly to the fact that emotions (however narrowly or broadly conceived) act as connectors between infants and others.

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happily to the mother’s response. It is these sorts of moments that constitute the rhythmic interactions that

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Involvement and Connection The human condition, especially in early development, is one of involvement. Our stance toward others in everyday life is rarely spectatorial and emotion-neutral. Although varying in intensity and salience, others’ responsive experience. These a ective perceptions and experiences connect us to others and to the world. However, involvement and emotional engagement is frequent and powerful, even in terms of the more traditional categorical a ects. The engagement of categorical a ects is evident even in early infancy, and a ords platforms for change and development in understanding. These emotional engagements provide the ground for social understanding in two ways: rstly, by their very nature, they demand a response, pushing the infant—and the adult—to understand the other; and, secondly, they may actually create new phenomena—new aspects of mind which, as it were, await understanding. In other words, they allow the emergence of new aspects which change the course of the relationship between infant and adult, and expand that which needs to be understood. Probably the most salient emotional engagements in early infancy are precisely those in which infants directly address or are directly addressed by others. These direct, second-person engagements allow us to meet another person in what Buber conceptualized as a no-holds-barred momentary openness to each other—an “I–Thou” way of knowing the other (Buber, 1958). Between persons, they involve the capacity for mutually “turning towards the other” (Cissna & Anderson, 2002), and have been described as “moments of meeting” (Lyons–Ruth et al., 1998). It is not just the matching or complementarity of emotions in these encounters that is the point; the power of such connections comes from “being known.” Being known by another allows us to “be” in social relations; and both are crucially important for knowing others. Three examples of such engagements in the rst year of life can provide instances of moments of meeting which o er springboards for development, or what Brazelton (1994) called “touch points.” Coy smiling, beginning in the third month of life, shortly after infants can chat and engage in protoconversation (Trevarthen, 1977), is a positive form of shyness. In response to a direct face-to-face greeting from a friendly adult, mostly at the renewal of an interaction, infants may break into a broad smile and, still within the peak of the smile, turn away or brie y avert gaze (Reddy, 2000, 2001; Colonnesi et al., 2012, 2014). The onset of positive attention from the adult—knowing that they are the object of attention of another subjectivity (Reddy, 2003)—moves the infant to a positive feeling strong enough to brie y overwhelm. This reaction reveals the infant’s awareness of others as attending consciousnesses and must also demand of the infant new types of recognition of the other in light of their own reactions. More interesting is the e ect of this infant reaction on the adult who elicited it: it can powerfully atter the adult, revealing the infant’s openness and vulnerability to them, and it can empower the adult to reapproach or intensify their interest in the infant. Engagements of these kinds are creative: the mutuality of recognition and response leads to

p. 255

change

in both partners. At around 3 months of age, the meeting of infant acts with maternal smiles, or

of infant emotions with maternal mirroring, seems to empower infants in their interpersonal bids (McQuaid et al., 2010; Markova & Legerstee, 2006; Legerstee & Varghese, 2001). Both the contingency and timing of the mother’s responses, and also the particular a ective quality of the response—its categorical appropriateness—seem to be crucial. In Buber’s terms, the mutuality of these movements seems to act to “con rm” each participant by the other; the appropriateness of each’s response to the other showing that each has seen, heard, understood, recognized the other. Another example of such moments of connection can be seen in infant attempts, after the middle of the rst year, to show o

and clown in order to re-elicit others’ attention, approval, or laughter (Reddy, 1991, 2008).

These a ord some of the clearest examples of the interplay between a ect and understanding. Somewhere around 7 or 8 months, infants appear to realize the connection between adults’ positive, approving, or laughing reactions and their own—often solitary or random—actions. We see a urry of intentional

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actions are, in terms of vitality a ects, perceptibly imbued with emotional tone, and so is our own

repetitions of actions to re-elicit adult reactions: fake coughing, vigorous and repeated head shaking, loud shrieks and banging with gaze to the adult, odd facial expressions and movements, and so on (Reddy, 2001). Such attempts not only reveal the infant’s early awareness of the triangulation of attention between infant, infant act, and adult (developmentally occurring before a triangulation of attention between infant, object, and adult), but they are themselves the locus of further development. The adult can respond—or not—in a months on infant bids for attention (McQuaid et al., 2010), potentially allow a growing sense of competence in the infant, in being able to move the other, and a growing awareness of what moves the other and what fails to. This is social cognition in continuing emergence. Teasing is another such phenomenon which involves a risky act toward the other—an invitation quickly withdrawn, or a threat held in suspension, or a provocation—usually involving something that is of signi cance to the other (Reddy, 1991, 2007; Altmann, 1988; Adang, 1984, 1986). It can entice the other to come and play, or to withdraw, or to be aggressive; certainly bringing the relation to a di erent— sometimes deeper and more connected—level, sometimes shutting the connection down (Nakano & Kanaya, 1993; Loudon, 1970). It works on the adult too. When the interacting adult is taken aback in surprise, realizing that the 9- or 10-month-old is actually being cheeky in o ering and withdrawing an object or deliberately appearing to touch the plug socket while looking expectantly at them, it cannot but provoke new reactions. The adult could be stern, and determinedly not encourage the teasing, or they could be amused, and allow the development of a new game, or some more complex reaction; but what it also does is allow the adult to take more risks themselves in provoking the infant. In sum, moments of direct, second-person emotional engagement in early infancy not only reveal the infant’s subtle understanding of the other as an attentive and responsive subject, but also provide a platform for the emergence of newer levels of connection and knowledge between them. They are powerful because, at least for brief moments, each feels “known” by the other, and feels allowed to “be” within social relations.

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Against Separations We have argued that in order to explain the emergence of social understanding we cannot separate it from emotional engagement. Experiences and patterns of emotional engagement constitute social understanding, and not just in terms of a ecting the perception of a ective cues (Mitchell & Phillips, 2015) or creating de cits in “theory of mind” (Heerey et al., 2003; Pears & Fisher, 2005). Neither emotions nor emotional engagements are best considered as “separable” or “independent” variables in the development of social understanding; our emotional relations with others constitute our understanding of others, and what we know about others as persons, as subjects, as psychological beings, is constituted by our relations with them. That which is known of others—the what of social understanding—cannot be separated from the knower’s relations to that which is known. Personal relations are inevitably emotional. If, as Macmurray (1961) put it, “we can only know persons in personal relation,” then what we understand about people is constituted by our emotional engagements with them (see also Vallgårda & Olsen, this volume). In this nal section, we suggest that this argument puts pressure on two other separations that are often found in the literature: (1) between cognition, conation, and a ect; and (2) between knowing and doing. Why have psychologists committed themselves so often to conceptualizing emotion as separate from other more cognitive, psychological states and processes? There may be a sense that if we do not separate things, do not make many divisions, we have nothing to get our teeth into, to understand; that the only way of grasping reality is to reduce it into smaller and smaller categories. However, perhaps this reductionist stance, that is so much part of our way of approaching understanding, itself needs to be rethought.

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variety of di erent ways. Positive responses, similar to the e ects of contingent maternal smiling at 3

Following some writers, we could blame the traditional division of the psyche into cognition, conation, and a ection. The separation of these processes is endemic within psychology (see Dixon, 2003, 2012) and is arguably responsible not only for the neglect of the intrinsic emotionality of some social actions (like looking, pointing, or reaching), but also to the classi cation of some psychological states (such as interest) as cognitive rather than a ective—as more akin to attention perhaps rather than to emotion (Hammond & to social understanding. He argues that our concepts of other persons (i.e., as individuals with thoughts and feelings and concerns) must originate in our a ective relations with them. This a ective relatedness is the stu

from which the very conception of “person” must be built. Citing the philosopher Hamlyn (1974),

Hobson argues that relation—and particularly, a ective relatedness—constitutes the thing that is to be understood: In order to be said to know something we must at least understand what it is for something to be the thing in question, and a part of that understanding is constituted by the relations in which the thing stands to us. So in order to know what persons are, one needs to experience and understand the kinds of relations that can exist between oneself and others—speci cally, reciprocal relations based on feelings. (pp. 228–229) p. 257

It is problems of a ective relatedness, Hobson argues, that underpin the disturbances of social understanding in autism. The argument of this chapter also has implications for a broader distinction—that between “knowing” and “doing.” Conceiving of the development of social understanding as constituted by emotional engagements challenges the notion of “understanding” or “knowing” other minds as a process speci able independently of action or “doing” (see also Mascolo, this volume). This argument demands the rejection of a conception of “understanding” as an internal mental process that is merely causally related to the actions involved in emotional engagements. So how should we conceive of “social understanding” in relation to social actions? We believe that we can nd the beginning of an answer in Gilbert Ryle’s treatment of how we should conceive of what it means to understand, or know, another mind: “When we characterise people by mental predicates, we are not making untestable inferences to any ghostly processes occurring in streams of consciousness which we are debarred from visiting; we are describing the ways in which those people conduct parts of their predominantly public life” (Ryle, 1948/2000, p. 50). The key intuition in this passage is that we should not conceive of our understanding of other minds as a separate process from the actions that we perform as a response to other people’s actions. Ryle argues that the sort of “understanding” involved in social understanding is not primarily understanding of a hidden “mind” but rather of the particular meaning of other people’s actions. The examples Ryle employs involve interactions where my understanding of the particular meaning of someone’s action involves an appropriate action in response. For instance, my understanding of someone’s jokes is my responding to them, say by laughing. My understanding a joke is not separable from my overt expression of amusement; the latter is just the particular form that my social understanding takes. It is also worth pointing out that Ryle’s examples are formulated as second-person engagements: I appreciate your jokes by laughing, I unmask your stratagems, and you pick holes in my arguments. It is within these engagements that my understanding of the particular meaning of your actions becomes manifest. Ryle’s intuition, although not talking about infant social understanding, can help to spell out the idea inherent in our argument above: infant social understanding develops in engagements with others as actions in response to others’ actions. The emergence of infant social understanding is not a separate process from infants’ responses in engagement, from infants learning how to be with others. Rather, their appropriate actions toward others and in response to others’ actions is the emergence of their understanding of the particular meaning of the other’s action: in other words, of their social understanding.

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Drummond, 2019). Hobson (1993) also challenges the cognition, conation, a ection distinction in relation

Notes 1. p. 258

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The use of the word “a ect” (or “a ectivity”) rather than “emotion” is o en used to refer to a broader range of phenomena than the word “emotion” typically conveys (Colombetti & Krueger, 2015; Oatley, 2004). Definitions of each vary according to traditions of usage as well as to theoretical orientations. In this chapter, we use the terms “emotion” and “a ect” synonymously because the distinction between them at this state is not helpful. We face a choice between accepting the vaguely di ering referents of each (with no clear agreement about the distinction) and choosing one or the other, or, on the other hand, avoiding the distinction between the two terms for the reason that it reifies yet another unfounded and therefore dangerous division.

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The Oxford Handbook of Emotional Development Daniel Dukes (ed.) et al. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/978019 8855903.001.0001 9780191889516

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CHAPTER

18 A Relational Conception of Emotional Development: Emotions as Felt Forms of Organismic Engagement  Michael Mascolo https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198855903.013.15 Published: 13 January 2022

Pages 261–276

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Published: 2022

Abstract This chapter advances a relational conception of emotions and their development. From a relational view, emotions consist of felt forms of organismic engagement with the world. As modes of engagement, circumstances. As modes of engagement, emotions are aspects of ongoing adaptive action—emergent con gurations of motivational, perceptual, experiential, expressive, and motor processes organized around a particular way of relating to the world. The idea that emotions are felt modes of engagement identi es experience as a primary aspect of emotional life. Building upon a biological grounding, emotions undergo structural change as they develop within intersubjectively-structured exchanges with others. The relational model is illustrated with an analysis of structural changes in jealousy and envy over the course of their development.

Keywords: relationalism, intersubjectivity, jealousy, envy, emotional experience, appraisal, developmental transformation Subject: Psychology, Developmental Psychology Series: Oxford Library of Psychology Collection: Oxford Handbooks Online

Introduction PSYCHOLOGICAL

scientists have elaborated a variety of approaches to the study of emotional development.

Evolutionary (Al–Shawaf et al., 2016; Montag & Panksepp, 2017) and discrete emotions theory (Izard, 2007; Tomkins, 1991) maintain that emotions consist of discrete biological reactions that are revealed by universal patterns of facial and bodily expression (Ekman, 1993). As products of evolution, basic emotions (anger, joy, fear, sadness, interest, disgust, etc.) serve adaptive functions and require minimal cognitive involvement. In contrast, appraisal (Clore & Ortony, 2008; Roseman, 2004), functionalist (Campos et al., 1994; Scherer & Ellgring, 2007), and systems (Lewis & Granic, 2000) approaches (Clore & Ortony, 2008; Roseman, 2004) maintain that emotions are largely dependent upon appraisals of the signi cance that events have for experiencing organisms (see also De France & Hollenstein, this volume). From these views, emotions consist of distributed systems of biopsychosocial processes that in uence each other over time. Constructionist scholars maintain that di erent emotions are constructed states of feeling and action that are organized around a common two-dimensional (i.e., evaluation, level of activation) foundation of core a ect (Russell & Barrett, 1999). While constructionists maintain di erent emotional experiences arise from personal interpretations of local circumstances, sociocultural (Shweder et al., 2008) and social constructionist (Averilll, 1982; Harré, 1987, 2009) theorists maintain that di erent emotions are organized by socially-constructed systems of symbolically-mediated meaning (Aranguren, 2017; Parkinson, 2012). p. 262

This chapter contains an outline of a relational-developmental (Barnes–Holmes & Hughes, 2013; Colombetti, 2017; Overton, 2013; Parkinson, 2012) approach to emotional development. From a relational view, emotions consist of felt forms of organismic engagement. From a developmental view, nothing simply is— everything becomes. It is not helpful to seek to identify the particular point at which any given emotion emerges over time (Campos et al., 2010). It is better to identify the particular structure that psychological processes assume as they develop gradually over time in particular contexts. As felt forms of engaging the world, emotions undergo development as their components become increasingly di erentiated and hierarchically integrated over time (Mascolo et al., 2003).

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di erent emotions are organized in terms of di erent relations between a person’s motives and

The Relational Approach Thinking, feeling, and acting have traditionally been understood as processes that occur within individual organisms. Traditional models have depicted psychological processes as properties of the individual. In De Jaegher, 2017; Overton, 2013). While organisms are distinct from the ecological systems of which they are a part, they are not independent of those systems (Erickson & Cottingham, this volume). As shown in Figure 18.1, individuals operate as aspects of multiply-nested person–context systems (Mascolo, 2013; Mascolo & Fischer, 2010, 2015). This system is composed of ve classes of co-acting processes: (1) the action of individuals; (2) the objects of action; (3) the actions of others; (4) the intersubjective co-regulation between self and other as mediated by cultural tools and other mediational means; and (5) the broader sociocultural context, which consists of systems of shared and contested meanings, values, and social practices.

Figure 18.1 The Relational Construction of Emotion and Emotion Understanding. The Relational Construction of Emotion and Emotion Understanding. p. 263

Within this model, psychological processes are intentional in the sense that they are about or directed toward some object, whether real or imagined. Emotions are directed toward objects in the same sense that verbs take objects within the structure of a sentence (Shargel, 2018). I am not simply angry; I am angry that Eric insulted me. The real or imagined object of the emotion—“that Eric insulted me”—is part of the emotional process itself. Thus, psychological processes are not simply properties of individuals, but instead properties of persons acting on objects in social contexts (Erickson & Cottingham, this volume). In face-to-face exchanges, individuals continuously adjust their actions, thoughts, and feelings to the ongoing and expected actions of their interlocutors (Fogel, 1993; Reddy, 2008; Reddy & Vanello, this volume). My feelings of anger arise as I accuse Eric of insulting me, and are moderated as soon as I hear him state his motives, and vanish when I understand that he was actually trying to help me. In this way, emotion is coregulated between people and is not something that occurs within the encased interior of “individual minds” (Colombetti, 2017; De Jaegher & Di Paolo, 2008; Reddy & Vanello, this volume).

Emotions as Felt Forms of Organismic Engagement Emotional processes are foundational organizers of psychological experiences (Freeman, 2000; Zajonc, 1980). The left panel of Figure 18.1 provides a sketch of the structure of emotional activity as it functions within individual persons. The construction of emotion is organized around shifting relations between a person’s motives and circumstances. Controversy exists about the role of cognition and appraisal in the production of emotion (Herzberg, 2009; Shargel, 2017). While some hold that cognition or appraisal precede the production of a ect (Roseman, 2004; Moors et al., 2013), others maintain that emotional states require minimal cognitive participation (Izard, 2007). From a relational view, while appraisal processes are forms of motive-relevant engagement, not all forms of motive-relevant engagement require signi cant cognitive activity. While some motive–event relations are registered more or less directly, others are mediated by various degrees of representational content (Olson & Vallgårda, this volume). By identifying motive–event relations (rather than appraisal per se) as central features of emotional experience, the relational model o ers a way to bridge the gap between bioevolutionary approaches and functionalist appraisal and systems models. Components of the emotion process mutually in uence each other in the construction of emotional states (Lewis, 1996; Scherer, 1982). As shown in Figure 18.1, (1) motive–event relations produce (2) bodily

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contrast, the relational view maintains that humans and other organisms are relational beings (Di Paolo &

(Friedman, 2010) and a ective changes (de Rivera, 2006) that are exhibited in (3) di erent patterns of expressive (Ekman, 1993) and instrumental (Frijda, 2004) action. Motive–event relations are typically monitored outside of consciousness. However, as the processing of motive–event relations evolves over time, a ective processes (4) select and organize representations of motive–relevant events into (5) conscious awareness (Lewis, 1996; Schwarz & Clore, 2007; Tomkins, 1991). As events become represented in consciousness, (6) slower and more deliberative adaptive

strategies for managing motive–relevant

events come into play (Mascolo & Kallio, 2019). While they evolve dynamically in moment-by-moment construction, there is no single sequence in the emergence of any particular experience in context (Holbrook & Hahn–Holbrook, this volume). Table 18.1 identi es the general structure of anger (De Rivera, 2006) and sadness—experiences commonly identi ed as emotions—as well as jealousy (Parrott & Smith, 1993) and envy (Protasi, 2016), which will be examined in more detail below. Table 18.1 The Structure of Selected Emotions Form of engagement

Phenomenal experience

Relational action

Anger

Violation of what one asserts ought to exist

Feelings of “heat,” “pressure,” “as if I will explode;” strengthening of will to move against other

Move against the other; remove the violation to what ought to exist

Sadness

Loss of valued object or outcome

Feeling “empty,” lethargic, “down”

Longing for lost object

Jealousy

Valued other bestows value onto a third person that is desired for the self

Feeling hurt, empty, insecure, devalued; marginalized

Remove rival; desire to gain, restore, or possess the love of the other

Envy

Desires status or worth possessed by the other for self

Feeling diminished or inferior in relation to the other

Desire to eliminate sense of inferiority; improve self-status; spoil or subvert otherʼs status

The Intersubjective Analysis of Emotional Experience It is often assumed that emotional experiences are private states, in the sense that they are available only to the persons experiencing them, and not to others. From this view, we identify our emotional feelings by introspecting into the private interior, locating feelings, and then assigning words to those feelings. Wittgenstein (1953) showed the problem of viewing emotional experiences as inherently private states: if experiences were truly private, there could be no way for people to agree on the words to use to refer to any given state. Without shared access to public criteria for de ning an experience, we could never be sure that we were using emotion terms in similar ways. Wittgenstein noted, however, that public criteria for de ning experience do exist—namely the bodily expressions of experience. Emotion words cannot gain their meaning through a capacity to point to an inner private world. Instead, they gain shared meaning through the shared capacity to refer to public expressions of emotion. Thus, public expressions ground the communal construction of shared emotion concepts (Point E in Figure 18.1); as individuals acquire an understanding of p. 265

culturally-shared emotion concepts (Clément & Dukes, this volume;

Reddy & Vanello, this volume;

Widen & Nelson, this volume), they use them to re ect upon and identify their experiences as instances of one or another emotion category (Point 7 in Figure 18.1). It follows that relations between experience and expression is not something that can be determined through mere observation. Instead, our understanding of those relations is already given in the intersubjective backdrop of the shared meanings we bring to social interactions (Point E in Figure 18.1). Psychological scientists have no special capacity to identify emotions independent of everyday knowledge.

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p. 264

Instead, psychological science is a re nement of the everyday process of understanding each other through intersubjective engagement (Martin & Sugarman, 2009; Mascolo, 2009; 2016; Mascolo & Kallio, 2020; Matusov, 1996). If this is so, psychological research involving identifying emotion in others is itself an intersubjective process (Mascolo, 2009; Reddy & Vanello, this volume; Zahavi, 2015)—one in which researchers use systematic methods to establish some form of intersubjectivity with the individuals, dyads, relational and intersubjective structure of a child’s emotional activity as it occurs in joint action. In what follows, dynamic skill theory (Mascolo & Fischer, 2010, 2015) is used as a tool for tracking changes in the relational structure of emotions as they are constituted within joint action. Skill theory provides a developmental yardstick for identifying the structure of action and experience as they arise within particular contexts. According to skill theory, structures of action and experience develop through four broad tiers: re exes (arising at birth), sensorimotor acts (arising around 4 months), representations (18–24 months), and abstractions (10–11 years). Within each tier, action structures develop through four levels— single sets, mappings, systems, and systems of systems. These iterative levels are illustrated in Figure 18.2. Within skill theory, at any given age, a person’s actions operate within a range of levels. The age ranges identi ed indicate the earliest age at which individuals are able to produce their highest level of skilled action —and then only in contexts that support their construction.

A Relational-Developmental Analysis of Emotion: Envy and Jealousy Much can be learned from a comparison of the developmental course of jealousy and envy. Jealousy and envy are similar emotions. Although people often use the terms jealousy and envy interchangeably, these emotions di er in substantial ways. Parrott and Smith (1993) suggest that in jealousy, “a person either fears losing or has already lost an important relationship with another person to a rival” (p. 4), whereas envy “arises when a person lacks another’s superior quality, achievement, or possession and either desires it or wishes that the other lacked it” (p. 906). Some theorists maintain that because jealousy involves a desire to possess that which another has, it builds upon and incorporates envy as part of its basic structure p. 266

(Kristjánsson, 2016). It may be more helpful to think

of jealousy and envy as di erent but overlapping

forms of emotional life. In envy, we not only want something that the other has, but what we want has evaluative implications for the self. In jealousy, we seek the undivided a ection of another.

Figure 18.2 Tiers and Levels in the Developing Structure of Action. Tiers and Levels in the Developing Structure of Action. Note: Skills are forms of action that individuals construct and use within particular contexts and domains. Depending upon a personʼs goal, the context and the domain of acting, at any particular point in development, people use skills that operate a variety of di erent developmental levels. The age ranges at which di erent levels of skill emerge reflect the earliest points at which the capacity to form target skills arise. Older individuals are perfectly capable of constructing skills at levels that are lower than the highest levels of skill they are capable of constructing.

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or groups being studied. The study of emotional development thus requires a capacity to analyze the

The Relational Origins of Jealousy in Infancy As discussed above, during the rst months of development (re ex tier), infants are capable of establishing primary forms of intersubjectivity with their caregivers. The capacity for intersubjectivity and its disruption sets the stage for the development of jealousy as it emerges in joint action over the rst year of life. Figure within social relationships. Beginning around 4 months, building upon constructed patterns of acting and relating developed over the rst months of life, infants construct skills in the sensorimotor tier. In so doing, they produce single, controlled, goal-directed actions (Step SM1 in Figure 18.3) (e.g., controlled looking at or reaching for objects or people). Around this age, infants show signs of sadness when caregivers exhibit 1

preferential treatment toward other agents. This is illustrated in a situation (Video 1; see  Appendix) in which a father and mother kiss in front of their 5-month-old. To attract the infant’s attention, the father p. 267

looked directly into the infant’s eyes. As the father turned his face

p. 268

toward the mother, the child stared at and reached toward the father’s cheek. Puckering their lips toward each other, with rising intonation intended to signal the moment of their impending kiss, the parents hummed the sound “mmmm,” which terminated as they kissed in front of the child’s gaze. As the parents turned away from each other, the infant looked at the mother, then the father, then protruded his lip, closed his eyes, wrinkled his brow, emitting a brief vocalization (“acht”), and began to cry. The father calmed the infant by kissing him and saying, “we love you.” The infant unwrinkled his brow, opened his mouth, and looked at his father.

Figure 18.3 Developmental Transformations in the Structure of Jealousy and Envy. Developmental Transformations in the Structure of Jealousy and Envy. The relational structure of this experience is indicated at Step SM1 in Figure 18.3. This observation is consistent with ndings that infants as young as 4–6 months exhibit signs of discomfort, anger, and sadness when their mother directs preferential attention toward other agents, but not when their mother directs attention toward nonhuman objects (Hart, 2016a). As shown at Step SM2 in Figure 18.3, by 7–8 months, infants are able to coordinate at least two actions into a sensorimotor mapping. Soon thereafter, they begin to exhibit a capacity for secondary intersubjectivity (Trevarthen & Aiken, 2001)—the ability to share the goal of acting on objects with other persons (Reddy, 2015). At this level, in situations involving di erential attention, infants seek physical contact with caregivers and attempt to push away the competing object of the mother’s attention (Hart, 2016a,b; Hart & Behrens, 2013; Mize et al., 2014; Szabó et al., 2014). For example, upon witnessing her father kiss her mother, one 10-month-old squealed, alternated her gaze between her parents, pushed her father away, and kissed her mother (Video 2; see  Appendix). By 12–13 months, infants can coordinate multiple actions into an integrated sensorimotor system (SM3 in Figure 18.3). At this level, their expressions of jealousy become more complex. For example, one 13-month-old (Video 3; see  Appendix) gazed seriously as his father held a 4month-old sibling. The boy then ran to his father, climbed on his lap, buried his face, and hugged his father. Do these infants feel jealous? Lewis (2010), for example, maintains that “jealousy can occur only after … self-representation has developed” (p. 28). Jealousy requires “that the infant is capable of thinking ‘that I want something that I do not have.’ Such a mental process of jealousy requires an ‘I’ ” (pp. 33–34). The capacity to represent “I” emerges around 15–24 months with the onset of the semiotic function. Under this interpretation, jealousy is a late-developing phenomenon. However, there are good reasons to believe that

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18.3 provides a comparative analysis of structural changes in jealousy and envy as they develop over time

symbolic representations of self and other are not necessary to experience a primordial sense of jealousy. This is because the infant’s immediate intersubjective experience is rich enough to support a presymbolic sense of the loss of a ection that occurs when a valued other expresses a ection toward a third person. We tend to think of social understanding as a process that requires making inferences about mental states— adopting a relational perspective, it becomes easier to understand the origins of this seemingly precocious form of emotion in infants. Over the course of early life, infants develop rich patterns of a ective attunement with their attachment gures. Infants bring their sensor–motor–a ective expectations of p. 269

attunement—the infant anlage of wanting to be loved—to their interactions with

caregivers. When an

infant sees their parents kiss, they directly experience the third party (i.e., their father or mother) as the recipient of a form of a ective attunement that is desired for the (prerepresentational) self. The meaning of the parents’ kiss is not encased in a separate mental sphere that lies behind their behaviors. Instead, it exists in the history of the ongoing intersubjective relation that occurs between infant and caregiver. Thus, the child does not have to make inferences about mental “goals,” “desires,” and “feelings” that lie behind the parents’ kiss. The infant directly experiences the parents’ kiss as a loss of the intersubjectivelystructured attunement desired for the self.

Infant Envy? While there is ample evidence that infants actively seek to secure wanted objects from the possession of others, there is no clear evidence suggesting that such acts are performed out of envy. Evidence for an infant form of envy might come in the form of establishing that such acts are motivated by a desire to obtain objects because the other child has them. However, in infancy, acts of procuring objects from others seem motivated by a desire for the objects themselves. Evidence that infants and children act out of envy would come in the form of seeking possessions from the other that are experienced as conferring some degree of status or self-worth, however inchoate. As such, it is possible that it is envy—and not jealousy—that requires the capacity for symbolic self-re ection for its emergence.

Symbolic Mediation in the Development of Jealousy and Envy 2

By 18–24 months, children gain the capacity to form single representations (Rp1 in Figure 18.3). Using representations, children are able to use one thing—a word, object, action, or image—to stand for something else, namely the concrete meaning of an event. Using single representations, children are able to create meanings that correspond roughly to a single concrete declarative sentence. With the emergence of the capacity for symbolism, the experience of jealousy is transformed. Children become able to construct a stable representation of their desire for the other’s undivided a ection. For example, as shown in Rp1 in Figure 18.3 (Video 4; see  Appendix), a mother of a 2-year-old girl said, “Daddy’s my baby.” Looking at the mother, and in a plaintive voice, the girl said, “I’m your baby.” At this level, children are capable of concrete forms of social comparison that support early forms of envy (Recio & Quintanilla, 2015). For example, in the context of pretend play (Video 5; see  Appendix), one girl exclaimed that “the monster is gonna eat me!” Her playmate, wanting to be eaten like her companion, responded by saying that “No monster not gonna eat you. It’s gonna eat me.” The child’s statements re ect a desiring for a valued “status” claimed by another. By 3.5 years of age, children begin to construct representational mappings (Rp2 in Figure 18.3) in which they understand relations between concrete representations. For example, at her mother’s birthday party, one 4-year-old girl sobbed in jealousy as she said, “I don’t like your birthday; I only like my birthday” (Video 6; p. 270

see  Appendix). In this

statement, the girl expressed her desire for the attention her mother was receiving

during her birthday. With the capacity for representational mappings, social comparisons become more explicit (Chafel & Bahr, 1988), paving the way for the experience of envy. For example, upon learning that

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goals, beliefs, desires—that operate inside of the mind of the other and are thus hidden from view. However,

her younger sister had a fever (and would thus have to be cared for by her mother), a 5-year-old girl said, screaming and crying, “I want a fever! I want-a-fee-ver!” Following her mother’s reply that “You wanna fever because your sister has a fever? You had a fever for two weeks already!”, the girl continued “But I want fever again! Let me have a fever!… I want a fever too” (Video 7; see  Appendix). This encounter more clearly indicates envy in the form of the older child desiring a “status” bestowed on her sister. Her envy might also her younger sister. By 6–7 years, children begin to coordinate two representational mappings into a representational system (Rp3 in Figure 18.3)—a complex and integrated system of representations. At this level, children can express the full meaning of experiences of jealousy and envy. As shown in Figure 18.3 (Video 8; see  Appendix), one 7-year-old girl explicitly expressed jealousy: “Whenever you hug people, it makes me jealousy [sic].” To the mother’s question, “Why do you get jealous?”, the child continued, “Because I don’t have anyone … then no one would want to play with me, they only want to do things with you, not any me … they all like (inaudible) … they just wanna play with you.” Similarly, at this same level, when asked to de ne jealousy, one 8-yearold boy described an example that illustrates what might better be understood as envy: “If someone had this like really cool toy car … it’s remote control and you like drive it all over the place someone spots it and it’s like really cool and I really want it” (Video 9; see  Appendix).

Higher-Order Experiences of Jealousy and Envy During adolescence, feelings change. The onset of puberty brings forth bodily transformations, secondary sex characteristics, and feelings of sexual attraction and desire (Compian & Hayward, 2003; Shirtcli , 2009). Adolescents must nd ways to position themselves in relation to these changes as they occur within a peer culture (Crone & Dahl, 2012; Scha huser et al., 2017). Drawing on emerging capacities for abstraction —what Inhelder and Piaget (1958) called “formal operations”—envy and jealousy arise as teens assess their social status, popularity, desirability, and social worth in relation to others using increasingly abstract standards represented within their local peer cultures. By 10–11 years, children begin to construct skills at the abstract tier of development. In so doing, preteens begin to de ne relationships in terms of their intangible qualities. In romantic relationships, normative jealousy can begin to be seen as a de ning aspect of a loving relationship. In a study of relationships among Mexican–American adolescents (Adams & Williams, 2014), at the level of single abstractions (Ab1 in Figure 18.3), one male described the importance of jealousy in a loving relationship: “If they see you with another and they aren’t jealous, they don’t care” (p. 302). By mid-adolescence, teens begin to develop the capacity p. 271

to coordinate abstract ideas into abstract mappings (Ab2 in

Figure 18.3). For example, Ab2 in Figure 18.3

3

shows how a woman’s feelings of jealousy arise by comparing her own qualities to that of her rival. While her jealousy arises from a comparative sense that her rival is “amazing in every way,” it is mitigated by her sense that she is also “a bit ugly” (Fussell & Stollery, 2012, p. 148). By later adolescence and adulthood, individuals are able to coordinate multiple abstract mappings into abstract systems (Ab3 in Figure 18.3). Ab3 in Figure 18.3 shows the structure of the appraisal described in the epigraph of this section. In thinking about the prospect of his wife’s in delity, a man re ected on the seemingly contradictory basis of his feelings of jealousy and love: “I love Sarah, I want her to be happy. But she’s mine—she’s just for me—I can’t bear the thought of her out there having fun with other people. She might meet someone. It makes me sick with jealousy” (Acton, 2010, p. 113). Loving his wife implies wanting her to be happy; however, his desire for her happiness does not extend to her being happy with another man.

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be said to overlap with jealousy in the sense that the older child seeks caring attention that will be given to

The experience of envy undergoes similar transformations. At the level of single abstractions (Ab1 in Figure 18.3), one 13-year-old girl (Video 10; see  Appendix) described feelings of envy in terms of the desire to possess socially-valued attributes of others: “I wish I had her eyes, I wish I had her hair. I wish I was as skinny as her, I wish I had her straight white teeth, I wish I had her social con dence. I wish as many boys liked me as they like her.” With further development, at the level of abstract mappings (Ab2 in Figure 18.3), status of being “Facebook famous”: “[You may] be ugly! But if you get like 60 or more than 70 likes on your status, you’re Facebook famous. And that’s why I want to kill you, because it’s not fair. Because sometimes I get like ve likes and I’m like, ‘Somebody’s viewed my status! Oh, my God!’ ” Still later, at the level of abstract systems (Ab3 in Figure 18.3), the social comparisons that mediate experiences of envy become increasingly nuanced and coordinated. One business executive described his feelings of envy when his best friend received a wanted promotion: “A choice assignment came up that I thought I was quali ed for … I wanted to be the prime person assigned to it and, ugh, management chose another. Unfortunately, he was my best friend … I think ‘my gosh, that should’ve been mine … What did I fail to do to prepare for this?’ ” (Tobach et al., 2018, p. 380).

Conclusions The relational approach maintains that emotions: • consist of ongoing processes rather than steady states; • are composed of motive–event relations, phenomenal experience, bodily expression, and states of action readiness; • are organized by the motivational signi cance of an organism’s circumstances; • exhibit both order and variability depending on the ways in which component processes mutually in uence each other over time within particular contexts; p. 272

•

undergo developmental transformation as we construct increasingly novel ways of relating to our worlds.

Finally, in viewing emotions as felt modes of relational engagement, the relational approach maintains that feeling and experience are core aspects of emotionality. However, in psychological science, the study of experience has historically been constrained by the belief that experiences are subjective states that are hidden from public view. From a relational approach, emotions should not be regarded as hidden states, but instead as intersubjectively knowable phenomena that we come to know through our human capacities for intersubjective engagement (Martin & Sugarman, 2009; Mascolo, 2009). Understanding the full range of emotional experience as it undergoes development can pro t from further elaboration of intersubjective methodologies.

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an older girl (Video 11; see  Appendix) described feelings of envy directed toward others who attain the

Appendix: Videos 1. Jealousy, SM1 on Figure 18.3 (5 months): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IzqBdT0Anvs 2. Jealousy, SM2 on Figure 18.3 (10 months): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1MFlnzH_Qkk

v=mALyFjBim8o 4. Jealousy, Rp1 on Figure 18.3 (2 years): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJ_3Euqww-Y 5. Envy, Rp1 on Figure 18.3 (approximately 2 years): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= U3f9touS1bI 6. Jealousy, Rp2 on Figure 18.3 (4 years): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BA-d3l0Z2vQ 7. Envy, Rp2 on Figure 18.3 (4 years): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hyTjG3u6l9w 8. Jealousy, Rp3 on Figure 18.3 (approximately 7 years): https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=57hJcCOW_JA 9. Envy, Rp3 on Figure 18.3 (8 years): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yUQ7rVM6kOQ 10. Envy, Ab1 on Figure 18.3: https://honey.nine.com.au/2017/05/30/11/04/teen-girls-impassionedspeech-about-daily-life-goes-viral-popular-girls-mean 11. Envy, Ab2 on Figure 18.3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vHw36x1ztSc

Notes 1.

p. 273

Examples of developmental levels of emotion are provided using publicly-available videos located online (see Appendix), providing the opportunity for readers to assess the merits of the structural representations directly.

  2.

In skill theory (Mascolo & Fischer, 2015), a single representation implies the capacity to represent symbolic meanings that are distinct from the sensory information provided. While younger infants are capable of representing aspects of their worlds, these representations tend to be dependent on the flow of sensory and perceptual stimulation. A 12-month-old may be capable of pointing to an infant and referring to them as “baby!” This di ers, for example, from the 2-year-old who is able to use the symbolic meaning of “baby” in the absence of an infant (e.g., to say, “Iʼm your baby” as a jealous reaction to viewing their father kiss their mother).

3.

Skills are forms of action that individuals construct and use within particular contexts and domains. Depending upon a personʼs goal, the context, and the domain of acting, at any particular point in development, people use skills that operate at a variety of di erent developmental levels. The age ranges at which di erent levels of skill emerge reflect the earliest points at which the capacity to form target skills arise. Older individuals are perfectly capable of constructing skills at levels that are lower than the highest levels of skill they are capable of constructing. While abstract mappings begin to emerge in mid-adolescence, the example given involves an emotion experienced by an adult female.

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3. Jealousy, SM3 on Figure 18.3 (12 months/00:34 on video): https://www.youtube.com/watch?

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The Oxford Handbook of Emotional Development Daniel Dukes (ed.) et al. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/978019 8855903.001.0001 9780191889516

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CHAPTER

19 Comparative Perspectives of Empathy Development: Insights From Chimpanzees and Bonobos  Zanna Clay, Christine E. Webb, Teresa Romero, Frans B. M. de Waal https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198855903.013.30 Published: 13 January 2022

Pages 277–290

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Published: 2022

Abstract Empathy—the sharing and understanding of others’ emotions and thoughts—is considered a de ning feature of what it means to be human. Although empathy underpins many of our social interactions presents research investigating socioemotional development in our closest living relatives, chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) and bonobos (P. paniscus), to identify the origins of empathy, across ontogenetic and evolutionary timescales. Research on consolation, a form of comforting behavior, indicate that sensitivity to others’ emotional states is present early in great ape life, and that individuals consistently di er from one another in this trait. Mirroring e ects shown for human infants, orphan juvenile apes show more disordered socioemotional functioning and reduced empathy as compared to mother-reared peers. These ndings suggest a deep evolutionary and ontogenetic basis of empathy and some striking similarities in socioemotional development between humans and great apes.

Keywords: Key words: consolation, sympathetic concern, emotion contagion, great apes, mammals, developmental disturbance, perspective taking Subject: Psychology, Developmental Psychology Series: Oxford Library of Psychology Collection: Oxford Handbooks Online

Introduction EMPATHY—BROADLY

de ned as the sharing and understanding of others’ emotions and thoughts—is a

cornerstone of sociality. Through sharing and understanding others’ states, empathy enables us to socially connect with others, to predict their behaviors, and to respond to them appropriately. Despite the importance of empathy for everyday social functioning and widespread interest in the concept, surprisingly little is known about its origins, in particular about how certain forms of empathy have evolved within our own species and how empathy rst develops in infancy. In order to address such questions, it is necessary to retrace its steps by identifying earlier points of emergence of empathy across both developmental and evolutionary timescales. Doing so enables us to reconstruct its basis, understand how its components interact, and establish how it could have evolved (de Haan & Gunnar, 2009). As our closest living relatives, great apes provide a unique opportunity to identify the evolutionary foundations of human empathy. Moreover, exploring when and how socioemotional skills, such as empathy, develop in great apes enables us to further re ne our understanding of empathy’s ontogenetic trajectory across species. In this chapter, we discuss and review recent comparative work that investigates evidence for empathic responding and its development in our closest living relatives, the chimpanzees and p. 278

bonobos. We examine the proposal that an orientation to the emotional needs of others

is present from a

young age in great apes, but becomes more discerning and cognitively sophisticated with age and experience, as it does in humans. Such a view challenges the claim that empathy is a uniquely-human capacity and, instead, highlights its deep evolutionary foundations and patterns of overlapping ontogeny.

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and is thought to be evolutionarily ancient, its origins remain relatively obscure. Here, this chapter

The Concept of Empathy The term “empathy” was rst proposed in 1903 by Lipps, and originates from the German einfühlung, which translates as “feeling-into.” Lipps argued that our ability to experience others’ emotions is achieved via a remains controversy about how to de ne empathy (Batson, 2009; Cu

et al., 2016; de Waal & Preston, 2017),

most de nitions retain, at least to some extent, Lipps’ concept of inner mirroring as a core component, upon and to which subsequent components are built and related. In this regard, empathy is considered as a multifaceted capacity involving both a ective and cognitive components (de Waal & Preston, 2017; Preston & de Waal, 2002, see Ketelaar et al., this volume). The a ective components, which include processes such as emotion contagion and motor mimicry, enable the sharing or experiencing of others’ states, whereas cognitive components, such as cognitive appraisal, perspective taking, and self–other awareness (Decety & Lamm, 2006; de Waal & Preston, 2017; Preston & de Waal, 2002), enable the individual to understand others’ states, by taking their perspective. Interconnected to empathy is the process of emotion regulation, which enables e ective management of one’s own internal states (Eisenberg et al., 1994). Taking this approach, de Waal and Preston (2017) de ne empathy as “emotional and mental sensitivity to another’s state, from being a ected by and sharing in this state to assessing the reasons for it and adopting the other’s point of view” (p. 498). Through integration of cognitive and a ective skills, individuals can come to experience another’s emotional state, understand it as separate from their own, and respond to it appropriately, such as by showing concern or providing assistance (Decety & Lamm, 2006). While the dual-component approach is a useful conceptualization, there remains active debate about whether these cognitive and a ective components can be dissociated or, rather, whether they represent an integrated system (Shamay–Tsoory et al., 2009). Current debates on empathy typically contrast a top–down view, which focuses on empathy as a mentalistic mind-reading process, with a bottom–up view, which considers empathy as a layered process, where more complex forms of cognition and a ect are built upon a more evolutionary ancient core. A top–down perspective assumes that great apes and other animals cannot show empathy given their limitations in the cognitive and a ective skills required to separate the emotions of self and other, to adequately regulate their emotions, and to take others’ perspectives (Baron–Cohen, 2005; Ho man, 2002). These cognitive and a ective skills are needed since failing to maintain the boundaries between the emotions of self and other can result in personal distress, which in turn prevents empathic concern and negatively a ects prosocial p. 279

behaviors

(Batson et al., 1987; Eisenberg et al., 1989). Early experiments were thought to support this

proposed di erence; for example, several studies indicate that chimpanzees are indi erent to others’ welfare (Silk et al., 2005; Vonk et al., 2008) and lack the ability or motivation to help others in need (Tennie et al., 2016). Other studies, however, have shown that both chimpanzees and bonobos do show evidence of caring about the well-being of others in that they seek prosocial outcomes or produce bene ts for others, even at a cost to themselves (de Waal & Suchak, 2010; Horner et al., 2011; Tan et al., 2017) From a theoretical standpoint, given the close phylogenetic relationship between humans and great apes, and the large overlaps in our social organization and cognition, it seems more parsimonious to assume the evolutionary principle of continuity, which posits that complex traits evolve gradually, usually as elaborations of pre-existing simpler traits. Using the analogy of a Russian doll, de Waal (2008) argues that more complex forms of empathy, such as sympathetic concern and targeted helping—are built upon a more automatic Perception–Action Mechanism (Preston & de Waal, 2002), whereby another’s a ective state is represented in the self’s own experience through an automatic mirroring of sensory and motor responses, known as sensorimotor coupling (de Waal, 2008). Sympathetic concern refers to concern about another’s state, and the attempts to ameliorate this state; whereas targeted helping refers to assistance and care, based on an appreciation of others’ needs or circumstances (de Waal, 2008). Thus, while evolution and,

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form of automatic “inner mirroring” that enables projection of the self into the other. Although there

similarly, ontogeny, may add layers of complexity in empathic responding, the fundamental cognitive and a ective building blocks appear to be already present in many nonhuman animals (Batson, 2009). In terms of empirical evidence for the building blocks of empathy within animals, many studies reveal evidence for motor mimicry in great apes and other animals, such as rapid facial mimicry in play faces (Kret Yamamoto et al., 2012) and wide observational evidence of sympathetic concern, discussed below (e.g., Clay & de Waal 2013a,b; Cordoni et al., 2006; de Waal & Aureli, 1996; Fraser et al., 2008; Romero & de Waal, 2010). Research in other taxa suggests that empathic capacities may occur widely across the animal kingdom. For example, studies have revealed evidence for a ective concern towards others’ in distress in a wide array of mammals, including rodents, monkeys, elephants, dogs, horses, and wolves, as well as some avian species such as ravens (Burkett et al., 2016; Custance & Mayer, 2012; Cozzi et al., 2010; Fraser & Bugnyar, 2010; Palagi et al., 2014; Plotnik & de Waal, 2014). MacLean (1985) proposed that empathy rst evolved within the context of mammalian parental care, which has since become incorporated into a broader adaptation for group living. However, the fact that we nd suggestive evidence for empathy in nonmammals, indicates that its evolutionary origins may be older than this. For social species that cooperate and/or show extended parental care, empathy enables individuals to quickly respond to one another’s states, which facilitates the regulation of social interactions, coordination of shared goals, and collective responses to danger (de Waal, 2008; de Waal & Preston, 2017). Consistent with this view, in both humans and animals, empathic responding falls along an “empathy gradient” where empathy is predicated by or biased towards social closeness; being lowest between weakly-bonded individuals, higher between tightly-bonded ones, and highest among kin (de Waal & Preston, 2017; Palagi et al., 2014).

p. 280

Consolation in Chimpanzees and Bonobos Observing the natural behavior of animals (the discipline known as ethology) provides a key opportunity to examine their underlying cognitive skills, including for capacities such as empathy. For ethologists interested in the evolutionary origins of empathy, observing how animals spontaneously respond to social con icts, in particular in response to the outbursts of distressed victims, has provided some of the most convincing evidence thus far of empathy in great apes and other animals. For example, in the immediate aftermath of a con ict in great apes, uninvolved bystanders sometimes spontaneously approach distressed victims to o er them a

liative contacts such as to groom, gently touch, hug, or even kiss them (see Figure

19.1; de Waal & van Roosmalen, 1979; Fraser et al., 2008; Romero & de Waal, 2010). Given the close resemblance between these apparently comforting bystander a

liative contacts to the acts of reassurance

seen in humans, it is not surprising that these post-con ict reunions have been labelled consolation since the rst time they were systematically studied (de Waal & van Roosmalen, 1979). Following the pioneering work by de Waal and van Roosmalen (1979) on chimpanzees, research has revealed evidence for consolation p. 281

in great apes (chimpanzees, bonobos, and gorillas) in a wide variety of conditions across captivity, sanctuaries, and the wild (Clay & de Waal, 2013a,b; de Waal & Aureli, 1996; Fraser et al., 2008; Koski & Sterck, 2007; Kutsukake & Castles, 2004; Palagi et al., 2004, 2006; Romero & de Waal, 2010; Webb et al., 2017; Wittig & Boesch, 2003).

Figure 19.1 A Juvenile Bonobo O ering Consolatory Contact to a Distressed Victim. A Juvenile Bonobo O ering Consolatory Contact to a Distressed Victim. Photo taken at Lola ya Bonobo Sanctuary, Democratic Republic of the Congo, by Zanna Clay.

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et al., 2014; Palagi et al., 2014). There is some experimental evidence for targeted helping (Melis et al., 2011;

The term “consolation” is a functional label implying that the friendly contact o ered by bystanders functions to alleviate the distress of the recipient (i.e., consolation should be o ered to those that are in need of emotional comfort). This spontaneous orientation toward someone in distress implies that consolation involves a direct emotional response to the victim’s state, as well as a motivation to ameliorate it. Though the underlying mechanisms motivating consolation remain elusive, there is reliable evidence fact that consolation is targeted toward distressed individuals and is e ective in reducing their distress suggests that it may also involve a cognitive ability to appreciate others’ needs as being separate from one’s own and, potentially, the capacity to appraise the reason for their distress. For this reason, consolation is considered a marker of sympathetic concern (see Box 19.1). Nevertheless, appraising the reasons causing their distress may not always be necessary for an empathy response; for example, in a recent study of monogamous prairie voles (Microtus ochrogaster), pair mates showed increased grooming toward their mate (but not to strangers) that had experienced an unobserved stressor, with their grooming providing e ective social bu ering (Burkett et al., 2016). Research has further revealed that patterns in chimpanzee responses toward others in distress follow predictions derived from an empathy-based hypothesis. In humans, expressions of empathy are facilitated by similarity, familiarity, and social closeness (de Waal & Preston, 2017). Similarly, research on consolation in great apes consistently reveals a bias toward social closeness based on kinship and a

liation (Clay & de

Waal, 2013a; Fraser et al., 2008; Kutsukake & Castles, 2004; Romero et al., 2010; Webb et al., 2017; but see Koski & Sterck, 2007). In chimpanzees, consolation is more commonly provided by females than males (Romero et al., 2010) which appears consistent with trends in humans, including during infancy (e.g., Knafo et al., 2008; Volbrecht et al., 2007; Zahn–Waxler et al., 1992) Nonetheless, there was no evidence for sex di erences in consolation in another study of chimpanzees (Webb et al., 2017) or bonobos (Clay & de Waal, 2013a), a topic therefore that warrants further investigation. Consolation Across Ape Development: Evolutionary Homologies Research on human development has shown that consolation and other empathy-based behaviors emerge early in life but increase with age, both in terms of the frequency and type of targets (Light & Zahn–Waxler, 2011; Davidov et al., 2013). There are also stable individual di erences (e.g., Eisenberg et al., 1999), with p. 282

higher empathy predicting

p. 283

various aspects of social and emotional competence (e.g., Allemand et al., 2015). Though children increasingly show comforting behaviors as they approach their second year (Davidov et al., 2020; Decety, 2011; Zahn–Waxler et al., 1992), the foundations for other-oriented empathic responding appear present from a much earlier age. For example, in a study of 8- to 16-month-old infants’ responses to others’ distress, personal distress responses were rare, whereas orientation and gaze toward the distressed other, rather than the mother, were more common (Roth–Hanania et al., 2011). In this way, even though not yet mobile or fully equipped with the sociocognitive capacities to take others’ perspectives or understand their needs, infants already appear to be attentive toward the arousal states of others. While this study did not control for infant attention to distress in unfamiliar people compared to in their mothers, the initial orientation toward others’ distress appears to represent the basis upon which more sophisticated forms of emotion responding can develop.

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that consolation is e ective in relieving the recipient’s distress (reviewed in de Waal & Preston, 2017). The

Box 19.1

Methodological Approaches to Study Empathy in Our Pan Relatives

Diverse methodologies have been developed and employed to measure the a ective and cognitive signatures of empathy in primates. A number of studies have focused on yawns as a possible form of yawn contagion has been measured naturalistically (by observing whether spontaneously-occurring yawns trigger further yawns in nearby groupmates; e.g., see Palagi et al., 2014) or induced experimentally (by showing subjects videos of conspeci c yawns; e.g., see Campbell & de Waal, 2011). As in humans (see Xu et al., 2009; Norscia & Palagi, 2011), both approaches have revealed that a ective contagion in chimpanzees and bonobos is biased by social closeness, thus suggestive of an underlying empathy mechanism. Studies on rapid facial mimicry provide even further support; for example, an experimental study revealed that both humans and chimpanzees are more likely to rapidly mimic the pupil size of conspeci cs than those of the other species (i.e., human and chimpanzee), corroborating the similarity bias posited by the empathy hypothesis (Kret et al., 2014). These and related methodological techniques tap into empathy’s a ective core by measuring the spontaneous matching between observers’ and targets’ a ective states. Empathy’s cognitive dimension in great apes has traditionally been investigated via targeted helping paradigms, which examine whether individuals can comprehend the target’s speci c goals or circumstances and act accordingly. For instance, chimpanzees are known to select the appropriate tool from a toolset to transfer to a partner in need (Yamamoto et al., 2012), and thereby help in situations wherein they cannot sel shly bene t (see also Melis et al., 2011; Tan & Hare, 2013; Tan et al., 2017). Additional evidence for empathic perspective-taking abilities stems from anecdotal accounts of animals orienting their help to another’s particular predicament, such as reports of bonobos rescuing group members from drowning (reviewed in de Waal., 2008). Sympathetic concern emerges when emotional contagion is combined with some appraisal of the other’s situation (de Waal, 2008). As emphasized here, consolation—or uninvolved bystanders approaching to comfort distressed victims of aggression—is the best-documented marker of sympathetic concern in other primates. Consolation is typically studied by comparing the frequency and timing of friendly contacts received by victims following an aggressive con ict with those of similar friendly contacts during noncon ict situations or controls (Veenema et al., 1994). This comparison allows one to correct for baseline levels of a contacts are not just a mirror of the general a

liation and thereby ensure that consolatory

liation tendencies within the dyad. Although

consolation is typically studied following con icts, there is some evidence that bystanders o er comfort following spontaneous distress (e.g., bonobos: Clay & de Waal, 2013b) and perhaps even over extended time frames subsequent to distressing events such as the death of a group member (e.g., chimpanzees: Goldsborough et al., 2020. In the latter study, chimpanzees consoled a bereaved mother through reassurance behaviors (e.g., mouth and body kisses) on the day of and after the stillbirth of her infant, and through increased grooming in the following month. As the range of social contexts and methodological approaches to study empathy-driven responses widens, so too will our understanding of this phenomenon across species.

While research into emotion development in great apes is still in its infancy, there is increasing evidence of homologous patterns. In a recent longitudinal study, Webb and colleagues (2017) analyzed a long-term dataset spanning nearly a decade of observations on over 3,000 con ict and post-con ict interactions in two captive groups of chimpanzees. The inclusion of 44 chimpanzee subjects comprising all age classes allowed for systematic investigations of individual di erences in consolation tendency: namely, because

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motor mimicry putatively related to empathy (although see Massen & Gallup, 2017). In such studies,

consolation was sampled across the full developmental spectrum from infancy to adulthood, analyses could test whether such di erences were relatively stable across developmental periods. Findings revealed that individual variation in consolation was strikingly consistent over time and context (i.e., an individual with high consolation tendencies relative to its peers when younger was likely to be a high consoler relative to peers when older). Thus, as in humans, empathy-driven behaviors in great apes are not only present from a across di erent developmental time points, consolation tendencies were positively related to individuals’ Composite Sociality Index scores, an index of social integration that comprises measures of grooming and social proximity. A similar result has also been shown Clay & de Waal, 2013a,b; as discussed below. Thus, akin to patterns reported in the human developmental literature, empathy appears to predict important measures of social competence in our primate relatives. From a developmental standpoint, both chimpanzees and bonobos show striking and consistent age-related changes in consolation behavior (Clay & de Waal, 2013a; Webb et al., 2017). Namely, infants and juveniles show the strongest propensity to console in their social groups, exhibiting signi cantly higher rates of consolation as compared to adolescent and adult counterparts (see Figure 19.1). These results are important for three reasons. First, they challenge the view that consolation, or indeed other forms of empathic responding, necessarily depend on sophisticated cognitive mechanisms, such as cognitive appraisal and perspective taking. Second, they demonstrate that young apes, as with young human infants, are already sensitive to the emotions of others and are able to respond to them appropriately (Clay & de Waal, 2013a,b; Webb et al., 2017). Finally, this apparent age-based decline in consolation in chimpanzees and bonobos p. 284

contrasts

with patterns typically reported in the human developmental literature (Eisenberg & Strayer,

1990; Ho man, 2008), suggestive of a potential increase in empathic responding in our own species across development, as compared to that of our close relatives.

Some Future Research Directions It is possible, for instance, that while humans share the basic capacity for empathy with great apes, the emotional and sociocognitive sca olding provided to human infants by their caregivers promotes the onset of unique forms of self–other awareness that facilitate more complex forms of emotional perspective taking. A key caregiver behavior, apparently universal across human societies is that of “a ect mirroring,” which refers to contingent and ampli ed emotional responses made by the caregiver toward the infant’s emotional state (Broesch et al., 2016). A ect mirroring is said to represent a kind of social “biofeedback” whereby caregivers’ contingent responses provide feedback to the infant about their internal states which they can thus externalize and relate to objects and events in the world (Gergley & Watson, 1996, 1999). Through this social biofeedback process, infants can learn to engage in reciprocal emotional exchanges, thus separating self from other and associating physiological sensations with external events. The rich and highly interactive nature of a ect mirroring in humans may represent a key divergence point from other species which could explain species di erences in human empathy development. Such a hypothesis is theoretically important but remains untested, as no systematic data have yet been collected on great apes. Investigating evidence for a ect mirroring in great apes is thus a topic ripe for future research (Broesch et al., 2016). Alternatively, the observed developmental decline in consolation in both bonobos and chimpanzees may point to other explanations. First, it is possible that the behavioral expression of empathy in great apes transforms over the course of development, becoming increasingly re ned or ltered with age (rather than re ecting a decline in empathy per se; see also Kim & Kret, this volume). For example, it is worth speculating that empathy’s socially-biased nature (i.e., empathic responding being biased toward individuals that are perceived to be socially close, familiar, or similar to the actor) increases with age, in

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young age, they also appear to form part of a stable personality disposition. As with research on humans

which case we would expect older individuals, as compared to their younger counterparts, to console fewer but more high-quality social partners. However, we do not yet know whether this explanation could account for the reported developmental patterns in great apes, nor to what degree, nor via what mechanisms (e.g., increased social-learning opportunities, heightened cognitive control). Interestingly, socioemotional selectivity theory (Carstensen, 1995), which has recently been extended from humans to study social consolation networks may, too, become progressively smaller and more tailored with age. Second, such ndings may also call for a re-evaluation of the methodologies that have led to such p. 285

assumptions about empathy in our own species. Speci cally, it is possible

that the variety and often

contrasting use of methodologies that have been employed to study empathy in di erent age groups in humans have biased conclusions. Namely, the tendency to rely on self-report measures in human adults contrasts markedly with the reliance on observed behavioral expressions in younger children. In particular, if the behavioral measures that are often used in young children are directly compared to the self-report methodologies that are often used in adults, developmental increases in human empathy may re ect the social desirability of the empathy response as much as any changes in empathy itself. Thus, future longitudinal and cross-sectional research with humans should strive to investigate the same or similar measures of empathy across the widest plausible range of developmental stages. Similarly, future ape research on the development of empathy would bene t from a more comprehensive approach, with the simultaneous evaluation of a range of empathy responses in di erent social contexts. There are also, evidently, similar issues to face when making species comparisons. In order to address such issues of comparability, Cordoni et al. (2016) carried out an ethological study on preschool children using the same observational methodology used for nonhuman primates. The study revealed many similarities in patterns of consolation observed in great apes and human children, which included the timing of consolation as well as the fact that children o ered comfort to others at a young age. As in the great apes, consolation by children seems to be a spontaneous and immediate response toward distress in others and also appears e ective in reducing victim anxiety. Thus, when data on humans and great apes are collected using similar procedures and operational de nitions, striking similarities in the sympathetic response can emerge. Nonetheless, longitudinal work that tracks a similar set of behavioral responses across a wider range of development stages will provide new comparative developmental perspectives on empathy’s trajectory in humans and great apes.

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networks in other primate species (Almeling et al., 2016), invites us to hypothesize that great ape

Note on Developmental Disturbances As with humans, comparative research also highlights the importance of the mother–o spring relationship and stability of caregiving for the development of socioemotional functioning, including empathy (Bard, (Cross & Harlow, 1965; Harlow, 1965), Harlow and colleagues separated infant rhesus monkeys from their mothers and examined the e ects of deprivation on socioemotional development. The results paralleled what has been demonstrated for deprived human children: lack of stable caregiving early in life has a signi cant negative impact on subsequent socioemotional functioning (de Bellis, 2005; van Ijzendoorn et al., 2009; see Plate et al., this volume). Building on this work, Clay and de Waal showed consistent impairments in the socioemotional functioning of orphaned juvenile bonobos being cared for within a sanctuary setting, as compared to their age-matched counterparts (Clay & de Waal, 2013a,b). Motherp. 286

reared juveniles were more likely to console victims of social con icts

than age-matched orphans, as

well as show generally higher levels of sociability and social competence and lower levels of social anxiety. For instance, there was a direct positive correlation between how juveniles handled their own distress and how they responded to distress witnessed in others: individuals quicker to recover from their own distress as victims (mother-reared) were more likely to console others. Overall, such results are consistent with the human developmental literature in demonstrating a tight interplay between emotional and social skills while highlighting the critical role of early experience for empathy development (Eisenberg, 2002; Eisenberg & Fabes, 2006; Murphy et al., 1999; Zahn–Waxler et al., 1985; Conner et al., this volume; Ketelaar et al., this volume).

Conclusion In sum, comparative research with great apes has revealed some striking overlaps in the form, function, and apparent ontogeny of empathy. Such research has prompted new and interesting questions concerning the expression of empathy, as well as its developmental and evolutionary foundations. Overall, the apparent similarity to ndings from human research is telling, providing further support not just for shared a ect in our closest relatives, but also for key aspects of socioemotional development across species. That empathyrelated responding emerges early in life demonstrates relative stability over the life span, and predicts social integration, allows for the conclusion that like humans, great apes exhibit marked “empathetic personalities” which are shaped by learning and experience across the life span.

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1994, 1996, 2012; Bard et al., 2014; Clay et al., 2015; van Leeuwen et al., 2014). In a seminal series of studies

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The Oxford Handbook of Emotional Development Daniel Dukes (ed.) et al. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/978019 8855903.001.0001 9780191889516

Online ISBN: Print ISBN:

9780198855903

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CHAPTER

20 Developmental Methods for Emotion Dynamics  Jessica P. Lougheed https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198855903.013.29 Published: 13 January 2022

Pages 291–304

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Published: 2022

Abstract Emotions and their development are complex processes. Emotions are dynamic; involve multiple biological, psychological, and social systems; and can be idiosyncratic. However, much of the research focus only on one biological, psychological, or social system; and/or do not account for individual di erences. This chapter provides an overview of current methods for developmental studies on emotion dynamics. First, it introduces methods for examining emotions as dynamic processes. Then, it extends this discussion to multiple-burst designs that capture emotion dynamics at multiple timescales (Ram & Diehl, 2015). Throughout, the author discusses approaches for both individual and interpersonal emotion dynamics that are applicable across the life span. The chapter concludes with a discussion of future directions in the study of emotion dynamics and their development.

Keywords: : emotion dynamics, emotion regulation, emotional development, research methods, developmental methods Subject: Psychology, Developmental Psychology Series: Oxford Library of Psychology Collection: Oxford Handbooks Online

Introduction EMOTIONS

and their development have long been conceptualized as dynamic processes that ebb and ow

(Cole et al., 2004; Thompson, 1994). Therefore, the study of emotion dynamics requires the use of methods that assess emotions across time and context. The study of emotion dynamics is burgeoning in part due to innovations in technology and statistics that facilitate the uptake of dynamic approaches. However, dynamic approaches are still far from the norm in the eld. In this chapter, I introduce developmental methods for examining emotion dynamics. I discuss methods for both individual and interpersonal processes, and the importance of the timescale (e.g., moments, hours, days, years) of unfolding dynamics. First, I discuss theoretical perspectives of timescales in emotion dynamics and their development. Then, I review methods for examining emotion dynamics at di erent timescales. I end with a discussion of future directions for developmental methods in emotion dynamics. Several theoretical conceptualizations emphasize that emotions and their development are dynamic processes unfolding at multiple timescales (Hollenstein et al., 2013; Lewis, 2000; Lougheed, 2019). In terms of individual processes, Lewis (2000) conceptualized emotions as self-organizing at three timescales: micromomentary emotions at the smallest timescale, longer-lasting moods, and an enduring structure of personality. Lower-order system elements (i.e., momentary emotional states) coalesce into moods, which, through repetition, can form the bases of individual di erences such as personality. These enduring personality structures in turn constrain the lower-order system elements of emotional states and moods, creating a self-organizing structure over development (Lewis, 2000). This perspective emphasizes that no conceptualization of emotional development is complete unless it accounts for processes that occur at more than one timescale. p. 292

In terms of interpersonal processes, Butler (2011) put forth a conceptualization of individuals in close relationships as temporal interpersonal emotion systems (TIES), in which each partner’s emotion systems (physiological, behavioral, and subjective emotional responses) interact with each other’s, creating a dyadic

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on emotional development has used methods that do not capture the dynamic nature of emotions;

system in which emotions are regulated interpersonally over time. With a focus on the developmental dynamics of the parent–adolescent relationship, in my own work (Lougheed, 2019, 2020) I recast the dynamics of TIES within a multiple timescale framework to illustrate how momentary interpersonal dynamics coalesce into broader features of the relationship, which in turn constrain the momentary dynamics of TIES. These two perspectives emphasize that emotional development occurs in the context of (e.g., features of the relationship) constrain how emotions are regulated moment by moment in the context of social interactions (see Méndez Leal & Silvers, this volume; Riediger & Bellingtier, this volume; and Stephens et al., this volume, for more on the social regulation of emotion). Multiple timescale perspectives on emotional development guide methods for examining the development of emotion. First, these perspectives provide guidance in de ning the dynamic process of focus. Second, these perspectives are linked to methodological approaches that can help match developmental theory to method. Finally, these perspectives help move developmental science closer to uncovering the mechanisms of developmental change in emotion. In the following sections, I review research that highlights the importance of dynamic methods for the study of emotional development. I rst discuss research methods for dynamics at short, moment-to-moment timescales. Then, I discuss methods for emotion dynamics at longer timescales across hours and days. I then discuss important future directions including the need to incorporate multiple timescales into study designs to fully understand the mechanisms of developing emotion dynamics.

Moment-to-Moment Dynamics To date, the most common approaches used to examine the development of emotions has been to observe individuals or dyads in emotion-eliciting tasks and have trained observers rate the occurrence of positive and negative emotion expressions using a microanalytic coding scheme (e.g., event-based, second-bysecond). A few recent studies illustrate how innovative analytical methods can leverage data that have been microanalytically coded to capture individual and interpersonal emotion processes as they unfold over short timescales.

Individual Dynamics Several di erent analytical strategies have been used to examine temporal relations among individuals’ p. 293

emotion-regulation strategy use and emotion expressions. The aim

of studies using such approaches is

often to examine whether or not the use of strategies is e ective in downregulating (i.e., resolving) negative emotions or upregulating (i.e., enhancing) positive emotions. Building o

prior work that has used

contingency analysis to examine changes in children’s emotion expressions following the use of emotionregulation strategies (Buss & Goldsmith, 1998), we recently used multilevel survival analysis (MSA) to estimate the timing of children’s recurring anger expressions, during a frustrating wait task, from their time-varying use of distraction and social-bid strategies (Lougheed et al., 2019). MSA can be used to statistically test the timing of recurring behavioral events, and time-varying in uences of that timing. We found that the likelihood of children’s anger expressions increased in the moments when they used bidding strategies that kept their attention focused on a restricted item, but that the likelihood of anger expressions decreased in the moments when they used a distraction strategy. One advantage of this analytical approach is that it allows inferences about the e ectiveness of strategy use—if the use of behavioral strategies increases or decreases the likelihood of emotion expressions in time. Dynamical systems approaches (Boker, 2001; Molenaar, 2004; Cole et al., 2020; Yang et al., 2019) are also gaining momentum as methods for examining individual emotion dynamics. Statistical approaches using

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relationships, which shape longer-term developmental processes. In turn, these developmental processes

ordinary di erential equations are one example, and this method can be used to examine temporal processes such as uctuations, damping, and ampli cation of emotions (Boker, 2001). This method was used in one study to examine children’s self-regulation during a frustrating wait task (Cole et al., 2017). It showed that 36-month-old children’s use of emotion-regulation strategies had a temporary damping e ect on their negative emotion expressions, but this damping e ect was not long-lived during the task. at this age is far from mature.

Interpersonal Dynamics Increasing attention has been paid in recent years to the development of emotion dynamics in interpersonal contexts, spurred forth by theoretical conceptualizations of emotion regulation in the context of social interactions (Butler, 2011; Campos et al., 2011). Some studies have examined individuals as nested within dyads to examine the development of interpersonal emotion dynamics (e.g., Morris et al., 2011; see Stephens et al., this volume). Much of this work has examined physiological synchrony in parent–infant dyads, which points to the importance of biobehavioral synchrony in the early years to establishing the basis of an adaptive parent–child relationship and developing infant regulation (Feldman, 2007, 2012). Caregivers and infants begin to develop a rhythm of interaction that is re ected in synchrony at the physiological level through caregivers’ behavioral attunement to infant cues (Feldman, 2007; Fogel, 1993). The basis of the relationship is established through this process, and infants learn the beginnings of physiological regulation. Interpersonal synchrony has become a major topic in research on interpersonal emotion dynamics and has p. 294

been studied in a variety of relationship types, including

parent–child and romantic partners (for

reviews, see Harrist & Waugh, 2002; Timmons et al., 2015). There are a number of methods for examining synchrony (Helm et al., 2018). Versions of actor–partner interdependence models (APIMs; Kenny & Kashy, 2011), including auto- and cross-lagged panel models, allow researchers to test the in uence of Partner A’s emotions at time t on Partner B’s emotions at time t + n (and vice versa), while controlling for the in uence of each partner’s own emotions at the previous time point. This type of dynamic maps onto theoretical conceptualizations of synchrony and emotion transmission, in which one partner’s emotions in uence the other’s at a subsequent time point (Butler, 2011). Across developmental periods, studies using these types of approaches have shown emotion transmission in parent–child dyads in infancy and childhood (Feldman, 2007) and adolescence (Papp et al., 2009). For example, mother–adolescent dyads show greater cortisol synchrony when they are experiencing negative emotions (Papp et al., 2009). Emotion transmission has been shown across di erent domains of the emotion system, including sympathetic nervous-system activity (Lougheed & Hollenstein, 2018; Lougheed et al., 2016), and expressed and experienced emotions (Mancini et al., 2016). Innovative methods have also been used to examine temporal links between two individuals’ observed behaviors. We used MSA to directly examine parental responses to children’s and adolescents’ expressed emotions from observations of behaviors during parent–child interactions (Lougheed, Craig, et al., 2016; Lougheed, Hollenstein, & Lewis, 2016; Lougheed et al., 2015). Taking this approach showed that parents of children with externalizing problems tended to be less contingent in responding supportively to their children’s negative emotion expressions than parents of typically-developing children (Lougheed et al., 2015), and that a similar lack of contingent responses may also be related to adolescent internalizing symptoms (Lougheed, Craig, et al., 2016). Another study examining age di erences in parent–adolescent dynamics used recurrence quanti cation analysis (Coco & Dale, 2014) together with growth-curve modeling to examine lead-lag associations in parent–adolescent emotion dynamics (Main et al., 2016). This study showed that older adolescents supportively validate their mothers’ emotions more than younger

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This modeling strategy enabled the authors to conclude that children’s use of emotion-regulation strategies

adolescents, but also that older adolescents tend more to be the “drivers” of negative emotional exchanges than younger adolescents. A number of research studies have examined socioemotional exibility of the dyadic parent–child system, which is the ability for a dyad to transition between emotions according to situational demands of the microanalytically-coded observations of dyadic emotion expressions during one or more interaction contexts and deriving measures such as the number of observed transitions between dyadic emotion states, and the range of states expressed (Hollenstein, 2013). Developmental research on dyadic exibility has shown that in early childhood, exibility is negatively associated with the longitudinal development of children’s externalizing behavioral problems (Hollenstein et al., 2004; Lunkenheimer et al., 2011). In middle childhood, children being treated for clinically-signi cant externalizing problems show increases in dyadic p. 295

exibility over the course of successful therapeutic treatment (Granic et al.,

2007). Flexibility increases

during the adolescent transition before settling into a new, more established dynamic, which suggests a reorganization of parent–adolescent interaction dynamics at the microsocial level leading to longer-term developmental reorganization (Granic et al., 2003). Flexibility in the parent–adolescent relationship is associated with both parental and adolescent psychosocial adjustment (i.e., lower internalizing symptoms; Lougheed & Hollenstein, 2016; van der Giessen et al., 2013). Taken together, microanalytic observations of behaviors enable researchers to examine the processes of how emotions unfold both intra- and interpersonally. Researchers can examine important topics such as the time course of emotions, how emotions are a ected by behavioral strategies, and how dyads respond to changing circumstances.

Hourly and Day-to-Day Dynamics Emotion dynamics have also been examined at longer timescales during day-to-day life. The experience sampling method (ESM; Bolger & Laurenceau, 2013) is the most common approach and enables researchers to prompt participants to respond to questionnaires throughout their day-to-day lives such as via their mobile phones. This approach captures emotion dynamics at longer timescales than studies making use of behavioral observations, with the speci c timescale depending on the number of samples per day, and allows researchers to examine individual and interpersonal emotion dynamics as they unfold in situ.

Individual Dynamics ESM has been used to investigate which emotion-regulation strategies individuals tend to use in their daily lives, and which strategies tend to be more strongly associated with changes in emotional experiences (Brans et al., 2013). This approach has revealed valuable insights about the regulation of emotions in daily life, such as that among adults, that distraction strategies tend to be the most commonly used, that multiple strategies tend to be used in combination, and that rumination and suppression strategies are associated with decreases in positive and increases in negative emotional experiences (Brans et al., 2013). Studies using similar approaches in adolescent samples have also shown that rumination strategies tend not to be e ective in resolving negative emotions, and are also associated with greater psychosocial adjustment di

culties (Silk et al., 2003).

The ESM method has yielded valuable information for developmental psychopathology. Greater depressive symptoms have been associated with greater emotional variability in day-to-day life in adolescence but not in late childhood (Larson et al., 1990), which suggests developmental changes in the associations between p. 296

emotion dynamics and psychopathology. Emotion-regulation dynamics also distinguish between youth experiencing clinically-signi cant anxiety disorders from typically-developing youth (Tan et al., 2012). Speci cally, adolescents experiencing anxiety do not di er from typically-developing adolescents in their

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interpersonal interaction (Hollenstein et al., 2013). This type of exibility is often examined by using

responses to typical day-to-day experiences but, rather, show heightened negative emotional reactivity to situations that are particularly emotionally challenging (Tan et al., 2012).

Interpersonal Dynamics relationships (for a review, see Schoebi & Randall, 2015; see also Stephens et al., this volume). When using ESM to collect data from individuals nested in relationships, it is common to prompt participants to respond to questionnaires at the same time. For example, by prompting participants to respond four times per day corresponding to personally-relevant times of day (e.g., before work, when reuniting with the partner at the end of the work day, before going to bed), researchers have examined the extent to which individuals in couple relationships are in uenced by each other’s emotional experiences (Randall & Schoebi, 2015). A variation of multilevel APIMs was used to statistically test if Partner A’s emotional experiences predicted change in Partner B’s subsequent emotional experiences (and vice versa). Greater susceptibility to partner’s emotional experiences may be protective against future distress, potentially because this susceptibility may indicate greater opportunity for emotional co-regulation within the couple relationship (Randall & Schoebi, 2015). Another study using this method showed that humor may be an e ective strategy for interpersonal emotion regulation among romantic partners—a humorous remark by one partner may increase both partner’s positive emotion and feelings of intimacy in the relationship (Horn et al., 2019). One of the rst examinations of parent–adolescent dynamics using ESM suggested that parents’ and adolescents’ emotional experiences are linked (Larson & Richards, 1994). During periods when family members were at home, adolescent girls’ emotional experiences predicted parental experiences (i.e., their emotions were “transmitted” to their parents at an hour-to-hour timescale; Larson & Richards, 1994). More recently, a new analytical method called grid-sequence analysis (Brinberg et al., 2017, 2018) has been applied to ESM data of parent–adolescent daily reports of connectedness (i.e., feelings of closeness, trust, and support). This method converts categorical time-series data into sequences, and then interdyad di erences in those sequences (i.e., how measured behaviors unfold over time) can be examined. In one study, results showed interdyad di erences in daily reports of parent–adolescent connectedness, with some dyads showing stable, high connectedness over a few weeks and others showing variable connectedness and discrepant parent and adolescent reports (Brinberg et al., 2017). Taken together, ESM methods enable researchers to examine intra- and interpersonal emotion dynamics in day-to-day life outside of the lab setting. Researchers can examine how an individual’s own use of emotion-regulation strategies, or their p. 297

partner’s, a ect

subsequent emotional experiences; and innovative analytical approaches facilitate the

examination of complex patterns.

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In terms of interpersonal dynamics, ESM has been used most extensively in the context of adult romantic

Combining Methods Innovative methods are being used to examine emotion dynamics at di erent timescales, ranging from micromomentary to hourly and daily. The most common approach for examining dynamics at the shortest approach for examining dynamics at hourly and daily timescales is sampling individuals’ experiences with ESM. Developmental science is seeing increasing uptake of such methods, which is inspiring exciting new research directions. However, a comprehensive developmental picture of emotion dynamics will not be available until we combine innovative methods to assess dynamics across multiple timescales. The combination of intensive observations of behavior (short timescale) over longer periods of development (long timescale) are referred to as multiple-burst designs (Ram & Diehl, 2015). In this nal section, I describe the few studies that have used multiple-burst designs and point towards future directions using such methods.

Multiple-Timescale Designs In one of the rst explications of development at multiple timescales, Nesselroade (1991) described shortterm change at the micro timescale (e.g., moments, seconds) as re ecting regulation and reinforcement processes, and changes at longer timescales (e.g., months, years) as resulting from developmental processes. Incorporating measurement “bursts” of intensive longitudinal data (micro timescale) repeatedly over developmental time (i.e., longitudinally over months or years) enables researchers to examine how longer-term development emerges from momentary dynamics and, in turn, how momentary dynamics are constrained by longer-lasting developmental structures (Nesselroade, 1991; Ram & Diehl, 2015). The few studies to date that have used such multiple-burst designs demonstrate its value to the study of developing emotion dynamics. To examine developmental changes in micro timescale dynamics, multiple-burst designs can involve repeating the same behavioral observation tasks at di erent ages (Cole et al., 2018). Examples include repeated observations of mothers soothing infants during immunizations—a challenging emotional experience (Benson et al., 2018; Stifter & Rovine, 2015); young children during laboratory tasks that challenge their self-regulation (Helm et al., 2016; Morales et al., 2018); children and parents during p. 298

structured and unstructured observations (Stoolmiller, 2016; Stoolmiller & Snyder,

2014); and parents

and adolescents during con ict discussions (van der Giessen et al., 2013). It is critical to consider the potential for practice e ects when using behavioral tasks repeatedly in multiple-burst designs. The studies listed above are exemplars of designs that minimize this problem. Although less common, there are also a few examples that link dynamics at hourly and daily dynamics to developmental change. In one study, adolescents’ emotion dynamics were examined with ESM over the course of treatment for major depressive disorder (Silk et al., 2011). Five bursts of experience sampling were conducted during an 8-week treatment protocol. Results showed that di erences in the intensity and lability of negative emotional experiences between adolescents experiencing depression and typicallydeveloping adolescents decreased during the course of treatment, which provides strong evidence that the e ects of the treatment translated to the real-world context of daily emotional experiences (Silk et al., 2011). Another study shows how multiple-burst designs can incorporate features of several research methods (Ram et al., 2014). Research on life-span development has the particular challenge of a “long” view of development spanning a broad range of ages. In this domain, longitudinal studies can potentially span generations of researchers to examine development over decades, which is not always feasible. An innovative approach combined cross-sectional measurement over a broad range of ages with longitudinal

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timescales is recordings of behavioral expressions and physiological responses. The most common

panel design, daily diary, and experience-sampling protocols to capture age-related di erences in daily emotion dynamics between the ages of 18 and 89 years (Ram et al., 2014). Participants completed three 21day measurement bursts and reported on emotional experiences and social interactions. Analyzing these data with multilevel models enabled the examination of how dynamics within bursts and individuals are related to age di erences in emotions and social interactions (Ram et al., 2014).

methods accessible to developmental scientists. A multiple timescale, multiphase latent-basis growth model has recently been developed to allow the analysis of behavioral change at multiple levels: (1) within task; and (2) longitudinal changes in these within-task changes (Helm et al., 2016). The rst application of this new method demonstrated how young children’s self-regulatory behaviors change over the course of a frustrating laboratory task, and how these within-task changes become less fragmented over age in line with children’s developing executive control (Helm et al., 2016). An extension of MSA enables researchers to model temporal contingencies between multiple streams of behaviors (i.e., dynamics at the micro timescale) within a broader structural equation model, to examine how momentary dynamics mediate developmental processes over longer time periods (Stoolmiller & Snyder, 2014). The rst applications of this method showed how parent–child emotion dynamics are related to the development of children’s antisocial behavior (Stoolmiller, 2016; Stoolmiller & Snyder, 2014). Another new method integrates di erential equations, which can describe momentary nonlinear dynamics, with multilevel growth modeling, which captures longitudinal change processes (Benson et al., 2018). The rst application of this p. 299

method showed how caregiver–infant interactions can be partitioned into self-and

co-regulatory

processes, and longitudinal changes in those processes. It is clear that joint-modeling approaches, which leverage combinations of statistical approaches (e.g., micro timescale approaches cast within multilevel or growth models), are the future of developmental methods for emotion dynamics.

Future Directions It is an exciting time for research on the development of emotion dynamics. New study designs and statistical approaches are enabling a greater matching of data analysis and hypothesis tests to complex developmental theories. At the same time, these new approaches are facilitating the elaboration and re nement of theoretical conceptualizations of emotion dynamics (Butler, 2011; Hollenstein et al., 2013; Lougheed, 2019). I propose several goals for developmental scientists as we move the study of emotion dynamics forward in new directions. The rst goal is to explore and describe dynamics at the micro timescale. The analysis of micro timescale dynamics is relatively new in the history of emotion science. Research that focuses on exploring and describing emotion dynamics in di erent contexts (e.g., positive versus negative emotional contexts; with di erent interaction partners such as parents and peers; in di erent settings such as home versus school and work), at di erent ages, and among di erent groups (e.g., gender, family structure, ethnicity, socioeconomic status) is crucial for forming a foundation of knowledge on which to elaborate into multipleburst designs. A second goal is to examine changes in short-term dynamics longitudinally with multiple-burst designs. Many developmental scientists may already have access to such data sets, as it has been a common practice to conduct longitudinal studies using laboratory observations of behaviors. Now that statistical approaches for modeling dynamics at multiple timescales are becoming more accessible, researchers could conduct secondary analyses of data that are already available to accelerate the body of research on dynamics at multiple timescales. Such secondary data analyses will bene t the design of new studies of dynamics at multiple timescales as we develop and re ne best practices for these designs.

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Innovations in statistical analyses are facilitating the uptake of multiple time-scale designs by making new

Finally, mixed-methods approaches will be a major asset to the study of developing emotion dynamics. For example, studies could employ multiple complementary methods, such as behavioral observations at the micro timescale with approaches that capture hourly and daily dynamics in situ with ESM. This approach would enable the observation of changes in dynamics at three or more timescales and a detailed analysis of processes underlying developmental change in emotion dynamics (see Hollenstein & Tsui, 2019 for more

The uptake of new methods also warrants some cautions. For example, su

cient statistical power is a

concern with all study designs and methods. As intensive longitudinal data, and the statistical approaches to p. 300

analyze them, become more common, it

is important for researchers to be well trained in the more

complex considerations for power (i.e., power at multiple levels, such as within-person/dyad and betweenperson/dyad; Bolger & Laurenceau, 2013). Another concern involves the complexity of model speci cation— as a eld, we need to beware the dangers of contributing to a scienti c body of work built on a foundation of model overspeci cation (e.g., inclusion of extraneous or too many predictors) and questionable research practices (e.g., p-hacking), which may be easier to intentionally or unintentionally employ with complex analyses where many analytical decisions must be made.

Conclusion Development is nonlinear and proceeds at multiple timescales (Nesselroade, 1991; Ram & Diehl, 2015). The complexity of emotional development is what makes it such a rich area of study, but also what provides challenges to implementing research. Between the increasing accessibility of advanced statistical methods, innovations in study designs, and theoretical emphases on dynamic processes, developmental scientists are well positioned to take giant leaps forward in understanding the complex processes at play in emotional development.

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discussion of this type of design).

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The Oxford Handbook of Emotional Development Daniel Dukes (ed.) et al. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/978019 8855903.001.0001 9780191889516

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CHAPTER

21 Early Interaction: New Approaches  Daniel S. Messinger, Jacquelyn Mo itt, Samantha G. Mitsven, Yeojin Amy Ahn, Stephanie Custode, Evgeniy Chervonenko, Saad Sadiq, Mei-Ling Shyu, Lynn K. Perry https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198855903.013.31 Published: 13 January 2022

Pages 305–322

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Published: 2022

Abstract Early interaction is a dynamic, emotional process in which infants in uence and are in uenced by caregivers and peers. This chapter reviews new developments in behavior imaging—objective interaction and development. Advances in the automated measurement and modeling of human emotional behavior—including objective measurement of facial expressions, machine-learning approaches to detecting interaction and emotion, and electrophysiological measurements of emotional signals—provide new insights into how interaction occurs. Furthermore, advances in automated measurement and modeling can be applied to the study of atypical development, contributing to our understanding of, for example, social a ective behaviors in toddlers with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The chapter concludes by posing questions for future directions of the eld of computational approaches to emotion.

Keywords: infants, machine learning, interaction, modeling, computational, electrophysiological, autism Subject: Psychology, Developmental Psychology Series: Oxford Library of Psychology Collection: Oxford Handbooks Online

Introduction EARLY

interaction between infants, parents, and other caregivers is an emotional process replete with bouts

of both laughter and distress. These emotional expressions often develop in the context of intricate social interactions that may be the basis of patterns of emotional engagement throughout the life span (Messinger et al., 2010). However, our understanding of emotional expression has been hampered because human coding of emotional expression is time-intensive (Cohn & Kanade, 2007). A consequence of this measurement bottleneck is that more is known about infants’ perception of emotional expressions than of their actual production of these expressions (Mitsven et al., 2020). To surmount these di

culties, this

chapter reviews computational approaches to the measurement and modeling of emotional expression and interaction. Modeling here refers both to advanced inferential (statistical) methods, machine-learning approaches, and their increasingly common hybrids. Finally, we review recent work applying automated measurement of electrophysiological and behavioral indices of emotion to the characterization of autism spectrum disorder (ASD).

Automated Measurement of Emotional Expression and Interaction Advances in machine learning (in which software learns to represent and classify video or audio signals) p. 306

o er the possibility of automated measurement of facial expressions,

emotional vocalizations, and other

expressive actions. Here, we review three primary approaches to automated measurement of emotion. In the rst approach, objective measures of low-level behavior features, including the movement of facial landmarks and the proximity of infant and parent, serve as direct indices of emotional functioning. In the second, unsupervised algorithms detect emotional signals directly from audio or video data. Here, the software detects and represents the phenomena of interest—and the human investigator interprets the results. The third and most common approach involves using algorithms to replicate human coding.

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quanti cation of human action—and computational approaches to the study of early emotional

Low-Level Tracking Methods Tracking of Emotional Facial Expressions One approach to measuring emotional expressions, such as facial expressions, involves automated tracking illustrative project, 13-month-olds were exposed to a positive (bubbles) and a negative (toy removal) emotion-eliciting task. Facial features exhibited greater displacement, velocity, and acceleration in response to the negative than the positive task, and infant head position showed the same pattern (Hammal et al., 2019). Together, the movement of facial features and head movement accounted for one third of the variance in manual behavioral a ect ratings within each of the two conditions (Hammal et al., 2015). Manual coding con rmed higher levels of smiles during positive tasks and higher levels of cry-faces (which encompass distress and anger expressions) during negative tasks (Hammal et al., 2018). The results suggest that low-level tracking of facial and head movement can distinguish negative (cry-face) versus positive (smiling) expressions.

Tracking Movement and Orientation Low-level physical features of interaction have also been used to predict expert measurements of psychological constructs such as synchrony and mutual engagement. Leclère and colleagues (2016) combined 2D and 3D sensor data from 10 high-risk (referred for neglect) and 10 low-risk 1- to 3-year-olds and their mothers to examine mother–infant interactions during a pretend tea party. Kinect depth and video tracking indicated that higher levels of mother motion were associated with lower expert ratings of maternal sensitivity and intrusiveness, and higher ratings of infant avoidance. In addition, pauses in infant and parent joint movement were associated with higher ratings of maternal sensitivity and higher levels of infant engagement. The ndings suggest that relatively low-level physical features such as mother–infant proximity and activity level are promising markers of caregiver sensitivity and intrusiveness and infant engagement, key indices of socioemotional development.

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Unsupervised Machine Learning A more radical approach to automated measurement involves direct unsupervised machine learning of emotional interaction from video or audio. Prabhakar and colleagues (2010), for example, directly detected parent–child playful interaction, characterized by quasi-periodic spatiotemporal patterns, from posted YouTube videos. Likewise, Chu and colleagues (2017) automatically detected a ective synchrony in videos of parents and infants engaged in face-to-face interaction. Using shape features of infant and mother faces, an unsupervised algorithm detected a priori areas of common action in overlapping segments of video that corresponded to infant and mother smile displays (see Figure 21.1). This is a bottom–up validation of the importance of positive emotion communication in early interaction. These approaches suggest the, as yet, unrealized potential of unsupervised machine learning to identify new patterns of early emotional interaction.

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of the movement of facial landmarks and head position in 3D space from video (Jeni et al., 2017). In an

Computational Approaches to Replicate Human Coding The most common approach to objective measurement is supervised training to replicate human expert measurements. One target is replication of the Facial Action Coding System (FACS; Ekman & Friesen, 1992; Ekman et al., 2002)—applied to infants in BabyFACS (Oster, 2006)—an expert system for documenting 2008). We previously instantiated automated measurement of the presence and intensity of Action Units by p. 308

using nonlinear manifold learning (Belkin & Niyogi, 2003) of data

by combining active appearance and

shape models to train support vector machines (SVMs; Messinger et al., 2012). This approach yielded insights into similarities between early positive and negative emotion expression, the structure of interactive positive a ect, and early interaction dynamics.

Figure 21.1 Discovered Synchronies in Six Parent–Infant Dyads. Discovered Synchronies in Six Parent–Infant Dyads. Reproduced from Chu, W.–S., De la Torre, F., Cohn, J., & Messinger, D. S. (2017). A branch-and-bound framework for unsupervised common event discovery. International Journal of Computer Vision, 123(3), 372–391, Figure 11. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11263017-0989-7 Copyright © 2017, Springer Nature. Strong smiles and mutual attention were among the synchronies discovered between parents and their 6-month-old infants.

Positive and Negative Expression Similarities Just as smiles are often used to index infant positive emotion, the cry-face is the preeminent infant expression of negative emotion. Importantly, both smiles and cry-face expressions can involve di erent degrees of mouth opening and Duchenne activation (i.e., eye constriction produced by the muscle orbiting the eyes). The Duchenne intensi cation hypothesis holds that Duchenne activation and mouth opening index the intensity of both smile and cry-face expressions (Bolzani–Dinehart et al., 2005; Darwin, 1872/1998). In support, both mouth opening and the Duchenne marker indexed greater perceived positive valence in smile expressions and greater perceived negative valence of cry-face expressions. Next, the intensi cation hypothesis was tested using the Face-to-Face/Still-Face (FFSF) protocol (Mattson, Cohn, et al., 2013; but see Mattson, Ekas, et al., 2013). In the FFSF, a naturalistic face-to-face interaction is interrupted when the parent is asked to hold a still-face and not engage with the infant, and ends when the parent is asked to play again with the infant (Adamson & Frick, 2003; Tronick et al., 1978). During face-toface play, which is expected to elicit positive emotion, smiles were more likely to involve eye constriction than during the still-face, which elicits negative emotion (see Figure 21.2). As predicted, the proportion of cry-faces involving eye constriction during the negative emotion-eliciting still-face was higher than during face-to-face play (Messinger et al., 2012). The results suggest that automated measurement of facial Action Units such as eye constriction can produce insights into the structure of infant positive and negative emotion expression.

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anatomically based appearance changes based on facial Action Units (Lucey et al., 2007; Mahoor et al.,

Interactive Positive A ect Use of the active appearance models described above (Mattson, Cohn, et al., 2013) to measure the Action Units involved in infant and parent smiling produced insights into the expression of positive emotion and the dynamic structure of early interaction. Some propose that only adult Duchenne smiling expresses they do have other important social functions (see Mireault, this volume). Objective measurement of the intensity of smiling and eye constriction in the face-to-face interactions of two dyads indicated that Duchenne smiling was not a discrete entity but a continuous signal (Messinger et al., 2009). Speci cally, the intensity of smiling and eye constriction were highly correlated in both mothers and infants. In sum, neither infants nor mothers appeared to exhibit discrete Duchenne and non-Duchenne smiles during interaction (Messinger et al., 2008). Instead, all features of smiling covaried together, suggesting they indexed a continuum of positive emotion.

Interaction Dynamics Messinger et al. (2009) went on to describe early caregiver–infant interaction using a continuous measure p. 309

of Duchenne smiling intensity derived from objective measurement

of facial Action Unit intensity. This

dynamic portrait of positive emotion uncovered variability in interactive synchrony at multiple temporal levels (see Figure 21.3). In Figure 21.3, changes in the zero-order correlation of infant and mother Duchenne smiling intensity illustrate variability in emotional synchrony over time. These changes suggest disruptions and repairs of emotional synchrony (Schore, 1994; Tronick & Cohn, 1989). Findings of dynamic changes in emotional synchrony are intriguing because a large body of research suggests that the degree to which parents adjust their own a ective expressions to match those of their infants is associated with subsequent self-control, the internalization of social norms, and attachment security (Beebe et al., 2010; Kochanska et al., 2005; Halberstadt et al., this volume).

Figure 21.2 Eye Constriction (the Duchenne Marker) Indexes Positive and Negative A ective Intensity in the Face-toFace/Still-Face (FFSF). Eye Constriction (the Duchenne Marker) Indexes Positive and Negative A ective Intensity in the Face-to-Face/Still-Face (FFSF). Adapted from Mattson, W. I., Cohn, J. F., Mahoor, M. H., Gangi, D. N., & Messinger, D. S. (2013). Darwinʼs Duchenne: Eye constriction during infant joy and distress. PloS One, 8(11), e80161, Figure 1. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0080161 © 2013 Mattson et al. Licensed under the CC-BY 4.0. Smiling during the face-to-face play with the parent involved a higher proportion of smiling with eye constriction than smiling during the still-face. The still-face involved a higher proportion of cry-faces with eye constriction than face-to-face play.

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positive emotion, whereas smiles without the Duchenne marker do not (Ekman & Friesen, 1982), although

Coding Vocal Expressions In the audio domain, the use of physical characteristics to index emotional components of vocal expression is common. Bourvis and colleagues (2018) employed automated measures of infant and mother vocalization during the FFSF. These were supplemented with detection of an emotional component of mothers’ speech— of vocalizing between the face-to-face and reunion episode of the FFSF, but mothers

exhibited few

changes in vocalization parameters. In the reunion episode, likewise, infants increased their rate of response to mothers’ e-IDS, rates of overlapping speech increased, and pauses in dyadic speech decreased. The results illustrate the potential of objective measures of the dyadic speech stream to disentangle patterns of emotional interaction following the still-face perturbation, a standard assessment of socioemotional functioning.

Figure 21.3 Automated Interaction: Correlations Between Infant and Mother Smiling Activity. Automated Interaction: Correlations Between Infant and Mother Smiling Activity. Reproduced from Messinger, D. S., Mahoor, M. H., Chow, S.–M., & Cohn, J. F. (2009). Automated measurement of facial expression in infant–mother interaction: A pilot study. Infancy, 14(3), 285–305. https://doi.org/10.1080/15250000902839963 Copyright © 2009 International Society on Infant Studies. Above each segment of interaction is a plot of the windowed cross-correlations for successive 3-second segments of interaction. High positive correlations are deep red and high negative correlations are deep blue (see color bar at right). The horizontal midline of the plots indicates the zero-order correlation; lagged correlations are indicated above and below the midline.

Coding Attachment Attachment security is central to early social and emotional development, and indexes an infant’s ability to be comforted by a caregiver when distressed. Attachment security is typically assessed in the Strange Situation Procedure (SSP), which involves two brief separations from and reunions with the parent. However, attachment assessment is conventionally assessed using expert subjective ratings. Using relatively low-level, Kinect-based, depth-video measurements of position and LENA (Language ENvironment Analysis)-derived estimates of infant crying, Prince et al. (2015) explored objectively p. 311

measured attachment behavior in the reunion episodes of the SSP. Objective

measurements of the

frequency with which the infant made contact with the mother, the duration of that contact, the duration of infant crying, and the inverse of the velocity of the infant’s initial approach to the mother accounted for a substantial proportion of the variance in, respectively, expert ratings of proximity seeking (approaching mother), contact maintenance (staying close to mother), resistance (to contact with mother), and avoidance (ignoring or moving away from mother). These results suggest that measurement of physical proxemics and crying can provide insight into patterns of attachment previously captured exclusively via expert, but subjective, rating scales. Chow and colleagues (2018) modeled “qualitative” changes in movement dynamics during the reunion episodes of the SSP by incorporating regime switching into a system of di erential equations. Seeking a computational foundation for attachment theory, the researchers distinguished a proximity-seeking regime, in which infants tended to approach the parent, and an exploration regime, in which infants moved away from the parent to explore the room. As the infant attachment system became more activated in the second reunion, there was an increase in transitions to the proximity-seeking regime. These transitions were heightened in the presence of infant vocalizations (often cries), which functioned as signals of the infant’s attachment needs. These results speak to an emerging capacity of researchers to computationally

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infant-directed speech (e-IDS)—indexed by higher pitch and wider pitch range. Infants increased their rate p. 310

capture objectively measured infant- and dyad-speci c emotional dynamics on a moment-to-moment basis to illuminate long-standing theories of early social motivation.

Modeling Approaches to Emotional Expression and Interaction algorithms to detect and measure expressive signals. Researchers are using increasingly sophisticated models to characterize when and why emotional signals are used during interaction, and to describe the development of those emotional interactions (for an advanced approach, see Rudrauf et al., this volume). Here, we review research on the development of dyadic responses to infant distress, modeling of the predictability of smiling interactions, and the application of a novel framework for inferring infant goals during emotion-laden interactions.

Modeling Face-to-Face Interactions Chow et al. (2010) applied computational and statistical modeling approaches to understanding changes in infant and parent a ective valence as they unfold in the FFSF. Speci cally, a bivariate autoregressive model indicated the presence of both infant-to-parent and parent-to-infant interactive in uence. Although each p. 312

partner was

responsive to the other, parents were more responsive to their infants than infants were to

their parents. A stochastic regression approach applied within a multidyad time series revealed changes in interactive in uence over time that were accentuated in the reunion episode following the still-face. The results point to the importance of quantifying change over time to characterize how dyads respond to one another emotionally (Chow et al., 2014).

Goals of Face-to-Face interactions Recently, our team used inverse optimal reinforcement modeling to infer likely infant and mother goals during their interactions (Ruvolo et al., 2015). Probable consequences of beginning and ending smiles on the durations of subsequent dyadic states such as mutual smiling were used to infer goals. Results of this modeling approach suggest that mothers’ likely goal is to increase the duration of mutual smiling (see Figure 21.4). However, infants’ likely goal is to increase the duration of epochs when mother is smiling but the infant is not. To achieve this goal, infants brie y smile until the mother smiles, and then they end their own smile. These results are surprising as they suggest infants do not act to increase the time they express positive emotion. Instead, infants smile as part of a dyadic process in which they create and then disengage from moments of mutual positive emotion expression (Stifter & Moyer, 1991).

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Figure 21.4 Means of the Probability Distributions of Potential Mother and Infant Goals. Means of the Probability Distributions of Potential Mother and Infant Goals. Reproduced from Ruvolo, P., Messinger, D., & Movellan, J. (2015). Infants time their smiles to make their moms smile. PloS One, 10(9), e0136492, Figure 1. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0136492 Copyright © 2015 Ruvolo et al. Licensed under CC BY 4.0. Error bars are 95% confidence intervals of the mean.

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Computational approaches to the study of early emotion involve more than the use of machine-learning

Development Changes in Face-to-Face Interactions We examined the predictability of infants initiating or ending a smile within particular face-to-face interactive contexts observed weekly from 1 to 6 months of age (Messinger et al., 2010). The mean, variance, and overall distribution of mutual smiling states became more similar over consecutive weekly sessions partner, as well as to an outside observer—with development. Infants and mothers also increased the number of alternating turns in turn-taking interactions involving initiating and terminating smiles, suggesting that infants and mothers became more emotionally responsive to one another with age (Messinger et al., 2010). These ndings suggest that repeated infant–parent interactions produce stable dyadic di erences in emotional expressivity.

Developmental Consequences of Face-to-Face Interactions Ekas and colleagues (2013) examined continuous trends in manually coded infant expressivity over the course of the still-face using multilevel models (see Figure 21.5). Group e ects indicated logarithmic decreases in infant gazing at the parent and smiling, and increases in infant cry-face expressions. At the level of individual trajectories, infant-gaze (but not smiling) trajectories were associated with later attachment security in a theoretically meaningful fashion (Ainsworth et al., 1978). Infants with later insecure-avoidant attachment exhibited the steepest drop in gazing at the parent (disengagement with the attachment gure); infants with later insecure-resistant attachment exhibited the least drop in gazing (they remained engaged with the parent despite their unavailability); and securely attached infants exhibited a moderate slope of disengagement. The results suggest that dynamic modeling of changes in engagement over time during the negative emotion-eliciting still-face may be associated with later patterns of socioemotional security.

Modeling Naturally Occurring Elicitors of Emotional Interactions Researchers have combined computational modeling (e.g., Hidden Markov Models, or HMMs) and statistical (e.g., cluster analysis) approaches to understanding infant–mother interaction in natural contexts—in this case, dyadic responses to childhood inoculations (Backer et al., 2018; Stifter & Rovine, 2015). Studies investigating interactive processes involved in the downregulation of infant distress following immunization have traditionally relied on correlational or contingency analyses to understand the e ectiveness of maternal soothing behaviors on infant distress. However, such approaches are unable to capture the in uence of multiple simultaneous soothing behaviors that occur in response to infant distress. HMMs indicated that infants utilized more complex responses to aversive stimuli and became more organized and e p. 314

cient in their soothing behaviors with age (Stifter & Rovine, 2015). Cluster analyses

indicated that the t between infants’ capacity to be soothed (indexed by temperamental factors)

and

appropriate and responsive changes in maternal soothing behaviors over time determined infant soothability. These ndings suggest the potential of an integrative approach to modeling the reciprocal interplay of emotional communication between parent and child over time (Backer et al., 2018).

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with age, such that individual dyads’ states of mutual positive a ect became more predictable—to each

Figure 21.5 Observed and Predicted Mean Frequencies of Gazes at Parent, Smiles, Positive Social Bids, and Cry-Face Expressions Over Time in the Still-Face Episode.

Reproduced from Ekas, N. V., Haltigan, J. D., & Messinger, D. S. (2013). The dynamic still-face e ect: Do infants decrease bidding over time when parents are not responsive?ʼ Developmental Psychology, 49(6), 1027–1035. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0029330 Copyright © 2013, American Psychological Association. Frequencies refer to the number of frames per second (maximum 30) in which a particular behavior occurred. Social bids were defined as smiles in the presence of gazing at the parent. Predicted refers to the expected frequency based on a hierarchical linear model containing an intercept and a linear term indexing behavior change proportional to log10 transformation of the number of seconds elapsed. Although the model only contains linear terms, the log transformation allows for curvilinear change over seconds.

Modeling Emotional Vocalizations Infant cries are a central focus of automated measurement research on emotional components of the vocal signal. Infant crying is a universal distress signal that becomes a more heterogenous negative emotion expression over the rst year (Gustafson & Green, 1991). The commercially available LENA technology employs Gaussian mixture models to detect adult speech, infant speech, and emotion-laden nonspeech vocalizations (which tend to be cries, and are referred to as such here).

Temporal and Interactive Dynamics of Crying In day-long home recordings, Fields–Olivieri and Cole (2019) found that mothers were less likely to respond to toddlers’ cries than toddlers’ word-like vocalizations. However, when mothers did respond to toddlers’ cries, the toddlers were more likely to subsequently produce speech-like vocalizations rather than additional cries (Fields–Olivieri & Cole, 2019). With respect to temporal structure, Abney and colleagues p. 315

(2017) found that home-recorded cries in the rst year exhibited a higher degree of clustering in time (temporal heterogeneity) than speech-like vocalizations. Likewise, among 1- to 2-year-olds in an early intervention preschool classroom, we found that vocal expressions of negative a ect perpetuated themselves in time (the duration of one cry predicted the duration of the next) and cries tended to occur in clusters over the day (burstiness; Messinger et al., 2019). Together, these results highlight the power of objective measurement of cries to shed light on the temporal structure of negative a ect and the dynamics of early communication using day-long samples of naturally occurring behavior.

Automated Measurement and Modeling to Understand Atypical Development Researchers have begun using automated measurement, including electrophysiological approaches, to measure individual di erences in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). ASD is a pervasive disorder of social communication that impacts both nonverbal and verbal interaction (American Psychiatric Association, 2013; see Conner et al., this volume). We begin by describing electrophysiological measurement of arousal and then review its application to ASD. We then review work using machine learning of behavior to index ASD symptoms during diagnostic assessments.

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Observed and Predicted Mean Frequencies of Gazes at Parent, Smiles, Positive Social Bids, and Cry-Face Expressions Over Time in the Still-Face Episode.

Tracking Arousal Physiological indices of arousal are a key index of emotional dynamics. Electrodermal activity (EDA) measured by skin conductance, for example, can index sympathetic nervous system (SNS) arousal, providing a physiologic indicator of children’s emotional responses and regulation (Benedek & Kaernbach, response and considers both the slow-changing levels of arousal (tonic EDA) and immediate responses to the environment (phasic EDA; Fowles, 2007). Phasic changes in EDA are the result of uctuations in eccrine sweat function in response to sympathetic activation (Fowles, 2007). EDA is widely used as an indicator of emotional arousal (Bouscein, 2012). In neonates, noxious stimuli—including a heel-prick procedure (Harrison et al., 2006) and high sound levels (Salavitabar et al., 2010)—have been tied to sharp, sustained increases in EDA. By contrast, cessation of nursing is associated with a reduction in EDA below baseline levels (Harrison et al., 2006).

Electrodermal Activity in Children With ASD Recent technological developments have enabled ambulatory measurement of EDA via wearable wrist p. 316

sensors approximately the size and appearance of a watch (Poh

et al., 2010, 2012). These ambulatory

measurements provide a unique understanding of individual di erences in response to environmental stimuli and interactions. In a sample of children with ASD (4–10 years), the concordance of ambulatory measures of parent and child EDA during a free-play period was lower in dyads in which the child had higher autism symptoms (Baker et al., 2015). Over developmental time, it is possible that autism-related social impairment interrupts the development of synchronous interactions between child and parent. Toddlers with ASD, with higher restricted and repetitive behavior scores on the Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule or ADOS-2 (Lord et al., 2012)—the gold-standard, play-based assessment of ASD— have greater increases in skin conductance level (SCL) in response to mechanical toys as opposed to passive toys (Prince et al., 2017). This lends credence to the idea that children with higher autism symptoms are di erentially reactive to speci c stimuli in the immediate environment in a way that may preclude concordance with the parent. In both children with typical development and children with ASD, low EDA appears to be a risk factor for externalizing behavior problems in the context of harsh or low-quality parenting (Baker et al., 2017; El–Sheikh & Erath, 2011). Strikingly, instances of severe physical aggression for inpatient, minimally verbal, school-age children with ASD can be predicted one minute ahead based on ambulatory monitoring of sympathetic (EDA) and parasympathetic (cardiac) arousal (Goodwin et al., 2018). The ambulatory measurement of arousal is a promising tool for understanding individual di erences in how children with and without ASD interface with their social and physical environments.

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2010; Chow et al., 2010; Rogers & Ozono , 2005). Measurement of EDA captures the SNS “ ght or ight”

Measuring ASD Symptoms With Machine Learning During the ADOS-2 assessment of ASD, a trained clinical examiner assesses autism symptoms. We were interested in predicting ADOS-2 social-a ect symptoms, which index de cits in the quantity and quality of vocal initiations, gesturing, and facial expressions including smiles, as well as unusual eye contact. the examiner and parent from video were inversely associated with ADOS social-a ect symptoms (Ahn et al., 2019; Mo

tt et al., 2019). LENA measures of adult–child turn-taking during the ADOS were also

moderately associated with social-a ect symptoms such that higher turn-taking was associated with lower symptom levels. We next used deep learning to directly predict social-a ect symptoms from the ADOS-2 audio stream (Sadiq et al., 2019). Deep-learning algorithms take raw data as input and represent features of these data in sequential layers whose output can be a classi cation (Bishop, 2006; LeCun et al., 2015) of audio or video signals (Lavner et al., 2016). We combined neural networks with recurrence and memory features to leverage temporal sequencing with a Synthetic Random Forest—a nonlinear algorithm in which the sequential interplay of input features correspond to the branches of virtual trees—to predict outcomes p. 317

(Lu et al., 2018). This deep-learning approach predicted social-a ect severity scores

more e ectively

than the pretrained LENA algorithm (Sadiq et al., 2019). Together, the results highlight the potential of di erent forms of machine learning to directly estimate emotional symptoms in children being assessed for ASD (Hashemi et al., 2012).

Conclusions Infants’ early interaction and emotional expressions set the stage for emotional functioning throughout the life span. Objective measurement of behavior and computational modeling are providing insights into how infants express emotion, and how emotional interactions unfold in real time and over development. Applications of these approaches to children with ASD suggest the potential utility of objective measurement of the emotional component of autism symptoms, and the role of psychophysiological measurements of arousal in understanding individual di erences in children with ASD.

Future Directions Objective measurement of children’s emotional behavior by means of deep learning is in its infancy. The synthesis of multimodal emotional parameters (e.g., facial, vocal, movement) remains an important goal, as does the integration of these objective measurements with psychophysiological indices of constructs such as arousal. Likewise, the ability of automated measurement to facilitate studies of children’s emotional functioning over substantial periods of time and multiple contexts (e.g., home, preschool, clinic) endures as a goal, as does the objective study of children’s emotional interactions with peers as well as parents. Finally, computational modeling of emotional interaction is increasing in its ability to understand moment-tomoment changes in a ective states. However, modeling of objective measurement to better understand emotional development remains aspirational.

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Processing video with the A dex system (Stockli et al., 2018), objective measurements of social smiling to

Acknowledgments Work on this chapter was supported by grants to the rst and last author from the National Science Foundation (1620294, PI Messinger), the Institute of Education Sciences (R324A180203, PI Messinger), and Translational Sciences, and the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities (Co-PIs Messinger and Perry). Its contents are solely the responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily represent the o

cial views of the funders.

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the Miami Clinical and Translational Science Institute, from the National Center for Advancing

p. 318

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The Oxford Handbook of Emotional Development Daniel Dukes (ed.) et al. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/978019 8855903.001.0001 9780191889516

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CHAPTER

22 Emotion Regulation in Couples Across the Life Span  Jacquelyn E. Stephens, Emily F. Hittner, Claudia M. Haase https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198855903.013.4 Published: 13 January 2022

Pages 323–338

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Published: 2022

Abstract Intimate relationships are hotbeds of emotions. Much of what psychologists know about emotion regulation comes from single-subject studies; but a growing body of research has examined emotion couples (with a focus on dynamic, iterative, and co-regulatory qualities) and measures (with a focus on di erences between self-report and performance-based measures). The authors then discuss developmental origins of emotion regulation in couples (with a focus on early attachment) and highlight changes across the life span (with a focus on longitudinal studies). Finally, the chapter reviews the consequences of emotion regulation in couples (with a focus on well-being and health) and closes with a discussion of directions for future research.

Keywords: emotion regulation, couples, intimate relationships, life span, developmental origins Subject: Psychology, Developmental Psychology Series: Oxford Library of Psychology Collection: Oxford Handbooks Online

Introduction INTIMATE

relationships are hotbeds of emotions (Levenson et al., 2013). As couples navigate emotional ups

and downs of their relationships, they encounter ample opportunities to express and modify joy or anger, become calm or upset, and get closer or drift apart. The vast majority of our emotion-regulation episodes take place in social contexts (reports suggest up to 98%; Gross et al., 2006). Thus, one might expect the emotion-regulation literature (e.g., Gross, 2013) to be ripe with studies of emotion regulation in couples. However, nothing could be further from the truth. In a review of emotion-regulation studies since 2001, Campos and colleagues estimated that less than 12% of studies assessed emotion regulation in the presence of another person (Campos et al., 2011). This was an optimistic estimate that included studies involving imagined as well as real others. Thus, much of what psychologists know about emotion regulation comes from single-subject studies (e.g., as participants watch pictures or lm clips and are instructed to regulate their emotions). However, a growing body of research has examined emotion regulation in couples. For example, as couples talk about areas of disagreement or pleasant topics in their relationship while their emotional experiences, expressions, and physiology are monitored and emotions are regulated. In this chapter, we review current directions in research on emotion regulation in couples across the life span. We zoom in on de ning qualities and measurement questions, review developmental origins and changes across the life span (see De France & Hollenstein; Méndez Leal & Silvers; Riediger & Bellingtier; this volume), highlight consequences for well-being and health, and provide suggestions for future research.

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regulation in couples. This chapter provides an overview of dimensions of emotion regulation in

p. 324

Defining Qualities De nitions of emotion regulation traditionally emphasized emotion regulation in individuals. For instance, James Gross initially de ned emotion regulation as “the processes by which individuals [emphasis added] emotions” (Gross, 1998, p. 275). More recent de nitions have been more attuned to interpersonal dimensions (e.g., Gross, 2013; Zaki & Williams, 2013). However, what about emotion regulation in couples in particular? Levenson and colleagues (2013) proposed that emotion regulation in couples has a number of special de ning qualities. Emotion regulation in couples: (1) is dynamic and iterative, as partners act and react to each other’s emotions (see Lougheed, this volume). This can make it di

cult if not sometimes impossible to parse out, for example, which

partner really started a ght (Gottman & Levenson, 1999). (2) is also co-regulatory, as partners regulate not only their own but also each other’s emotions, often with quite di erent emotion-regulation goals and strategies. This can result in partners’ emotions linking up, synchronizing, and resonating with each other—or unlinking, desynchronizing, and not resonating (Butler & Randall, 2013; Fredrickson, 2016). (3) is often bidirectional, as partners need to down- and upregulate emotions. To be able to dial emotions both down and up is important for individual emotion regulation, but may become particularly important in couples, when partners come from very di erent emotional places in order to nd some common ground. (4) is often bivalent, as partners need to regulate both negative and positive emotion. Again, this is also a de ning quality of emotion regulation in individuals, but may become particularly important in couples, for example, when partners need each other to downregulate positive and upregulate negative emotions in times of despair (Clark et al., 1987).

Measurement Studies of emotion regulation in couples have used many di erent measures, including self-report and performance-based measures. Re ecting the prevailing individualistic focus in the emotion-regulation literature, most self-report measures were designed to measure emotion regulation in individuals. For example, one of the most widely used self-report measure of emotion regulation, the Emotion Regulation p. 325

Questionnaire

(Gross & John, 2003), measures cognitive reappraisal and suppression in individuals on a

10-item scale (e.g., “I keep my emotions to myself.”). One of the rst instruments to measure interpersonal emotion regulation, the Emotion Regulation of Others and Self Scale (EROS; Niven et al., 2011) measures di erent intrinsic (e.g., self-directed) and extrinsic (e.g., other-directed) strategies to improve a ect (e.g., “I thought about something nice” or “I spent time with someone”) or worsen a ect (e.g., “I thought about my shortcomings” or “I explained to someone how they had hurt myself or others.”). However, Hofmann and colleagues (2016) note there was limited empirical evidence for the a ect-worsening strategies, and that these dimensions were infrequently endorsed. Thus, the 20-item Interpersonal Emotion Regulation Questionnaire (IERQ; Hofmann et al., 2016) was developed next, with the intention of building on the EROS and eliminating the unsupported a ective dimensions. The IERQ assesses how and when individuals receive emotion support from others (e.g., “I look to others for comfort when I feel upset.”).

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in uence which emotions they have, when they have them, and how they experience and express these

More recently, Williams and colleagues (2018) developed and validated the 16-item Interpersonal Regulation Questionnaire, which measures both individuals’ tendency to pursue interpersonal emotion regulation in response to positive and negative emotional events and also the e

cacy with which they

perceive interpersonal emotion regulation to improve their emotional lives (e.g., “When something good happens, my rst impulse is to tell someone about it.”) Although these are not speci c to the couple

There are also a number of measures of couples’ communication, con ict resolution, relationship functioning, as well as adult attachment, that all include items that could be used to measure emotion regulation in couples (Levenson et al., 2013). For example, the Experiences in Close Relationships Scale (Brennan et al., 1998) assesses attachment anxiety and avoidance using 36 items that tap heavily into couples’ emotion regulation (e.g., “I prefer not to show a partner how I feel deep down.”) Self-report measures of emotion regulation have many virtues. They clearly capture important information, are easy to administer, are cost e

cient, and can be scaled up for use with large samples and hard-to-reach

populations. However, these self-report measures also have limitations (e.g., Robinson & Clore, 2002), and they do not seem to track couples’ actual emotion regulation well. For example, Bloch (2011) found no link between questionnaire and performance-based measures of couples’ emotion regulation. This is consistent with many other ndings in a ective science showing weak or nil associations between self-report and performance-based measures of aspects of emotional functioning (e.g., cognitive empathy; Murphy & Lilienfeld, 2019). Performance-based measures thus seek to evaluate emotion regulation in couples while it occurs. These measures can assess emotion-regulation abilities (as relationship partners are instructed to regulate emotions and their success in implementing the instructions is assessed), as well as practices (as relationship partners’ emotion regulation is observed “in the wild” or in the lab, and emotion-regulation success is quanti ed using di erent metrics). In studies of emotion-regulation abilities, participants are instructed to suppress, reappraise, or otherwise regulate their emotions. These studies often use dyads (e.g., p. 326

Butler et al., 2003; Horn & Maercker, 2016; Peters et al., 2014),

but there are also a number of studies that

have manipulated emotion regulation (e.g., suppression, reappraisal) in romantic couples (e.g., Ben–Naim et al., 2013). Studies of emotion-regulation practices have a strong tradition of using experience-sampling approaches (Hektner et al., 2007; Perrez et al., 2000). These approaches often involve couples reporting on their and their partners’ a ect, stressors, and social support multiple times a day across a week or longer (e.g., Horn et al., 2019). Experience-sampling methods provide ecologically valid and nonintrusive assessments that reduce bias associated with recollected reports of emotion and emotion-regulation strategies (Robinson & Clore, 2002), and can provide unique insights into couples’ emotion regulation in real-world contexts. There is also a long tradition of observing couples’ emotion regulation as they discuss areas of con ict, pleasant topics, or “events of the day” and their emotional experiences, behaviors, autonomic physiology, or hormonal changes are monitored in the laboratory (Gottman & Gottman, 2017; Levenson et al., 2013). These laboratory-based studies have examined many di erent aspects of emotion regulation. For example, focusing on the dynamic nature of emotion regulation in couples, Bloch and colleagues (2014) examined downregulation of negative emotion in couples by assessing how long spouses stayed in “hot zones” of negative emotional experiences, behavior, and physiological arousal during marital con ict discussions. There is also growing momentum to zoom in on the co-regulatory nature of emotion regulation in couples by studying linkage, synchrony, or resonance (e.g., covariation in moment-to-moment behavioral or physiological states between relationship partners) in married couples and other dyads, such as parent– infant dyads (Butler, 2015; Feldman, 2007; Helm et al., 2014; Levenson & Gottman, 1983; Otero et al., 2019; Timmons et al., 2015). As such, these laboratory-based approaches allow researchers to capture the

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context, these scales seem like measures that could be adapted to assess emotion regulation in couples.

multidimensional and dynamic nature of emotion regulation in close relationships in a more controlled setting.

Developmental Origins Infants rely heavily on their caregiver to regulate their emotions (Thompson, 1991), be it through physical touch (e.g., nursing, rocking, cradling, cuddling, petting, tickling), voice (e.g., prosody, laughter, singing), or facial expressions (e.g., smiling, raising eyebrows). The importance of the caregiver’s face, in particular, for regulating infant emotions has been well documented through experimental paradigms. For example, the closed-eyes (Papousek, 2007) and the still-face (Tronick, 1989) paradigms elicit powerful emotional reactions in the infant as caregivers close their eyes or cease to provide facial feedback, respectively. At the same time, emotions are also regulated at a physiological level, with evidence showing that mothers’ stressful experiences can be physiologically contagious to their infants and set in motion reciprocal upregulation of physiological arousal, resulting in greater physiological linkage between mothers and p. 327

infants (Waters et al., 2014). This reminds us that emotion

regulation in infant–caregiver dyads (much

like in couples across the life span) is deeply co-regulatory, with infants also regulating caregivers’ emotions in powerful ways (Papousek, 2007). Bowlby’s theory of attachment famously asserts that early infant–caregiver interactions create an internal working model of the self and close others that guides beliefs and behaviors of what a close relationship is or should be like—with important consequences for development across the life span (Bowlby, 1988). Infant–caregiver dyads greatly di er in their attachment styles and, accordingly, in their capacity for emotion regulation. Securely attached infants (Ainsworth & Bell, 1970) react with distress when their caregiver leaves, but seek proximity and contact and are easily soothed when they return. Insecurely attached infants remain distressed (when insecure-ambivalent) or avoid the caregiver (when insecureavoidant) when they return. The idea that there are parallels between infant–caregiver and romantic-partner relationships was developed in depth by Hazan and Shaver (1987) who asserted that romantic relationships work in a similar way to early attachment relationships and share underlying motivations. Longitudinal research has documented the consequences of early di erences in attachment styles for long-term developmental outcomes, including emotion regulation and intimate relationship functioning later in life (Mikulincer et al., 2003; Sroufe, 2005). Such studies can be remarkably di

cult to conduct, as they require careful

measurement of early attachment and later emotion regulation in couples and longitudinal designs spanning decades. In one landmark study, Simpson and colleagues (2007) used a double-mediation showed that secure attachment at 12 months of age predicted greater social competence during early elementary school. Social competence then predicted more secure relationships with close friends at age 16, which in turn predicted more positive daily emotional experiences in adult romantic relationships. Thus, there were important indirect (i.e., mediated) e ects of early attachment on emotion regulation in adult romantic relationships, but no direct e ects. Such ndings illustrate that, although attachment is relatively stable (Fraley, 2002; Fraley et al., 2011), there is important within-person uctuation in attachment security across the life span, depending on relationship experiences over time (Girme et al., 2018). In sum, early attachment experiences appear to be an important cradle for couples’ emotion regulation, but this cradle can be “rocked” and early attachment experiences can be disrupted by later relationship experiences, for better or worse.

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In many ways, the relationship between infant and caregiver is the cradle for emotion regulation in couples.

Changes Across the Life Span As individuals age, they experience loss and decline in many life domains (Heckhausen et al., 1989). Their memory declines (Park & Bischof, 2013; Salthouse, 2004), their health deteriorates, many earlier sources of al., 2013). p. 328

However, not all is lost as we age. People maintain and even experience gains in some domains of functioning—with intimate relationship functioning as a prime example (Carstensen et al., 1999, 2011). Although broader social networks shrink (Wrzus et al., 2013), relationships with spouses, family members, and close friends actually tend to grow closer and more satisfying well into late life (e.g., Carstensen, 1992; Carstensen et al., 1995; Gurung et al., 2003; Henry et al., 2007). We now have longitudinal evidence that the emotional climate in marriages becomes increasingly favorable with age (Verstaen et al., 2020). Tracking objectively coded emotional behaviors during marital con ict discussions across three waves over a 13-year interval in long-term married couples, we (Verstaen et al., 2020) found that positive emotional behaviors (primarily humor, enthusiasm, and validation) increased and negative emotional behavior (primarily belligerence, defensiveness, fear/tension, and whining) decreased with age. These e ects were found for husbands and wives, for middle-aged and older spouses, and in satis ed and unsatis ed marriages. What explains these improvements? Socioemotional selectivity theory (e.g., Carstensen, 2006; Carstensen et al., 1999) famously proposes that, as time horizons shrink, older adults prioritize socioemotional goals and seek to upregulate positive emotions and downregulate negative emotions—and close relationships o er prime opportunities to do so. Thus, when we come to realize that our time on this earth is limited, we seek to make the most of now with the people we love. It is possible that this tuning of the emotionregulation system toward the positive and away from the negative not only bene ts subjective well-being but also protects physical health. Positive emotions have soothing e ects (Fredrickson & Levenson, 1998) and reduce physiological arousal in couples (Yuan et al., 2010), which may be one reason for why upregulating them becomes so important as we age. Conversely, negative emotions have powerful detrimental e ects on physical health (Haase et al., 2016), which may be one reason for why downregulating them becomes so important as we age. Supporting basic premises of socioemotional selectivity theory, a rich body of work has shown that emotion-regulation capacities are not only preserved but can actually ourish in late life (for a review, see Haase & Shiota, 2019). Older adults are more likely to avoid situations that induce negative emotions (Birditt et al., 2005; Charles et al., 2009; Stawski et al., 2008), prefer positive over negative information (Reed et al., 2014), engage in emotion-regulation strategies that upregulate positive emotions (Charles & Carstensen, 2007), perform better when instructed to reappraise negative emotions (Shiota & Levenson, 2009), and report using more reappraisal and less suppression strategies (but see Eldesouky & English, 2018; John & Gross, 2004) compared to younger adults. Moreover, older adults prune their social networks by cutting down on peripheral but not core social partners; they experience less negative and more positive emotions in these social relationships, and this appears to bene t emotional experience in daily life (English & Carstensen, 2014). To be clear, older adults do not outperform younger adults in all emotion-regulation strategies all the time (Charles, 2010; Eldesouky & English, 2018); there is evidence that the stakes for emotion regulation to go awry become particularly high in late life (Haase & Shiota, 2019).

p. 329

However, the available empirical evidence highlights heightened emotion regulation as an important resource for late-life functioning. To date, the vast majority of emotion-regulation studies have used single-subject paradigms, and many have used cross-sectional designs (which confound age and cohort e ects). At the same time, existing longitudinal studies with couples (Verstaen et al., 2020) have studied the

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meaning (e.g., careers) are no longer as important (Erikson, 1950), and social networks dwindle (Wrzus et

product of successful emotion regulation in the form of increased positive and decreased negative emotional behavior in married couples. What is missing are studies to examine how speci c emotionregulation strategies in couples change with age. Do partners increasingly avoid con ict and resort to more pleasant topics in their conversations, as some longitudinal work showing increased avoidance behavior suggests (Holley et al., 2013)? Do partners willfully look the other way and forget each other’s misgivings? shortcomings (Shiota & Levenson, 2009)? Or do partners increasingly switch from activating emotions that may antagonize others, such as anger, to de-activating emotions that may help elicit sympathy and support, such as sadness (Haase et al., 2012; Kunzmann et al., 2014; Lwi et al., 2019)?

Consequences for Well-Being and Health How individuals regulate their emotions has important consequences for their short- and long-term wellbeing and health. A wealth of single-subject studies has documented that e ective emotion regulation has positive links with individual and relational well-being (e.g., Gross & John, 2003; Quoidbach et al., 2010; Williams et al., 2018), physical health (DeSteno et al., 2013), mental health (Aldao et al., 2010), and human capital outcomes (Côté et al., 2010). Among the studies that have examined emotion regulation in couples, most have focused on consequences for relationship functioning. Self-report studies show that couples who report less frequent use of “containment” (akin to suppression) of negative emotion have higher marital satisfaction (Feeney, 1999). Conversely, the inability to regulate negative emotions has been linked with profound relationship dysfunction, including higher likelihood of partner abuse (McNulty & Hellmuth, 2008). Performance-based studies of emotion regulation in couples have often used laboratory-based paradigms to study how the type, timing, and intensity of emotion regulation during couples’ interactions predict relationship well-being and stability (for a review, see Gottman & Gottman, 2017; Levenson et al., 2013). For instance, lower levels of negative emotions for individuals and lower levels of negative emotion reciprocity predicted higher levels of marital satisfaction both concurrently (Levenson & Gottman, 1983) and longitudinally (Levenson & Gottman, 1985). In contrast, high levels of shared negative emotions are an p. 330

important predictor for divorce (Gottman, 1994).

In a similar vein, less escalation of negative emotions

and a higher ratio of positive to negative emotions during con ict has been linked with higher levels of marital satisfaction and relationship stability, concurrently and longitudinally (Gottman & Levenson, 1992). Moreover, there is now considerable support for the idea that linkage or synchrony (i.e., physiological linkage) plays an important role in predicting relationship functioning, with high levels of linkage in negative contexts predicting lower levels of marital satisfaction (Levenson & Gottman, 1983) and higher levels of positive linkage (i.e., positivity resonance) predicting higher levels of marital satisfaction (Otero et al., 2019). There is also evidence for the long-term consequences of couples’ emotion regulation in predicting marital satisfaction. Speci cally, we (Bloch et al., 2014) have shown that the speed with which wives (but not husbands) downregulated negative emotions in marital con ict discussions was an important predictor of wives’ increases in marital satisfaction over 13 years. The downregulation of negative emotional behaviors (i.e., anger, belligerence, contempt, defensiveness, disgust, domineering, fear/tension/worry, sadness, and whining) emerged as a key predictor, which we interpreted as supporting wives’ roles as the emotional center in a marriage in these cohorts. Experience sampling and diary studies of emotion regulation provide another valuable pillar of empirical evidence to support the importance of emotion regulation for relationship functioning (e.g., Luginbuehl & Schoebi, 2019). For example, using a dyadic ambulatory assessment framework, Horn and colleagues (2019) examined positive humor experienced with one’s romantic partner as an interpersonal emotion-regulation

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Do partners become better at looking at “the bright side” when confronted with each other’s aws and

strategy. Their ndings showed that positive humor predicted more positive daily a ect for oneself and one’s partner, with the latter e ect partially mediated by changes in psychological intimacy (i.e., feeling cared for, close to, understood, and secure). In addition to studies linking emotion regulation in couples and relationship well-being, there is a sizable Wilson, 2017; Robles & Kiecolt–Glaser, 2003). This literature focuses on physiological regulation mechanisms (Smith et al., 2011) that predict sickness or health outcomes. Two prominent mediating pathways are increased sleep problems and metabolic alterations (Kiecolt–Glaser & Wilson, 2017). Other studies have zoomed in on other outcomes and correlates of couples’ emotion regulation, including mental health (Holley et al., 2018) and memory functioning (Richards et al., 2003). For example, building on a sizable literature documenting bene ts of physical touch (Coan et al., 2006), Debrot and colleagues (2013) examined dating couples who completed an electronic diary four times a day over the course of a week. Findings showed that physical touch was associated with more positive a ect in the partner and predicted better psychological well-being 6 months later. With mounting evidence supporting links between couples’ emotion regulation and well-being and health outcomes, recent research has begun to examine mechanisms and moderators for these associations. For instance, we have shown that higher levels of constructive communication mediated the longitudinal association between wives’ downregulation of negative emotions and increases in their marital satisfaction p. 331

(Bloch et al., 2014). Moreover, all regulation strategies are not created equal; some approaches

to

managing emotions are healthy, while others can be unhealthy (e.g., John & Gross, 2004). Adaptive emotion-regulation strategies (e.g., perspective taking) predict higher levels of relationship satisfaction (Rusu et al., 2019), whereas maladaptive emotion-regulation strategies (e.g., suppressing emotions) predict lower levels of marital quality longitudinally (Velotti et al., 2016) and more thoughts of breaking up (Impett et al., 2012). Finally, life stage appears to be an important moderator, with the consequences of emotion regulation for well-being and health becoming ampli ed in late life. As older adults spend increasing time with their spouse (Charles & Carstensen, 2007) compared to friends and strangers, appropriately regulating emotions to maintain these close ties can a ord protection against health declines (Rook & Charles, 2017). However, older adults may also face more dire consequences when they cannot e ectively use emotion regulation to change their emotion state (Charles, 2010; Charles & Carstensen, 2007). For example, doses of negative emotional behaviors (e.g., eye rolls) have been shown to be particularly problematic for couples in late life (Rauer et al., 2017). Moreover, the perception of spouses’ warmth and hostility during marital interaction more strongly predicts relationship satisfaction among older than among middle-aged adults, suggesting greater sensitivity to the emotional climate of close relationships (Henry et al., 2007).

Future Directions Intimate relationships are one of the most important social relationships in the lives of many people. According to the USA census, 96% of American adults over the age of 65 have been married at least once in their life. At the same time, societies are aging across the globe. Average life expectancies are predicted to continue to increase, and half of babies born in the 2000s are expected to see their 100th birthday (Christensen et al., 2009). In 2020, we entered the Decade of Healthy Aging, as announced by the World Health Organization (www.who.int/ageing/10-priorities/en/). Emotion regulation (particularly in intimate relationships) appears to be a key factor in successful aging, and our chapter points to a number of fruitful directions to pursue in future emotion research.

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literature examining the consequences of relationship functioning for physical health (Kiecolt–Glaser &

First, studies are direly needed to examine emotion regulation in couples across the life span. We need to better understand how couples’ emotion-regulatory goals, abilities, and practices develop over time, when these aspects are malleable, and when they are stable. In particular, future studies should go beyond selfreport measures to assess actual emotion-regulation performance in couples, by examining multipleresponse systems (e.g., subjective experience, emotional behavior, language, autonomic physiology) and and examine samples that are more diverse than existing samples in terms of relationship status (e.g., marriage vs. cohabitation), socioeconomic status, race/ethnicity, sexual orientation, and religious orientation. p. 332

Second, more research should be directed toward the consequences of couples’ emotion regulation, with special attention given to linking di erent kinds of emotion regulation with di erent kinds of outcomes. Speci cally, more studies are needed that examine consequences not only for relationship satisfaction and stability, but also well-being, health, or cognitive performance (Waldinger et al., 2015), to name just a few domains of interest (Schoebi & Campos, 2019). Third, more research is needed on the sources of emotion regulation in couples, looking both at psychological (e.g., attachment history) as well as biological (e.g., genetic) factors that predispose individuals and couples to develop particular adaptive or maladaptive ways of regulating emotions. This research will be highly fruitful in understanding the more and the less malleable aspects of couples’ emotion regulation across the life span. Finally, we hope that this work will inspire more counseling and therapy research and practice. Interventions have traditionally been regarded as the province of earlier life periods. However, there now exist e ective intervention protocols that have proven successful in boosting emotion-regulation capacities in late life, for example, among dementia caregivers (Moskowitz et al., 2019). One important direction for future research will be to extend this work to the couple context. As emotion and close relationships become more important and consequential in late life, there is good reason to assume that emotion-focused therapy approaches for couples (which have demonstrated remarkable success; Gottman & Gottman, 2008; Johnson & Greenman, 2006; Lebow et al., 2012) could prove to be a tremendous resource for healthy aging.

Acknowledgment Emily F. Hittner is funded through the Multidisciplinary Program in Education Sciences (USA Department of Education, Institute of Education Sciences, Multidisciplinary Program in Education Sciences, Grant Award #R305B140042).

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collecting data in the laboratory as well as in the eld. Ideally, these studies would use longitudinal designs

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The Oxford Handbook of Emotional Development Daniel Dukes (ed.) et al. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/978019 8855903.001.0001 9780191889516

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CHAPTER

23 Emotions in Play: The Role of Physical Play in Children’s Social Well-Being  Guida Veiga, Brenda M. S. da Silva, Jenny Gibson, Carolien Rie e https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198855903.013.28 Published: 13 January 2022

Pages 339–353

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Published: 2022

Abstract Play is an important context for children’s emotional and social development. Most play research has been focused on pretend play; however, observational studies have shown that children spend a known about the role of physical play in children’s emotion socialization. Physical play can be categorized in two forms: exercise play and rough-and-tumble play. Both forms involve moderate to vigorous playful body activity, which is accompanied by physiological arousal. In addition, rough-andtumble play often involves role taking, requiring children to accurately read their partners’ emotional and intentional expressions, control their anger impulses, and cope with frustration. Recent research has shown that exercise play, especially when engaged with peers, is related to emotion understanding and emotion regulation; but this is less clear for rough-and-tumble play. Besides, physical play provides an important mechanism for peer interactions that is less dependent on verbal interactions, which is especially relevant for children with communication impairments, and hearing loss in particular.

Keywords: play, exercise play, rough-and-tumble play, emotion socialization, emotion regulation, emotion understanding, deaf, hard of hearing Subject: Psychology, Developmental Psychology Series: Oxford Library of Psychology Collection: Oxford Handbooks Online

Some things about children become so familiar to us that we lose sight of how remarkable they are —and lose sight too, of how little we understand the processes that underlie developmental achievements. Hobson, 2002, p. 5

Introduction CHILDREN

like to play. Play provides relaxation, evokes pleasure, induces a sense of freedom, and gives

children the opportunity to re ne their skills without fear of failure. Play begins very early in life and has been argued to be one of the leading sources of children’s development by many developmental theorists (Montessori, 1989; Piaget, 1951; Vygotsky, 1967). Children will almost automatically start playing whenever and wherever they can, and they will play whatever they want to: sometimes children run and chase each other, or construct things, or pretend to be someone else. From a social perspective, we can see children playing alone, playing with caregivers, playing cooperatively in small or larger groups, and sometimes quietly observing others at play. Although the observation of children playing uncovers signi cant variation in play behaviors (see Zaharia et al., this volume), many play theories and much research have focused on pretend play (Fein, 1981; Lillard et al., 2013). Yet, what can we observe when observing a playground after the morning classes? What do children do outdoors when the sun rises after a rainy week? How do children play when in a forest or at the beach? They run, jump, chase each other, and wrestle! They laugh and speak in ways that are as powerful p. 340

and as dynamic as their movements. Indeed, observational studies have shown

that children spend a

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considerable amount of time engaged in physical play. Although it is thought to be important, little is

considerable amount of time engaged in physical play—such as running, catching, or wrestling—especially when outdoors (Lindsey, 2014; Veiga, de Leng, et al., 2017). Despite its signi cance in children’s everyday lives, physical play has been relatively neglected by most developmentalists. A recent review found that while much research has been done linking physical play to (Gibson et al., 2017). Historically, this may be due to the in uence of mind–body dualism and the subsequent separation of movement and emotion in popular conceptualization and in academic research. However, as researchers have returned to investigations of the link between physicality and emotion there is an emerging body of work that connects the physical aspects of play with children’s social and emotional well-being (Gibson et al., 2011; Heravi et al., 2018; Lindsey, 2014; Pellegrini & Smith, 1998; Veiga, de Leng, et al., 2017). This chapter provides an introduction to how di erent types of physical play are related to emotional development in childhood. An introduction to the body and emotions, and, to the concept of physical play, is given before moving to a discussion of the links between physical play and social-emotional well-being. The chapter then explores, in depth, the case of rough-and-tumble play, which has been proposed as a key mechanism for childhood emotional and behavioral self-regulation. Finally, the chapter considers the importance of physical play for those children who face challenges due to disability, focusing in particular on children with hearing loss. The chapter concludes with suggestions for future research in this important area.

Body and Emotions An emotion starts with a meaningful situation that captures our attention and arouses the body. This leads to an appraisal—an evaluation of the eliciting event as pleasant or unpleasant and of the capacity to cope with the situation. Along with the appraisal comes an urge to respond—an action tendency, which results in the actual response—the communication of the reaction and the behavioral intention, which will modify the situation and restart the process (Frijda, 1986; Sander et al., 2005; Scherer, 2000). Emotions are often experienced as (more or less) notable bodily sensations (e.g., rapid heartbeat when a big dog starts barking, tension in the abdominal zone on an examination day), re ecting changes in skeletomuscular, neuroendocrine, and autonomic nervous systems (Levenson, 2003) that prepare the individual to react quickly and adaptively in order to manage and regulate the intensity of the arousing experience. Young children need to learn to link those bodily cues to the emotion-evoking situation; for example, linking the sensation of tummy ache to anxiety about attending a new class. As children gradually come to understand that bodily sensations are part of the emotion process, they also learn to ignore them and focus on the emotion-evoking situation instead (Rie e et al., 2008). Yet, when asked to re ect upon p. 341

their bodily sensations

retrospectively, children and adults alike can point out that they feel tension in

their muscles when angry, or tension in their stomach when nervous. The “sense of the physiological condition of the body” (Craig, 2003), also called interoception, is therefore related to the experience of emotions (Barrett et al., 2004), facilitating their understanding and regulation (Füstös et al., 2012), both in adults (e.g., Barrett et al., 2004; Füstös et al., 2012) and in children (e.g., Koch & Pollatos, 2014; Schaan et al., 2019). In fact, from an early age (at least since preschool age) children are already able to consciously experience internal bodily sensations (Füstös et al., 2012), and such capacity to perceive one’s own bodily sensations (e.g., heart beats) has been related to emotion-regulation skills (Schaan et al., 2019). The importance of interoception within emotional experience sheds light on the role of physical play on children’s social-emotional well-being.

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physical health outcomes, there is little research on its importance in children’s emotional socialization

Physical Play De ned as moderate to vigorous physical activity that takes place in a playful context, physical play involves large muscle activity and physiological arousal (e.g., racing heartbeat, rapid breathing, high muscle tone) rough-and-tumble play. Both forms of physical play represent a signi cant part of children’s daily lives and play an important role on children’s social-emotional well-being. Exaggerated, active, and moderate to vigorous locomotor behaviors such as running, jumping, and climbing are labeled exercise play (Pellegrini & Smith, 1998). Exercise play begins in the rst year of life, when children start mastering motor skills, and peaks around 4–5 years of age before declining in the primaryschool years (Pellegrini & Smith, 1998). Although exercise play has been historically considered a masculine play type, recent research has found no gender di erences in this domain (Colwell & Lindsey, 2005; Lindsey & Colwell, 2013; Veiga, de Leng, et al., 2017). Exercise play accounts for 19–40% and 14–48% of preschool girls’ and boys’ peer play respectively (Colwell & Lindsey, 2005; Veiga, de Leng, et al., 2017). When these active play behaviors involve suspending reality and relate to chasing, play ghting, and wrestling, we identify them as rough-and-tumble play (Bjorklund, 2009). This form of physical play has a strong social component, and often involves reversing roles (win and lose, catch and be caught) and suspending reality (e.g., playing monsters, pirates, wrestling) (Pellegrini, 2009). Research has found that boys engage more in rough-and-tumble play than girls (Colwell & Lindsey, 2005; Lindsey & Colwell, 2013; Veiga, de Leng, et al., 2017). This form of physical play increases during the preschool period, peaks around the age of 6–10 years, and declines in adolescence (Bjorklund, 2009). The frequency of rough-and-tumble play seems to be highly related to the characteristics of the environment. Rough-and-tumble is the most p. 342

prevalent form of social play in the preschool outdoor playground, accounting for 34% and 62%

of

preschoolers’ social playtime for girls and boys respectively (Veiga, de Leng, et al., 2017). However, when observed in indoor and more structured environments, these frequencies decline to 19% and 22% respectively (Lindsey, 2014).

Physical Play and Childrenʼs Social-Emotional Well-Being Children are wired to move; to experience themselves and others in space and time in ways that do not have to involve words. In fact, when we observe toddlers and preschoolers playing in a park, we may see them throwing themselves to the ground, feeling their bodies in contact with the rocks, splashing their feet in puddles, and racing against each other. We hear them shouting and laughing with pleasure and joy. The large body movements in this scenario give children important sensory inputs, and stimulate their muscle and bone strength, advancing such motor skills as balance and coordination. In early childhood, when language skills are still developing, motor competence is of particular importance for young children’s engagement in peer interactions. Improved motor competence makes children more adept and attractive playmates (Pellegrini & Smith, 1998). On the contrary, poor motor competence may limit children’s engagement with team physical games and interactions, and it is linked to a lower sense of physical and social competence, and increased experience of anxiety and depression (Cummins et al., 2005; Piek et al., 2008; Schoemaker & Kalverboer, 1994). Furthermore, physical activity modulates hormones, amino acids, and neurotransmitter levels (e.g., dopamine, serotonin, cortisol), stimulating positive mood states and producing a calming e ect (Heijnen et al., 2016), which may support positive peer relationships. Hence, as a rich opportunity to improve motor competence and to promote positive mood states, physical play seems to contribute to children’s establishment of successful peer relationships (Pellegrini & Smith, 1998).

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(Pellegrini & Smith, 1998). This form of play can be categorized into two distinct subtypes: exercise play and

As described previously, the physiological arousal (e.g., racing heartbeat, rapid breathing, high muscle tone) present in physical play is an important component of the emotional experience. A girl happily running away from her friend can hear her heart beating quickly; a boy walking on a narrow high wall can feel the tension in his stomach and notice his shortness of breath. Through the opportunity to perceive bodily changes associated with emotional experience, physical play constitutes an important context for children Recent research has shown that exercise play, especially when engaged in with peers, is related to emotion understanding, emotion regulation, and social competence (Lindsey & Colwell, 2013; Veiga, de Leng, et al., 2017), but this association is less clear for rough-and-tumble play.

p. 343

The Case of Rough-and-Tumble Play Consider the following short play observation: John and Mike are two 6-year-old friends who are at the school playground. John is tall, strong, and the oldest of the class; Mike is the shortest. John suggests to Mike, “Let’s play the world wrestling championship!” John starts moving his arms with combative, yet soft, owing movements. The play ght continues with soft and balletic moves made by both children. John slowly punches Mike, who passively falls to the ground. John raises his arms shouting, “Yeah! I won the ght!” John circles around the playground shouting, “I won the ght!” John returns to Mike and tells him, “Let’s go again!” This time it is Mike who puts John on the ground, proudly winning. They have a third bout and John “wins” again. When their teacher calls them back to class, Mike and John are holding hands and run back to the classroom together. This short observation illustrates two friends engaged in play ghting, alternating roles, cooperation, and competition. However, no “real” ghting occurred in this scenario and, therefore, it is an excellent example of rough-and-tumble play as a privileged arena for children to practice their emotional competence. First, rough-and-tumble play requires children to understand their own and others’ emotions. As children enact vigorous, emotionally charged themes, excitement, pleasure, and sometimes frustration rise up, requiring children to be skilled at expressing their own emotions and intentions, as well as reading the a ective and intentional cues from others about the play episode. Second, as children easily become aroused, they have to ne-tune their playful aggressive mode and modulate their excitement. In other words, during rough-and-tumble play interactions, children need to be skilled at regulating their intense emotions in order to sustain the vigor, excitement, and emotional intensity of this apparently violent form of play, instead of breaking down into aggression (Flanders et al., 2010; Pellegrini & Smith, 1998). This way, children learn their own and others’ personal limits and abilities, and understand how their behavior a ects others (Logue & Harvey, 2009). For instance, in the example observation, if John had hurt Mike, the play would have stopped, and John would learn that he had been too rough. This function of rough-and-tumble

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to become aware of their own and others’ emotions, and to learn how to regulate them (Smith, 2010).

play as a form of emotional regulation may have its roots in early development, particularly in the context of father–child playful interactions. Rough-and-tumble play is considered a key context where fathers p. 344

teach

their children to regulate intense a ect by intensifying the arousal of the rough interaction and

subsequently decreasing it when it surpasses what children can tolerate (Paquette, 2004). For these reasons, rough-and-tumble play is argued to be the “traditional means by which most children learn to regulate However, research shows ambiguous ndings. On the one hand, research shows that rough-and-tumble play among peers is positively associated with preschool boys’ emotion-regulation skills, both concurrently and longitudinally (Lindsey & Colwell, 2013). Interestingly, such associations have not been observed for girls. Rough-and-tumble play has also been found to be associated with school-aged children’s and adolescents’ social competence (Pellegrini, 1988, 1994). On the other hand, other studies have found that preschoolers’ rough-and-tumble play at school recess is positively related to physical aggression (Veiga et al., 2020) and to negative indicators of social competence, such as being disliked by peers (Hart et al., 1992; Ladd & Price, 1987). Such equivocal ndings could suggest that the functions of rough-and-tumble play may change across children’s development (Hart et al., 1992). It is possible that such play may be too demanding for preschoolers, given that the frequency of this form of physical play peaks at an older age (Pellegrini & Smith, 1998). This explanation would t with the extensive theoretical framework arguing that this form of play has the immediate function of practicing social-signaling skills (Bjorklund & Pellegrini, 2000). Furthermore, engaging in rough-and-tumble play requires children to accurately distinguish play from aggression, which might be extra demanding within an arousing atmosphere (Smith & Boulton, 1990). Therefore, regulating arousal during rough-and-tumble play might be especially challenging for a preschooler, who might misinterpret the situation, given that cooperative behaviors, theory of mind, and emotion-regulation capacities are only just emerging in children of this age group. Carraro and colleagues (2014, 2018) developed a program based on rough-and-tumble play, assuming that exposing students to nonthreatening body-contact experiences within the school setting would help to reduce self-perceived aggression. School-aged children and young adolescents engaged in eight lessons, two times a week, over 1 month (Carraro & Gobbi, 2018; Carraro et al., 2014). The program entailed a progression in terms of physical contact and opposition. For example, initial games involved brief physical contact and touch between participants, while in the nal lesson, participants engaged in play ghting in pairs, pushing, pulling, chasing in pairs, or trying to pull the partner to the ground. Both studies showed that the program e ectively reduced school-aged children’s and adolescents’ self-reported aggression (Carraro & Gobbi, 2018; Carraro et al., 2014). A similar program carried out with institutionalized schoolaged children was shown to decrease internalizing symptoms (Veiga et al., 2020). While these studies reinforce the idea that rough-and-tumble play may be bene cial for older children’s p. 345

emotional competence, the fact that these programs were carried out

in a structured environment (i.e., in

physical education classes, psychomotor therapy) also suggests that this form of physical play requires certain boundaries. For example, in the study that showed a positive relationship between rough-andtumble play and preschoolers’ physical aggression (Veiga, O’Connor, et al., 2020), there were only two adults supervising 100 children during recess, who had been instructed not to interfere in children’s play, and to let them play freely and solve their own problems independently. Possibly, preschoolers needed a more controlled and calmer environment to take the best from rough-and-tumble play. Research shows that qualitative aspects of father–child rough-and-tumble play, such as dominance and positive a ective climate, support children’s development in social and emotional domains. When we observe parent–child rough-and-tumble play interactions, we often see caregivers sensitive to their children’s needs and emotional states, maintaining physical and emotional engagement and enabling a

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physical aggression” (Tremblay, 2006, p. 485) and to foster children’s social-emotional well-being.

reciprocal exchange of dominance and subordination, with warm and positive a ect. However, this is not always the case. Some caregivers nd it di

cult to contain and maintain the positive atmosphere of such

intense body-play interactions, and highly aroused children come close to the point of losing control and becoming physically aggressive (Paquette, 2004). This can occur for di erent reasons: for example, due to overexcitement, di

culties in the caregiver’s reading of their child’s emotional expressions, or di

making it more di

culties

cult to maintain arousal at an optimal level,

cult for children to self-regulate.

Children need to learn to regulate their own emotions. This process takes place through emotion socialization, which is based on modeling, observing others, and talking about emotions with knowledgeable others. Therefore, if caregivers do not set limits during play, they may reduce opportunities for their children to learn “the social boundaries of their aggressive behavior,” and this may inhibit emotion-regulation skills (Flanders et al., 2009, p. 287). Moreover, if caregivers respond to their children’s playful yet aggressive behaviors with harsh emotional expressions, they may be teaching them to respond reciprocally to others’ negative a ect; that is, to respond by increasing con ict, which may in turn negatively impact their social interactions (Carson & Parke, 1996). Two factors seem to be important for caregiver–child rough-and-tumble play. First, the caregiver should set limits on play by regulating the child’s aggressive impulses. Research shows that when caregivers do not set limits or show dominance, the child can become more, rather than less, hostile (Barth & Parke, 1993; Flanders et al., 2009, 2010). In fact, caregivers should “communicate a double message to his child: ‘I love you’ (a ective component) and ‘I am stronger than you’ (agonistic component)” (Paquette, 2004, p. 208). Second, the emotional atmosphere should be positive, as the display of negative a ect through the course of playful interaction has been associated with more physical aggression in children (Carson & Parke, 1996; Veiga, O’Connor, et al., 2020). Caregivers should be aware that rough-and-tumble play should always involve a “laugh play face”—a warm and playful expression that is distinctly di erent from one adopted during ghting or aggression (Humphreys & Smith, 1987).

p. 346

The Importance of Physical Play for Children with Disabilities: Children with Hearing Loss As physical play does not require complex receptive or expressive communication skills, ne motor skills, or sustained attention, almost every child can engage and succeed in physical play. Many children with disabilities enjoy, and often prefer physical play (Case–Smith & Kuhaneck, 2008). Physical play involves proprioceptive and vestibular stimulation, which can support children with challenges in these domains (e.g., autism, attention de cit hyperactivity disorder, sensory integration disorder) to organize their behavior and feel calm (Baranek, 2002; Blanche & Schaaf, 2001). All these features make physical play an important context for social learning for children with disabilities. These bene ts of physical play may apply particularly to children with communication impairments, such as children with hearing loss, speci c language impairments, or autism spectrum disorder. This group of children may have particular di

culties in engaging in play that involves higher levels of verbal

communication (e.g., complex role play or pretense). The remainder of this chapter therefore explores how physical play could enhance social-emotional skills of children with communication impairment, using the example of children with hearing loss as an illustrative case study. Like other children with communication impairments, children with hearing loss have reduced access to incidental learning (see Ketelaar et al., this volume). In their case, they may struggle to learn from observing or overhearing their peers’ emotions and/or social behaviors in naturalistic contexts (Calderon et al., 2003;

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in managing their child’s emotions. Some caregivers nd it di

Moog et al., 2011). For these children, it might be harder to “connect the dots” of communication (i.e., facial expression, gestures, tone of voice, eye contact and other nonsymbolic actions, verbal content), which might lead to misinterpretations of the emotional exchange that is taking place. For example, some facial expressions can be misunderstood when they are not connected to the tone of voice or to the verbal information. Incidental learning is crucial for children’s emotional and social development, and research cult to understand others’

emotions, regulate their own emotions, and communicate emotions (Ketelaar et al., 2012; Netten et al., 2017; Wie erink et al., 2013). As stated previously, play is a privileged arena for children’s overall development. However, engaging in play can be a serious challenge for children with hearing loss. During play, linguistic competence is important for maintaining social interactions. Yet, with the extensive auditory and kinetic stimulation, the rapid development of contacts and rules that occur during play, participation becomes even more di

cult

(Brown et al., 2008; Rie e et al., 2016). Perhaps not surprisingly, children with hearing loss seem to be more successful in engaging in one-to-one peer situations than in interactions involving two or more hearing p. 347

peers (Martin et al., 2010). Furthermore, although children with

hearing loss position themselves

optimally for participation in the group, some research indicates that they are less well tuned in (Brown et al., 2008). Children with hearing loss, either in mainstream education (da Silva et al., 2020) or in a special class (Mira et al., 2019), show a higher prevalence of exercise play compared to their hearing peers. Although the image of children with hearing loss running and jumping in the playground apparently contradicts the old idea that these children have motor di

culties (Hartman et al., 2011; Savelsbergh et al., 1991), recent studies

have shown that, despite their possible balance de cits, children with hearing loss show a similar level of motor competence as their hearing peers (Engel–Yeger & Weissman, 2009). In fact, Higginbotham and Baker (1981) suggest that one particular form of physical play—exercise play—could help children with hearing loss to organize and maintain their play. Possibly, as pretend play relies on complex and continuous verbal interactions, exercise play could o er a less verbal alternative for children with hearing loss to more easily hang out with their peers. Exercise play o ers opportunity for them to use their body and movement to communicate, cooperate, and share the joy of playing together. Moreover, exercise play is more perceptible than pretend play, therefore readily catching children’s attention and signaling what they need to do to join the peer interaction. Imagine in a large playground, a young girl with hearing loss wandering around, observing her peers playing, and wishing to join them. From afar, she sees a small group of children using some little toys and talking. Because of her auditory impairment she is not able to quickly gure out what her peers are doing, and what they are actually playing. Are they taking part in pretend play? Are they building something? She might not feel con dent enough to enter their interaction, and choose to avoid it. Next, she sees some peers throwing a ball at a wall, trying to see who can throw the highest and laughing when the ball goes away. This scenario catches her attention; she can easily understand what her peers are doing, and joins them. It seems plausible to assume that, considering the bene ts of exercise play for children’s emotion understanding and regulation that we have described here, this form of play, which is so readily available for joining in with, might be an important venue for the social-emotional well-being of children with hearing loss. Note that this scenario not only suits children with hearing loss, but also other children with communication impairments, for example children with a developmental language impairment. Although not all children with autism would like to join active group play, exercise play might be more easily accessible for them also, for the aforementioned reasons. Regarding rough-and-tumble play, and based on our observations in the playground, children with communication impairments, and hearing loss in particular, are less likely to engage in play ghts, preferring to chase and be chased (Vicente, 2019). Possibly, chasing gives these children with hearing loss

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has consistently shown that young children with hearing loss nd it more di

an alternative rough interaction which only involves brief physical contact and opposition, and is therefore less demanding in terms of emotion understanding, emotion regulation, and theory of mind capacities. Nevertheless, more studies are needed to understand the importance of rough-and-tumble play for children with communication di

culties. For example, given the research showing that young children

with communication impairments use less adaptive emotion-regulation strategies, it would be worthwhile to understand how caregivers of

these children use rough-and-tumble play in caregiver–child

interactions. Intervention research may lead to a better understanding of whether helping caregivers to be sensitive in understanding and regulating their children’s emotions, while in rough-and-tumble play, could have a positive e ect on the social well-being of children with communication di

culties.

Summary and Outlook To summarize, this chapter has explored how physical play is an important, yet often neglected, component of how children learn to regulate their emotions. Physical play can be used to support social and emotional skills development both in the context of interactions between peers and of caregiver–child interactions. Finally, the relevance of physical play for providing a mechanism for peer interactions that is less dependent on verbal interactions for children with communication impairments and hearing loss was explored speci cally. Given the scarcity of research on this topic, there are plenty of gaps that could be addressed. One priority is to develop reliable measurement tools and analytical methods that could be used to test various theoretical propositions regarding physical play. Advances in this area have been made by increasing use of sensor technologies that can provide physiological, social, spatial, and temporal information (Heravi et al., 2018; Moreno et al., 2019; Veiga, Ketelaar, et al., 2017). Secondly, as most research to date has been carried out in Western contexts, and playful interactions and emotion appraisal/expression are known to vary by culture (e.g., Rao & Gibson, 2018), we recommend that more research be done across a range of countries and cultural contexts. Finally, given the promising data on physical play supporting inclusion, we hope that this chapter will inspire more research into how physical play interventions can support children with communication di

culties.

Acknowledgment Chapter opening quote reproduced from Peter Hobson, The cradle of thought: Exploring the origins of thinking, p. 5, Copyright © 2002, Pan MacMillan, with permission.

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The Oxford Handbook of Emotional Development Daniel Dukes (ed.) et al. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/978019 8855903.001.0001 9780191889516 9780198855903

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CHAPTER

24 Play and Games: Means to Support Emotional Development  Alexandra Zaharia, Linda Dell'Angela, David Sander, Andrea C. Samson https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198855903.013.9 Published: 13 January 2022

Pages 354–370

Online ISBN: Print ISBN:

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Published: 2022

Abstract This chapter examines the mechanisms through which play may contribute to emotional development. First, the authors discuss di erent types of play that can be identi ed across developmental stages. factor against the manifestation of psychopathologies. Next, it speci cally refers to the experience of positive emotions and to emotion regulation, which are triggered in play, as key elements for adaptive emotional functioning. Furthermore, the authors characterize board games as a particular type of play that holds powerful learning value through their design and mechanics. Finally, the chapter brie y summarizes the rst study to date to examine theory-driven board games that were explicitly designed to support emotional competences in school-age children.

Keywords: play, board games, emotional competences, positive emotions, emotion regulation Subject: Psychology, Developmental Psychology Series: Oxford Library of Psychology Collection: Oxford Handbooks Online

Introduction THIS

chapter focuses on the idea that play is essential for emotional development while discussing the

subsequent bene ts. On the one hand, positive emotions generated and achieved through play build up new valuable experiences and disclose the repertoire of emotional skills. On the other hand, emotion regulation skills, which are extremely important for well-being and developing relationships with others, are triggered by the close-to-life play events, and further trained and re ned due to the social component of play. Finally, we discuss the potential of board games as tools to train emotional competences and support children’s adaptive functioning.

Play: Definition and Types Play has been described as being considerably supportive of human development in various ways and in di erent domains (e.g., social, intellectual, emotional) at all ages (Eberle, 2014). Over the years, numerous conceptualizations of play have been formulated, highlighting its complex nature and the di erent perspectives from which it can be studied and understood (Eberle, 2014; Glenn et al., 2013; Graham & Burghardt, 2010; Miller, 2017; Nicolopoulou, 1993; Van Vleet & Feeney, 2015). Play can be examined on at least two levels: an intraindividual level, focusing on individual psychological processes; and an interindividual level, focusing on play as a social activity (Nicolopoulou, 1993). Despite the multiple theories, classi cations, and di erent characteristics regarding its structure and function, one can notice that the p. 355

term play is a dynamic concept, which changes with societal evolution (e.g., apparition of digital

games;

Etzel, 2010) and across development, from infancy to adulthood (Zosh et al., 2017). Moreover, multiple theories have consistently highlighted a set of characteristics inherent to play: positive emotions, intrinsic motivation, engagement and immersion, and a relaxed and safe environment (Burghardt, 2005; Hirsh– Pasek & Golinko , 2008; Krasnor & Pepler, 1980; Miller, 2017; Perry et al., 2000; Zosh et al., 2017). In Piaget’s view (Nicolopoulou, 1993; Nijhof et al., 2018; Piaget, 1978/1994), play evolves with the child’s cognitive level from sensorimotor or practice play (up to around 18 months) to symbolic play (e.g., pretend

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Second, the chapter focuses on the emotional bene ts of play and its potential role as a protective

or sociodramatic play; emerging around 18 months), and, then, towards rule-based play (i.e., play with explicitly stated rules; emerging around 7 years old). From 2 to 6 years of age, di erent types of play can be identi ed (Pellegrini & Smith, 1998; Whitebread et al., 2017): physical (locomotor; e.g., chase, rough-andtumble play); object (e.g., puzzles, building blocks); language (e.g., repetitions, humorous rhymes); and pretend (i.e., role playing in narrative sequences). Obviously, these types of play do not exclude each other: (Nijhof et al., 2018; Piaget, 1978/1994). For instance, while playing with dolls (play with object), children may assign roles and create a narrative (pretend play). Given this overlap, neatly distinguishing di erent types of play and attributing them to a particular developmental stage is a di

cult task for experts in the

eld. One possible way of conceptualizing play is on a continuum from free play to rule-based play (e.g., card games, board games; Evaldsson & Corsaro, 1998; Piaget, 1978/1994). In free play, rules might exist, but they are rather spontaneous, transient, implicit, and child-guided; whereas in games with rules (often designed by adults), rules are explicit, unchangeable, and imposed (Hsu, 2006; Zosh et al., 2017). Most research concentrates on free play in children, especially on physical and pretend play. However, play behavior can be identi ed throughout adolescence and adulthood. These older ages are often neglected in research (Nicolopoulou, 1993; Van Vleet & Feeney, 2015), with the exception of digital games, which provide a rich and complex research area (e.g., in relation to addiction, violent or prosocial games; Connolly et al., 2012; Festl et al., 2013; Greitemeyer & Mügge, 2014; Maynard et al., 2011). Despite the nonexhaustive de nition of play and the approach biased towards childhood, various lines of research have contributed to build a research eld on play within the developmental framework. Play can still be easily recognized when one sees it, as it is universally present and widely spread in humans’ lives, holding an important role as a knowledge and skill transfer tool, bridging developmental stages and binding generations.

Benefits of Play Play is not simply a fun activity that lls children’s free time; in fact, play holds a crucial role during development and a ords multiple bene ts at all ages (Elkind, 2008; Ginsburg, 2007; Gray, 2011; Hromek & p. 356

Ro ey, 2009; Piaget, 1951/1991; Smith &

Pellegrini, 2013; Vygotsky, 1966; Whitebread et al., 2017). It

fuels development and accelerates various learning processes (Elkind, 2008; Perry et al., 2000). It has been argued that the competences required in play need to lie in the zone corresponding to a child’s development (Perry et al., 2000). If the di

culty is too high, children will not engage in play or their play might take

maladaptive forms with negative outcomes (e.g., violence, bullying; Brown, 2012; Cohen & Mendez, 2009; Smith & Pellegrini, 2013; Veiga, De Leng, et al., 2016). As such, while extending and shaping skills, play creates a zone of proximal development (ZPD) (i.e., a zone slightly ahead of the development of psychological functions— originally referring to children’s learning processes— that may stimulate the maturing of these functions) (Nicolopoulou, 1993; Veiga, Ketelaar, et al., 2016; Vygotsky, 1966). Interestingly, play is considered as a primordial right (United Nations, 1989), constituting a bu er against the manifestation of physical and mental health pathologies (Gray, 2011, 2013). For instance, it has been suggested that play can alleviate anxiety symptoms or facilitate behavioral inhibition in attention de cit hyperactivity disorders (Li et al., 2016; Panksepp, 2007; Takis, 2018). It is therefore important to promote and use it to foster development. Play deprivation, and in particular deprivation of physical and outdoor play, can negatively impact physical (e.g., brain and muscle ber development, weight gain), cognitive (e.g., problem solving), social (e.g.,

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they can merge and be alternated depending on the individual’s age, mood, preferences, and interests

con ict resolution, social communication), and emotional (e.g., emotion regulation) development (Brown, 2012; Gray, 2011; Lauer, 2011; Pellegrini & Smith, 1998). As children grow, play is often cut back, devalued, and gradually replaced by work and other activities (Hirsh–Pasek & Golinko , 2008; Whitebread et al., 2017; Wohlwend & Peppler, 2015). The time children number of hours engaged in play behavior decreases by 50% from preschool age to school age: 3- to 5year-old children play approximately 17 hours per week, compared to 9- to 12-year-old children who play approximately 9 hours per week (Ho erth, 2009; Ho erth & Sandberg, 2001). Moreover, it is thought that the general decline of play in society over recent decades may be linked to the increase in psychopathologies, including emotion-related disorders such as anxiety or depression (Bodrova, 2008; Gray, 2011). Thus, play deprivation is a matter of high concern for authorities in charge of children’s protection (e.g., medical sta , childcare and social workers), because it may hinder child development and adult functioning (Eberle, 2014; Lauer, 2011). One particular domain to which play contributes signi cantly is emotional development. Play elicits a variety of emotions, both negative and positive (Gleave & Cole–Hamilton, 2012; Gray, 2013). Although the emotional bene ts of play have been previously acknowledged (Howard et al., 2017; Nicolopoulou, 1993), the mechanisms through which these bene ts occur remain elusive, as well as which speci c emotional competences may be acquired. Here, we aim to shed light on two key bene ts that play may provide to the development of emotional competences. One obvious immediate bene t is the experience of positive p. 357

emotions, which may have favorable and protective

long-term e ects on development (Krasnor &

Pepler, 1980; Miller, 2017; Perry et al., 2000; Van Vleet & Feeney, 2015; Zosh et al., 2017). A second important component may be the exercising and ne-tuning of several emotional competences during play, especially the regulation of both positive (e.g., amusement, interest, pride, satisfaction) and negative emotions (e.g., sadness, anger, frustration) (LaFreniere, 2013; Van Vleet & Feeney, 2015).

Positive Emotions at the Heart of Play The experience of positive emotions is central in play and constitutes an intrinsic motivation for players to engage in this activity (Gray, 2011, 2013; Sweetser & Wyeth, 2005). Positive emotions represent not only a reason for engaging in play, but also an objective. For example, interest throws players into play, and fun, joy, and amusement act as a reward, reinforcing subsequent play behavior and exploration (Weber, 2003). Therefore, play is bene cial in the short term by reducing momentary stress and increasing individuals’ well-being. Play may also have long-term bene ts through repetition and practice supported by rewarding emotions. According to the broaden-and-build model (Fredrickson, 1998, 2001; Tugade et al., 2004), positive emotions contribute to a broader mindset, creativity, and exploration. Consequently, these behaviors facilitate resource building and promote resilience. Speci cally, positive emotions may even be elicited while adhering to the rules and goal of a game (Gobet et al., 2004; Gray, 2013; Vygotsky, 1966). For instance, the main goal of many board games is often to compete against others or against the game to eventually win, while having fun and experiencing pleasure. In this regard, play elicits positive achievement emotions that are both activity-related (e.g., enjoyment, pleasure) and outcome-related (e.g., joy, hope, pride, gratitude, relief), as can be extrapolated from the control–value theory of achievement emotions (see Pekrun, this volume, 2006). Players are motivated not only to have fun and enjoy pleasant moments with their peers, but also to perform at their best in order to improve their skills and ultimately to win, and to acquire mastery and self-con dence (Perry et al., 2000).

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spend playing could be viewed as a function of age. For instance, researchers have found that the weekly

I Play, Therefore I Regulate Emotions Emotion regulation is presumed to be a primary function of play, transcending all forms of play (Dillon, 2009; LaFreniere, 2013; Schaefer & Drewes, 2014). Emotion regulation can generally be described as the they express them (Gross, 1998; Thompson, 1994). Both positive and negative emotions occurring during play need to be regulated in some fashion (i.e., downregulated, maintained, or upregulated) to carry on the p. 358

activity. Although the role of positive emotions in play is well documented in

the literature, the role of

negative emotions (e.g., frustration, anger, boredom, fear of being laughed at, fear of losing) remains underresearched. In the eld of video games, researchers have highlighted the importance of experiencing and regulating negative emotions (Lobel, 2016), which may also be relevant in other forms of play. Next, we further develop how play can be considered as a safe context, providing opportunities to use and practice emotion regulation skills, or as a form of emotion regulation. First, play may o er opportunities to learn how to regulate: moderate amounts of negative emotion are induced and need to be regulated in order to sustain the activity and teach individuals to adapt to unexpected and unpleasant events (Flanders et al., 2010; Gray, 2013) and to handle social interaction characteristics such as teasing and sportsmanship (Burghardt, 2005; Hromek & Ro ey, 2009; Schaefer & Drewes, 2014). Play provides a dynamic setting in which players continuously exchange information and adjust their emotions depending on the course of play. A player could use emotion regulation to show appropriate reactions to winning or losing so that the relationship with other players is preserved, or to modify other players’ behaviors to maintain suspense or cover up their next move. Furthermore, play provides an opportunity to learn from others by observing how they express and regulate emotions. In free play, young mammals and children engaging in rough-and-tumble or chase deliberately put themselves into moderately risky and stressful situations (see Veiga et al., this volume). By doing so, they actively practice regulating their fear at an intensity which is challenging, but still manageable. Children engaging in pretend or rule-based play learn to act contrary to their will and immediate impulses in order to follow the rules (Vygotsky, 1966). They might also need to deal with their own emotions while respecting or defying the game rules and its ow: turn-taking, cheating or blu

ng, increased di

culty level, or time

pressure. In this safe environment of play, individuals challenge themselves by creating situations of high arousal and vulnerability, experience thrill (as a combination of fear and joy), and are allowed to withdraw at any moment if the emotional or physical challenge is too high (Gray, 2013; LaFreniere, 2013). We could therefore argue that the ctional worlds and objects generated in play prepare the individual to face future life events while eliciting “real” emotions, very similar to the ones experienced in nonplayful contexts of daily life, which certain experts refer to as quasi emotions (e.g., emotions generated by ction, such as movies and books; Cova & Friend, 2019; Saatela, 1994). Although some studies show that pretend play is positively associated to emotion regulation skills in children, more research is required to better understand how play and emotion regulation are speci cally intertwined (see Lillard et al., 2013; Whitebread et al., 2017). Second, play may help to regulate negative emotions that have previously been experienced in “real” life and substitute them with positive ones. In line with these assumptions, it is stipulated that play holds a cathartic function (Freud, 1961; Menninger, 1942; Saracho & Spodek, 1995). For example, during pretend play, it has been suggested that children repeatedly re-enact stressful and unpleasant experiences while in a safe space, gaining a sense of control over the situation and their emotions (Verenikina et al., 2003). Such practice may help children to improve the use of reappraisal (i.e., reinterpretation of the emotion-eliciting p. 359

situation to alter its emotional impact; Gross, 1998) by point of view and by imagining positive consequences.

considering the distressing event from a playful

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processes through which people monitor, evaluate, and in uence the emotions they experience, and how

Finally, play itself can be seen as a form of emotion regulation, tapping into di erent categories of emotion regulation strategies (see Gross, 1998): situation selection (e.g., selecting or approaching play to upregulate positive emotions or to avoid unpleasant activities); attentional deployment (i.e., diverting attention away from negative stimuli or stressful situations); or response modulation (e.g., venting anger). On the one hand, play has the potential to increase positive emotions while indirectly reducing negative emotions. For Dungeons and Dragons, Mansions of Madness) can o er alternative realities in which one can “escape” and temporarily forget about worries (Granic et al., 2014; Gray, 2013). On the other hand, play has also the potential to increase negative emotions. The paradox of negative emotions and sensation seeking may explain the engagement in forms of play eliciting negative emotions, although in “real” life we tend to avoid them (see Cova & Friend, 2019). For instance, video-game players are drawn to and strive to upregulate negative emotions, such as disgust or shock, as these can then switch to positive emotions, such as amusement and excitement (Cova & Friend, 2019; Lazzaro, 2004). However, some forms of play have also the potential to lead to detrimental outcomes. For example, certain types of solitary play in children can be linked to socioemotional di

culties (Veiga, Ketelaar, et al., 2016).

Excessive gaming can lead to behavioral addictions, such as for video gaming (Grüsser et al., 2007) or for gambling. Individuals with gambling disorders use gambling to upregulate positive rewarding emotions, such as thrill and excitement, to escape from anxiety and stress, or to modify boredom (Rogier & Velotti, 2018). It is therefore important to consider the turning point of play from adaptive to maladaptive emotion regulation (Granic et al., 2014). In addition, it has been suggested that play can be also used as a form of interpersonal emotion regulation during social interactions (Zaki, 2020). For example, parent–child dyads and romantic couples (Keltner et al., 2001; Miyazaki, 2004; Zaki, 2020) may engage in play using teasing (e.g., tickling, peek-a-boo, use of repetitive and humorous phrases or nicknames) in order to increase fun or amusement, or to distract the other from an unpleasant or stressful event. Once again, this particular form of play might sometimes slip into maladaptive behavior if it becomes one-sided and transforms into bullying or harassment, with the intention to increase negative emotions in others (Burghardt, 2005; Zaki, 2020).

A Particular Type of Play: Board Games Board games involve a particular type of play eliciting emotions and requiring emotion regulation skills. There is little consensus about how to de ne board games, in spite of several attempts. In this chapter, we p. 360

de ne board games as a socially interactive,

rule-based form of play, with an incorporated theme,

including one or more physical components (e.g., boards, cards, dice), in which actions are limited by rules and in uenced by a certain amount of unpredictability, and in which the end is determined by the 1

achievement of a goal (Chircop, 2017; Dillon, 2009; Gobet et al., 2004; Hays, 2005). It has been argued that board games can be used as tools to foster behavioral changes and to facilitate learning in an enjoyable manner and in various settings, such as in school contexts, in social and emotional learning (SEL) programs (see Maxwell & Peplak, this volume), and in therapy (Hromek & Ro ey, 2009; Matorin & McNamara, 1996). They have also the potential to accelerate skill development and help improve regulative and social skills (Hawkinson, 2013; Salmina & Tihanova, 2011; Treher, 2011). Although more research is required to con rm this, it has been shown that educational games lead to positive behavioral changes in a variety of areas, and especially those related to health (e.g., tobacco use, sexual health, nutrition) and social behavior (e.g., bullying) (for review, see Gauthier et al., 2019; Nakao, 2019; Noda et al., 2019). Such promising e ects of board game-based interventions may be due to certain characteristics of these games. Board games can be appealing, stimulate communication, and relieve tension (Breen & Daigneault,

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example, pretend play or role-playing digital, board, or app-assisted games (e.g., World of Warcraft,

1998; Clary, 1991). Group discussions emerging during gameplay can help individuals gain insight into their di

culties and facilitate discussions around sensitive topics using a positive and fun frame, and can provide

opportunities to approach emotion-related topics that may be di

cult to access using traditional methods

(Bruneau & Protivnak, 2012; Matorin & McNamara, 1996; van der Stege et al., 2010; Wiener et al., 2011). Moreover, games tend to be inclusive, relatively inexpensive tools, easy to implement and adapt to the & McNamara, 1996). However, several experts (e.g., Catalano et al., 2014; Gobet et al., 2004; Hromek & Ro ey, 2009; Lennon & Coombs, 2007; Nakao, 2019) have highlighted that methodologically sound research, designed to test the impact of board games on emotional competences, is scarce. In our view, board games could be optimal tools to teach and train adaptive behavior, including emotional competences, in children, adolescents, and adults. To achieve these goals, games should incorporate di erent di

culty levels, which should be

carefully calibrated to correspond to the player’s ZPD. Theoretically, playing games on a di

culty level

slightly above the player’s level of emotional competences should stimulate their emotional development, building upon already existing competences and training new ones. This idea aligns with the game ow model (Sweetser & Wyeth, 2005), which refers to the fact that games should challenge the players at an appropriate level matched to their skills, while maintaining their positive emotions of interest and enjoyment. Importantly, since the game experience will help to reach the learning goals (e.g., acquire knowledge about a certain topic, train a speci c skill), it is important to nd the right balance between player-based dynamics (e.g., skills, knowledge) and game-based dynamics (e.g., mechanics; Hawkinson, 2013). The mechanics underlying a board game (e.g., turn taking, point scoring) contribute to its interactivity and p. 361

each player’s game experience (Hawkinson, 2013). Many educational

games designed for behavioral

change use particular types of game mechanics, such as question-and-answer or trivia (Gauthier et al., 2019). This might be useful to convey knowledge, but not necessarily to maintain interest and to train competences. To do this, researchers advise to integrate adaptive behavioral patterns into the game design in an action–consequence learning style (Gauthier et al., 2019). Players should then be able to actively apply the competences in order to make progress in gameplay and experience immediate reward when the target behavior emerges. Not only should game designers and educators collaborate, but also initiators of such projects should rely on sound psychological theories and integrate learning-based processes, such as trial and error and immediate feedback (e.g., win or lose points), within game mechanics (Catalano et al., 2014; Mega et al., 2014; Wohlwend & Peppler, 2015). Some guidelines for conducting research on games exist, but they are mostly emerging from the videogame literature (Catalano et al., 2014; Granic et al., 2014; Kemble, 2014). However, based on previous work on video and board games (Azmi et al., 2016; Gauthier et al., 2019; Hays, 2005), we have identi ed certain research guidelines that could be applicable to designing and testing board games: (1) Test the quality criteria for game mechanics and feasibility. Possible measures include intrinsic motivation, positive emotions, immersion, and ow (see Dell’Angela et al., 2020). (2) Compare speci c e ects of games to conventional interventions (not involving games) using a randomized control trial. Game-speci c e ects on outcome measures (e.g., emotional competences) should be assessed with su

ciently large samples and adequate control groups. For example, a

control group playing traditional games without embedded emotional-competence training can help disentangle general e ects of play from e ects of the speci cally designed games on outcome measures. In addition, a control group receiving conventional teaching/intervention about the competences can clarify the bene ts of games.

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target public and to such di erent settings as school, family, or therapy (Lennon & Coombs, 2007; Matorin

(3) Assess long-term e ects in interventional designs using follow-up measures to examine the stability of the e ects and of the stipulated bene ts. The trained competences should be assessed in order to measure the di erences between pre-test (baseline), post-test, and follow-up measures. (4) Verify the generalizability of learned skills to various real-life situations or settings: home, school, (Moskowitz & Young, 2006; Stone et al., 2019), and indirect measures, such as teachers’ observations (e.g., classroom climate, absenteeism), are recommended and would help maximize the ecological validity of the ndings. (5) Test the use of the game in di erent settings (e.g., educational, therapeutic, stand-alone or part of a program). Instructions on how to use the game in di erent settings should be speci ed, along with the trained competences, the developmental stage, and the degree of adult sca olding required.

p. 362

Board Games Focused on Emotional Competences Although we have identi ed several studies using board games to train di erent competences, the research in this eld is still nascent, especially concerning the links to emotion. To our knowledge, no study to date has examined board games speci cally focusing on the improvement of emotional competences. Although certain commercially available games might implicitly tap into emotional competences, their goal remains tangential to learning (Hassinger–Das et al., 2017). We therefore suggest a type of board game holding a targeted learning goal, marrying the educational content to the game design (Hassinger–Das et al., 2017). Such board games could answer the needs emphasized by educational policy makers: teaching emotional competences to students in a playful way. Only recently were emotional competences o

cially recognized

as an important educational outcome, but the work necessary to perform this requires valid material and rigorous preparation (Rawolle, 2013). In this regard, Dell’Angela and colleagues (2020) have designed board games focusing on emotional competences (i.e., emotion recognition, di erentiation, and regulation) and tested their feasibility with school children (aged from 8 to 12 years old). While the results did not reveal any signi cant di erence between the board games focused on emotional competences and the commercially available games in terms of game experience (e.g., all games seemed to have similar patterns in terms of inducing high positive emotions and high immersion), the new board games triggered the intended emotional competences. Most importantly, and in line with the ZPD and game- ow theories, the children’s emotional competences predicted the perceived game experience. For instance, children who showed higher performance in an emotion recognition task rated the emotion recognition game less di

cult and invested

less e ort during gameplay. This suggests that such board games could challenge individuals who have more di

culties with a speci c emotion competence to implement their skills. Future research is required

to test the potential of these board games focused on emotional competences as tools to promote emotional competences, using interventional and follow-up study designs.

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peer interactions. Direct measures, such as diaries and ecological momentary assessments

Conclusion In this chapter, we have emphasized the di erent mechanisms through which play may facilitate valuable opportunities to support emotional development. Play may represent an experiment mirroring real-life players of all ages can approach and explore in a safe way. Positive emotions experienced in play pave the p. 363

way for well-being, broaden the individual’s behavioral repertoires, and build new resources (Fredrickson, 2004; Garland et al., 2010; Tugade & Fredrickson, 2007). Conversely, negative emotions elicited during play can provide opportunities to implement and practice emotion regulation skills. Traditionally, the conceptualization of play functions has centered on the alleviation of negative emotions and the elicitation of positive ones. Nevertheless, play activates various emotional states that can be maintained, upregulated, or downregulated, independently of their valence. In addition, we have highlighted the bidirectional link between play and emotion regulation: on the one hand, play may implicitly lead to the enhancement of the emotion regulation skills, and, on the other hand, the engagement in the emotion regulation process may lead to the use of play as a strategy to regulate one’s own emotions. Furthermore, we have drawn attention to the potential of board games to promote emotional competences. Although research in this area continues to develop, promising evidence exists supporting the idea that board games could constitute learning tools that may be used to implicitly teach and train adaptive functioning. Our own research on this topic suggests that trait emotional competences are linked to game experience in board games focused on using speci c emotional competences. We suggest that such board games can provide opportunities to shape players’ socioemotional skills. Although merging content to game structure may be challenging for both designers and educators, the promise represented by such games presents a fascinating opportunity to encourage transmission of knowledge and training of targeted competences in an interactive and appealing way.

Note 1.

Based on this view, board games refer here to social, nondigital games (whether they include a board or not), which use a tabletop setting with two or more players. As such, card games, dice games, and any games using tokens, that do not require a physical board, are also considered as board games.

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events (e.g., negotiation, problem solving, dealing with rejection and loss, competition, cooperation), which

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The Oxford Handbook of Emotional Development Daniel Dukes (ed.) et al. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/978019 8855903.001.0001 9780191889516 9780198855903

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CHAPTER

25 Emotion Development in Context  Rebecca J. Erickson, Marci D. Cottingham https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198855903.013.32 Published: 13 January 2022

Pages 373–386

Online ISBN: Print ISBN:

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Published: 2022

Abstract This chapter demonstrates the importance of examining emotional-development processes as the embodiment of social context. Context is de ned broadly, including the ways that the body and the self contexts that help to shape how individuals learn and master the complexities of emotional experience and its management. The chapter illustrates the complementary yet diverse ways that theoretical traditions have conceptualized and measured emotional development in context, along with the ways in which these e orts may best advance. The argument presented centers and broadens “context” to demonstrate the varied and interconnected implications of contemporary social theory and measurement related to emotional development.

Keywords: emotional development, emotion, self, body, social context, emotional socialization, emotional capital Subject: Psychology, Developmental Psychology Series: Oxford Library of Psychology Collection: Oxford Handbooks Online

Introduction AS

an essential aspect of the socialization process, newborn humans develop the a ective capacities for

social interaction. Interactional abilities enable children to begin learning the emotion norms associated with their speci c culture and social status, becoming, over time, able to function in society (Handel, 2006; Thoits, 2004). As symbolic interactionists have demonstrated, emotional socialization involves more than the passive absorption of normative rules about feeling and expression; it requires the emergence of a self that shapes how individuals (re)produce elements of surrounding structural and cultural contexts (Cahill, 1998; Gordon, 1990; Handel, 2006). Emotional development is a lifelong process of socialization that has been traditionally theorized as occurring “in contexts”—including the caregiver–newborn dyad, the family, school, and workplace. As contexts change, so do the rules and experiences that in uence not only what we feel but when, how strong, and whether or how we express or regulate such emotional experiences. Yet, such approaches often frame the body and the self as separate objects that exist within multiple, apolitical settings. We suggest a reframing of emotional development as a process of embodying context from which the feeling self emerges. It is not just the agentive self that re ects and a ects social context, but our bodies are also seen and trained through this process as the embodied practices of feeling become a source of meaning (Fourcade, 2010; Kiverstein, 2012). To be sure, this approach includes how individuals learn to experience, manage, and display feeling as well as the ways in which they develop the capacities, skills, and resources necessary to meet both physiological and social needs. In addition, however, as agentive members of distinct groups, these emergent feeling selves are also developing in relation to the social hierarchies that make up contemporary societies (Jaggar, 1989). p. 374

Examining the contextual foundation of emotional development is not new (Boiger & Mesquita, 2012; Lewis & Michalson, 1983). However, the sociological approach taken here frames emotional development as a process by which context becomes embodied as the emerging self learns and masters the complexities of emotional experience and its management. We pay explicit attention to the ways in which the sites of emotion socialization (e.g., family, school) are not neutral interactional contexts, but serve as conduits for replicating status and power di erences that produce novel emotional experiences and skills while also

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operate as key contexts for emotional development as well as interactional, institutional, and cultural

1

regulating and constraining them. Thus, power and status become internalized as a ective self-standards that re ect and in uence the classed, gendered, and raced development of emotion (Burke & Tully, 1977; Burke & Hoelter, 1988; Kemper, 2006; Smith–Lovin & Thoits, 2014). In this way, speci c emotions become (erroneously or otherwise) attributes of collectives (e.g., women, young Black males; Ahmed, 2014; Gould, 2009) and not just individuals.

Psychologists attend more explicitly to the physiological bases of development—or “biologically grounded aspects of emotion” (Harris & Saarni, 1991, p. 7)—including their universality, and the how and when of developmental milestones (Thoits, 2004, p. 365). Sociologists, on the other hand, tend to take up the social and interactional dimensions of development (Johnson, 1992), its cross-cultural dimensions and content. We see emotional development as both a biological and social process through which social context becomes embodied. Classic texts on emotion note how situational contexts shape the labeling of an aroused state as love or fear, depending on environmental cues (Schachter & Singer, 1962); and clearly, physiological cues are embedded within emotional processes. New technologies have enabled emotion scholars to use neural imaging and other means to deepen understanding of these processes (e.g., Barrett et al., 2004; Niedenthal, 2007; Rogers & Robinson, 2014). These studies have demonstrated the ways that cognitive models and linguistic accounts of emotion rely on the partial reactivation of sensorimotor and a ective systems to develop (Niedenthal & Maringer, 2009), suggesting that emotion-development processes also implicate the body in complex ways that we are now only beginning to understand. Yet there are additional features of the body that become salient when it moves into the social world: its gender classi cation (Butler, 1990; Fausto–Sterling, 2019), its placement within a racial hierarchy (Branigan et al., 2017; Watson & de Gelder, 2017), and its attunement to others in ritual interaction (R. Collins, 1990) all highlight the body’s physical and social interface. Emotions and their development are of interdisciplinary interest and pose ongoing ontological and methodological questions precisely because, as embodied practices, they confound a clean demarcation between cognition and physiology; mind and body (Smith– Lovin & Winkielman, 2010). p. 375

Emotional control, in addition to re ecting the achievement of developmental milestones (regulating body temperature, feeding, toileting, dressing), is key to gaining “adult” status (Cole et al., 2004; Thompson & Lagattuta, 2006; also see Elias, 1978). Emotions are critical in the processes of becoming that are implicated in development. Just as we each become a gender (Fausto–Sterling, 2019), we become an adult through acquiring or “incorporating”—taking into the corpus, the body—distinct emotion practices that match wider social norms (Ahmed, 2014; Jaggar, 1989). To match these norms, development is necessarily oriented toward the hierarchies embedded in social structures, including class, gender, and racial hierarchies. In this way, we can think of developed emotion practice not as the acquisition of “correct” emotion knowledge but as a ne-tuning between individual and society that takes di erent forms in di erent historical periods, as well as across and within cultural and institutional contexts (Erickson & Stacey, 2013; Russell, 1991; Stearns & Stearns, 1985). Culture shapes feeling and its related elements (e.g., naming, expressing, masking, changing) as well as embodied, phenomenological sensations. Similarly, as Smith–Lovin and Winkielman (2010, p. 330) note, “the fact that even abstract emotion concepts are embodied provides a mechanism through which social structure can literally get ‘under the skin’ and convert a symbolic meaning to a physical experience” (see also Lako

& Johnson, 1999). Interactions across

social contexts transfer structural and cultural resources (Cottingham, 2016) and provide opportunities to habitually practice channeling inchoate embodied experiences into (relatively) preestablished emotion categories and scripts (Johnson, 1992; Russell, 1991).

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Context Embodied

Grounding emotion development in the body, when combined with emerging measurement technologies (e.g., Korb et al., 2016; Clay–Warner & Robinson, 2015), suggests new ways of seeing. For example, it draws attention to the initial process of becoming that begins in the body of another (Frank, 1991; Shilling, 2012), and that may underlie the initial development of gender. Interaction with the primary caregiver and objects in the environment convey not only the necessary nutrition for the developing fetus and newborn to grow and closeness or distance between the infant and caregiver during interaction (Fausto–Sterling, 2019). As Russell (1991) suggests, other embodied elements—skin-to-skin touch, saliva and milk transfer to the infant, temperature regulation, manipulation and compression of the body—may also transfer feelings of comfort/discomfort or pleasure/displeasure that form the basis of newborn infants’ initial judgments of their immediate environments. These initial experiences stimulate motor development, sensorimotor neural networks, and cognitions that become the physiological basis for more advanced a ective learning (also see Barrett, 2018; Karsten et al., 2017). The experiential elements of emotion development can straddle conscious and nonconscious selfawareness, but these can become lost when researchers focus primarily on cognitively grounded scripts (Russell, 1991) and the acquisition of “beliefs, vocabulary, and regulative norms” (Gordon, 1991, p. 322) p. 376

rather than embodied practices of feeling. In their study of children’s emotional socialization in a preschool for those deemed emotionally disturbed, Pollak and Thoits (1989) found little discussion of the physiological sensations that accompany children’s emotions (tight muscles, uttering in the stomach, exhaustion, etc.). Although adults might take such physiological sensations for granted as they become engrained in their own practices (as habit, see Blackman, 2013; or habitus, see Bourdieu, 1990), other scholars have continued to demonstrate the importance of “embodied” approaches, particularly when children’s emotional “de cits” are suggested (Eigsti, 2013). Certainly, conscious knowledge about emotions and the emotional vocabulary that young children develop around labeling discrete emotions according to cultural norms is an important element in development (a lack of which could lead to alexithymia, see Taylor & Bagby, 2000), but new advances in social theory argue against approaching these issues in a way that entrenches a social versus nature dualism (Shilling, 2012). Emotional development, as context-embodied, blurs the nature/culture binary. Such a framing is consistent with an emotion-as-practice approach (Cottingham & Erickson, 2020; Erickson & Stacey, 2013; Scheer, 2012) that theorizes the embodied elements of how emotional capital is acquired and deployed. Emotional capital (Cottingham, 2016; Reay, 2000) refers to valued emotional resources that individuals develop over time as they confront new demands. This includes knowledge of emotion norms, skills in emotion expression/management, and capacities for feeling that vary across contexts and positions within social hierarchies. Emotional development emerges from interactional practices that lead to the development of vocabularies and scripts as well as shared, habitual ways of being and feeling (Erickson & Cottingham, 2014; see also Clément & Dukes, this volume) that can be conceptualized as resources. From this perspective, embodied practices and emotional capital combine to form a distinct sense of self—or a seemingly biographically stable and self-re exive cluster of self-feelings.

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physically, but also provide embodied sensations of voice tone, speech patterns, arousal, facial expression,

The Emergent Emotional Self Symbolic interactionism distinguishes itself from other sociological approaches to emotion by attending to the construction of meaning and self through language (Fields et al., 2007). Within this framework, emotion through the internalization of meanings attached to social roles (Stryker, 2004)—themselves linked to institutionalized contexts and resources. Within the interactionist tradition, re exivity suggests the self’s ability to role-take (i.e., re ect back on itself as an object), and in so doing, to observe, regulate, and change such internal components as cognition and emotion. Rosenberg (1990, 1991) argues that this re exive agency is central to the human capacity to move from physiological sensations to emotional identi cation, as well as to the ability to develop social competence surrounding emotional display and the self-regulation of emotional experiences. For symbolic interactionists, once the re exive, agentive self emerges, it remains p. 377

a part of the context with which others must

contend (Hewitt, 1989). However, because role-taking is an

inherently social process, to understand self and re exivity also requires an understanding of how larger, patterned relational contexts (e.g., family, school, work) shape interaction and the self-meanings that emerge from it. As one type of self-relevant meaning, emotions are neither static nor given in advance but emerge from interactional contexts that entwine selves with sociocultural rules and resources, informing us about individuals and societies simultaneously. Despite its cognitivist tendencies (Meltzer et al., 1975), early work within the interactionist tradition grounded self in emotion. William James (1890/1950, p. 298), for example, noted that the “central part” of the self is “felt,” and always “together with other things.” Cooley (1902/1964) followed this line of thought noting that the agentive, looking-glass process of imagining how we are viewed by others explains the development of “self-feelings” and that such feelings are the determining factor in what we identify as “I” (Erickson, 1995). Cooley’s reference to feelings of pride and shame in this regard anticipated Lewis et al.’s (1989) nding that such secondary emotions are more reliant on the development of self-re exivity than primary emotions. As Ward and Throop (1992) state: “The very mechanisms that give rise to emotional experience provide the core experiences out of which the individual arises” (p. 80). Combining these emotional foundations with the discursive approach to re exivity taken by Mead (1934) and Rosenberg (1990, 1991), Pagis (2009) introduces embodied self-re exivity which arises through practices that focus on developing greater awareness of one’s self through “feeling the body” (p. 266)—or, as Damasio (1999) suggests in his somatic marker hypothesis, a nonverbal messaging system that captures the emergent relationship between organism and object. Demonstrating similarities with Bourdieu’s (1990) habitus and Giddens’ (1984) practical consciousness, Pagis notes that embodied re exivity can operate outside of conscious awareness and deliberate self-control. Johnson (1992) speci es the stages through which infants move from experiencing sensations to developing social selves that experience discursively intelligible emotions, suggesting a developmental continuum echoed by Pagis (2009, p. 279). Re ecting the social foundations of this process, the child’s experience of primary emotions (e.g., joy, fear, sadness) emerges through child–caregiver interaction to the extent that mutual a ective reciprocity occurs and advances as connections between cognition and a ect are built. For example, caregivers model expressions to young children so that children can see what face they are making and learn to associate that face with their own feeling (Leavitt, 1994; Tominey et al., 2017). In addition, Begeer et al.’s (2008) review of the diagnostic criteria identifying emotional impairments among children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) suggests that because emotion is the primary means of communication in infancy, an early tendency to miss interactional social cues—a tendency more common among children with ASD—impairs their development of emotional competence and regulation. Johnson goes on to identify Shott’s (1979) discussion of re exive role-taking emotions (e.g., pride, shame; see also Turner, 2007) as requiring the child’s discursive awareness of self, rst in the presence of speci c

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development is made possible through the emergence of self as a re exive process (Mead, 1934) and

p. 378

others and more fully with the emergence of the

“generalized other” (i.e., the community or social group

which gives an individual their “unit of self;” Mead, 1934, p. 154). Drawing on anthropological data and using Schacter and Singer’s (1962) two-factor theory, Shott anticipates the social implications of individual emotion regulation (Fischer & Manstead, 2018) by demonstrating how the social control upon which societal functioning and strati cation depend is grounded in the self-based processes of re exive and Prosocial Behavior), re exive role-taking emotions only occur when we mentally view the world from another person’s perspective. The experience and social-control function of these emotions require only the imagined presence of another and are thus not dependent on others’ surveillance of our behavior but only on the development of these emotional self-surveillance processes (Foucault, 1980). However, as Pagis (2009), and Cooley (1902/1964) before him, would point out, these cognitive processes join with embodied sensations in an emergent self that mirrors the social world and has the potential to transform it. In developing her theory of constructed emotion, Barrett (2018) (see also Barrett et al., 2007) draws on neuroscienti c evidence that provides support for the interactionist view that sharp lines of distinction cannot be drawn between physical, cognitive, and emotional events; suggesting further that emotions are not our reactions to the world but re exive, agentic constructions of it. In addition to more critical accounts of emotion processes (e.g., Cottingham, 2016; Froyum, 2010; Zembylus, 2007), the development of re exive role-taking emotions such as guilt and embarrassment, along with the shared experience of others’ emotions through empathic or vicarious role-taking processes (conceptualized as emotional contagion within psychology; see Hat eld et al., 2009), serve as potential motivators for altruistic behavior (Shott, 1979). Importantly, this is not a unidirectional transfer of embodied knowledge, as caregivers also develop embodied re exivity based on what they learn from their newborns (e.g., Fleming et al., 2002). Because these mechanisms can also be self-referential, not requiring the physical presence of others to have their socially reparative e ect, their development re ects how “self” emerges from an embodied context as well as a socially signi cant one.

Contextual Hierarchies and Embodied Emotional Selves Emotional-development scholars have highlighted the family, educational systems, and the economy as “universal institutions [that] structure children’s lives and the distribution of emotions around them” (Gordon, 1991, p. 329). In discussing some of these institutions, we focus on how social hierarchies tend to be maintained through the emotional development of their incumbents (see Hitlin & Harkness, this volume). This discussion adds to the already well-established coverage of cross-cultural (Gordon, 1991; p. 379

Markus & Kitayama, 1991; Russell, 1989) and cross-historical (Matt & Stearns, 2013;

Gordon, 1981)

di erences in emotional development. We argue that future empirical research should further explore how emotional development reproduces social advantage and disadvantage within contemporary cultures as well as the emotions-based processes that might enable change. Families serve as the primary institutional context in which emotional socialization occurs and as the central context through which emotions link social order and social action (Barbalet, 2001; Erickson & Cottingham, 2014). Studies of emotional development within families have tended to focus their attention on how children acquire the emotional competences that assure the continued functioning of the family and other social systems (see Stearns, this volume). Until recently, scholars have been less likely to consider how these socialization processes are implicated in the reproduction of structured inequalities and the distribution of power (e.g., Lareau, 2011; Reay, 2000). We suggest that this shift toward a more critical approach is called for in light of growing global inequality (Alvaredo, et al., 2018), and that this would be aided by the broader use of a term mentioned earlier: emotional capital.

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empathic role-taking emotions. As motivators of normative and moral conduct (see Section 5: Morality and

Although the conceptualization of emotional capital as an individual’s emotion-based knowledge, emotion-management skills, and feeling capacities links it to commonly examined developmental concerns (Erickson & Cottingham, 2014), the reference to “capital” also posits a direct relationship between these microresources and their unequal distribution within contemporary societies (Bourdieu, 1996; Cottingham, 2016). Making the symbolic shift from a focus on the “development of emotional competence” to the embodies power relations and becomes implicated in creating, continuing, and changing long-standing social distinctions such as class, gender, and race (Ahmed, 2009; Cottingham, 2016; Cottingham & Erickson, 2020; Froyum, 2010; Nowotny, 1981). For example, consistent with Nowotny’s (1981) original formulation of emotional capital as the private, relational responsibility of women, Zaman and Fivush (2013) reported that when white middle-class parents reminisced with their children about emotional events, mothers tended to model more emotional explanation and elaboration than fathers. As Ridgeway (2011) would note, such patterns transmit stereotypically female interactional behavior and reproduce the normative expectation for greater female emotionality (Barrett, 2018, pp. 226–228; Knothe & Walle, 2018; Lutz, 2002). In line with critical theory, more scholars are recognizing the complex ways that emotional-development processes are shaped by the intersections of social-status positions (Schrop & Knop, 2014; Thoits, 2004; Wilkins & Pace 2014), as well as the ways in which their outcomes (e.g., mental health, academic performance) are shaped by cultural norms (Markus & Kitayama, 1991; Mesquita & Albert, 2007). Bonilla– Silva (2019) rea

rms the importance of continuing to target such complex status locations as they

profoundly a ect how people learn, perceive, and react to emotional behavior. The fact that these outcomes are not randomly distributed across the population requires further recognition that the classed, gendered, and racialized emotions “that shape actors’ subjectivity are not individual emotions …[but] have histories and speci c contexts of manifestation (Denzin 1984)” (Bonilla–Silva, 2019, p. 4; see also Mercer, 2014). p. 380

For instance, drawing on Halberstadt and Lozada’s (2011) four-dimensional approach to emotion development, Morelen and Thomassin’s (2013) review of empirical work among ethnically diverse families demonstrates that emotional-socialization practices are related to the broader community context in which they occur (see also Halberstadt et al., this volume). As they note, the “appropriateness of di erent emotion socialization techniques depends on the context” (p. 176). Parker et al. (2012) agree, reporting that the need for black children, particularly boys, to engage in high levels of emotional regulation within a whitemajority society leads to fewer emotional restrictions within the family setting compared to other racialethnic groups. Lending support to this conclusion, Leerkes et al.’s (2014) retrospective study found that “non-supportive” practices (i.e., minimizing, punishing, teasing, ignoring) that tried to coerce children into suppressing or reducing their display of negative emotions in public, were interpreted less negatively by African American women than their European counterparts. Despite African American participants reporting that they felt more loved and less ashamed when such practices were used during their childhood, these processes may have unintended consequences for African American women’s adult mental health. For example, Ashley (2014) reported that African American women in the United States are at increased risk for not receiving e ective mental health care, largely as a result of emotional processes linking gender and race. Here, fearing the stereotypical label of the “angry black woman,” clients feel unsafe in the treatment context and tend to suppress feelings of anger and its e ects when interacting with mental-health professionals. Clinicians unfamiliar with this racial mythology may then miss or misinterpret symptoms and observations of black women, resulting in compromised mental-health treatment. While such results may at rst seem perplexing, they become less so when the larger racial hierarchy is considered (Bonilla–Silva, 2019). For example, Walley–Jean (2009) reported that the myth of the “angry black woman” in uences emotional-socialization processes and outcomes among African American families in ways that have no relevance when only white families are considered. Similar complexities emerge surrounding the stereotype of the “angry black man.” The empirical work of Wing eld (2010) has

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“transmission of emotional capital” enables scholars to capture their explicit focus on how emotion

drawn attention to the complexity of developing middle-class black men’s emotional capital, as she illustrates how extraordinary emotional restraint must be exhibited interactionally as black men adhere to racialized feeling rules that simultaneously require the denial of structured, race-based inequities. Wilkins (2012) draws on these insights as she illustrates how emotional-socialization processes continue into adulthood as black men within white university spaces learn and practice “moderate blackness” as a

The empirical research of Wing eld and Wilkins illustrates how, in addition to families, schools and workplaces serve as contexts for the development of emotional capital and the rules and practices by which it is reproduced. Further research is needed to understand the conditions under which children internalize and resist classed, gendered, and racialized emotion messages in ways that may later become embedded p. 381

within

their family, school, and work contexts. As Cottingham’s (2016) analysis of the emotional capital

of men in nursing has shown, however, such a call should not be misconstrued as limiting future theory and research to particular oppressed (or privileged) groups. Similarly, future empirical work should seek deeper insight into the ways in which emotional capital circulates between social contexts, thereby demonstrating its relative power. As embodied markers of structured class, gender, and race locations, the outcomes of particular emotional-socialization processes must be measured as an accumulated form of capital that can be transmuted into other “pro table” forms. It is in this way that emotional capital both persists over time and becomes something that parents (among others) seek to transmit to the next generation in their e orts to either maintain or change the child’s resulting structural position (see Bourdieu, 1990). Such transmission, while rooted within intersecting structures of reproduced oppression and privilege (P. H. Collins, 1990), must also be seen as grounded in an embodied, agentive self capable of resistance and the active construction of emotion within and across social contexts (Bourdieu, 1990; Mead, 1934). Herein lies the sociological importance of recent neuropsychological challenges to essentialist approaches to emotion. These challenges provide further empirical bases for showing that although class-, gender-, and racebased emotional stereotypes have no scienti c justi cation, they nonetheless remain codi ed within law, medicine, and other institutions (Barrett, 2018). As such, Barrett might be expected to join Bourdieu and Mead in suggesting that while emotional experience and its management are a culmination of multiple developmental factors (including physiological, cognitive, and linguistic), none can be fully understood outside of the fundamental role played by social context. Such social realities, as Barrett (2018, p. 39) observes, are “not just about words—it gets under your skin.”

Conclusion We have drawn on interdisciplinary research on emotion to argue that emotional development be framed as a process of embodying context through which self emerges and social hierarchies are often maintained. Given the potential for re exivity and self-socialization, this should not imply that emotional development is a purely unidirectional or fully determined process. Children, adolescents, and adults can exert agency over the emotional capital they develop, and seek out novel opportunities to further develop such resources. Framing emotional development as both a social and biological process is critical for moving the eld beyond nature versus nurture, body versus culture dualities. With illustrations related to di erent interactional contexts, we emphasized the ways in which social class, gender, and racial hierarchies permeate emotional development for di erent groups within the same culture and same time period. Future research should continue to empirically trace how the social becomes embodied, and who are advantaged and disadvantaged by these processes.

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necessary form of emotional restraint.

p. 382

Notes 1.

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Power and status are relational dimensions for a range of di erent types of actors—from individuals to families to nation states. As defined by Kemper (1978, p. 29), power denotes a social relationship in which compliance is obtained by others who do not give it willingly (also see Weber, 1946). In contrast, status denotes voluntary (rather than coerced) compliance. Power-status processes are structured yet dynamic, in that compliance willingly given can quickly turn to an imposition of power if the compliance given is not the desired type or rather than of level (see Kemper, 1978, pp. 369–389).

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The Oxford Handbook of Emotional Development Daniel Dukes (ed.) et al. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/978019 8855903.001.0001 9780191889516

Online ISBN: Print ISBN:

9780198855903

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CHAPTER

26 A ective Social Learning: A Lens for Developing a Fuller Picture of Socialization Processes  Fabrice Clément, Daniel Dukes https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198855903.013.33 Published: 13 January 2022

Pages 387–397

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Published: 2022

Abstract From their very origins, psychology and sociology have each tended to follow their own path, without taking the other into consideration. This mutual indi erence is particularly problematic when tendency to consider the child as a “lone explorer,” while on the sociology side, the irreducibility of the social agent to their individual epistemic endeavor is, of course, central. However, socialization is essentially about transmission, from one generation to the next, of ways of doing, thinking, and feeling. In this chapter, the authors argue that culture is mostly about what is socially relevant, and that what is socially relevant can be learned by observing relevant others’ a ective expressions. This a ective social learning may help close the gap between psychology and sociology by providing di erent mechanisms that enable individuals to embody, via their developing emotions, the system of cultural relevance in which they live.

Keywords: a ective social learning, natural pedagogy, social appraisal, social referencing, socialization a ective observation, socialization Subject: Psychology, Developmental Psychology Series: Oxford Library of Psychology Collection: Oxford Handbooks Online

The Perpetuation of Cultural Forms SOCIOLOGY

and anthropology owe their scienti c legitimacy to the idea that certain entities that furnish our

social environment exceed mere individual existences. Indeed, languages, laws, customs, and religions were there before we were born and, for the most part, will still be there after we die. At the same time, these entities, social and cultural in nature, need to be “taken up” by people of esh and bone in order to be perpetuated. The question of cultural transmission is therefore absolutely central to social sciences, since it explains how it is possible for social entities to persist in time despite the inexorable loss of their individual, physical constituents. Socialization is the umbrella term that refers to the process by which new individuals —infants or immigrants for example—internalize the norms and ideologies of their increasingly familiar society. Strangely enough though, socialization is considered by most social scientists as a black box from which individuals progressively emerge to become full members of their group, community, society, or culture. On the one hand, sociologists and anthropologists detail the norms and values that characterize a culture; on the other hand, psychologists tend to focus on individual development of cognitive abilities, leaving aside the importance of the social context in individual maturation and adaptation to the speci c form of life of their community. To ll this gap, we propose that a ective processes play a crucial role in the transmission of culturally shared values. By detecting and interpreting others’ a ective expressions, new members of any given social group are able to gure out what is “expected” from them.

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studying processes of socialization. On the developmental psychological side, there is perhaps a

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Bourdieu and the Habitus Sociology is rich with statistical correlations demonstrating that individuals are profoundly marked not only by the socialization process itself, but by the speci c cultural form that the socialization process takes (e.g., Bourdieu, 1979). One of the main factors involved is the parents’ socioeconomic status (SES): for depend largely on their parents’ SES. Pierre Bourdieu was one of the rst sociologists to propose an explanation of this social reproduction (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1990). According to Bourdieu, children growing up in upper-class families are immersed from a very young age in a universe where reading stories, expressing oneself with appropriate language, arguing, and being curious are all highly valued skills. This way of behaving and thinking, what Bourdieu called the habitus, is precisely what is expected of children when they begin formal education (Bourdieu, 1984). Those who have been prepared for school will do well: they already know how to play the game and, as such, their attitude is appreciated by the teachers, who cannot help but like them more than those who cannot stay in their place, distracted and undisciplined. Being comfortable and appreciated in the school environment, these players do well, get excellent grades, and are therefore highly motivated academically, leading them, on average, to successfully pursue their careers in academia and beyond. This process in not without ideological consequences. In the end, each of these players will have the feeling that they have earned their high salary and ful lling way of life, winning the game through their own individual endeavors, and that while others had their chances, they gave them away. At least it could easily appear so. It is therefore important, not only for scienti c reasons but also politically and morally, to understand how societies’ ways of being, doing, thinking, and feeling come to be transmitted. In other words, if we collectively intend to give to everyone the same chances in life and avoid any latent form of inequality, it is crucial to identify the proximal mechanisms—to open the black box as it were—to explain the functional reproduction of any society (see Erickson & Cottingham, this volume).

Imitating Appropriate Behaviors The question of imitation is hardly new and, in fact, was already present in the minds of two of the most in uential founders of sociology. For Gabriel Tarde, cultural transmission was achieved by working through imitation (Tarde, 1903); for Emile Durkheim, it was through education (Durkheim, 1968). Both of them identi ed a valid but incomplete mechanism. As Tarde pointed out, it is of course true that humans are great imitators, a competence that has probably p. 389

been selected because of the necessity for our species to acquire

a very large number of good tricks,

developed by others, in order to survive (Dennett, 1997; Henrich, 2017). Children not only imitate from a very early age (Meltzo , 1985) but they also tend to overimitate a model when they do not understand the function of the observed behavior (Gergely et al., 2002). One of the most famous cases in the literature is the “Bobo doll” experiment conducted in the 1960s by Albert Bandura and his colleagues (Bandura et al., 1963). They showed that preschoolers who could observe an adult behaving aggressively toward a big doll mistreated the doll once left alone in the room with it. This experiment paved the way for research in social learning and showed that imitation can therefore explain how many social ways of behaving (walking, moving, speaking, etc.) are sustained over the generations through individual social members. However, socialization cannot be entirely reduced to ways of behaving. In particular, social groups di erentiate themselves by di erent systems of values: what is considered as important, worthy of interest, or indeed of sacri ce, can vary considerably in space and time. To explain such di erences, Durkheim insisted on the role of formal education at school. For him, a su

cient degree of homogeneity is necessary

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instance, the chances of a child doing well at school, attending a good college, and having a well-paid job

for a society to survive and “education perpetuates and reinforces this homogeneity by xing in the child from the beginning the essential similarities which collective life demands” (Durkheim, 1972, p.207). Indeed, it is in accounts of the early immersion of an infant in a particular society’s system of values that some of the best explanations of the child’s subsequent behavior and cognition can be found. However, the to a given culture are not well understood. It has been shown that infants are not born as a blank slate on which experiences inform all learning but, rather, that they are naturally endowed with competencies at (or closely following) birth in order to navigate their natural and social environment (e.g., Hirschfeld & Gelman, 1994; Kaufmann & Clément, 2014). In the social domain, newborns demonstrate, for instance, a preference for faces (Johnson et al., 1991) and they even show a rudimentary form of gaze following (Farroni et al., 2004). For cultural values, research in infancy has recently tended to focus on the active role of individual achievement as an explanation for socialization, and in particular on how an infant can improve their social skills in terms of recognizing other people’s emotions, socioemotional learning, and, for example, how it predicts early school success (Denham et al., 2014) or its link to prosocial behavior (Brownell, 2016; see Camras & Halberstadt, 2017, for an overview of a ective social competence and socioemotional learning programs). Our suggestion is that a ective processes play a crucial role in the transmission of culturally shared values (see Halberstadt et al., this volume). While Tarde and Durkheim focus either on implicit (imitative) or explicit (educative) explanations for the transmission of values, an encompassing model has to integrate the fact that one does not necessarily need imitation or direct education to acquire cultural values.

p. 390

The A ective Social Learning Model A ective social learning (see Figure 26.1) is the name we have given to a process of social transmission of value—a process, we argue, that builds the bridge between the sociological focus on social structures and the more individualistic psychological approach of socialization. This socioa ective path of value transmission explains how the learner (an infant or out-group member, perhaps) can rely on someone else as a guide or model to what is relevant in the environment. In other words, the infant can use the other person as an exemplar of the group to gain knowledge about what counts as worthy, inspiring, awesome, frightening, or disgusting to the members of that group. In this way, an object that may have previously been ignored has become relevant to the child through their observations of the model (to whom they defer) and, in particular, that model’s a ective engagement with the object in question.

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nature of the psychological mechanisms that ensure that newcomers are able to gure out the values proper

Pedagogy The a ective social learning model proposes that the social transmission of values can follow four di erent paths, although these paths should be seen as points on a continuum rather than as entirely independent of one another. Our rst focus of proximal mechanisms entails a form of social transmission that requires an species (see Figure 26.2). According to Gergely and Csibra (2009), we humans are endowed with an innate p. 391

ability to teach and be taught—a natural pedagogy. From

the teacher’s perspective, this ability translates

as a very speci c way to communicate with a “learner.” For instance, adults tend to speak to a child in motherese or “baby talk”—a speci c intonation with a higher and wider pitch, slower speech rate, and shorter utterance, that di erentiates it from the speech used with adults (Fernald, 1985). Similarly, when showing an infant how to do something, adults tend to exaggerate their actions, highlighting the most relevant aspects of action sequences and attracting and maintaining the infant’s attention; this pattern of action has been called “motionese” (Brand et al., 2002). Even if motherese and motionese are produced in a nonconscious way by the model, driven by the pedagogical setting, pedagogy nevertheless requires the model to be conscious of the transmission procedure. On the one hand, the model needs to represent the state of knowledge they are trying to improve; on the other hand, they have to gure out the kinds of information susceptible to help the child to move forward (what Vygotsky called the “zone of proximal development”). Pedagogy is therefore cognitively quite complex to master and its usage seems to be restricted to our species.

Figure 26.1 The Relational Triangle of A ective Social Learning. The Relational Triangle of A ective Social Learning. Reproduced from Dukes, D., & Clément, F. (2019). Foundations of a ective social learning: Conceptualizing the social transmission of value, © Cambridge University Press 2019.

Figure 26.2 The Proximal Mechanisms of Socialization as Components and Dimensions of A ective Social Learning. The Proximal Mechanisms of Socialization as Components and Dimensions of A ective Social Learning. Reproduced from Dukes, D., & Clément, F. (2019). Foundations of a ective social learning: Conceptualizing the social transmission of value, © Cambridge University Press 2019. From the “learner’s” perspective, these expressive patterns also automatically trigger certain reactions. For instance, the higher pitch almost instantaneously attracts infants’ attention, who consequently start to watch more carefully what the model is doing/showing. Importantly, children consider what is shown to them in such a fashion as being generalizable. This has been demonstrated by Gergely and his colleagues (Egyed et al., 2013). When an experimenter addressed the infants with ostensive signals of communication before showing joy/interest or dislike/disgust for an object, children generalized the value of this object, handing the object that had been attended to with joy/interest to a second person when prompted to give them one of the two objects. Without any communicative signaling, infants o ered the object signi cantly more often to the person that demonstrated their own interest for it, but not to a second person. It is as if, in the expressive-pattern condition, the infant learned that the object is “to be liked/interesting” as a general p. 392

rule. In other words, from an early age, children

seem to be sensitive to cues signaling that the

information given to them is relevant and that they can extend this newly acquired knowledge to other social contexts.

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intentional e ort from the model; such explicit and conscious teaching is undoubtedly important to our

A certain number of features about this pedagogical stance must be highlighted (Clément & Dukes, 2017). Firstly, this kind of transmission is guided by the model. Of course, the learner intends to obtain new information and can even ask questions to satisfy their curiosity; the model is nevertheless responsible for the transmission process to be successful. Secondly, pedagogy can be seen as a powerful way not only for helping the learners to memorize di erent sorts of cultural content, but also for them to become sensitive model, this latter has to be motivated to continue their teaching. This condition is met when the model is aware that they are transmitting valuable skills and knowledge to the pupil. For example, by explaining, in detail and with patient enthusiasm, how to transfer one’s body weight from one ski to the other in order to turn, parents simultaneously demonstrate that this activity is important for the members of their social group. Thirdly, to be e ective, this transmission requires a sort of emotional engagement. People can try, because they think it could be an asset for their children, to teach them how important classical music is. However, if the models do not manifest a real interest for that music, it is more than probable that this lack of a ective investment will be detected. It has been shown that interest can be detected by adults (Dukes et al., 2017), and it is more than likely that even infants, when observing, can feel if adults are truly interested or not. Without this genuine interest, we predict that it would be hard for children to endorse this activity as something that is truly valuable. Finally, the importance of pedagogy in what is considered as essential and valuable in a community is actually di

cult to evaluate. Anthropologists and cultural psychologists have,

for instance, described explicit acts of transmission as being rare in traditional societies (Rogo , 1990). Therefore, to acquire a fuller picture of how culture is transferred from generation to generation, we need to consider the other proximal processes included in a ective social learning.

Beyond Pedagogy While the impact of others’ emotional expressions is well demonstrated (even if not always entirely focused upon) in natural pedagogy, one of the main characteristics of pedagogical transfers is that they mostly rely on language. However, there are types of communication that do not require any linguistic exchange and that can nonetheless be very informative when evaluating aspects of our environment. As adherents of the appraisal theory of emotion insist, emotions are to some extent evaluations of our environment and of the objects that can be found there (Roseman, 1991, Scherer, 2009; Smith & Ellsworth, 1985). When unsure or unable to evaluate a particular object (or event or person), perhaps because you are unfamiliar with it, or because it is partially occluded, it might be possible to use other people’s emotional expressions to do the appraising for you. An expression of joy, awe, or interest indicates that a given object is relevant for that person in a particular way. Additionally, if this someone is a loved parent or another p. 393

person you readily trust, you will then have a strong tendency to consider this object in a positive

light

(see Broesch & Carpendale, this volume). On the other hand, an expression of disgust or contempt will elicit a speci c negative evaluation. This third-party evaluation has been called social appraisal by Manstead and Fischer (2001).

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to what is culturally relevant for their caregivers. Indeed, as pedagogy requires time and e ort from the

Social Referencing Social appraisal can be broken down further into two di erent social learning processes (although see Walle et al., 2017, for a contrasting opinion). The rst process, social referencing, was made famous by experiments initiated by Joseph Campos and his colleagues (Sorce et al., 1985). In the classic “visual cli

experiment,”

pattern just underneath the surface and was therefore apparently judged secure by the babies. However, halfway across was a visual cli : the pattern was no more just underneath the surface, but rather 30 cm below, triggering a sense of uncertainty, even if the plexiglas top continued. The experimenters asked the infants’ mothers to either facially express a positive emotion (e.g., joy or interest) or a negative emotion (e.g., fear or anger). As there was a desirable toy at the other end of the apparent drop, the babies wanted to cross the table. As they reached the “cli ,” they started visually “interrogating” their mother—referencing her. When the mothers adopted a positive facial expression, most babies appeared to appraise the situation as being safe and consequently crossed the table. However, they stopped crawling when they were confronted by a negative emotion. This experiment showed, for the rst time, that babies are able to use others’ nonverbal emotional expressions to modify their behavior, to evaluate their environment. Social referencing is ubiquitous during socialization. Children regularly check, by watching their caregivers, whether what they are doing is “OK.” Their “teachers” do not need to do much: a nod, a smile, or a frown can all communicate a certain evaluation of what is going on. In a way, it is a form of a ective “nudging,” where the emotional signals orient the learner to value the social environment in the “appropriate” way. It is important to note that, in such conditions, it is the learner—usually the child—that turns intentionally to the caregiver for an appraisal of the situation. The latter is therefore aware of this demand and, usually, answers to it by expressing something facially. Social referencing is therefore a case of social learning that involves an intersubjective exchange between a person who is asking for evaluative help and another person who is ready to help by o ering an emotional expression. However, this is only one of two processes of social learning that constitutes social appraisal.

A ective Observation Consider a caregiver pushing an infant in a stroller. It appears that most parents in Western culture choose to orient the stroller in a way that allows their infant to see what is in front of them. The infant is therefore not in a position that enables them to see the face of their caregiver (who in any case may, for example, be p. 394

concentrating on something

they have seen on their smartphone). This position is a perfect

observational standpoint for the infant. During their ride, they can watch a myriad of events and, at the same time, people’s reaction to these events. In particular, they can observe the emotions displayed by people and link them with whatever the people are reacting to. Depending on who is expressing these emotions, one can expect a more or less deep e ect on the infant’s own appraisal of the object. Very young children are, for instance, already more attentive to in-groups (Frick et al., 2017), and this ability is precious to gure out what is socially relevant for people of their group. Similarly, children are sensitive to consensus, and this sensitivity is important to detect what is relevant for most of the members of their community (Bernard et al., 2015). Prestige or hierarchy is also detected at a young age, and children tend to be more sensitive to prestigious or dominant characters (Chera edine et al., 2015). In all these situations, the people who are transmitting what is valuable in their culture do not have to intentionally communicate their appraisal of a given situation. These are the socially relevant people who, by their natural reactions to the happenings in their environment (admiring, being scandalized, disgusted, etc.), are implicitly teaching the infant in the stroller how to evaluate, how to value, how to feel. The infant learners are not asking for these appraisals: they are simply curious to discover what is socially relevant and, by observing, can take advantage of others’ reactions.

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infants aged 12 months were placed on a large plexiglas-topped table. Half of the table had a checker-board

In other cases, an event suddenly happens, and people do not know how to evaluate it, so they turn to others to gure out how to appraise it. The classic experiment demonstrating this e ect in adults was conducted by Latane and Darley in the 1960s. When participants were put with two confederates in a room that began lling with smoke, they did not know how to react. They therefore observed the confederates’ reactions. When the confederates remained passive, the participants did not react, deciding, through their observation when confederates expressed anxiety (Latane & Darley, 1968). Throughout our life, we constantly rely on others’ emotional reactions when taking decisions. This is valid for deciding what piece of art to love as well as what kind of car to buy. As this type of social learning does not require the “teachers” to intentionally communicate their appraisal, we called this kind of social learning a ective observation.

Emotion Contagion The nal way in which we will consider how emotions impact social learning and cultural transmission is more basic still: emotion contagion. It is acknowledged that, in certain contexts, emotions can be contagious. This has been noticed even for newborns, by Sagi and Ho mann (1976). They recorded babies’ cries and played them in a nursery, observing that even 1-day-old babies cried signi cantly more often than those exposed to silence or to a synthetic cry that resembled a baby’s cry. The babies were sensitive to the emotion, simply by being confronted by it. Even if they do not really understand what is happening, some p. 395

somatic markers will be formed (Damasio, 1994), and this

sound will be enough to trigger some positive

feelings in the future, just as in the case of the “madeleine” that the famous French writer Marcel Proust used to eat with his grandmother (Proust, 2003). This process can explain why certain atmospheres, places, or people become associated with certain emotions, even if people might not be able to describe exactly with what these emotions are associated. During the socialization process, these atmospheres will then play the role of “attractors.” People will be attracted by those things that trigger warm and sweet feelings, and this approach behavior will most likely end with an increasingly more positive appraisal. Similarly, they will avoid situations that trigger negative feelings, and this will lead to negative evaluations of the speci c objects that constitute these situations. By putting together emotional contagion, a ective observation, social referencing, and natural pedagogy, our objective is to integrate di erent and worthwhile perspectives explaining how social values are transmitted in one model: a ective social learning (Dukes & Clément, 2019)—how what we feel about the objects in the environment develops. These proximal mechanisms of cultural transmission, structured along a dimension of intentionality, enable us to specify how society is able to reproduce and how values can be transmitted from generation to generation, and to understand why something that is considered as essential in one place can be judged as futile by a neighbor. This model has the advantage of being compatible with the main intuitions of the social sciences, demonstrating the importance of social transmission in the construction of personal identities. At the same time, it provides a framework that is in line with the most recent discoveries of the psychological bases that enable social learning. A ective social learning opens, then, the possibility to describe with more precision how individuals become the inheritors of a cultural legacy thanks to evaluations that are made by the people we trust and with whom we share our lives.

Acknowledgment Daniel Dukes’ research for this chapter was supported by a Swiss National Science Foundation grant (Earlypostdoc grant: SNSF:P2NEP1-178584).

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of the others’ appraisal of the situation, that the smoke was not dangerous; their reaction was very di erent

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The Oxford Handbook of Emotional Development Daniel Dukes (ed.) et al. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/978019 8855903.001.0001 9780191889516 9780198855903

Search in this book

CHAPTER

27 Emotional Development Across Cultures  Tanya Broesch, Jeremy Carpendale https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198855903.013.45 Published: 13 January 2022

Pages 398–406

Online ISBN: Print ISBN:

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Published: 2022

Abstract The biological characteristics of human infants set up a developmental trajectory toward forming emotional attachments with caregivers. The caregiver–infant system sets the stage for later common across cultures and social contexts, and therefore we see similar emotion recognition, production, and communication across diverse contexts in the rst few years of life. Yet, di erences emerge in how caregivers respond to infants and shape their expressions. This can be seen in cultural display rules—that is, the expression of emotion based on social norms. The authors argue that emotions ground communication, speci cally through a process of mutually shared enjoyment (species-speci c), and also develop in complexity as children learn words to describe and then re ect on emotional experience. This chapter provides an overview of emotion development drawing on cross-cultural research.

Keywords: emotions, development, culture, infancy, responsiveness Subject: Psychology, Developmental Psychology Series: Oxford Library of Psychology Collection: Oxford Handbooks Online

Overview HUMANS

are a cultural species, necessarily developing within cultures, as well as transforming and

transmitting their culture. Infants are born into a caregiver–infant emotion system that plays a central and foundational role in early communication. This system sets up a process through which infants form emotional bonds with caregivers. Within this emotional system between an infant and caregiver, early nonlinguistic communication begins and supports the development of more complex forms of communication, and eventually language development (Carpendale, 2018). Although the developmental process is similar across cultures, the ways in which it is shaped and expressed di ers, and may result in divergent patterns of developmental outcomes or displays of emotion across cultures (Halberstadt & Lozada, 2011; Green eld et al., 2003). In this chapter, our objective is to describe the processes involved in this interactive, bidirectional emotional system of the rst relationship between a caregiver and their infant. We provide evidence suggesting that this rst relationship sets the emotional tone and is a necessary and universal feature of development, which acts as a springboard for other forms of early communication. We organize the chapter by beginning in early infancy, describing both similarities and di erences in the emotional system—focusing speci cally on the infant in context with caregivers. We draw upon ethnographic as well as experimental evidence. We propose a developmental system with mutual joy as its foundation, which, we argue, is critical in grounding social and communicative development.

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development and learning through these early interactions in a bidirectional manner. This system is

Emotions Are Embedded in Culture It is clear from research conducted across cultures that societal pressures, norms, and individual beliefs p. 399

shape emotional communication styles—the expression and experience

of emotion—of individuals

emotion experience and expression is shaped by this cultural process early in development is the focus of this chapter. To fully understand the complex ways in which emotions impact the developmental process, we expand our lens beyond an urban and western setting to view emotional development across diverse cultural contexts (Henrich et al., 2010; Nielsen et al., 2017; Kline et al., 2018). The sample populations that make up 95% of developmental psychology research are from English-speaking, typically North American and Western European countries (Nielsen et al., 2017). This is problematic as this population has been shown to be an unrepresentative sample of the human population (Henrich et al., 2010). To determine the generalizability of developmental science requires an examination beyond so-called Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) societies (Kline et al., 2018). We draw speci cally from societies that have been largely unrepresented in the developmental literature—the Global South.

The First Relationship The signi cance of emotional bonds in the rst year of life cannot be overstated. Human infants are born relatively helpless, requiring, and thus creating, a socially responsive, caring developmental context. Bowlby noted, “It is fortunate for their survival that babies are so designed by Nature that they beguile and enslave mothers” (1958, p. 367). This comment brings out the role of caregivers’ emotions in the socialemotional cradle in which human infants develop. The resulting strong emotional bonds that infants form early in life within relationships with caregivers have long-term in uences across the life span for their interaction with others (Waters et al., 2000). Attachment theory, as it was proposed and articulated by Bowlby (1958) and tested by Ainsworth (1979), transcends diverse cultural contexts and parenting goals. According to this theory, an emotional bond is necessary for healthy development. This bond is created and maintained by “responsive parenting,” which is loosely de ned as responding to an infant in a timely and appropriate manner. We come back to the signi cance of the emotional bond later in this chapter (see section “Mutual Joy”).

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embedded within a society (see Hofmann & Doan, 2018, for a description of the system). Understanding how

Emotion Responsiveness Across Cultures Often, responsive parenting in the rst year of life is examined as appropriately timed responding to an infant’s bids. It has further been examined as a ect attunement—with caregivers accurately identifying caregiver’s responsiveness and attunement to their infant’s needs, they become identi ed as a trustworthy p. 400

secure

base for the child. To a prelinguistic infant, the primary mode of communication is the nonverbal

sounds, movements, and expressions between themselves and their caregivers, which subsequently become the foundation for further communication. Despite widespread evidence of di erences in parenting practices across cultures (e.g., Whiting, 1963), there is evidence that responsiveness and emotional attunement transcend cultural boundaries. Broesch and co-authors (2016) examined contingent responsiveness and emotional mirroring by parents in Fiji, Kenya, and the USA, and found striking similarities between these three diverse cultural environments in caregivers’ response to their infants. There were no societal di erences in the degree of caregiver responsiveness. Furthermore, the authors examined the acoustic modi cations of infant-directed speech and found similarities in the ways that caregivers changed their pitch and speaking rate when talking to infants (Broesch & Bryant, 2015). These ndings support the idea of a universal communicative system rooted in emotions. Although parents are similar in terms of their degree of responsiveness, they may di er both across and within societies in how they respond to infant emotional bids within this communication process. For example, Keller and co-authors (2009) report that in more “proximal” and interdependent societies, parents respond to infants using body contact and body stimulation, in contrast to parents in more “distal” and independent societies who typically respond to infants using face-to-face emotional responses (e.g., smiling and frowning while vocalizing). Furthermore, at 2 months of age, infants have already become embedded in these cultural models of emotion co-regulation. We see the rst clear behavioral expression of this with the infant’s social smile. Cross-cultural comparisons indicate that infants begin to smile socially around the same age; yet the ways in which caregivers respond and co-regulate with their infants di ers (Lavelli et al., 2019). Smiling is an example of a social skill that develops within interactions (Jones, 2008), and can then be used by infants as a means to elicit further interaction (Mcquaid et al., 2009; see also Mireault, this volume, for a description of this developmental process). Furthermore, evidence with infants and caregivers across diverse cultural contexts has shown that the infant response to a pause in mutually joyful social interaction (e.g., the classic “still-face” paradigm) is distressing, irrespective of the modality—whether the pause in social interaction is visual or tactile. This work, in combination with ethnographic observations of infants in di erent societies (Levine et al., 1994; Lancy, 2014; Hewlett & Lamb, 2005), suggests that the focus on facial emotional responsiveness as shaping infants’ emotional experience may be Western-biased and not generalizable. While the infant’s interactive needs are similar, the caregiver’s response modality varies, depending on the society in which the infant is embedded. Lavelli and colleagues (2019) examined mother–infant dyads during the rst few months of life in three cultural contexts—rural Cameroonian Nso, urban Italy, and also West African immigrant families in Italy. They found that mothers’ typical response to their infants varied signi cantly across cultures. For example, urban Italian mothers emphasized positive vocal and facial expressions as well as sustained mutual eye gaze, while in contrast, Cameroonian Nso mothers emphasized tactile and motor responses to infant displays and appeared not to foster or support sustained mutual gaze. West African immigrant dyads in Italy p. 401

showed a combination of strategies from their native

and new cultures—using a combination of face-to-

face and sensorimotor exchanges. These ndings support the idea that the infant is born into an emotional co-regulatory system which is shaped by caregivers’ selective emotional responses. Additionally, Little and co-authors (2016) found that mothers living on an island nation in the Paci c—Vanuatu—rely more on

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infant emotions and responding in an “attuned” manner (Stern, 1985). The idea is that through a

tactile stimulation during caregiver–infant interactions compared to mothers in the USA, who rely more on facial expressions. For example, while a caregiver in the USA may vocalize and smile in response to an infant, a caregiver in Vanuatu may touch and reposition the infant while vocalizing. Research by Broesch and colleagues (2016) posit that the society into which an infant is being socialized is a found that when an infant produced a negative facial expression, they would be more likely to receive a response if they were living in a Fijian society compared to an infant–caregiver dyad in an American society. Additionally, this research also found that while mothers in Fiji, Kenya, and the USA mirrored their infants’ emotion expressions (a ect mirroring) to a similar degree, more mothers in the USA mirrored their infants’ emotions compared to Fijian and Kenyan mothers. While we do not know the direct e ect of these di erences, one hypothesis is that infant emotional experiences and expressions are shaped by caregiver responses. We suspect that the mechanism would operate in a similar manner to the timing of contingent responsiveness. We know that caregivers’ response to infants varies, and infants, in turn, develop social expectations about the timing of the caregiver response (Bigelow & Rochat, 2006). We suspect that infants are also learning from caregiver selective responses to emotional displays (as well as from observing others interacting), and this further supports any di erences in emotional displays (see Broesch et al., 2016). If we look closely at the ethnographic evidence for infant social-emotional development in the rst year of life, we see further di erences in caregiver responses which appear to shape the infant according to di erent cultural pathways of development. For example, Levine and co-authors (1994) found that the Gusii mothers of Kenya had a preference for keeping their infant calm. In this context, emotional regulation of both positive and negative emotions becomes important, as witnessed in behavioral observations. Rather than engaging in exaggerated mimicry of a positive emotional vocal or facial display, mothers responded gently and gazed away. According to Levine and co-authors, the Gusii mothers in this particular context value emotional regulation and control over expressing one’s positive and negative feelings. Therefore, mothers do not engage in stimulating positive emotions and, instead, appear to dampen positive expressions with the goal of fostering a calm, emotionally regulated infant. This suggests that our current understanding of the speci cs of emotional regulation may be western-biased and needs revision.

Socialization Goals Across Cultures In an elegant review article, Kärtner and co-authors (2013) argue that the sociocultural model of emotional p. 402

development needs reconceptualization to consider the

interpretation of infant behaviors by caregivers in

a given society. They draw upon evidence from selective responses to infant social smiling across cultures suggesting that caregivers co-regulate the infant’s emotional experience (Kärtner et al., 2013). The authors suggest that the ways in which parents respond to infants is tied to their cultural orientations as adaptations to a speci c ecocultural environment (e.g., di erential emphasis on autonomy and belonging), yet the process is universal. Furthermore, Mesquita (2001) investigated understanding of emotion components in societies di erentially valuing independence of an individual and interdependence among individuals within a group. The results of this study with adults indicated that an individual’s emotion understanding is closely tied to their societal values. Mesquita reported that emotions in “collectivist” cultures were tied to the self–other relationship rather than the subjectivity of the self as in “individualistic” cultures.

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determining factor in shaping caregivers’ selective responses to infant emotional bids. In their work, they

Emotion Talk Across Cultures Children’s understanding of emotions develops further as they master the use of language. Words can be used to articulate and re ect on aspects of emotional experience; yet cultures di er in which aspects of examining conceptions of emotions in three cultural groups residing in the Netherlands, di erences were found between cultural groups that emphasized individualism compared to groups that emphasized collectivism. For instance, in the collectivist cultures studied, emotions centered more on the self–other relationship and were taken to re ect behavior rather than an individual’s inner experience, compared to individualistic cultures which emphasized inner experience (Mesquita, 2001). Furthermore, there are cultural di erences in the extent to which it is acceptable to discuss internal states, and there is some evidence to suggest this impacts how children construe others’ minds (i.e., theory of mind). Work in the Paci c indicates that individuals report that it is di

cult or impossible to assess others’

mental states; therefore they do not engage in this activity (Mayer & Träuble, 2013). Others have found that mental-state reasoning in regions of the Paci c (e.g., Vanuatu, Samoa) may follow a di erent developmental pathway compared to Western developmental evidence. This di erence has been attributed to the widespread belief and social norms surrounding the “opacity of the mind” in this region. The idea is that engaging in discussion of internal mental states, including the experience of emotions, violates social norms and, therefore, individuals refer to observable behavior and not internal experiences (Dixson et al., 2017; Mayer & Träuble, 2013; Ochs, 1988). It is argued that one can never know the internal workings of another’s mind; therefore there is no point in discussing it. While there is little work directly investigating the impact of cultural di erences in social norms regarding mental-state language and the e ect on emotion expressiveness and understanding, one can imagine a link. We suspect that the reduced emphasis p. 403

on

emotion expression leads to di erences in the extent to which individuals spend time thinking about

others’ internal states. In fact, a study by Taumoepeau (2015) examined ethnic identity, mental-state talk by caregivers, children’s emotion development, and theory of mind in several Paci c cultures living in New Zealand. The author found that the strength of caregiver ethnic identity as a Paci c Islander was negatively correlated with their children’s ability to identify and predict the emotion of an individual in a vignette (Taumoepeau, 2015). In urban and Western societies, gender di erences in development of how children talk about emotions have been reported. Such di erences were found in a longitudinal study in which boys’ and girls’ use of emotion words at 3 years of age did not di er, but both mothers and fathers talked to their daughters more about emotions, and, by 5.5 years, girls were using more emotion terms and a wider variety of words than boys (Kuebli et al., 1995). This strongly indicates that the ways in which parents talk about emotions result in di erent outcomes, and suggests that we would also expect di erences across cultures in adults’ use of emotion words, and in turn, children’s learning about emotion words. The eld of emotions across cultures is large. Here we can just acknowledge its breadth and give some examples (e.g., Lillard, 1998, pp. 20–21). Ways of talking about emotions in terms of the salience of emotional aspects of experience, as well as the variety and breadth of emotional concepts, vary across cultures (Hofmann & Doan, 2018; see Liew & Zhou, this volume). For example, Taumoepeau (2015) noted that children from Paci c Island cultures develop a complex understanding of the relationships that are central in their cultures, and may be encouraged to develop skills in being aware of nonverbal cues in understanding others’ emotional states. This form of social understanding may focus more on social processes rather than on the intentions of individuals (Taumoepeau, 2015).

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emotional experience are articulated and expanded upon (Mesquita, 2001). For example, in a study

Emotion Regulation Children learn to regulate their emotions, partly through the ways in which their caregivers respond to their actions and emotional displays. The form of caregivers’ responses is in uenced by cultural values regarding and acknowledge. One form of emotional regulation may emerge already in the rst year or two of life, through the ways in which parents respond to infants’ displays of emotions. As we have noted throughout, there are aspects of caregivers’ responsiveness that are similar across cultures (e.g., frequency and timing) and some aspects that are di erent (e.g., how caregivers respond). Keller and Otto (2009) investigated these cultural di erences in emotion regulation and provide a model for understanding the developmental pathway. The authors propose that societal values shape parenting goals and behavior and, in turn, this behavior is experienced by the child. They carve these cultural di erences into two developmental pathways p. 404

—emphasizing various degrees of autonomy and relatedness. research by Friedlmeier and Trommsdor

Support for this idea also comes from

(1999), who examined emotion regulation in toddlers from

Germany and Japan. The authors found di erences in regulation patterns: speci cally, that German toddlers used more positive regulation strategies (e.g., eye contact with the mother), whereas Japanese toddlers used more negative regulation strategies (e.g., not seeking support from the mother). All of this strongly suggests that early social experiences with caregivers and others, which are embedded in a given society, shape the development of emotion regulation in children (see also Liew & Zhou, this volume).

Mutual Joy Emotions structure patterns of interaction in which communication and learning from others emerges (see Clément & Dukes, this volume). Infants learn to enjoy the attention they receive from caregivers. This shared enjoyment in interaction becomes more complex, beginning with adults’ attention directed toward infants, then to actions the infants perform, and later to objects and events. Infants gradually develop declaratives as a form of interaction based on the mutual joy of the infant and caregiver when engaging around communication regarding aspects of their world (Bates et al., 1975). As Clément and Dukes describe in detail, children learn by observing and attending to others’ emotional expressions (see Clément & Dukes, this volume). Developmental progression typically and gradually moves from holding out, showing, and then giving objects, as ways in which to elicit adults’ attention, to declarative communication. What is often overlooked in the literature on the development of communication is the feature of shared enjoyment by interactive partners. Not only does the infant or young child engage in a joint interaction, but the interaction can have a positive emotional tone throughout (see Mireault, this volume). We recognize that there may be cultural di erences in the ways in which this pathway develops. However, in the authors’ repeated personal observations of caregivers and infants across cultures, the joyful engagement of a caregiver and an infant in the rst year of life appears to transcend cultural boundaries (see also Mireault, this volume). These episodes of mutual joy likely become more complex and sensitive to cultural norms of interaction; yet this area of research has been unexplored across cultures.

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the display of emotions and what aspects of emotional experience are acceptable to articulate, re ect on,

Conclusion Emotions play central roles in structuring the social interaction that is critical for infant development. (See also Reddy & Vanello, this volume, for a clear description of the inseparability of emotions in the bidirectional manner, in uences the interactions children experience. Thus, emotions are crucial in the p. 405

social processes

that are common across cultural settings. Yet, as outlined in this chapter, these universal

processes are impacted by culturally speci c norms around emotion understanding, expression, and regulation. Given that there are cultural di erences that appear to result in di erent developmental pathways of emotion development, it is essential that we address the dearth of evidence from non-western cultures. Lacking such research limits our understanding of emotion development to urban and western societies—which is not the ultimate goal of any scienti c eld (Broesch et al., 2020). In order to fully understand the complexity and the processes by which emotion understanding, expression, and regulation develops, we need evidence from societies with a range of socialization goals and cultural norms.

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developmental process.) Through development, emotions become more complex, and this in turn, in a

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The Oxford Handbook of Emotional Development Daniel Dukes (ed.) et al. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/978019 8855903.001.0001 9780191889516

Online ISBN: Print ISBN:

9780198855903

Search in this book

CHAPTER

28 Emotions as Fixatives for Children’s Understandings About the World: The Role of Emotion in Socializing Race and Gender Attitudes  Amy G. Halberstadt, Courtney A. Hagan, Fantasy T. Lozada https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198855903.013.34 Published: 13 January 2022

Pages 407–420

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Published: 2022

Abstract Parents’ emotions provide unintentional and intentional communications to their children, attaching themselves to the messages that children receive about the ways of the world. Both theory and orientations to objects, concepts, and people. Applying these concepts to real-life problems, this chapter explores the role of emotions as a “ xative” in the process of socializing children’s understanding of the world and particularly the development of beliefs about race. We suggest that the emotions associated with messages about race are not overtly recognized as part of the messages and that these emotional layers are the invisible glue that hold these messages and subsequent beliefs in position. Although the chapter focuses primarily on negative emotions, it also notes the role of positive emotions, such as pride, with the hope of generating more research on these emotions in relation to racial understanding.

Keywords: social referencing, a ective social learning, emotion contagion, emotional communication, race, implicit bias Subject: Psychology, Developmental Psychology Series: Oxford Library of Psychology Collection: Oxford Handbooks Online

Introduction THERE

is a lot to learn in childhood. How children learn, and how children learn about emotion, has been

well chronicled through the decades (e.g., Bandura, 1977; Dunsmore & Halberstadt, 1997; Eisenberg et al., 1998; Jones, 1924; Skinner, 1963; Watson & Raynor, 1920). Further, how emotion serves to direct attention toward objects and the people embedded within a situation, and to then interpret these, has also been well noted in the social-appraisal and social-referencing literature (Camras & Sachs, 1991; Clément and Dukes, 2017, this volume; Feinman, 1982; Reschke et al., 2017). In this chapter, we describe the role of socialization processes very brie y. We then suggest the role of emotion as a “ xative” that helps consolidate the messages received during socialization from parents, peers, social media, and so on. Because the emotional part is not an ostensible part of the propositional message learned, it serves, in a way, as the largely invisible “glue” that holds the pieces of the messages together. We then move to the challenging topic of race-related socialization processes, and suggest emotion as one reason why changing racist beliefs may be challenging.

p. 408

Socialization Through Emotion As children encounter novel objects and situations, they look to their parents or others for speci c guidance as to how to value and respond to a person, situation, or thing (Kim et al., 2010; Kushnir, 2013; Zarbatany & Lamb, 1985). This social referencing, which is the process whereby individuals utilize others’ emotionladen appraisals to help inform their own appraisal of situations, supports young children’s safe engagement in the world (Campos et al., 1989; Mumme et al., 1996; Walden & Ogan, 1988). Children use social referencing particularly when they encounter ambiguous, novel, or uncertain situations or stimuli, and they demonstrate this behavior as early as 10 months old (Blackford & Walden, 1998).

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research suggest that parents’ emotions impact children’s learning and activate children’s a ective

Parents’ emotionally laden communications are also highly salient, inviting children to “pay attention” to whatever novel aspects are present in the situation. Emotion alerts children that there is an opportunity for learning, as well as provides information regarding how to value those novel aspects in the situation. Thus, emotions guide what children pay attention to and then encode into memory; in so doing, parental emotions may then create or further develop their self and world schemas (Dix, 1991; Dunsmore & used in frustration or anger in the vicinity of their young child who, while appearing to be inattentive, then begins to parrot the word, to parental dismay. In such instances, the emotion expressed activates the attention of the child, and learning occurs. Negative emotion, in particular, activates some degree of vigilance in children, as well as in adults, with learning funneled through a concern about safety and well-being (Hermans, et al., 2001). Indeed, even 12month-old infants are more likely to avoid ambiguous stimuli after receiving negative messages compared to positive or neutral messages from others (Hornik et al., 1987; Mumme & Fernald, 2003). These ndings suggest that the negativity bias, which is the tendency to pay more attention and encode negative stimuli, is present early in development and is one part of a ective social learning (Dukes & Clément, 2019; see Clément & Dukes, this volume), whereby children may pay more attention to and encode negative messages about stimuli compared to positive or neutral messages (Vaish et al., 2008). Further, learning to identify mixed or multiple emotions develops over time for children (Halberstadt et al., 2013; see Kramer and Lagatutta, this volume), so the negative emotion is the one most likely recognized and shared. Then, once an evaluation is created (i.e., the connection of a message to emotional content), recall or recognition of other information congruent with that evaluation is stronger than recall or recognition of incongruent information, thus strengthening connections of the original message (Baron, 2013).

Emotions as Fixatives The use of socially acquired, emotion-laden knowledge to attend to and interpret the world is essential for p. 409

children when navigating the world. Acquisition may develop over

repeated instantiations of emotionally

evoking events, but it may also occur through single, memorable events. In either case, we propose that the emotion infused in a situation functions as a “ xative” to what is learned, so that the ideas/beliefs about the signi cance of objects or persons becomes encoded in a permanent way in one’s memory. Because emotions are communicative, whether intended or not, they have impact. In situations in which an emotion is ostensive, its e ects are usually clear and known to both the sender and recipient (e.g., smiling when receiving a present, articulated anger when someone misses a third deadline). However, in situations in which the emotion is not meant to be part of the message, it may work instead to become the message itself, to x the message in place, or to alter the message altogether. In such instances, we believe that the emotion becomes more generalizable to future situations than a more explicit message which could be bound to that speci c situation. Thus, given that the emotion may be an enduring piece of information that remains with children as they view intergroup interactions, it is likely to become part of a schema of intergroup interactions; and this, in turn, adds to the di

culty in changing those beliefs later in life.

Here is an example: Imagine a situation in which a parent sti ens and gives a curt reply when a tall, black male stranger greets them on the street. Despite the parent’s discomfort, they may have meant to convey the message to the child that a person should always respond to others when they greet you, no matter who they are. The parent believes that this should be apparent from the fact that a response to the greeting was given to the black male stranger. However, that the parent sti ened and gave a curt reply sent a message of “caution” and discomfort that the child may see or feel (either visually or via emotion contagion), and may internalize. Later, because all of this has occurred in nonarticulated ways, the child has no language to cement the speci c memory of the parent’s interaction with the black stranger in place. Yet, the salience of

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Halberstadt, 1997; Sullivan, 1940, 1953). Every parent is probably familiar with an inappropriate word being

the emotion of the interaction has endured. In future interactions with other black strangers, the child may experience and display discomfort and caution, without explicit awareness about when or why such a feeling originated. That is, emotions can hold or “ x” the ideas or beliefs in place, but indirectly or unconsciously, so that even when the ideas themselves no longer hold much merit in the eyes of the more mature individual, they are di

cult to eradicate. Further, because most adults prefer to avoid having to say

situation), we struggle, instead, to generate reasons for why we feel what we feel. However, the opposite may be what is really happening; instead of reasons driving our feelings, our feelings may be driving our reasoning. We are not alone in proposing the role of emotion as a “ xative.” Almost 90 years ago, the Russian psychologist Vygotsky described all cultural understandings as rst sca olded in the interpersonal, emotionally laden relationships that support children’s development, and then emergent later in the intrapsychic level of the individual, where they are now deeply embedded (Wertsch & Tulviste, 1992). Additionally, 25 years ago, Chodorow argued that gender is infused with emotional meanings and, further, that an understanding of gender relies on the “interpersonally transmitted emotional responses” conveyed by parents (Chodorow, 1995, p. 518), which are then further processed through infants’ and young p. 410

children’s interpretive lens. These very

di erent theoretical traditions both suggest the central role of

interpersonal and emotional components as “ xing” the way in which children come to understand their world, and also that these understandings then become deeply entrenched in the psyche of the individual. Demonstrating this process experimentally, however, has been di

cult (Bigler, 2013; Dunsmore et al.,

2005). Here, we describe the process in research that most closely demonstrates this concept, focusing on how parental emotions might be re ected in their communications with their children about race, which then serves to consolidate those racial messages in the schemas of children. We focus on emotions in understanding race for black and white families in the United States, but the underlying processes apply broadly to understandings of other races, and ethnicity, religion, gender, and age as well.

The Role of Emotions in Consolidating Messages About Race Developmental intergroup theory suggests that children attach meaning and value to salient social groups (Bigler & Liben, 2007). Both explicit and implicit sources of information from adults, peers, and the media have been identi ed as important sources for children’s “meaning making” about social groups, including both children’s consideration of which groups are or should be salient, as well as the content of how to think about those groups. Children receive information about members of racial groups through explicit statements that link speci c racial groups with attributes (e.g., “Black people get so angry over nothing!” or “Those type of people live on the rough side of town.”) and implicit, nonverbal behaviors that might reveal emotional associations with speci c racial groups (e.g., expressing nervousness or anxiety when walking by an unknown African American male on the street, annoyance at the loud laughter coming from the group of black adolescents at a nearby table in a restaurant). Also, adults often judge the same characteristics or behaviors di erently when enacted by a black versus a white person (Halberstadt et al., 2018; Hugenberg & Bodenhausen, 2004), and these di erential judgments can be communicated to children. All of these sources of information create biased associations and assumptions about racial groups to children, which then become a part of children’s racial schemas and attitudes. Implicit and nonverbal behaviors, as well as di erential judgments, are relatively unconscious and, thus, rarely discussed, leaving children to draw their own conclusions about the meaning of these emotional behaviors regarding social groups (Bigler & Liben, 2007). This silence ultimately supports cultural messages of di erence and de cit, which are then left unchallenged. Further, given the pervasiveness of these racial

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“well, I just feel that way” (thus demonstrating a lack of rationality or thoughtful consideration of a

messages, at least in American culture, it is inevitable that children will receive such messages at some point in their development. Do these implicit messages matter? Castelli and colleagues (2008) demonstrated that they do. In two p. 411

studies, white preschoolers were shown videos of an interaction between

a white and a black adult. When

black adult, they endorsed more negative attitudes toward the black adult, as well as another black adult not even present in the video. These ndings are consistent with correlational work indicating that while white parents’ explicit racial attitudes were unrelated to their preschoolers’ racial attitudes, their implicit attitudes predicted preschoolers’ preference for a white rather than a black playmate, as well as both positive and negative attributions about a black playmate (Castelli et al., 2009). In other work, preschoolers exposed to negative nonverbal signals from an adult (such as those we described in the previous example) develop new biases about novel group identities (Skinner et al., 2017). Additionally, associations between parents’ and children’s more explicit attitudes is clearer in older children, suggesting that these belief systems become more systematically embedded in the attitudinal structures of children over time (Carlson & Iovini, 1985; O’Bryan et al., 2004). These messages may be societally pervasive as well, and once embedded in children’s thinking, are entrenched and di

cult to change with cognitive interventions

(Aboud, 2013; Bigler, 1999, 2013; Steele, 1997). We argue that this is because of the largely emotional, nonverbal processes infusing these messages. Despite preliminary evidence of the importance of emotion-infused nonverbal behaviors in communicating and shaping racial bias in white children, we know of no targeted explorations of emotion speci cally as the xative that solidi es racial attitudes. Nevertheless, the construct of racial socialization is well studied among black families, and recent work suggests emotion and emotion-related constructs as supporting links between parents’ racial messages and children’s outcomes. Thus, in the next section, we consider the empirical literature on racial socialization among black and white families, discussing what is known from current work and theoretical paradigms explored among black families and connecting it to and expanding on the limited work among white families.

Supporting Evidence of the Role of Emotion in Racial Socialization Racial socialization is the process by which children are taught about race—an experience that is common and important for people who live in a racially diverse society (Spencer, 2006). Empirical work on racial socialization was initially intended to describe the ways in which racial-minority families communicate pride in cultural heritage across generations and prepare their children to safely and successfully navigate white, mainstream culture. Racial socialization has been most often studied among black families, and this work provides some support for the presence and importance of emotion as solidifying messages in the racial-socialization process. Researchers have theorized that racial socialization in black families is communicated between parents and children through message content, message frequency, nonverbal behavior, and emotional content (Smithp. 412

Bynum et al., 2016). To test this model, these

researchers observed black mothers and adolescents during

a racial-socialization discussion and rated maternal verbal and nonverbal (i.e., positive: smiling, enthusiasm, interest, and a pleasant facial expression; negative: frowning, scowling, rolling eyes, and defensive body posture) support and warmth. Across discussions, mothers exhibited positive emotion with their adolescents. Additionally, greater positive emotion expressed during these discussions was associated with more frequent racial-socialization messages about how adolescents should respond during a racialdiscrimination incident. In this way, mothers’ positive emotions were a part of the messaging and support provided for their children while engaging in serious problem solving around race. Although Smith-Bynum et al. (2016) did not test how black mothers’ positive emotions during the racial-socialization conversations

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the preschoolers witnessed a white adult engaging in negative versus positive nonverbal behaviors toward a

were associated with their children’s racial beliefs, other studies with black families and children’s psychosocial functioning highlight the moderating role of emotional quality of the general parent–child relationship in associations between racial messages and children’s outcomes (Cooper & McLoyd, 2011; Elmore & Gaylord–Harden, 2013).

utilize “color-blind” or “color-mute” approaches which attempt to disregard or ignore race, these approaches convey important information nonetheless (e.g., Pahlke et al., 2012; Vittrup, 2018; Vittrup & Holden, 2011; Zucker & Patterson, 2018). Many white parents may be well intentioned in avoiding racial discussions as a way of communicating racial egalitarianism by de-emphasizing race, yet such an approach leaves a child to inevitably draw conclusions about race, without meaningful discussion. In these socialization approaches, white parents do not provide any explicit message content for children to use as information about race, leaving only implicit, nonverbal, and emotional content which, as previously noted, is in uential in shaping white children’s racial attitudes (Castelli et al., 2008, 2009). Indeed, when questions about race are sidestepped or shut down by parents, we suggest that the nonverbally expressed emotions about the conversation that did not happen can become enduring feelings which are then attached to race-related issues; and, because they are never organized through language, conversations about race later in life feel uncomfortable and are thought to be best avoided. At the very least, the omission of these conversations conveys to children that such topics are unimportant. Precisely for these reasons, “colorblind” and “color-mute” approaches create the opportunity for the development of bias or prejudice beliefs without constraint (see Vittrup, 2018 for a review), likely through the nonverbal behaviors that reveal emotion and emotional tone. There is another reason why the lack of conversation about race in white families may be problematic. We know that children who lack the tools with which to talk about emotions fare less well on a host of socioemotional indices, whereas improving children’s emotion labeling skills, so that they can talk about their own emotions and those of others, increases their emotional and social competence in general and reduces problematic behaviors in school (Finlon et al., 2015; Fishbein et al., 2016; Greenberg & Kusche, 2006). In the same way, children’s impoverished ability to express their thoughts and feelings about race p. 413

may perpetuate simplistic understandings, and dampening

conversations about race may impact

children’s ability to e ectively understand and engage with diverse others. Children also become afraid to talk or ask questions about race, and come to believe that even mentioning someone’s race is bad or wrong (Tatum, 2017). In these ways, emotions accompany thoughts about race and may solidify messages about any aspect of race as inherently problematic (e.g., race should not be discussed, race should be ignored, race problems are caused by those who happen to be of a di erent race). When white families do decide to tackle conversations about race, for instance in a “color-conscious” approach (Hagerman, 2014; Vittrup, 2018), white children receive explicit messages about race, inequality, and social justice, in addition to implicit, emotional content that highlights parents’ beliefs of the importance of such conversations. For instance, in Hagerman’s (2014) ethnographic study of white parents’ racial-socialization approaches, “color-conscious” white parents describe intentionally exposing their children to people of diverse racial backgrounds, knowing that the ensuing conversations with their children about these experiences might be di

cult and cause discomfort and confusion for both themselves

and their children. However, these parents were willing to engage in such conversations because they believed that such discomfort teaches their children about the importance of these issues and that such explicit conversations are important for mitigating potentially problematic developing racial beliefs. When considering emotions as a xative for negatively racialized messages, we note several other phenomena. First, black families are not immune to internalizing the hate- and fear- lled messages which have been infused into American culture over the centuries, designed to separate the races and maintain the race-organized hierarchies of power and privilege. Some black parents explicitly communicate negative

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White parents also communicate racial messages to their children. Although white parents predominantly

messages about the behaviors and characteristics of black Americans that re ect stereotypes about the black community (e.g., Neblett et al., 2008). Second, black parents and grandparents have had to be fully aware of the potential dangers of integrated society, and continue to need to maintain vigilance in their daily lives (Posey–Maddox, 2017), which may include implicitly or explicitly conveying vigilance to their children, early in development. These concerns may expand into emotion socialization in interesting ways. with their emotion word use when reading and talking about a picture book with their young child; this e ect was signi cant even when controlling for a host of other variables, including socioeconomic (e.g., income-to-needs ratio, education, marital status), child (e.g., joint attention, a ect, expressive vocabulary), and maternal (e.g., engagement, intrusiveness, depression) characteristics (Odom et al., 2016). Experiences of racial discrimination may thus lead to a heightened awareness of emotional information (Pearlin et al., 2005), shaping parents’ propensity to comment on emotions during conversations with their children and promoting “emotional vigilance” as important for navigating the minority experience in America (Odom et al., 2016). Third, black parents’ messages of racial and cultural pride are often explicitly discussed and children’s p. 414

psychological adjustment is strongest when parents communicate

frequent messages about pride and

about the awareness of discrimination (e.g., Neblett et al., 2008). Similarly, black young adults whose mothers engaged in high levels of cultural pride and moderate levels of racial-discrimination messages, coupled with high endorsement of supportive responses to their negative emotions, demonstrated the lowest levels of depressive symptoms (Dunbar et al., 2015). Such ndings suggest that the presence of the positive emotion of pride in black parents’ conversations about race work to counter the e ects of the negative emotions that may surface from black parents’ historical and current experiences of racism and subsequent messaging about those experiences. Unfortunately, positive messages about black life and culture, and explicit discussion of race relations within white families, as noted previously, are infrequent (Vittrup, 2018; Zucker & Patterson, 2018), and thus fail to provide a counterweight to the nonidenti ed but ubiquitous negative emotionality associated with race. Further, when conversations about race and racism are unavoidable in these families, they tend to elicit a range of negative emotions such as anger, denial, sadness, and guilt (Bigler & Wright, 2014), further “ xing” the belief of children in these families that race is problematic, not their problem, and something to be avoided if at all possible.

E ecting Change in Childrenʼs Understanding About Race and Race Relations Finding successful interventions to change racist thinking has also been more challenging than expected (e.g., Bigler, 1999, 2013; Johnson & Aboud, 2013; Lai et al., 2016). Although supportive of our claim that the emotion becomes the invisible glue that stabilizes beliefs, the di

culty in establishing successful

interventions is somewhat discouraging with regard to e ecting social change. Bigler (2013) suggests that stark linguistic di erentiations (e.g., “black” versus “white,” and also, concomitantly, “boy” versus “girl”), coupled with a ective responses, create and maintain children’s (and then correspondingly adults’) beliefs, making them even more di

cult to modify. There is some supportive evidence in the sex-

stereotyping literature for the process by which parental socialization messages, coupled with children’s gendered language learning, predicts children’s acceptance of gender roles (Fagot & Leinbach, 1989). Certainly, the dichotomizing of groups enables young children to participate in identifying ways of di erentiating those groups further. Thus, adult employment of dichotomies early in children’s development may be one way in which our culture maintains categorical di erences, but avoiding these could also be a way by which we e ect change in future generations.

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For example, the frequency of black mothers’ racial-discrimination experiences was positively associated

Following Bigler’s lead that prevention is more e ective than remediation (2013), anecdotal descriptions of attempts with degendering may provide a useful paradigm for race relations (e.g., Bem, 1998). Pointing out to children that gender does not/should not matter, but that some people have thought it does, highlights p. 415

nonessentialist aspects

of gender, while also recognizing structural sexism. With regard to both gender

and race, beginning with this simple dialectic and continuing to note the aspects of structural sexism and for a developmentally sensitive socialization process. Given how much inadvertent emotionally connected learning occurs about race during childhood and, indeed, continues throughout adulthood, continued e orts toward nding successful interventions is important (e.g., Aboud & Brown, 2013; Johnson & Aboud, 2017; Qian et al., 2019). Perhaps making visible the emotional components that have tended to be invisible previously can weaken the bonds of racialized socialization messages formed in early childhood. Additionally, we need to remember that developmental processes are not always linear (Aboud, 2013). For racial-relevant attitudes, children seem to have a greater predilection for developing bias around the age of 4 years, with some shifting and more nuanced thinking possible only three or so years later as children develop better perspective taking and the ability to shift multiple frameworks in their thinking (Johnson & Aboud, 2017; Quintana, 1998). Thus, the toddler and preschool years, when youngsters organize categories relatively simplistically, may be a time when it is most important, for at least white children, to experience and personally engage in ethnically and/or racially diverse friendships. Further, when children perceive color more as a continuum or involving a multiplicity of possibilities, then dichotomization is less likely to occur. As white children grow up, explicit messages against oppression and racism can then be coupled with their own personal, emotionally positive experience of friendships and understandings of the diversity of experiences. Within the context of home life, an understanding of the emotional cues sent by parents can inform parenting programs to promote racial conversations in the family more e ectively. Such programs may begin by helping parents to understand that emotion is likely present in conversations about race and interracial interactions in ways that may contradict or skew what explicit messages about race parents intend to share. For example, parents can learn how to more deeply engage in pride and/or respect in their cultural messaging, while reducing unintentional messages of ambivalence in both black and white family conversations, and can consider how nonverbal messages of closeness (versus distance) and positive expressiveness also communicate important emotional messages to their children.

Summary We propose that emotions guide children’s attention and interpretation of the world around them, and, indeed, serve as a “ xative” for lessons learned—even those which are not intentionally taught. By this we mean that the emotion serves to more rmly entrench the connections being made, so that attempts later to p. 416

“undo” those lessons learned are challenged by the hidden power of the connecting emotions. These emotional messages could be an underlying force that helps maintain racist and sexist ideologies and holds them in place; the idea of emotions as a xative suggests that we negotiate intergroup interactions based on the cognitive and a ective connections we have learned about members of other groups early in development, without fully recognizing when and how we have made such connections. Additionally, although we have largely based our ideas in messages about race and sometimes in gender, the notion of emotion as a xative is also useful for understanding the nature of prejudice and bias with respect to a range of social issues regarding intergroup relations across class, religion, sexual orientation, and other social groups. Likewise, emotion as a xative might help explain more positive associations too, such as one’s own racial pride and also appreciation of others’ race, ethnicity, religious heritage, sexual orientation, and so on.

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racism as children are increasingly able to understand job selection, housing inequities, and so on, allows

We note that the theory is supportive of the role of emotions as described, and much of the work on racialsocialization processes in both black and white families is supportive of our arguments. However, the eld currently lacks investigations documenting and isolating the e ects of emotion in the socialization of racerelated messages. One ideal domain would involve parent–child conversations about race and associations between parents’ emotion and children’s racial attitudes over time. Also, because white parents and their e

cacy would also be useful for guiding intervention research.

Parents’ emotions are ubiquitous throughout their social interactions with children and others, providing children with ample opportunity to learn about the ways that their parents experience and value such interactions and the people that are a part of them. Beyond the mere presence of emotions, however, is the functional role of emotions to initiate and “ x” beliefs into place as they relate to social interactions and groups. When applied to the intergenerational transmission of racial beliefs and behaviors, the potential for emotions to cement racist ideology versus embed respect and awareness of the “other” in white families, and to facilitate racial conversations that balance pride and safety in black families, highlights the urgency with which we need to take up the exploration of emotions in the racial socialization of American children. In so doing, researchers, interventionists, and practitioners may be able to create more e ective opportunities and leverage points for addressing racial tension and inequality.

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teachers are often unsure as to how to talk about race, creating sca olding techniques and then assessing

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29 Parenting, Emotional Self-Regulation, and Psychosocial Adjustment Across Early Childhood and Adolescence in Chinese and Chinese-Immigrant Sociocultural Contexts  Je rey Liew, Qing Zhou https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198855903.013.37 Published: 13 January 2022

Pages 421–436

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Published: 2022

Abstract This chapter introduces a heuristic model and synthesizes extant research on cultural, parental, and child in uences on emotion regulation or emotional self-regulation processes and adjustment where culture is part of the macrosystem, philosophical foundations and core cultural values that are relevant to Chinese parenting and parental socialization of children’s emotion and emotional selfregulation processes are discussed. In addition, major changes that have been observed in Chinese societies and cultures across the 20th and 21st centuries are discussed in relation to parenting and emotional self-regulation processes. In light of such cultural values and dynamics, transactional or bidirectional in uences between parent and child factors on children’s emotional self-regulation processes and psychosocial adjustment, along with promising future research directions, are highlighted and discussed.

Keywords: culture, emotion regulation, temperament, parenting, e ortful control, executive functioning, Chinese, Asian American, immigrants Subject: Psychology, Developmental Psychology Series: Oxford Library of Psychology Collection: Oxford Handbooks Online

Introduction YOUNG

children are natural-born learners, and their parents or primary caregivers often are their rst

informal teachers in life. Throughout childhood and adolescence, parents directly or indirectly socialize their children about experienced and expressed or suppressed emotions (Eisenberg et al., 1998), and these socialization processes occur within parents’ historical and cultural contexts (Bornstein & Cheah, 2006). Given the prominent role of cultural norms and values in shaping parents’ beliefs and practices related to emotions and children’s emotional self-regulation processes (e.g., Friedlmeier et al., 2011; Trommsdor

&,

2011), we explicitly discuss cultural values and cultural dynamics as factors that are linked to parenting and parental socialization of children’s experienced and expressed or suppressed emotions. Furthermore, as part of our synthesis of the extant research, we propose a heuristic model (see Figure 29.1) that conceptualizes how cultural contexts shape emotional self-regulation processes and individuals’ person– p. 422

environment t to their developmental niches from early childhood

to adolescence. In the bioecological

model of human development (Bronfenbrenner & Morris, 2006), culture is part of the macrosystem that is an all-encompassing context in relation to individuals’ development. Given the broad and diverse nature of culture, we focus this chapter on Chinese and Chinese-immigrant families and their cultural contexts in relation to parenting, child emotional self-regulation, and child adjustment.

Figure 29.1 Heuristic Model of Cultural, Parent, and Child In uences on Emotional Self-Regulation Processes and Adjustment Outcomes. Heuristic Model of Cultural, Parent, and Child Influences on Emotional Self-Regulation Processes and Adjustment Outcomes. Adapted from Eisenberg, N., Cumberland, A., & Spinrad, T. L. (1998). Parental socialization of emotion. Psychological Inquiry, 9(4), 241–273. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327965pli0904_1 Copyright © 1998, Informa UK Limited.

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outcomes in Chinese and Chinese-immigrant families. Consistent with a bioecological framework,

There are good reasons to conduct research on Chinese and Chinese-immigrant families. There are approximately 1.4 billion Chinese people living in China, and approximately 50 million ethnic Chinese people living outside of China. In the USA, for example, the Asian American population grew faster than any other ethnic-minority group between 2000 and 2010, with individuals of ethnic Chinese background comprising the largest proportion of Asians in the USA (Lopez et al., 2017). Thus, there is a need to include future directions for research on culture, parenting, and children’s emotional self-regulation.

Reflective and Reflexive Systems in Emotional Self-Regulation Emotion-related self-regulation or emotion regulation refers to “processes used to manage and change if, p. 423

when, and how (e.g., how intensely) one experiences emotions

and emotion-related motivational and

physiological states, as well as how emotions are expressed behaviorally” (Eisenberg et al., 2007, p. 288). Henceforth, we refer to emotion-related self-regulation or emotion regulation as emotional self-regulation for brevity. We chose to use the term “emotional self-regulation” to emphasize the self-regulatory processes involved in emotion regulation. These self-regulatory processes have bases in temperament and neurobiology. Temperament refers to individual di erences that can be observed as early as in infancy and remain relatively stable across the life span. Emotional self-regulation processes consist of control (re ective) and reactive (re exive) dimensions that in uence one another across time and across biological, behavioral, and social levels (Perry & Calkins, 2018). A ective or emotional reactivity (or the re exive system) and self-regulation (or the re ective system) are two broad dimensions of temperament with neurobiological bases that contribute to emotional self-regulation processes (Rothbart & Bates, 1998; see also Méndez Leal & Silvers, this volume). The re exive system includes positive and negative emotionality or a ectivity (e.g., exuberance and fear), while the re ective system includes “top–down” processes such as e ortful control and executive functioning (Rothbart & Sheese, 2007). E ortful control is part of self-regulation and is the ability to override an immediate or primary response and to execute an alternate or secondary response in order to meet one’s goals, while executive functioning refers to higher-order cognitive and neurological processes (e.g., inhibitory control, cognitive exibility, working memory) that allow for deliberate, goal-directed thought and action (Liew, 2012; Lin et al., 2019; for a review, see Nigg, 2017). However, research on epigenetics show that individuals’ experiences in their environments modify or shape the development and expression of temperament and personality (Caspi et al., 2005; Meaney, 2010). Thus, culture can shape the functional signi cance of temperament traits and how people perceive and evaluate or give meaning to expressions of those traits (for a review, see Chen, 2018).

Philosophical Foundations and Core Values “Parenting is at least partly culturally constructed” (Bornstein & Cheah, 2006, p. 4), and parents’ beliefs and practices related to experienced and expressed or suppressed emotions are shaped by cultural values and norms. Halberstadt and Lozada (2011) called for using “cultural frames” to understand how culture shapes the ways that parents socialize their children about emotions (see also Clément & Dukes, this volume). To understand Chinese parenting, it is important to understand some of the core values of Chinese cultures and their potential in uences on parental socialization of children’s emotion and emotional selfregulation processes.

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and to synthesize extant research on Chinese and Chinese-immigrant families, and to identify promising

p. 424

Yin-Yang: Intra- and Interpersonal Harmony, Equilibrium, and Balance The concepts of yin and yang (阴阳) are deeply ingrained into traditional Chinese philosophy, and many Chinese philosophers from the late 900s (Song dynasty) onward have been in uenced by yin-yang (Chen, 2017), which continues to have universal signi cance today. Yin and yang are viewed as fundamental hot, turbulent, and proactive. The combination of yin and yang is a process of dynamic and complementary interaction that results in harmony, equilibrium, and balance (Chen, 2017). Accordingly, social or group harmony is highly valued and guanxi (关系) refers to close relationships and social networks built on reciprocity and trust. Guanxi (关系) serves as a “social glue” and social capital that individuals continually work to develop and maintain. Emotions and behaviors that disrupt intrapersonal equilibrium or balance as well as interpersonal or group harmony would be inconsistent with traditional Chinese philosophies and cultural values.

The Family, Collectivism, Filial Piety, and Face Familism is typically one of the de ning features of collectivistic cultures, and the family is the most basic institution that serves as a “social glue” in traditional Chinese society (Schwartz et al., 2010). Filial piety (孝) is a tenet and virtue calling every person to respect and listen to or obey their parents and their elders. Daughters and sons are viewed as extensions of the parents, and it is important for children to engage in proper public behaviors such as showing good manners and making a good impression on the family. The concepts of face and face-saving are important in traditional Chinese society. Face (mianzi or 面子) can be understood as dignity, reputation, honor, or prestige. Thus, face is directly linked to one’s personal, familial, and public or social identities. One traditional approach that parents use to teach their children to protect or save face is to use shame, so their children learn to avoid doing things that make them lose face, which would also bring shame to themselves and their family. For example, in a study comparing Chinese and American mothers, Jing–Schmidt (2014) found that Chinese mothers use negative a ective speech such as threats, scolding, and name-calling to induce guilt and to solicit social or behavioral compliance in their children. Thus, cultural concepts and customs of face and face-saving are related to emotional selfregulation, because social relationships and face are often maintained through controlling expressions of emotions and masking or suppressing negative feelings that could lead to social con icts and disrupt social harmony.

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Cultural Dynamics Culture is uid and dynamic; often responsive to and re ective of the changes that occur across time, place, and events among peoples and society. China’s “open-door” policy in 1978 marked a major change for Chinese society, opening international trade and foreign investments in China and leading to modernization and globalization of China. Correspondingly, traditional Chinese cultural values have undergone changes (Faure & Fang, 2008). We discuss some of these changes in relation to parenting and emotional selfregulation processes that have been observed across the 20th and 21st centuries in Chinese society and culture.

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elements or forces of the world, with yin representing the cold, still, and passive and yang representing the

Social Class, Education, Occupation, and Income China’s economic growth since 1978 has made it the fastest growing economy in the world since the 1980s. This is re ected by the fact that China is one of the world’s largest markets for high-end or luxury goods (Sun et al., 2014). While traditional Chinese culture emphasizes humility as well as thrift, frugality, and highly valued. With the rise of educational and occupational levels of the middle and upper class in Chinese society, the phenomenon of “face consumption” emerged, de ned as consumerism driven by the cultural value of face and feeling the need to purchase high-end or luxury products for the self and as gifts for others to enhance, maintain, or save face (Li & Su, 2007). In a study on middle- and lower-class families in China, Hong and Zhao (2015) found that middle-class parents had signi cantly greater capital investment that could be directed to their children’s education and development, but no di erences were found in parenting attitudes or beliefs across middle-class and lower-class families. Thus, parents’ educational and occupational or income levels, consumption patterns, and ability to invest resources in their children di er dramatically, but parents’ attitudes and beliefs about childrearing remain similar, across social classes.

Rural and Urban Households Urbanization in China has increased dramatically since the “open-door” policy in 1978, and China’s urbanpopulation growth is higher than that of all of Asia, and indeed of the world. In a study on Chinese adolescents living in rural and urban households, Zhang and Fuligni (2006) found urban adolescents p. 426

endorsed greater willingness to openly

disagree or argue with their parents, and reported greater

intensity of con ict and lower levels of cohesion with their parents compared to rural adolescents. Thus, urban adolescents endorsed attitudes and behaviors that appear to have shifted from the principle of lial piety or respecting and listening to or obeying parents and elders. Much of the urban-population growth in China can be attributed to the largest ow of rural–urban migration known in human history to date (Zhang & Song, 2003). Many Chinese migrants move to urban areas for work opportunities, and a large segment of these migrants are parents who have “left-behind” children who remain in their rural hometowns and are cared for by the grandparents, other relatives, or family friends (Yiu & Yun, 2017). These children are separated from one or both of their parents for extended periods that range from months to years. In a systematic review of the extant research on “left-behind” children in rural China, Cheng and Sun (2014) found that children who were separated from their parents at a young age and/or for a long duration were at increased risk for anxiety and depression. Early and extended separation from parents may leave these children prone to attachment insecurity, emotion dysregulation, and problems with social-emotional development and psychosocial adjustment (Cheng & Sun, 2014; Wen & Lin, 2011). Thus, parents’ physical presence and emotional availability are factors to consider in children’s emotional self-regulation and adjustment.

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conservation to save or protect resources and avoid waste, face (mianzi or 面子) and face-saving is also

Language Language is constructed within historical and sociocultural contexts, and it re ects the speakers’ history, beliefs, values, cultures, and identities (Bonvillain, 2010; Sapir, 1949; Vygotsky, 1978). For Chineseimmigrant families living in countries where Chinese is not the dominant language, children are often both developmental asset and risk factors. First, the experience of bilingualism is hypothesized to be associated with some bene ts in executive-function development (Bialystok, 2017). In studies of preschool to school-aged children in Chinese American immigrant families, researchers found that both children’s English and Chinese pro ciency were uniquely and positively associated with their cognitive control—an executive-function component re ecting one’s exibility in shifting attention and/or behavior in the face of changing situations (Chen et al., 2014; Williams et al., 2019). Second, parents’ heritage-language practices re ect how culture and language intersect to in uence parenting and the way that parents communicate with their children. Studies show that parents’ childrearing beliefs and their attitudes on the role of children in society are shaped by culture, and those beliefs and attitudes have in uence on parents’ language socialization of their children (Ochs, 1984). Chinese and Chinese-immigrant parents are increasingly confronted with making choices about familylanguage practices and what language(s) their children will learn to speak, read, and write. While relatively little is known about the social-emotional development of bilingual or dual-language learners, including p. 427

those who are multilingual or multidialectal

(Hammer et al., 2011), research shows that parents’

language input and support predict children’s language development (e.g., Dale et al., 2015). Furthermore, children’s language skills serve as tools for labeling, processing, and understanding of emotions that facilitate their emotional self-regulation (Eisenberg et al., 2005; Izard et al., 2011). Third, parent–child language gaps (i.e., discrepancies in parents’ and children’s language pro ciency)—a re ection of parent–child acculturation discrepancies—have shown to be risk factors for children’s maladjustment in immigrant families (e.g., Chen et al., 2014; Kim et al., 2012). The potential mechanisms underlying this risk process is that language gaps or acculturation discrepancies can escalate parent–child con icts and decrease parents’ use of supportive parenting. In a study on parent–adolescent language use among immigrant families in the USA, Tseng and Fuligni (2000) found that adolescents who maintained and used their heritage or native language with their parents reported greater cohesion and conversations with their parents than those adolescents who did not. The authors suggested that the use of heritage or native language between parents and their children may re ect that the latter are adhering to the immigrant parents’ cultural values of familism and lial piety.

Food and Eating Practices Foods and eating behaviors or habits are an important part of Chinese culture, particularly because food and eating are often used as means for people to meet or gather, and to build or maintain their close bonds or ties and social networks (guanxi or 关系). The social functions or sociality of food can be observed among individuals (e.g., family members, friends), community members, religious groups, and ethnic groups (Ma, 2015). In traditional Chinese culture, serving very fresh, abundant, expensive, and special foods to guests are ways to show hospitality and respect or to give face (mianzi or 面子) to others. Furthermore, the o ering or sharing of food frequently symbolizes social bonds, care, concern, and love, as represented by one of the most common Chinese greetings of “Have you eaten, yet?” (Wong, 2010). Food preferences refer to an expressed choice or selection of certain food or drink items over others. Commonly eaten traditional Chinese foods include mixed dishes, carbohydrates (e.g., rice, noodles, breads), vegetables, meats, seafood, and soups (for a review, see Diep et al., 2015). However, food preferences and

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exposed to multiple languages in their home and/or school environment, which might be associated with

eating habits often change in the context of globalization and migration or immigration (Wang et al., 2016). In one of the rst large-scale cross-sectional studies on parental feeding and children’s eating habits in Hong Kong, China, Lo et al. (2015) found that less than half of the children (N = 4553) consumed the government-recommended amounts of fruits and dairy products, and less than 20% consumed the recommended amounts of vegetables. In addition, migration and immigration often results in acculturation changes could have implications for children’s emotional self-regulation processes, particularly when p. 428

parents engage in emotional feeding or use foods to soothe children

(Liew et al., 2020; Stifter & Moding,

2015). Lo et al. (2015) found that Chinese parents’ use of emotional feeding was related to their children consuming high-energy-dense foods. Indeed, emotional feeding has been described as an interpersonal emotion-regulation strategy because the parent o ers food to in uence or alter the child’s emotional responses (Christensen, 2019).

Parenting and Parental Socialization of Emotional Self-Regulation Processes Parenting is one of the primary mechanisms by which cultural norms and values that are relevant for emotional self-regulation are transmitted from society or from parents to children. According to ecocultural theory, parents’ childrearing values and beliefs correspond to parenting behaviors, and those values, beliefs, and behaviors correspond to parents’ historical, socioeconomic, and cultural backgrounds and contexts (Harkness & Super, 1992, 2021). Parents who endorse authoritarian or restrictive childrearing values tend to reinforce conformity and obedience in their children and endorse parenting practices such as restriction and coercive control, whereas parents who endorse authoritative or democratic childrearing values tend to promote independence or autonomy in their children and endorse parenting practices such as responsiveness and support (Luster et al., 1989; Schaefer & Edgerton, 1985).

Relations Between Culture and Parenting Cultural values and cultural dynamics have in uences on parents’ childrearing values and beliefs as well as parenting practices (Bornstein & Cheah, 2006). In a study on Chinese mothers, Xu et al. (2005) found that traditional Chinese cultural values of emotional self-control and humility were uniquely associated with authoritarian (restrictive) parenting, but values of collectivism and conformity to norms were associated with both authoritarian and authoritative (democratic) parenting. The shared cultural values between authoritarian and authoritative parenting likely re ect core values such as mianzi (面子) (or face) and guanxi (关系) (or close relationships and social networks), and philosophical foundations such as balance and harmony (or yin-yang) (阴阳).The commonalities in core Chinese values between authoritarian and authoritative parenting appear consistent with Liew et al.’s (2014) recommendation to conceptualize the counterbalance of parental strictness supervision with parental autonomy support as yin-yang (阴阳) parenting, particularly because yin-yang parenting appears to facilitate positive youth development and whole-child success. In addition, cultural dynamics are also related to parenting practices. Chen and p. 429

colleagues (1997) found

that the social status of Chinese parents (e.g., occupational and educational

levels) was positively related to authoritative parenting but negatively related to authoritarian parenting. Similar relations have been found for Chinese-immigrant parents, particularly those who continue to endorse traditional Chinese cultural values (for reviews, see Chao & Tseng, 2002; Kim & Wong, 2002).

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processes, including changes in food preferences and parental feeding or food-parenting practices. Such

Relations Between Parenting and Child Emotional Self-Regulation Processes Longitudinal studies have shown that parenting beliefs and practices contribute to the development of children’s emotional self-regulation processes in ethnically diverse families (e.g., Liew et al., 2018; see also Riediger & Bellingtier, this volume). Results from a meta-analysis of 41 studies on parenting and children’s support and structure) and parental psychological control (i.e., intrusive parenting) are two types of parenting practices that are linked to child self-regulation (see Karreman et al., 2006). Behavioral and psychological control are orthogonal constructs, so that the level of one does not necessarily correspond to the level of the other (Barber et al., 1994). Parental behavioral control refers to parenting practices aimed at the regulation of children’s behaviors through the parent communicating, monitoring, and reinforcing guidelines and boundaries for children’s behaviors (Barber et al., 1994). Parental psychological control refers to intrusive parenting practices aimed at the control of children’s behaviors and psychological experiences through the parents’ use of manipulative or coercive techniques (Barber et al., 2005), and such parenting practices are associated with poor child emotional self-regulation processes in ethnically diverse, including Chinese, families (Liew et al., 2014; Morris et al., 2007). In addition to parental psychological control or intrusive parenting, parental supportiveness, such as expressions of warmth and positive emotions, have also been linked to children’s emotional self-regulation processes. Although these studies have primarily been conducted with European American samples, a few studies have reported similar ndings in Chinese and Chinese-immigrant samples. For example, in a threewave longitudinal study, Eisenberg et al. (2005) found that parents’ warmth and positive expressivity predicted children’s e ortful control—part of the re ective system involved in emotional self-regulation processes—two years later. Positive relations between supportive parenting or parental positive expressivity and children’s e ortful control were also reported in native Chinese and Chinese American families (Chen et al., 2015; Zhou et al., 2004). Moreover, Liew et al. (2011) found that observations of parents’ expressions of warmth and positive emotions when their children were undergoing a stressful experience predicted child self-regulation as indexed by both physiological (respiratory sinus arrhythmia) and behavioral measures. These ndings are consistent with the view that parental supportiveness contributes to children’s emotion socialization and development of emotional self-regulation skills, p. 430

because “when parents are warm and supportive,

children are unlikely to be overaroused and are better

able to respond to parental e orts to focus their attention and guide their behavior” (Eisenberg et al., 2005, pp. 1056).

Transactional Relations Between Child Temperament and Parenting Transactional or bidirectional models of parenting and child temperament posit that parents and children mutually in uence one another across time and contexts, and studies have shown such bidirectional in uences have implications for children’s internalization of parental socialization e orts as well as children’s emotional self-regulation processes (for a review, see Ki

et al., 2011). In a longitudinal study

that tested transactional or bidirectional relations between parenting and child temperament in Chinese families, Lee et al. (2012) found bidirectional relations between high authoritarian parenting and low levels of e ortful control and high levels of negative emotionality. This is noteworthy given that e ortful control and emotionality are the re ective and re exive temperament systems most directly relevant for emotional self-regulation.

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self-regulation showed that parental behavioral control (i.e., provision of developmentally appropriate

Emotional Self-Regulation Processes and Psychosocial Adjustment In a study on children living in China and in the USA, Zhou and colleagues (2009) explored whether relations between child temperament (e ortful control, positive emotionality, and negative emotionality) and externalizing and internalizing problems di ered across Chinese and American cultures. Zhou et al. problems in both cultures, but relations were stronger in the Chinese than the American sample. In addition, low positive emotionality was linked to high internalizing problems in both cultures. However, high positive emotionality was linked to noncomorbid externalizing problems in the Chinese but not in the American sample. These ndings indicate that emotional self-regulation processes are linked to psychosocial adjustment outcomes such as internalizing and externalizing problems, with cross-cultural similarities and di erences found in those linkages (for a review of additional studies on emotional selfregulation and psychosocial adjustment, see Liew et al., 2011).

Conclusions and Future Directions Norms concerning emotional self-regulation in all cultures can be understood through cultural-value p. 431

orientations concerning interpersonal relationships and emotions

(Matsumoto et al., 2008). In

traditional Chinese culture, such orientations include collectivism and familism, as well as social or group harmony, as re ected in the Chinese philosophy of yin and yang (阴阳) that results in harmony, equilibrium, and balance akin to homeostasis (Chen, 2017). Collectivism, familism, lial piety (孝), guanxi (关系), and face (mianzi or 面子) are all cultural concepts and value orientations that reinforce stable and collaborative social relations as well as strong social bonds and ties. These cultural-value orientations are relevant for emotional self-regulation processes in that experienced and expressed or suppressed emotions that disrupt intra- or interpersonal harmony/equilibrium/balance, weaken familial or interpersonal relationships and harm guanxi (social networks), or cause individuals to lose face (dignity) are viewed as undesirable, harmful, dangerous, and threatening (Matsumoto et al., 2008). While these traditional cultural concepts and values remain relevant in modern times, it is important to recognize that cultures continually evolve across time, space or place, and contexts (Boyd & Richerson, 1985). Thus, cultural dynamics such as social class, income, education, urbanization and modernization, language, and food or eating/feeding practices also have relevance for parenting and child emotional self-regulation processes (see Figure 29.1). Traditional and modern cultural values, along with cultural dynamics including acculturation processes, in uence parents’ childrearing values and beliefs and parenting practices (Bornstein & Cheah, 2006). In light of the philosophical foundations and cultural-value orientations of Chinese peoples, the counterbalance of parental strictness supervision and parental autonomy support—a combination that facilitates positive youth development and whole-child success—can be conceptualized as “yin-yang (阴阳) parenting,” with strictness supervision represented by yin (i.e., “cold”) and warmth/autonomy support represented by yang (i.e., “hot”) (Liew et al., 2014). While parent characteristics and parenting practices contribute to emotional self-regulation processes and psychosocial adjustment in childhood and adolescence (Liew et al, 2014; Zhou et al., 2009), child characteristics such as temperament also play an important role, because parents and children mutually in uence one another across time and contexts (Lee et al., 2012). In conclusion, peoples’ beliefs about the experience, expression, or suppression of emotions as desirable (vs. undesirable), useful (vs. useless), and helpful (vs. harmful) are often re ected in peoples’ philosophical and cultural values (Ford & Gross, 2019). Our heuristic model (Figure 29.1) draws attention to an inclusive scienti c approach to understanding developmental diversity and the need to include cultural frames to understand how parenting and socialization beliefs and practices are related to children’s experienced, expressed or suppressed emotions, as well as to in- and out-of-school adjustment outcomes. Furthermore, our heuristic model is consistent with a positive youth-development perspective by calling for a need to

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(2009) found that low e ortful control and high negative emotionality were linked to high externalizing

consider the role of emotional self-regulation in children’s and adolescents’ holistic adjustment and wellbeing (Gestsdottir et al., 2011). By taking culture and in- and out-of-school contexts seriously, we will be able to gain a fuller and deeper understanding of intra-, inter-, and extrapersonal in uences on emotional self-regulation processes and adjustment outcomes. Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/edited-volume/38848/chapter/337801636 by University of California Library - Berkeley Library user on 13 March 2024

p. 432

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The Oxford Handbook of Emotional Development Daniel Dukes (ed.) et al. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/978019 8855903.001.0001 9780191889516 9780198855903

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CHAPTER

30 Emotional Frontiers  Stephanie Olsen, Karen Vallgårda https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198855903.013.35 Published: 13 January 2022

Pages 437–445

Online ISBN: Print ISBN:

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Published: 2022

Abstract This chapter focuses on the historical contingency and cross-cultural plurality in codes of “emotional development,” a value-laden and culturally embedded concept. What counts as healthy or virtuous life cycle) varies signi cantly over time and place. The plurality of emotional codes also means that an individual might experience either unfamiliarity with the codes of emotional behavior in a given context, or sometimes become aware of con icting sets of emotion rules. While “formation” designates the culturally speci c codes of a ective comportment and expression, and the process through which the individual child incorporates and embodies these codes, this chapter introduces the concept of “emotional frontiers” to describe the a ective experience of encountering a boundary between di erent a ective formations or divergences within the same formation. A frontier may be encountered in various ways—from a little misunderstanding to a violent confrontation.

Keywords: emotional frontier, history of emotions, history of experiences, children, youth, school, indigenous people Subject: Psychology, Developmental Psychology Series: Oxford Library of Psychology Collection: Oxford Handbooks Online

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emotional experience, comportment, or growth among children and youth (and in other stages in the

Concept IT

is no longer possible to isolate universal processes of emotional development from their cultural

situation. Rather, we endorse the concept of emotional formation, de ned as the emotional codes that these codes (see Vallgårda & Olsen, this volume). Emotional formations are mutable, a ected positively and negatively (perhaps even obstructed) by various external factors that are dynamically entangled with an individual’s development. As Rob Boddice has recently argued, “Historians of emotion … contribute to and complicate biocultural constructionist theories, and radically problematize the fundamental importance of culture” (2019, p. 1994). He goes on: “Any given individual case of emotional development … begins with the world of that individual. Historians can instantiate that world” (Boddice, 2019, p. 1996). Our focus on “emotional frontiers” in this chapter is designed to show the quotidian complexity of any such world and the cultural demands that must be met in order for emotional development to be considered successful. In fact, “emotional development” itself is a heavily value-laden and culturally embedded concept that privileges a situated understanding of a normative process (see also Vallgårda & Olsen, this volume). What counts as healthy development, resulting in situated emotional competence, is an expression of a certain instance of script valuation, and such values vary signi cantly over time and place. They are connected to religion and culture, as well as to shifting understandings of gender, sexuality, race, class, and age. Hence, what is today considered sound emotional development in Europe or North America might, in other historical or geographical contexts, have been seen as a sign of sickness, sin, or perversion. Until around the mid 19th century, American parents, for example, thought it proper to instill a certain amount of fear in p. 438

their children—parenting advice and practice which run counter to contemporary

North American and

European pressures for children to display happiness as a sign of successful parenting and successful childhood (Stearns & Haggerty, 1991; Stearns, 2010; Vallgårda & Nyvang, 2018; Stearns, this volume). Furthermore, an individual might encounter a plurality of emotional codes at any given time. Such an individual might experience unfamiliarity with the codes of emotional behavior in a given context, or become aware of con icting sets of emotion rules. Such instances are what we term an emotional frontier. Sometimes individuals might succeed in crossing it; sometimes they might not. Elsewhere, we have explored various historical cases of emotional development on the emotional frontier (see Vallgårda, Alexander & Olsen, 2015). In a separate chapter in this volume (see Vallgårda & Olsen, this volume), we discuss the methodological possibilities of employing the concept of emotional formation as a historically sensitive alternative to “development” that might help researchers grasp the historicity of growth and change in collectives, as well as in individuals’ a ective ontologies. While “formation” refers to the culturally speci c codes of a ective comportment and expression, and the process through which the individual incorporates and embodies these codes, the concept of “emotional frontiers” designates the a ective experience of a boundary between di erent a ective formations, or the divergences or contradictions within an emotional formation. We cannot assume that emotional formations are internally without complexity or contradiction because they are embedded within cultural systems that are themselves shot through with internal inconsistencies and contradictory expectations. An emotional frontier may be perceived in various ways, either by the individual or through relational practices. An individual may be so habituated to traversing emotional frontiers that they do not notice them at all; alternatively, the existence of a frontier might be registered through a sense of unease, a change in emotional register that requires a conscious shift, or through the socially compromising experience of getting the emotional codes wrong. Relationally, the emotional frontier might emerge via an innocuous misunderstanding or a violent confrontation occasioned by feelings and expressions that do not meet the situation at hand. This is all the more likely when individuals habituated in di erent emotional formations —or within an internally contradictory formation—meet, and where available emotional scripts are incompatible. The barrier between actors need not be physical, but it feels palpable all the same.

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structure a given society, culture, or subculture, and the processes through which humans learn and adapt

While it is instructive to think of the emotional make-up of individuals, it is also crucial to understand that it is part of a collective emotional context which encompasses diverse collective formations: siblings in a family; children in a classroom; people of a certain background, generation, or society share emotional formations. They encompass internal variation across what Barbara Rosenwein might have called “emotional communities” (Rosenwein, 2002). Competence in frontier crossing may well depend on the frontier. In this case, the process of navigating emotional formations becomes an emotional script itself, central to the particular developmental map in a discrete web of emotional formations.

p. 439

E ective Crossing of Emotional Frontiers and Historical Contingency Emotional formation occurs throughout the life cycle, as a result of dynamic responses to internal and external signals. An individual’s emotional formation is never static so long as they interact with the world around them—people, spaces, things, institutions, expressions of power. Historically, however, the periods of childhood and youth have often been pinpointed as crucial for the process of normative emotional development, suited to the contingencies of the individual’s class, race, gender, family, society, and culture. Many children (and adults) learn and accept that there are di erent modes of emotional expression and practice in di erent social and material contexts. They learn to internalize those di erences and move, as if seamlessly, between them. Therefore, crossing emotional frontiers might seem so smooth that they appear nonexistent. It is only when there is a disjuncture or discomfort when crossing frontiers that their boundaries become apparent and that the process becomes visible. Frontiers are not xed but necessarily shift according to changes in intersecting emotional formations. The process of learning how to navigate frontiers is inherently protean. The concept is a useful way to understand the formative, or educative, component of emotional formations and how they aid in successfully navigating the emotional frontier. Examples of crossing an emotional frontier include family/school, family/church, school/peers, school/work. We will now turn to some particular and individual examples to anchor the concept of emotional frontiers. In choosing these examples we stress that all emotional frontiers are historically contingent, meaning that they are shaped by a particular space and time, in uenced by political, cultural, and societal factors. The concept, therefore, is equally relevant to historical and contemporary emotional development and experience.

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extent to which the majority of people in an emotional formation are also obliged to deal with a particular

Experiencing and Crossing Emotional Frontiers From Germany to France persecution in 1933, wrote several famous memoirs of her escape and her life as an exile in Switzerland, France, and England. Though in these books she writes in the third person, calling herself Anna (her middle name), these accounts are faithful to her memories and feelings during her childhood. Her account of her p. 440

entry

into a Parisian girls’ school, an école communale, is a good example of traversing a multilayered

emotional frontier. Firstly, she had to contend with a di erent language and culture, which entailed particular codes of emotional conduct contained in that particular emotional formation. Secondly and connectedly, she entered into a school system which was wholly di erent from both her experience in her school in Berlin and in her village school in Switzerland. Though Kerr tells her story as one of adventure, fun, and resilience amid frightening and insecure conditions, she describes her rst day at her Parisian school in an uncharacteristically dark and foreboding way: Anna found herself in a large room crammed with desks. There must be at least forty girls, Anna thought. They were all wearing black overalls and this, combined with the gentle gloom of the classroom, gave the whole scene a mournful look. The girls had been reciting in unison, but when Anna came in …they all stopped and stared at her. Anna stared back, but was beginning to feel rather small and suddenly wondered, violently, whether she was really going to like this school. She held on tight to her satchel and her sandwich box and tried to look as though she did not care. (Kerr, 2017/1971, p. 179) Anna (Judith) quickly adjusts to life at the école communale, yet this passage demonstrates that crossing this particular emotional frontier was not automatic nor without emotional strain, as she felt “small.” She needed “violently” to adapt to a di erent emotional formation in order to bene t from, and enjoy, life at school. Her culture, language, class, and family stature all played into this adaptation, which was required of her upon entering and leaving the school every day. Her uniform, the atmosphere and cramped feeling of the classroom, and the monotonous recitation, were all new and di

cult for her. Even her “satchel”

(associated with German children) and her “sandwich box” (her classmates either went home to hot meals, or brought cooked French meals to school), to which she “held on tight,” are indications of her di erence and the strain of crossing this frontier. Anna adapts to the expectations of her teachers and her classmates, brings the correct food for lunch, and, crucially, learns French. After a while, Kerr writes that she could hardly wait to go back to school. She loved it all since she had learned to speak French. Suddenly the work seemed quite easy and she was beginning to enjoy writing stories and compositions in French. It was not a bit like writing in German—you could make the words do quite di erent things—and she found it curiously exciting. (Kerr, 2017/1971, p. 245) Anna’s emotional formation at school increasingly matched what was expected of her. She “loved” school, passed her exams (against her own expectations), and even received a top essay prize. Though not without e ort, she ended up successfully crossing the emotional frontiers between life in her German family (and previous schooling) and her new school.

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Judith Kerr, a German Jewish girl who along with the rest of her prominent family ed Berlin and Nazi

p. 441

Class Barriers Robert Roberts, who was a boy in Edwardian Salford (England), described his childhood in the slums in devastating detail. He wrote of a highly strati ed existence, where everyone had to deal with numerous class-, gender-, and age-based divisions, which exemplify varied emotional frontiers. These divisions themselves. As Roberts explains, “A boy had to learn the hard way what modes of speech and gesture, common in the street, were strictly forbidden at home” (Roberts, 1990/1971, p. 159, fn 3). Gestures, songs, modes of behavior—perhaps learned because they were enjoyable or perhaps to t in with peers—were clearly unacceptable when crossing the emotional frontier of home and family. Yet both sides of this frontier were essential in order to survive in the slums. Another important and di

cult frontier was the school. Roberts describes many students, especially from

the poorest backgrounds, as being unable to adapt to the harsh experience of school. Truancy and failure were common. Roberts describes underfunding, poor structures and supplies, and condescending attitudes by school authorities. He also describes an environment in which the students had constant reminders of their position in the class hierarchy and their future roles outside of school: Under appalling conditions in our school the sta

worked earnestly but with no great hope. The

building itself stood face on to one of the largest marshalling yards in the North. All day long the roar of a work-a-day world invaded the school hall, where each instructor, shouting in competition, taught up to sixty children massed together. (Roberts, 1990/1971, p. 134) As a boy, Roberts recognized that this sort of environment was not conducive to academic success, yet he was one of the “bright boys” who was good at his lessons and wanted to stay in school. Because of a lack of both pedagogical and material support, he would fail the exam to obtain a technical-college bursary and would need to nd work instead. At the end of his schooling, however, he had had relative success in traversing the emotional frontier of his classroom. Social-class frontiers would prove more intractable; however, the navigation of this emotional frontier in early life helped equip him in later life for his work as a teacher and a writer. Being accepted in a particular social context and being able to navigate that sociomaterial space in a comfortable and appropriate manner depends entirely on knowing and mastering the codes of emotional conduct. Because such codes are particular to an emotional formation, the change of social context requires adaptation of emotional behavior. As the historically grounded and contingent examples of Anna and Robert vividly demonstrate, the unfamiliarity entailed in crossing an emotional frontier might make individuals intensely aware of their own place in the world. The emotional frontier renders individuals vulnerable, p. 442

especially when they are not in a privileged

position in a social hierarchy. In the next section, the

emotional frontier is made even more visible through the intersection of race, with the crossing and recrossing of that frontier having devastating consequences for individuals.

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informed life at home, at school, on the streets, in the workplace—all emotional frontiers, in and of

The Emotional Frontier Made Painfully Visible: Emotive Failure We now want to focus on an example in which racialized oppression made the crossing of an emotional frontier particularly painful. Canadian residential schools operated in the 19th and 20th centuries, the last them from the “corrupting” in uences of their parents, families, and communities; and to forge new Canadian citizens out of them. The premise was that as children, they were more malleable than their irredeemable parents. These boarding schools were the sites of emotional, physical, and sexual abuse, and cultural belittling and denial, giving children a uniform and a number in a concerted e ort to forever strip away the individual. These practices have been described as “cultural genocide” (e.g., Miller, 1996, p. 9). As Doris Young, a former student at the Elkhorn residential school in Manitoba, testi ed under the auspices of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission: Those schools were a war on Aboriginal children, and they took away our identity. First of all, they gave us numbers, we had no names, we were numbers, and they cut our hair. They took away our clothes, and gave us clothes …we all looked alike. (Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, 2015, p. 145) Residential schoolchildren crossed the starkest of emotional frontiers when they rst entered the schools, and they did so again when they saw their families or were allowed to return home for holidays. We are fortunate to have the recollections of residential-school survivors who have directly addressed this issue. The indigenous emotional formations of these children before going to school were fundamentally and intentionally re-formed. As Mary Courchene, a former student at the residential schools at Fort Alexander in Manitoba and Lebret in Saskatchewan, testi ed: And I looked at my dad, I looked at my mom, I looked at my dad again. You know what? I hated them. I just absolutely hated my own parents. Not because I thought they abandoned me; I hated their brown faces. I hated them because they were Indians… So I, I looked at my dad and I challenged him and I said, “From now on we speak only English in this house,” I said to my dad. And you know when we, when, in a traditional home where I was raised, the rst thing that we all were always taught was to respect your Elders and never to, you know, to challenge them. And here p. 443

I was, eleven years old, and I challenged … my dad looked at me and I, and I thought

he was

going to cry. In fact his eyes lled up with tears. He turned to my mom and he says … “Then I guess we’ll never speak to this little girl again. I don’t know her.” (Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, 2015, p. 154) The extremity of this child’s negative feelings toward her parents, and by extension, her community, her culture, and her entire way of life before entering school, is telling of the destructive e ectiveness of this system in instilling a new set of emotional codes in students and the e ectiveness of the emotional formation taking place at the school. This made crossing and recrossing the emotional frontier between school and home exceedingly di

1

cult, if not impossible. The schools forced indigenous children to

question everything that made up their emotional formations to the point that many policed themselves in avoiding their languages and traditional cultural practices. In the aforementioned example, the father devastatingly no longer “knew” his daughter; the process of estrangement and alienation was a sinister and e ective tool in ripping apart communities, families, and individuals. Examining emotional frontiers at this extreme allows us to demonstrate the usefulness of the concept. Agnes Mills, a former student at All Saints residential school in Saskatchewan explained: “I wanted to be white so bad, and the worst thing I ever did was I was ashamed of my mother, that honourable woman,

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one only closing in 1996. The stated goal of these schools was to “civilize” indigenous children; to remove

because she couldn’t speak English” (Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, 2015, p. 154). Former students frequently express in the report and elsewhere how residential schools made them feel ashamed of their families, their communities, their languages, and their indigeneity. They tried to look, act, and sound “white” to “ t” into European Canadian society—at a terrible price. Such brutal practices and attitudes, and the forced crossing of emotional frontiers, have contributed to premature death for many former school reunion, many “spoke of wasting years and decades in alcohol, drugs, and violence before they managed to put their lives back together, confront the pain that had been driving them to harm themselves, and get on with the business of living” (Miller, 1996, pp. 7–8). Though the examples from Canadian residential schools are disturbing, they are hardly unique. From Aboriginal children in Australia to children born to unmarried mothers in Ireland, thousands or even hundreds of thousands of children around the world have been forcibly separated from their parents, usually in the name of serving the best interests of the child (Gordon, 2008; Swain & Hillel, 2010; Vallgårda, 2014). In addition to the many di

culties and agonies that these children experienced as a result, they

presumably also encountered pronounced and powerful emotional frontiers, arising from the often fundamentally di erent emotional formations to which they were exposed. They were ultimately required to unlearn what they had learned about proper emotional behavior and to adopt new forms of feeling and demeanor. Importantly, however, emotional frontiers do not merely arise from such dramatic circumstances as displacement or resocialization. Rather, they may occur in more everyday settings, both historical and contemporary, in which competing codes of emotional conduct clash. Present-day examples include p. 444

immigrant children navigating

between their home and a mainstream school, and young people who are

the rst in their family to go to college and learn how to adapt to a new set of emotional codes. Crossing an emotional frontier may be entirely unproblematic, as is often the case when children, youth, and adults move between family and school, place of worship and peer groups, the workplace or the supermarket. On some occasions, individuals experience (partial) unfamiliarity with the unwritten rules governing a particular social space; they get the codes wrong or they are unable to adjust their own emotional behavior to what is expected in a particular context. They, too, experience an emotional frontier. This is often an almost visceral process but, we stress, a fundamentally historically contingent one nonetheless.

Conclusion Working from the premise that individual emotional formation is deeply culturally variable and contingent upon the prevailing emotional codes in the social world within which the child develops, we have argued that new analytical concepts are required to enable a better understanding of the dynamics o ered in the multiplicity of processes of emotional development. The fact that what is deemed moral emotional conduct or appropriate emotional expression di ers from one context to the next, also means that humans are sometimes placed at what we call an emotional frontier—that is, the real and experienced boundary between di erent sets of prescriptions and proscriptions. Sometimes, the individual (or group) travels more or less successfully between sociocultural contexts, perhaps hardly noticing the emotional frontier. At other times, however, crossing frontiers involves a di

cult emotional con ict or powerful confrontation.

Although striking, the examples given here are just a few among thousands; after all, most people cross emotional frontiers every day. Whether the emotional frontier appears seamless or is acutely and painfully felt, the concept makes visible the historical contingency and cross-cultural plurality of emotional development and helps explain the fraught emotional experiences that this plurality entails for individuals and collectives.

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residential-school attendees, and lifelong trauma for survivors. As Jim Miller reported after a residential

Note 1.

Children, young people, and adults who are presented with emotional frontiers they are unable to cross successfully su er “emotive failure,” a concept coined by William Reddy (2001) to explain the (sometimes radical) disjuncture between prescriptive demands on emotional expression and the experience of feeling states. Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/edited-volume/38848/chapter/337801701 by University of California Library - Berkeley Library user on 13 March 2024

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The Oxford Handbook of Emotional Development Daniel Dukes (ed.) et al. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/978019 8855903.001.0001 9780191889516 9780198855903

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CHAPTER

31 Development of Achievement Emotions  Reinhard Pekrun https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198855903.013.36 Published: 13 January 2022

Pages 446–462

Online ISBN: Print ISBN:

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Published: 2022

Abstract Children and adolescents frequently experience emotions such as enjoyment, hope, pride, anger, anxiety, shame, or boredom in school. Similarly, achievement situations at work or in sports during achievement emotions as a theoretical framework, this chapter reviews developmental research on these emotions. The ndings show that achievement emotions develop early and continue to unfold during childhood and adolescence. This development is shaped by success and failure on achievement tasks, related cognitive appraisals, and social environments in school, at work, and in the family. Achievement emotions, in turn, in uence individuals’ attention, motivation, use of strategies, selfregulation when performing tasks, and long-term achievement outcomes. The chapter also discusses how achievement emotions, their outcomes, and their antecedents are linked by reciprocal causation over time, how they can be regulated, and to what extent they are universal. In closing, directions for future research are outlined.

Keywords: achievement emotion, enjoyment, pride, anxiety, shame, boredom, control, value, achievement, control-value theory Subject: Psychology, Developmental Psychology Series: Oxford Library of Psychology Collection: Oxford Handbooks Online

Introduction SUCCESS

and failure in performing activities and attaining outcomes are critically important for human

development. This is true over the life span and across domains, such as education, work, and sports. Given their importance, achievement settings can evoke intense emotions, like enjoyment of learning, hope for success, pride about accomplishments, anger about unreasonable task demands, fear of failure, shame about poor evaluations, or boredom during monotonous lectures. Throughout the life span, achievement emotions are among the most frequently occurring emotions. Furthermore, these emotions can exert profound e ects on learning, performance, educational and occupational trajectories, and psychological as well as physical health. As such, developmental science should consider these emotions. Traditionally, research on achievement emotions has focused on test anxiety, but has neglected emotions other than anxiety. Speci cally, research on test anxiety began in the 1930s (Brown, 1938), started to ourish in the 1950s (Mandler & Sarason, 1952), and has generated more than 2,000 empirical studies to date. More recently, however, researchers have recognized that a broader range of emotions, both negative and positive, can occur in achievement settings. Furthermore, across disciplines, it is acknowledged that emotions are more than mere epiphenomena of achievement in these settings. Rather, they can profoundly in uence important outcomes. In fact, in disciplines such as educational science and management studies, it has been noted that there is an a ective turn in research (Barsade et al., 2003; Pekrun & Linnenbrink– Garcia, 2014a). Nevertheless, research on achievement emotions beyond anxiety is still at a preliminary stage. In this chapter, I use the control-value theory (CVT) of achievement emotions (Pekrun, 2006, 2018, 2021; p. 447

Pekrun & Perry, 2014) as a theoretical framework to

discuss their development. I rst outline the concept

of achievement emotions. Next, I address their individual origins and developmental trajectories, and the

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adulthood can evoke intense emotions. Using Pekrun’s (2006, 2021) control-value theory of

role of social environments. I then discuss their developmental linkages with learning and performance. In the subsequent sections, I address reciprocal causation, emotion regulation, and the relative universality of achievement emotions across genders and sociocultural contexts. In conclusion, directions for future research are outlined.

Achievement emotions are de ned as emotions that relate to achievement activities and their success and failure outcomes (Pekrun et al., 2002). This de nition makes it possible to distinguish di erent types of achievement emotions according to their object focus. Activity emotions relate to achievement activities, such as enjoyment of learning or boredom when reading repetitive texts. Outcome emotions relate to success and failure resulting from these activities, such as hope and pride related to success, or anxiety, shame, and hopelessness related to failure. Combined with the dimensions of emotional valence (positive vs. negative, or pleasant vs. unpleasant) and activation (activating vs. deactivating), this distinction renders a threedimensional taxonomy of achievement emotions (see Table 31.1). Table 31.1 A Three-Dimensional Taxonomy of Achievement Emotions Object focus

*

**

Positive

Negative

Activating

Deactivating

Activating

Deactivating

Activity

Enjoyment

Relaxation

Anger Frustration

Boredom

Outcome/prospective

Hope *** Joy

Relief

Anxiety

Hopelessness

Outcome/retrospective

Joy

Contentment

Shame Anger

Sadness

Pride Gratitude

Relief

*

= pleasant emotion;

**

= unpleasant emotion;

***

= anticipatory joy/relief

***

Disappointment

Achievement emotions are not the only type of emotions that can be prompted in achievement settings. Topic emotions, epistemic emotions, and social emotions can also play a major role in these settings. Topic emotions relate to the contents of learning materials or a project at work, such as anger about climate change dealt with in a science class. Epistemic emotions relate to the knowledge-generating qualities of cognitive tasks and activities. These emotions serve the production of new knowledge and can be triggered by discrepant information and cognitive incongruity. Prototypical epistemic emotions are surprise about unexpected events, curiosity about new information, and confusion occurring when discrepancies cannot be p. 448

resolved. Social emotions relate to

others who are present in the setting, such as enjoyment of interacting

with peers or anger about one’s supervisor. Di erent categories of emotions in achievement settings can overlap. An example is social achievement emotions like admiration, compassion, or contempt that relate to the success and failure of other persons.

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Concept of Achievement Emotions

Individual Origins and Developmental Trajectories As emotions more generally, the development of achievement emotions can be in uenced by various individual factors, such as genetic dispositions, situational perceptions and appraisals, and neurohormonal of task demands, individual competencies, and the likelihood of success and failure are thought to be of primary importance for situational arousal and long-term development of achievement emotions (see also Walle et al., this volume). According to CVT, two types of appraisals are especially important: perceived control over one’s achievement activities and their outcomes, and the perceived value of these activities and outcomes. Perceived control comprises expectancies to be able to successfully perform an achievement activity (self-e

cacy expectations) and to attain success and avoid failure (outcome expectations), as well

as causal attributions of success and failure. Perceived value includes intrinsic values of achievement activities (e.g., interest value) and achievement outcomes (attainment value), as well as the extrinsic, instrumental value of activities and outcomes to attain further outcomes. Prospective, anticipatory outcome emotions are thought to be generated by perceptions of control over success and failure in upcoming achievement situations. For example, anticipatory enjoyment of success is prompted if there is full control over performance and success seems certain, and hopelessness when there is a complete lack of control. With an intermediate level of control and resulting uncertainty about the outcome, hope and anxiety can be triggered, with hope being prompted when the attentional focus is on possible success, and anxiety when the focus is on failure. Retrospective outcome emotions such as joy and frustration can immediately follow success and failure, respectively, without further cognitive mediation by control and value appraisals. In contrast, more complex self-conscious and social emotions depend on causal attributions of achievement outcomes (Weiner, 1985, 2018). Pride and shame are induced by attributions of success and failure to internal factors such as ability or lack of ability, respectively, and gratitude and anger by attributions of success and failure to the actions of other persons. In addition, all of the outcome emotions depend on perceived value, with value amplifying the emotions. Finally, activity emotions like enjoyment of learning or boredom depend on perceptions of control over the current activity and the value of the activity. For example, students can enjoy learning if they feel competent to master the learning material and perceive the material as interesting. p. 449

Empirical evidence con rms these proposed relations between control-value appraisals and emotions (see Forsblom et al., in press; Pekrun & Perry, 2014). For example, numerous studies document that students’ test anxiety relates to perceived lack of self-e

cacy and low self-concepts of ability. In addition, research

has shown that perceived control over achievement relates positively to students’ enjoyment, hope, and pride, and negatively to their anger, anxiety, shame, hopelessness, and boredom. Research has also shown that the perceived value of achievement relates positively to achievement emotions, con rming that these emotions are intensi ed when success and failure are subjectively important. Boredom is an exception. For boredom, negative links with value have been found, corroborating the idea that boredom is reduced when individuals value achievement (e.g., Pekrun et al., 2010). Finally, studies have con rmed that control and value interact in the arousal of achievement emotions, as positive emotions are especially pronounced when both control and value are high, and negative emotions when value is high but control is lacking (e.g., Goetz et al., 2010; Lauerman et al., 2017; Putwain et al., 2018; Shao et al., 2020). Given that achievement emotions are closely linked to cognitive appraisals, the development of these emotions over the years is related to the development of achievement-related appraisals. Between 2 to 3 years of age, children are able to express pride and shame when successfully solving tasks or failing to do so, suggesting that they are able to di erentiate internal versus external causation of success and failure (Stipek, 1995; Tracy & Robins, 2004). During the early elementary school years, children additionally acquire capabilities to distinguish between di erent types of internal and external causes, such as ability

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processes (Pekrun & Linnenbrink–Garcia, 2014b; Zeidner, 1998). Among these factors, cognitive appraisals

and e ort, to develop related causal expectancies, and to cognitively combine expectancies, attributions, and value-related information (Heckhausen, 1991; see also Kramer & Lagattuta, this volume). By implication, children have developed the cognitive competencies to experience all major types of achievement emotions early in their educational career.

largely limited to the school years. Speci cally, studies have shown that average scores for test anxiety are low at the beginning of elementary school, but increase dramatically during the elementary school years (Hembree, 1988). This development is congruent with the decline in academic self-concepts during this period, and is likely due to increasing realism in academic self-perceptions, to the cumulative failure feedback students may receive across the years, and to the increasing importance of academic success. After elementary school, average anxiety scores stabilize and remain at high levels throughout middle school, high school, and college. However, stability at the group level notwithstanding, anxiety can change in individual students. One important source of individual dynamics is the change of reference groups implied by transitions between schools and classrooms (Zeidner, 1998). All things being equal, the likelihood of low achievement relative to peers is higher in high-ability classrooms and lower in low-ability classrooms. Therefore, moving from a low-ability to a high-ability classroom can increase anxiety, whereas the reverse may apply upon entering a low-ability classroom. While anxiety increases in the average student, positive emotions such as enjoyment of learning seem to p. 450

decrease across the elementary school years (Lichtenfeld et al.,

2012). The decrease of enjoyment can

continue through the middle school years (Pekrun et al., 2007), which is consistent with the decline of average scores for subject-matter interest, mastery goals, and general attitudes toward school (e.g., Fredricks & Eccles, 2002; Scherrer et al., 2020; Watt, 2004). Important factors responsible for this development may be an increase of teacher-centered instruction and academic demands in middle school, and the stronger selectivity of subject-matter interest that is part of adolescent identity formation (Fredricks & Eccles, 2002; also see Hidi & Renninger, 2006). However, to date, these assumptions are speculative because empirical studies testing their validity for emotions are largely lacking.

The Role of Social Environments Given the role of control and value appraisals as proximal antecedents of achievement emotions, the impact of social environments is likely to be mediated by these appraisals. Variables in the environment that a ect these appraisals should in uence the resulting emotions as well. According to CVT, the following groups of factors may be relevant for a broad variety of achievement emotions (see Figure 31.1).

Cognitive Quality The cognitive quality of environments at home, in education, and at work—as de ned by their structure, clarity, and potential for cognitive stimulation—likely has a positive in uence on perceived control and the perceived value of achievement tasks, thus positively in uencing achievement emotions. In addition, task demands impact the likelihood of successful performance, thus in uencing perceived control and resulting emotions. Furthermore, the match between demands and competences can in uence perceived task value, thus also a ecting emotions. If demands slightly exceed current competencies, the task can be perceived as a challenge that is enjoyable (see also Vygotsky, 1978). In contrast, if the demands are too high (overchallenge) or too low (underchallenge), the incentive value of a task may be reduced to the extent that boredom is experienced (Csikszentmihalyi, 1975; Pekrun et al., 2010).

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However, empirical evidence on the development of achievement emotions over the life span is scarce and

Motivational Quality Teachers, supervisors, coaches, parents, and peers deliver messages about the controllability and value of tasks, thus in uencing individuals’ emotions. For example, perceived value can be promoted by explaining the relevance of learning materials (Harackiewicz et al., 2014). However, increasing perceived importance can boost not only positive emotions but negative emotions as well. For example, reminding students

of

the importance of exams is a double-edged sword—“fear appeals” can exacerbate achievement anxiety (Putwain et al., 2015). More indirect ways to increase value include deploying tasks that relate to individuals’ interests and shaping achievement environments such that they ful ll needs for autonomy and social relatedness, which can increase the perceived value of achievement activities and foster positive activity-related emotions (see also Tsai et al., 2008). Environments that reduce negative consequences of failure, ful ll these needs, and boost the intrinsic reward value of achievement activities may be especially p. 452

helpful. An example is educational environments that stimulate

playful learning, such as learning with

computer-based games (see Zaharia et al., this volume; Loderer et al., 2020b).

Figure 31.1 Control-Value Theory of Achievement Emotions: Basic Propositions. Control-Value Theory of Achievement Emotions: Basic Propositions.

Emotional Quality Emotions can be directly transmitted to others nonverbally (see Clément and Dukes, this volume). Facial, gestural, and postural expressions of emotion can be automatically mimicked by others so that the others experience the same emotion. Such “emotional contagion” (Hat eld et al., 1994) likely plays a major role in daily interaction, with emotions being transmitted from teachers to students, from students to teachers, from supervisors to employees, and so on. Supporting this view, a few studies suggest that teachers’ enjoyment can facilitate students’ enjoyment of class and that this process is mediated through teachers’ displayed enthusiasm (Frenzel et al., 2009, 2018).

Goal Structures and Social Expectations Di erent goal structures imply di erent standards for evaluating achievement (Johnson & Johnson, 1974; Murayama & Elliot, 2009). In individualistic goal structures, achievement is based on absolute (task mastery) or individual standards (individual improvement over time). Competitive goal structures de ne individual achievement relative to the achievement of others. In cooperative goal structures, individual achievement is a positive function of the achievement of others. These goal structures de ne opportunities for experiencing success. For example, competitive structures imply that some individuals have to experience failure, thus inducing anxiety and hopelessness (Pekrun et al., 2006). Similarly, the demands implied by an important other’s unrealistic expectancies for achievement can lead to negative emotions. For example, if parents hold overly high aspirations for their children’s academic success, they can reduce children’s sense of control, which can prompt anxiety and ultimately prevent the very attainment that parents had hoped for in the rst place (Murayama et al., 2016).

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p. 451

Feedback and Consequences of Achievement Success can strengthen perceived control, and cumulative failure undermines control, thus in uencing the development of achievement emotions. In addition, the consequences of success and failure are important, since they are key to the instrumental value of achievement. Positive outcome emotions (e.g., hope for opportunities), provided there is su

cient contingency between one’s own e orts, success, and these

outcomes. Negative consequences of failure (e.g., unemployment), on the other hand, may increase p. 453

achievement-related anxiety and hopelessness (Pekrun,

1992a). As such, high-stakes testing is likely to

amplify students’ test-related emotions and to exacerbate their negative emotions if failure cannot be avoided.

Composition of Groups The ability level of reference groups determines the likelihood of performing well relative to other group members. All else being equal, chances for performing well relative to others are reduced when being in a high-achieving group; thus perceived control tends to be reduced as well. In contrast, being in a lowachieving group o ers more chances to be successful, enabling a sense of competence. Due to these e ects on perceived control, positive emotions such as enjoyment can be reduced, and negative emotions such as anxiety exacerbated, when being in a high-achieving group. Pekrun et al. (2019) call this the “happy- shlittle-pond e ect”—all other things being equal, it may be preferable to be a “happy sh” in a “little pond” rather than an unhappy sh in a big pond of high achievers. Empirical evidence supports these propositions (Pekrun et al., 2019). The negative e ects of membership in a high-achieving classroom pose a conundrum for composing groups in school, at work, and in sports. Placing individuals in high-ability groups provides them with peers who are role models for strong performance. However, these possible bene ts need to be weighed against the psychosocial costs of such a placement, including the risk for a reduction of self-con dence and increase in negative emotions. Furthermore, it may be that the possible bene cial e ects do not even occur. For example, when controlling for measurement error, the e ects of class-average achievement on individual students’ achievement can be negative (Dicke et al., 2018), implying that being in a highachieving class neither bene ts a student’s emotions nor their cognitive learning.

Implications for Practice Evidence on the impact of achievement environments is still scarce. As such, rm recommendations for practice cannot yet be derived. However, it seems likely that the following factors can help to develop adaptive achievement emotions and prevent or reduce maladaptive emotions (Pekrun, 2014; Linnenbrink et al., 2016): (1) cognitively stimulating tasks that slightly exceed current capabilities but are still manageable; (2) achievement environments that are aligned with individual interests and ful ll needs for autonomy and social relatedness; (3) enthusiasm displayed by teachers, supervisors, and coaches; (4) a reduction of the negative consequences of failure, combined with an achievement culture that considers errors as opportunities to improve rather than indicators of inability; p. 454

(5)

cooperative goal structures; and

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success) can be increased if success produces bene cial long-term outcomes (e.g., future career

(6) achievement expectations that are challenging but can be met. In addition, it can be helpful to provide guidance on how to regulate one’s achievement emotions, as provided in programs of social-emotional learning (see Brackett & Rivers, 2014).

Emotions can profoundly in uence a broad range of cognitive and behavioral processes (Barrett et al., 2016; Clore & Huntsinger, 2007). For individuals’ learning and achievement, e ects on attention, motivation, use of learning and problem-solving strategies, and self-regulation of achievement activities may be most important, as depicted in the cognitive-motivational model of emotion e ects that is part of CVT (Pekrun, 1992b, 2006, 2018; Pekrun & Linnenbrink-Garcia, in press). As for positive emotions, activating emotions like enjoyment focus attention on the current activity, promote motivation to learn and achieve, and facilitate use of deep strategies and self-regulation. As such, these emotions are thought to have positive short- and long-term e ects on learning and achievement. In contrast, positive emotions that do not relate to the current task, such as romantic feelings when thinking about one’s love, can draw attention away, reduce e ort, and lower overall performance. Similarly, deactivating positive emotions, like relief and relaxation, may not always have positive e ects on achievement. As for negative emotions, activating emotions such as anxiety, anger, or confusion distract attention and reduce interest, intrinsic motivation, and use of deep strategies. However, they can strengthen extrinsic motivation to avoid failure. For example, if you are afraid of failing an impending exam, you may be highly motivated to invest e ort in order not to fail. As such, the e ects of these emotions on achievement can be variable. Deactivating negative emotions such as hopelessness and boredom, on the other hand, generally undermine attention, motivation, and strategy use, suggesting that they uniformly impair achievement. If you are bored by a lecture, your mind starts wandering, you cannot focus your attention on the lecture anymore, your motivation to continue is undermined, and when you are tested on the contents, you will not remember the material. Links between emotions and achievement outcomes have been best researched for students’ anxiety (Barroso et al., 2021; von der Embse et al., 2018; Zeidner, 1998), but recent studies have also addressed emotions other than anxiety. Across studies, positive emotions such as enjoyment of learning and work, hope, and pride typically correlated positively with students’ achievement at school and employees’ p. 455

performance at the workplace. For negative emotions such as anxiety, anger, shame, hopelessness,

and

boredom, correlations were negative (Camacho-Morles et al., 2021; Loderer et al., 2020a; Pekrun & Stephens, 2012). Furthermore, there is longitudinal evidence demonstrating that students’ emotions impact the long-term development of their achievement. Longitudinal investigations of achievement anxiety found that anxiety had negative e ects on achievement outcomes over the years while controlling for prior achievement (Meece et al., 1990; Pekrun, 1992a; Steinmayr et al., 2016). Similarly, students’ boredom was found to negatively impact their performance (Pekrun et al., 2014). Additionally, in an investigation of students’ emotions in mathematics (Pekrun et al., 2017), we found that math-related enjoyment and pride had positive e ects on math grades and test scores across 5 years during secondary school, whereas anger, anxiety, shame, hopelessness, and boredom had negative e ects, while controlling for the in uence of prior achievement, gender, intelligence, and family socioeconomic status. This evidence con rms that emotions in uence long-term achievement outcomes, over and above the impact of potentially confounding variables. However, across these longitudinal studies, it also turned out that achievement reciprocally in uenced the development of students’ emotions over time. Achievement

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Developmental Linkages with Learning and Achievement

had positive e ects on positive emotions, and negative e ects on negative emotions such as test and math anxiety. As such, the evidence suggests that emotions and achievement show reciprocal developmental linkages. Positive emotions are drivers of learning and achievement; resulting success, in turn, strengthens the development of positive emotions, thus constituting virtuous circles of emotion and achievement. In contrast, negative emotions can undermine achievement, and resulting failure exacerbates negative

Reciprocal Causation and Emotion Regulation Reciprocal developmental causation is likely to hold not only for emotions and achievement, but for the linkages between achievement emotions, their outcomes, and their origins more generally (Pekrun, 2006; see Figure 31.1). Reciprocal causation may involve a number of di erent feedback loops. In addition to reciprocal relations between emotions and achievement, the following two feedback loops may be especially important. First, individuals’ appraisals in uence their achievement emotions; but these emotions can, in turn, in uence both momentary appraisals and the development of underlying control and value beliefs. Second, achievement environments shape individual appraisals and emotions; but these emotions reciprocally a ect environments and the behavior of teachers, supervisors, and coaches. For example, teachers’ and students’ enjoyment of classroom instruction are likely linked in reciprocal ways, with p. 456

teachers’

displays of enjoyment facilitating students’ enjoyment of class, and students’ emotional

engagement strengthening teachers’ enjoyment of teaching (Frenzel et al., 2018). In line with perspectives of dynamic systems theory (Turner & Waugh, 2007), it is assumed that such reciprocal causation can take di erent forms and can extend over fractions of seconds (e.g., in linkages between appraisals and emotions), days, weeks, months, or years. Positive feedback loops are likely commonplace (e.g., supervisors’ and employees’ anger reciprocally reinforcing each other), but negative feedback loops can also be important (e.g., when a lost match induces anxiety in a soccer team, and anxiety motivates the team to avoid being defeated again in the next match). Reciprocal causation has implications for the regulation of achievement emotions and related interventions. Since emotions, their antecedents, and their e ects can be reciprocally linked over time, emotions can be regulated by addressing any of the elements involved in these cyclic feedback processes (Pekrun, 2006; Pekrun & Stephens, 2009; see also Antoniadou & Quinlan, 2020; Harley et al., 2019; Riedinger & Bellingtier, this volume). Regulation can target: (1) the design of emotion-inducing tasks and achievement environments (situation-oriented regulation and intervention); (2) the control and value appraisals underlying emotions (appraisal-oriented regulation and intervention; see De France and Hollenstein, this volume); (3) the competences determining individual agency (competence-oriented regulation and intervention; e.g., training of learning skills); and (4) the emotional response itself (emotion-oriented regulation and intervention, such as using drugs and relaxation techniques to cope with anxiety, or employing interest-enhancing strategies to reduce boredom; Sansone et al., 1992). Empirical evidence on ways to regulate achievement emotions and their development is still largely lacking, with few exceptions (e.g., Nett et al., 2011; see Harley et al., 2019).

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emotions, implying vicious cycles of negative emotion and failure over time.

Relative Universality of Achievement Emotions As for emotions more generally, CVT proposes that general functional mechanisms of achievement emotions are bound to universal, species-speci c characteristics of our mind (functional universality), thus trajectories of these emotions are thought to vary widely across individuals, genders, achievement contexts, and cultures (Pekrun, 2009, 2018; see also Broesch and Carpendale, this volume). For example, it has been found that the relations between girls’ and boys’ appraisals and their achievement emotions in p. 457

mathematics are structurally equivalent across genders (Frenzel et al.,

2007). However, perceived control

in this domain was substantially lower for girls. As a consequence, girls reported less enjoyment in mathematics, as well as more anxiety and shame. Similarly, in a cross-cultural comparison of Chinese and German students’ achievement emotions, we found that mean levels of emotions di ered between countries, with Chinese students reporting more achievement-related enjoyment, pride, anxiety, and shame, and less anger (see Pekrun, 2018, for an interpretation of cross-cultural di erences in achievement emotions). Nevertheless, the functional linkages of these emotions with perceived control, important others’ expectations, and academic achievement were equivalent across cultures (Frenzel et al., 2006). Especially robust evidence for relative universality is provided by ndings from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) conducted by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). In 3-year cycles with representative samples, PISA assesses competences of 15-yearolds in core academic subjects across a broad range of OECD and non-OECD countries. For example, mean scores for 15-year-olds’ mathematics anxiety, domain-general achievement anxiety, and science enjoyment di ered substantially across countries in the PISA 2012 and 2015 assessments. These mean-level di erences notwithstanding, the relations with students’ performance were largely consistent. In the PISA 2012 assessment, students’ anxiety and achievement in math correlated negatively in all of the 64 participating countries, and all of these correlations but one were signi cant (OECD, 2013). Similarly, in the PISA 2015 assessment, students’ schoolwork-related anxiety showed negative correlations with their science performance in 52 of 55 countries participating in the assessment of anxiety (OECD, 2016). The robustness of relations with achievement also extends to positive emotions. In the PISA 2015 assessment, the relation between students’ enjoyment and performance in science was positive in all of the 68 countries for which this relation was examined. In sum, this evidence suggests that levels of appraisals and emotions vary widely across genders and sociocultural contexts, but that their relations with achievement are remarkably similar. However, most of the extant evidence has been cross-sectional. It remains open to question whether long-term developmental trajectories of achievement emotions and their functional relations with outcomes and antecedents show similar patterns of relative universality versus speci city.

Conclusions and Future Directions Achievement emotions are critically important for individuals’ learning, short- and long-term achievement, educational and occupational careers, and psychological as well as physical well-being. The available evidence suggests that control and value appraisals are prime determinants of achievement emotions, and that these emotions, in turn, impact attention, motivation to achieve, use of strategies, and achievement in school and at the workplace. There is also preliminary evidence for the role of social p. 458

environments

in the development of achievement emotions, and for the relative universality of these

emotions and their functional relations across genders, countries, and cultural contexts.

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following nomothetic principles. In contrast, reference objects, frequency, intensity, and developmental

Much of the existing evidence, however, is based on cross-sectional research or short-term experimental studies. With few exceptions, longitudinal studies investigating the development of achievement emotions are lacking (see Pekrun et al., 2017). Furthermore, the few existing longitudinal studies focused on the development of achievement emotions during the elementary, middle, and high school years (primary and secondary school), but did not consider their development during adulthood. As such, more longitudinal

Additionally, research on individuals’ regulation of achievement emotions, which is especially important to elucidate their functions for human development, is still in its infancy and needs to be advanced. Similarly, while there is rich evidence on the e ective use of psychotherapy to reduce test anxiety, intervention studies targeting achievement emotions other than anxiety are still largely lacking. E ort needs to be invested to develop treatment interventions and to design tasks and shape achievement settings such that adaptive achievement emotions are facilitated and maladaptive emotions are prevented or reduced. Finally, it is important to note that most of the existing studies used samples from Western countries. More research with diverse samples of participants is needed to more fully explore developmental trajectories, origins, outcomes, and the proposed relative universality of achievement emotions across multiple cultural contexts around the world. This also is true for intervention research and studies on the design of achievement settings, given that the developmental e ects of interventions, environmental designs, and task designs could vary substantially across cultures.

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data across the full life span are needed to better understand the development of achievement emotions.

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The Oxford Handbook of Emotional Development Daniel Dukes (ed.) et al. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/978019 8855903.001.0001 9780191889516

Online ISBN: Print ISBN:

9780198855903

Search in this book

CHAPTER

32 Developing Emotional Intelligence in Social and Emotional Learning  Bruce Maxwell, Joanna Peplak https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198855903.013.39 Published: 13 January 2022

Pages 463–474

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Published: 2022

Abstract This chapter provides a critical overview of the evidence on the impact of social and emotional learning (SEL) programs on emotional intelligence (EI). The social and emotional learning movement and emotional learning in educational circles has contributed to a situation in which program implementation and evaluation has gotten ahead of the impact of social and emotional learning on emotional intelligence as a measureable psychological construct, and frequently ignores relevant theoretical issues. Mapping out this terrain, the chapter shows that despite the extensive research on the impact of SEL on key indicators of academic success and youth well-being, compelling evidence that SEL a ects the development of EI remains scant.

Keywords: social and emotional learning, emotional intelligence, program evaluation, academic success, youth well-being, psychological measurement Subject: Psychology, Developmental Psychology Series: Oxford Library of Psychology Collection: Oxford Handbooks Online

Introduction EMOTIONAL

intelligence (EI), like self-esteem, the unconscious, and grit, is one of those rare psychological

terms that has jumped the boundaries of the discipline and taken on a life of its own in the popular 1

imagination. Strong cultural forces have made EI virtually a household name and driven the sweeping education movement known as social and emotional learning (SEL), whose putative aim is to support the development of EI. School-based SEL programs became popular among educational reformers during the 1990s, and even in educational jurisdictions where traditional instruction remains the focus of educational policy, SEL has been successfully marketed. Schools need to engage students in SEL, proponents argue, because young people who display EI have greater academic success and avoid risky behaviors like truancy and drug and alcohol consumption (Grant et al., 2017). A broad spectrum of SEL programs (implemented mainly in the United States, Canada, Australia, and the UK), designed to teach socioemotional competencies in schools, are now available. These include social skills training, cognitive–behavioral modi cation, selfmanagement, and multimodal programs (Topping et al., 2000). Estimates of universal school-based SEL interventions designed for delivery to whole cohorts range from 85 (Grant et al., 2017) to over 200 (Durlak et al., 2011). If the count includes SEL programming intended for children and youth displaying high-risk behaviors or social and emotional di

culties, the number rises much higher (Ho man, 2009).

Compelling moral, scienti c, and educational factors combine to make EI attractive as an educational idea and its promotion among youth by teachers and parents an enticing instructional goal. Morally, EI speaks to p. 464

egalitarian concerns by challenging

the perceived hegemony of general intelligence as measured by IQ.

EI, if it exists, seems to legitimize a widespread belief that IQ is elitist and exclusionary. It is plain to see that people frequently act in skilled, intelligent, and socially valuable ways that IQ does not capture (Waterhouse, 2006). Scienti cally, the notion of EI meshes with one of the most important recent advances in social, cognitive, and neuropsychology: the wholesale rejection of the historical opposition between reason and emotion. In Western psychology, from the Hellenistic period to very recently in historical terms,

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research on emotional intelligence are intimately linked. However, exuberance for social and

emotions were at best considered a second-rate psychological phenomenon of interest primarily because of their alleged role in interfering with cognition (Gross, 2006). Plato’s analogy of the mind as a chariot pulled in opposite directions by the horses of emotion and cognition captures this idea eloquently. Psychologists now universally recognize that emotions can facilitate cognitive processes and may enable rational decision making (Frijda, 1986; Lazarus, 1991; Lemerise & Arsenio, 2000; Stearns, this volume; Turiel, this volume).

self-management (Humphrey et al., 2007), a simple illustration being the e ect of emotional valence on reasoning performance (see Blanchette, 2006; Jung et al., 2014). Educationally, EI and associated SEL approaches are often seen as a remedy to instruction-centered educational ideologies perceptible in socalled Global Educational Reform Movement policies, the best known of which may be the No Child Left Behind Act in the USA. Educators committed to the idea that providing young people with the best possible start in life also means helping them learn to be self-con dent, develop skills in maintaining positive relationships, and deal with life’s challenges e ectively have latched onto EI and SEL en masse (Qualter et al., 2007). Although promoting EI through the use of SEL programs is a promising avenue for raising not only intelligent but also socially competent and kind individuals (see Thompson, this volume), as a consequence of what some might regard as blind enthusiasm for EI in educational policy and practice circles, the implementation of SEL has tended to ignore relevant theoretical issues regarding its conceptual clarity and makes hasty assumptions about the impact of SEL on EI as a measurable psychological construct. Documenting these e ects, this chapter aims to show that despite the intimate historical links between the SEL movement and EI as an educational aim, and the continuing appeal to EI to justify SEL initiatives, there remains remarkably little evidence that SEL a ects the development of EI when considered in the light of disciplinary norms in the eld of psychology.

Core Competencies of Emotional Intelligence and Social and Emotional Learning Since at least the publication of Daniel Goleman’s seminal book, Emotional intelligence (1995), SEL has been p. 465

intimately linked with a set of capacities that have clear a

nities

with Mayer and Salovey’s in uential

four-branch model of emotional intelligence (see Mayer & Salovey, 1997; Salovey & Mayer, 1990). Elements of the model consistently recur in accounts of the particular skills that SEL intends to impart. The fourbranch model divides emotional intelligence into four discrete psychological processes: (1)  emotional awareness, or the ability to perceive one’s emotions and those of others; (2)  emotional facilitation of thinking, or the ability to use one’s emotions to guide attention toward important information and make decisions that are positive for oneself and others; (3)  emotional understanding, or the ability to comprehend why certain emotions arise in certain circumstances, how thoughts in uence emotions and how emotions in uence behavior, and the di erences and similarities between emotions; and (4)  emotional regulation, or the ability to manage one’s emotions for the sake of personal well-being and creating and maintaining positive relationships (Mayer & Salovey, 1997). In its 2013 report on evidence-based SEL interventions in primary and secondary schools, the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL)—an organization that plays a leading role in promoting school-based SEL in the United States— puts forward a list of “core competencies” that SEL

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Intelligence, even as traditionally de ned, requires a certain awareness of emotion and skills in emotional

targets. The report does not state that SEL aims to develop young people’s EI, but each of the four branches of Mayer and Salovey’s model are perceptible in CASEL’s competency framework. Among the interpersonal and intrapersonal competencies integral to SEL are the following abilities (Grant et al., 2017, p. 4; see also CASEL, 2013, p. 9):

understanding]” • “Successfully regulate one’s emotions, thoughts, and behaviours in di erent situations [emotional regulation]” • “Take the perspective of and empathize with others [emotional understanding]” • “Establish and maintain healthy and rewarding relationships [emotional facilitation of thinking]” • “Make constructive choices about personal behaviour and social interactions [emotional facilitation of thinking]”

Evidentiary Obstacles Although SEL interventions may be expressly designed to promote certain social and emotional assets that align with the classical four-branch model of EI, a cursory look at meta-analyses of school-based SEL reveals that program evaluation studies rarely examine the impact of SEL on social and emotional competencies themselves. Instead, they tend to focus on the e ects of SEL on positive and negative p. 466

behavioral,

academic, and mental-health outcomes, and then infer from such e ects to impact on EI. As

Taylor et al. (2017) describe this dynamic, the SEL approach relies on a “theory of change.” Accordingly, if an SEL intervention that targets capacities like emotional awareness, emotional regulation, and emotional understanding succeeds in enhancing indicators of well-being such as academic success, less drug use, and positive social behavior, then the intervention in question was e ective at promoting the social and emotional competencies thought to be responsible for the observed behavioral change. It is an open question, however, whether the research showing that appropriately designed and properly implemented SEL programs have a positive impact on indicators of youth well-being (see Grant et al., 2017; Taylor et al., 2017; Durlak et al., 2011) constitute evidence that SEL impacts the development of social and emotional competency. Gathering evidence for the a

rmation that SEL works because it helps young people

develop social and emotional competencies and, a fortiori, that the acquisition of such competencies explains the targeted real-world behavioral changes would require a two-step process. The rst step would involve examining the impact of the intervention on EI or cognate skill sets. The second step would involve determining whether those pupils who made gains in terms of EI through participation in an SEL program also demonstrated the desired behavioral changes. Even if the predilection for an indirect approach to assessing the impact of SEL on EI is best explained by accountability pressures—educators may be generally more concerned about the link between SEL interventions and certain indicators of social and emotional health and academic success than the precise psychological mechanisms underlying e ectiveness—there are nevertheless some real conceptual and methodological obstacles to acquiring direct evidence that SEL a ects the development of EI. Extensively commented upon in the theoretical discussions of EI and education, these obstacles are threefold: inconsistent terminology, operationalization issues, and haphazard measurement.

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• “Recognize one’s own emotions [emotional awareness] and how they in uence behaviour [emotional

Inconsistent Terminology A rst basic scienti c requirement of investigating the impact of SEL on EI is clear de nition; yet both SEL and EI have multiple aliases in the literature and there is no consensus on the extent to which de nitions of SEL intersect with EI. As Humphrey (2013) points out, numerous synonyms are used to refer to EI— skills, and noncognitive skills, among others—and the boundaries between EI and such cognate concepts are fuzzy. While some authors may use these terms interchangeably, others argue for introducing distinctions between them (see Merrell & Gueldner, 2010; Weare & Gray, 2003). Others still advocate for viewing EI as a collective term under which concepts sometimes taken as synonymous should fall (Humphrey et al., 2007). p. 467

As for the de nition of SEL, commentators generally agree that “SEL” is an umbrella term for an extensive array of educational programs created to promote goals touching on mental and public health, con ict resolution, social integration, positive interpersonal relations, academic success, personal perseverance, and character development. However, such interventions are known by myriad names, including life-skills training, self-science, education for care, social awareness, social problem-solving, social competency, and resolving con icts creatively (Humphrey, 2013). Furthermore, opinion is divided over the question of whether programs that seek to inculcate emotional and social competencies must attempt to enhance speci c skills and abilities referred to in the four-branch model of EI for them to be considered forms of SEL as such. Ho man (2009), for example, opts for a comparatively restrictive conception of SEL, advancing that “the term refers to programs that attempt to enhance EI and emotional literacy and/or the development of what are perceived to be fundamental social and emotional skills and competencies” (p. 535). By contrast, CASEL’s review of the evidence on the e ectiveness of SEL programming adopts a far more expansive conception. The authors of this report state, “we use SEL to describe e orts promoting a variety of competencies that research has shown to be important for student success in school and in life” (Grant et al., 2017, p. 3).

Operationalization Issues A precondition for the development of valid measures of EI and the assessment of intervention programs designed to increase EI is a solid theoretical framework that clearly de nes EI and contains a coherent rationale for program objectives (Elias et al., 1997; Zeidner et al., 2002; Zins et al., 1997). Simply put, we need a theory of what it means to be emotionally intelligent and a clear idea of which key psychological processes are involved (Zeidner et al., 2009). However, the terminological debate and protean use of EI across the psychological literature, described earlier, makes assigning a precise meaning to EI a di

cult

matter (Zeidner et al., 2002). As such, researchers and educators alike continue to struggle to agree upon a singular theoretical framework and conceptualization for EI, despite recognition of the need for consistency and e orts made in this direction. From the plethora of divergent operationalizations of EI discernible in the literature, two primary frameworks have become prominent: ability-based models and mixed-conception models. Ability-based models, which focus on a person’s capacity to identify and process emotions (see Mayer et al., 1999), re ect traditional intelligence models. These models hold that one can train speci c emotion-related competencies such as emotion perception and the use of emotion language in order to achieve higher levels of EI (Allen et al., 2014). In this case, EI is like a muscle that can be developed and strengthened. Abilitybased models of EI have recently been re ned and improved due to the incorporation of emergent research p. 468

on emotion recognition, emotion appraisal,

and other work on social emotions (e.g., Banziger et al.,

2009; MacCann & Roberts, 2008; Roberts et al., 2006).

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emotional competence, emotional literacy, fundamental social and emotional competences, character

In contrast with ability-based models, mixed-conception models, which incorporate various components including traits, motivations, and abilities (Bar–On, 2000; Goleman, 1995), draw strongly upon personality psychology. These models suggest that for an individual to be deemed emotionally intelligent, they require a subset of personality traits (often high extraversion and low neuroticism) and emotion-related abilities (i.e., controlling impulses and coping skills; Zeidner et al., 2009). Unlike ability-based models, the mixedindividual, implying that these facets may be less amenable to change through training or other forms of intervention. Most research on EI adopts one of the aforementioned two perspectives; however, there remain problems internal to and across these frameworks. First, the ability-based and mixed-conception approaches are fundamentally di erent, but purportedly explain the same phenomenon—making EI appear atheoretical (Zeidner et al., 2009). This raises concerns about the roots of EI and the extent to which it is a singular (and valid) concept. Second, it is unclear how we can distinguish these two operationalizations of EI from other phenomena within psychology that are already grounded in years of empirical evidence. Regarding the ability-based model, it is unclear how it is distinct from models of cognitive intelligence, as ability models and cognitive-intelligence models rely heavily on many similar components. For example, perceptual factors and speed of processing, which are part of Carroll’s (1993) three-stratum model of cognitive intelligence, are heavily involved within abilities such as emotion perception (Zeidner et al., 2009). Regarding the mixed-conception model, it seems that EI may not be more than a mishmash of existing personality factors and other intrapersonal abilities (e.g., alexithymia or the ability to understand and verbalize one’s own feelings; Zeidner et al., 2009). Nevertheless, di erentiating EI from other abilities and constructs that are already employed in educational, personality, and developmental psychology is a continuous problem and requires the development of comprehensive, multistratum models (Zeidner et al., 2002). As previously mentioned, SEL emerged from EI theorizing and research as an educational means to promote EI abilities. As such, it should come as no surprise that the operationalization issues that a ect EI are also perceptible in operationalizations of SEL. Undoubtedly, the conceptual frameworks used within SEL research and practice are becoming more consistent and better streamlined, insofar as the “emotional competencies” that SEL programs seek to develop are generally enumerated and well de ned. Having said that, an inspection of curricular contents of SEL reveals that SEL programs routinely go beyond EI in the sense of including competencies that are drawn from other schools of thought in developmental, moral, and personality psychology (Zeidner et al., 2009). For example, SEL programs often lump together character development, moral reasoning and behavior, and decision making, and target these components either in tandem or one at a time. This expansive, all-encompassing approach to operationalizing SEL is almost p. 469

certainly attributable to

the rapid popularization of SEL across North America, its corresponding protean

nature, and, most importantly perhaps, to negligence around the need to establish a common theoretical framework for SEL right from its inception. Be that as it may, the operationalization issues surrounding SEL contribute to a state of general confusion about what exactly children and young people are supposed to learn from SEL, which does little to facilitate a systematic, consistent approach to assessing SEL programming.

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conception framework assumes that a portion of the components involved in EI are inherent within an

Haphazard Methodology As pointed out previously, a remarkable feature of SEL impact research is its tendency to take the e ects of SEL on behavioral outcomes and other observable indicators of youth well-being as proxies for socialemotional competence and its reliance on a methodologically suspect theory of change as the basis for manifestations of EI rather than EI itself, Coryn et al. (2009) suggest, is a proliferation of assessment instruments, each with its own idiosyncratic de nition of and objectives for SEL and tailored to a particular research context or educational goals. The instruments devised often measure only de cits in a speci c “subfactor” of SEL such as verbal expression (see Kring et al., 1994) or friendship (see Parker & Asher, 1993) and, again, measures that gauge real-world behaviors can at best generate arms-length evidence about impact on the core emotional competencies targeted by SEL. A further evaluation di

culty stems from the

tremendous variability in the EI-related components targeted by SEL programs. Some programs, such as the Seattle Social Development Project (see Herrenkohl & Hawkins, 2012), target relatively few elements, while others, like Promoting Alternative Thinking Strategies (PATHS; see Kelly et al., 2004), cover quite a number of EI’s core components. Validated measures of EI, however, are available, and these measures could be more widely used in SEL program evaluation to complement the usual focus on behavioral outcomes and, in this way, bring SEL research more in line with methodological norms in psychology. To raise methodological standards, not only should research that examines the outcomes of SEL interventions use these measures, but also SEL programs should take greater care in using SEL-related terminology and conceptualizations of EI consistently. One way to do this would be to explicitly target either the ability-based or mixed-conception approach. With this in mind, we brie y discuss two popular, previously validated tools used within psychological research to measure EI. Mirroring the dichotomy found in operationalizations of EI previously discussed, existing measures can be divided into two types: ability scales, which adopt the ability-based conception of EI, and trait scales, which re ect mixed-conception operationalizations of EI. In addition to their diverging theoretical roots, these two types of measures adopt quite di erent evaluative approaches. Ability measures often use maximumperformance assessments, whereas trait-based measures are typically comprised of self-report rating scales that call upon an individual to appraise their abilities or competencies (Petrides & Furnham, 2000). p. 470

A traditional, well-validated and recognized ability measure is the Mayer–Salovey–Caruso Emotional Intelligence Test (MSCEIT; Mayer et al., 2000). This measure was designed to assess each of the four discrete branches of EI (as outlined previously) and was speci cally elaborated from within an intelligencetesting paradigm (Qualter et al., 2007). Currently, ability measures are the gold standard in EI research. Since intelligence is thought to re ect an individual’s capacity to perform well within the ability-based framework, assessing variability in functioning should re ect intellectual ability (see Carroll, 1993). Nevertheless, the extent to which the MSCEIT truly assesses one’s ability has been debated. Brody (2004), for example, claims that the MSCEIT assesses broad knowledge of how to deal with emotional situations rather than actual performance (with the exception of emotion perception, which is straightforward to objectively assess). On these grounds, several researchers have argued in favor of extending this approach to EI measurement and focusing on the development of more objective performance-based ability indicators (e.g., task-based assessments) of EI that span across contexts and cultures (Mayer et al., 1999, 2000). As for trait measures, one is the Bar–On Emotional Quotient Inventory (EQ-I; Bar–On, 1997) which encompasses multiple aspects of personal functioning and is loosely related to emotion-related abilities. Validation studies of such trait measures have not made them immune to the usual strenuous objections to self-report measures. Asking individuals to provide self-perceptions of EI may be inaccurate and is vulnerable to social desirability, deception, and impression-formation e ects (Zeidner et al., 2002).

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inferences about the e ect of SEL on EI. A consequence of this focus on the presumed behavioral

Furthermore, self-reports allow for the assessment of emotional experiences, but they cannot render realtime estimates of emotional processes, which is problematic for assessing EI if it is thought to re ect performance (Pekrun & Linnenbrink–Garcia, 2014). Although there are circumstances when self-reports are valuable (see O’Sullivan, 2007), self-report and objective emotion-ability measures appear to be uncorrelated (Ciarrochi et al., 2002). Due to the known drawbacks of self-report measures, some have and more re ned (e.g., Zeidner et al., 2009). Additionally, using multiple informants to assess EI (particularly using trait-based measures) may eliminate some concerns regarding the validity of selfreports (Denham, 2015). That is to say, an increased focus on gathering information from parents, teachers, and peers in addition to self-reports has the potential to reduce measurement bias, since socialization agents like parents and teachers bring a context-speci c perspective to individuals’ social-emotional capacities that may not be accessible to the individuals themselves (Denham, 2015). Supplementing the multiple-informant approach, it would be bene cial to measure the complete range of emotional capacities when assessing EI. That is, taking a holistic approach would likely furnish better information about which components of SEL programs and initiatives most strongly play into creating an emotionally competent child across multiple environments (i.e., the home, the classroom, and the playground). To be sure, the marked preference among SEL researchers for an indirect approach to SEL study design and measurement, to a direct approach that uses validated psychological measures of EI to study the impact of p. 471

SEL, is in one respect well founded. SEL

programs were originally developed in educational contexts for

speci c institutional purposes: to combat certain behavioral problems like school dropout, substance abuse, and school violence, and to promote academic success. The fact remains, however, that the use of appropriately designed research protocols using validated measures of EI would generate better knowledge about the impact of SEL on EI. For the time being, claims to the e ect that SEL produces positive behavioral outcomes because it fosters the development of EI among young people are largely conjectural.

Conclusion This chapter has drawn attention to the urgent need to take a step back from SEL measurement development and put greater e ort into achieving conceptual clarity in EI and SEL in order to develop appropriate instruments and improve the overall way SEL is evaluated. The measurement failures and the operationalization issues to which they are directly linked become increasingly worrisome when considering their implications. In the United States alone, nearly 50 billion dollars are invested yearly in SEL programs that frequently use unvalidated instruments (Krachman & LaRocca, 2017). Indeed, Durlak and colleagues (2011) have shown that only about 51% of SEL programs use validated measures. If these programs do not adequately assess SEL, it raises the question of whether and to what degree these programs are bene cial and hence worthy of such costly investments. In terms of a way forward, we would recommend concerted initiatives to streamline the operationalization of the core competencies SEL targets and to reduce the number of measures used to assess school-based SEL. Clearly, the proliferation of di erent operationalizations of social and emotional competency has been a major factor in the creation of intervention programs and SEL techniques (see also Vallgårdo & Olsen, this volume, for a discussion of the role of context in social-emotional development). Improved concertation among researchers and practitioners in integrating conceptualizations of EI and the instructional goals of SEL would greatly facilitate SEL program comparison and assessment. In this regard, prioritization should be given to the ability-based conceptualization of EI, since this model is more compatible with the educational paradigm of school-based SEL, as discussed in this chapter. In assessing SEL, if researcher and practitioners fail to measure change in the socioemotional components outlined in the classical fourbranch model of EI, they cannot know which of the components is most directly involved in the real-world

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advised halting the development of self-report assessments until operationalizations of EI become clearer

behavioral changes that SEL is implemented to impact. Having this information available is crucial for the creation of more targeted and speci c SEL interventions that would focus on improving the most important social-emotional skills comprising EI. To illustrate, interventions designed to combat violence may need to focus on interpersonal aspects of EI, whereas intrapersonal competencies may be central to programs designed to foster improved academic-study skills. Such advances would be particularly important for institutions

facing nancial austerity, allowing decision makers to invest more selectively in SEL

programming that they know will have the greatest impact on the learning and behavioral outcomes that need most urgently to be addressed.

Notes 1.

We recognize that there is a terminological debate about whether to term abilities within the emotional domain “intelligence” or “competencies.” For the sake of consistency with the language typically used in the educational literature, we will refer to these abilities as “emotional intelligence” throughout. Addressing this issue is beyond the scope of this chapter.

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The Oxford Handbook of Emotional Development Daniel Dukes (ed.) et al. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/978019 8855903.001.0001 9780191889516

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CHAPTER

33 The Development of Moral Judgments, Emotions, and Sentiments  Elliot Turiel https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198855903.013.44 Published: 13 January 2022

Pages 477–490

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Published: 2022

Abstract This chapter addresses interconnections between moral judgments and emotions. The development of morality, which begins in early childhood, involves a construction of reasoning about welfare, justice, that context, common uses of intuition and guilt are critiqued, with a reframing of guilt as re ection and regret. Positive emotions of sympathy, empathy, and a ection as evaluative appraisals are interconnected with the development of moral judgments. It is also proposed that emotions are not separate from processes of moral thinking and moral decision-making. Additionally, the idea of general sentiments, as somewhat distinct from emotions, is considered as part of the process of moral development. Three key sentiments are identi ed: the value of life, respect for persons, and human dignity.

Keywords: intuition, reflection, moral judgments, sympathy, empathy, a ection, evaluative appraisals, sentiments Subject: Psychology, Developmental Psychology Series: Oxford Library of Psychology Collection: Oxford Handbooks Online

Introduction IN

1952 Solomon Asch published a book entitled Social Psychology. Whereas the title can be taken to mean it

was a textbook for undergraduate courses, actually Asch wrote it with the intention of providing a comprehensive analysis of the psychology of social relationships and relations between individuals and society. Asch’s viewpoints had a grounding in gestalt psychology (e.g., Ko ka, 1935; Kohler, 1947; Lewin, 1931; Wertheimer, 1935), but his approach went well beyond gestalt propositions. He emphasized the thinking of individuals regarding social relationships and asserted that, unlike the dominant behaviorist and psychoanalytic theories of that time, it was necessary to recognize that “children and adults have a direct interest in their surroundings, in the working of things” (Asch, 1952, p. 19)—including an interest in social relationships. In attempting to provide a comprehensive analysis, Asch addressed the role of emotions in thought. He stated: No assumption has spread more widely in modern psychology than that men are ruled by their emotions and that these are irrational. Although there is much to support this view, it has nevertheless been responsible for a systematic depreciation of the possibilities of intelligence and thinking in human a airs. Technically this formulation nds expression in the proposition that there is a cleavage between emotional and intellectual processes … Emotions, we are told, disturb thinking and strip it of its critical character. (Asch, 1952, p. 21) p. 478

In contrast, Asch proposed that emotional attitudes can play a positive role in thinking, that thinking may indeed require appropriate emotions, that there can be, and under certain conditions, there is a cooperative

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and rights. A critique is provided of propositions that emotions are primary in moral functioning. In

relation between emotion and reason. Nor have they considered the possibility that the intellectual grasp of given conditions can generate appropriate emotions. (Asch, 1952, p. 21)

and are irrational, and that there is a cleavage between thought and emotions, still hold for many contemporary formulations—especially in some quarters of moral psychology (see Turiel, 2010b). Therefore, it is important to rst consider contemporary propositions regarding the predominance of emotions in moral decisions and ways in which those positions are inadequate. I then address relevant theory and research on the development of moral judgments, as well as other domains of social judgments. Most of the research we have conducted bears on the development of moral judgments, alongside the development of other domains of thought. Nevertheless, the research on moral and social domains does include considerations of thought as interconnected with emotions, as well as signi cant aspects of developmental changes in those connections (see Reddy & Vanello, this volume). I discuss these theoretical and developmental propositions after considering inadequacies in moral psychological propositions that draw a “cleavage” between emotions and thought and largely depreciate the role of thought.

Emotion as Intuition In giving priority to emotions, it has been proposed that moral decisions are emotionally driven, and, that insofar as any reasoning is involved, they entail rationalizations (Haidt, 2001; Haidt & Graham, 2007). Asch (1952, p. 21) had also characterized (and criticized) the view that reason is primarily rationalization, which was extant at that time too. It is also frequently assumed that emotions are primary in early life, with infants and very young children lacking processes of thought. Piaget’s (1936) classic analyses of sensorimotor development and research (discussed in this chapter) have shown that the development of thought, including moral thought, has its origins in early life. The contemporary propositions that moral decisions are primarily and irrationally driven by emotions have been labeled “intuitions.” Intuitive moral decisions are immediate and without reasoning—primarily because they are emotionally determined. As an example, it is said that the emotion of disgust drives many p. 479

moral decisions involving

an aversion to actions; negative evaluations of an act, like someone in icting

severe physical harm on another, are determined by feelings of disgust evoked by such acts, rather than the proposition that the judgment that the act of in icting harm is wrong is intertwined with feelings of disgust evoked by the act. In referring to these processes as involving intuition, two indices are usually used: one is that such responses are immediate or rapid (which supposedly contrasts with slow responses involving thought), and the other is an inability to give reasons for moral evaluations. Those propositions entail an idiosyncratic conception of intuition, as well as an inadequate way of explaining the role of emotions. The characterization of intuition is idiosyncratic in that it diverges from the usual philosophical ways of conceptualizing it. Although the term intuition is being used currently in moral psychology, there has been very little psychological research into the processes involved. Jerome Bruner (1960), a psychologist, did provide astute analyses of intuition—analyses that have not been adequately pursued in research. The main features Bruner attributed to intuition include that it involves thinking that rests “upon a solid knowledge of the subject, a familiarity that gives intuition something to work with” (Bruner, 1960, pp. 56–57). An additional aspect of intuition is that it involves a holistic perception of a problem, an “immediate apprehension or cognition” (Bruner, 1960, p. 60) without awareness of how the solution was derived and the employment of shortcuts. Nevertheless, intuitions often lead to subsequent rechecking, with attempts to verify conclusions; intuition involves thought that leads to testing of its validity through analytic thinking.

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These descriptions about propositions, common in the early 1950s, that individuals are ruled by emotions

There is a super cial commonality between Bruner’s explanation of intuition as involving immediate apprehension and those who regard rapid responding as an index of emotionally determined responses. If moral responses were primarily emotionally determined, it would make sense to expect that they would evoke immediate or rapid responses. What does not make sense, however, is to use the rapidity of a response, in itself, as an indicator of whether thought is involved in the decision, since the source of rapid thinking. The unreliability of fast or slow responses as indices of intuition can be illustrated by comparing individuals with expertise and novices in elds of knowledge. Consider comparisons between professionals in elds like mathematics or physics and students learning the elds. As examples, teachers are likely to give solutions to complex problems in an immediate, rapid fashion, whereas students frequently would labor with the problems and provide solutions at a slow pace. That the professionals’ rapid solutions stem from prior analytic thinking illustrates the inadequacy of immediacy of responding as an index of either intuitive or analytic thinking. Developmental di erences, as well, illustrate the inadequacy of rapid responses as an index of lack of thought. Older individuals (e.g., adolescents, adults) are likely to give rapid solutions to, say, problems of addition and subtraction or the conservation of quantity, whereas younger children would exert e ort, with a slower pace, in dealing with such problems (Piaget, 1952).

p. 480

Emotions, Intuitions, and Decisions About Saving Lives Bruner’s proposition concerning intuitions—that there is not an awareness of how a solution was derived— is also only super cially related to the idea of inability to explain reasons in moral decisions. It is important to keep in mind that other features of intuitive thinking are that it is based on a solid knowledge of the subject and a holistic apprehension and cognition of the issues involved. The problems inherent in propositions that moral decisions involve a lack of ability to explain them can be illustrated in research on so-called “trolley-car dilemmas” conducted by psychologists and neuroscientists (e.g., Cushman et al., 2006; Greene et al., 2001; Koenigs et al., 2007). In that research, participants placed in a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine were presented with situations depicting a runaway trolley about to strike and kill ve workmen on the track. In one version, a bystander can throw a switch that would divert the trolley and kill one person but save the lives of ve. In another version, a bystander can push a man from a footbridge in front of the trolley, killing that person but saving the lives of ve other people. The usual ndings are that most participants judge it acceptable to throw the switch and unacceptable to push the man. The usual interpretations of these ndings are that pushing a person to his death evokes much stronger emotions than throwing a switch, and that emotions are primary in such decisions since people are inconsistent in their judgments as to whether to sacri ce one life to save ve others. Such an interpretation stems from the proposition that moral decisions are nonrational and “intuitive,” with the assumption that these situations primarily present a utilitarian calculation of ve lives versus one. The seeming inconsistencies in applying a utilitarian calculation of ve lives versus one life is also seen to re ect the nonrational bases of decisions about the trolley-car situations. From a psychological perspective, there are reasons to question the interpretation of the ndings that decisions are mainly emotionally driven (Dahl et al., 2018; Killen & Smetana, 2007; Turiel, 2010a). First, both types of situations should be seen as involving strong conceptual and emotional con icts for participants, since they are posed with the problem of choosing whose lives to save and whose to sacri ce (see Dahl et al., 2018 and Turiel, 2010a for extensive discussions). Embedded in the trolley-car situations are emotionally laden problems with multiple considerations to take into account that are di

cult to reconcile without violating serious moral precepts in

order to achieve serious moral goals: the strongly held value of life must be violated in order to preserve that very value.

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(or more rapid) responses can be well-understood concepts based on sound knowledge and analytic

Furthermore, the possible greater intensity of the emotions in the footbridge situation is not the only di erence between the two. Although the footbridge situation is likely to evoke more intense emotions, the two situations are not otherwise the same. In the analyses of the philosophers who originated trolley-car p. 481

problems, the situations were

seen to entail di erent contexts presenting di erent moral considerations

(Edmonds, 2013; Foot, 1967, 1985; Thomson, 1976, 1985). Speci cally, they used these situations to of lives saved, and such considerations as the rights of the actors involved, responsibility for one’s actions, and concerns with personal integrity. The footbridge situation includes the component of in icting physical assault on another person and thereby directly causing his death. In addition to utilitarian calculations, judgments might be made about the fundamental con ict in values in the situations, that judgments are made about the means used to achieve ends, and that people do take into account the di erent features of social situations and attempt to coordinate di erent types of judgments relevant to those features. To a greater extent than the switch situation, the footbridge situation presents a compounded problem involving the saving of lives, taking a life, the natural course of events, the responsibility of individuals altering natural courses, and causing someone’s death in a direct way. The emotions and coordination of judgments involved are more complex in one version than the other. The possibility that one situation was more complex than presumed in the neuroscience research (Greene et al., 2001) was explored in a set of studies that assessed the ways people experience the con icts involved, and the judgments and reasoning they apply to trolley-car situations (Dahl et al., 2018). It was found that participants did perceive the nature of the con icts involved and did articulate their reasons for the judgments that the acts were or were not permissible. Con icts were expressed for both the switch and footbridge versions, with concomitant emotional attributions. The con icts revolved around concerns with the value of life and the undesirability of the loss of life, which were evident in all the age groups sampled (adolescents, young adults, and older adults). The ndings support the proposition that the value of life is a “sentiment,” along with respect for persons, that is central to moral judgments (more about this follows). The ndings also showed that the two types of trolley-car situations are construed as constituting di erent contexts involving somewhat di erent considerations (in ways consistent with philosophic analyses; e.g., Foot, 1967 and Williams, 1973). The situation calling for the throwing of a switch was for the most part construed in utilitarian terms, but still seen as involving con icts. As one 16-year-old female who judged it permissible to throw the switch put it: If you see a situation where ve people could be killed compared to one person being killed … It would be a horrible outcome obviously if anyone was killed but it would be ultimately better if only one person had to die than ve people. (Dahl et al., 2018, p. 47) The nature of the con ict, with rami cations for the emotions experienced, was articulated by a 20-yearold male who judged that it was not permissible to throw the switch: p. 482

I guess it depends on my personal opinion. I would say it doesn’t make it any better. The person still has intrinsic worth but coming from a utilitarian standpoint, it might make more sense to kill one person than ve persons but I believe that each individual has their own intrinsic worth and so it is not morally right to kill them, any of them. (Dahl et al., 2018, p. 54) Other considerations regarding the act of pushing a person to his death included the value of life based on rights of the victim, and responsibilities for the consequences of one’s actions. The ways in which consequences for one’s actions were seen as central to the decision is evident in the following responses:

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illustrate that in addition to utilitarian calculations, moral decisions can involve con icts around a number

[19-year-old female]: I don’t think it will be right to push the stranger onto the tracks because I feel like then I would be playing an active role in killing him even though I would save 5 other people. [19-year-old female]: It’s worse to force the other person to die than to let those 5 people die … It would be more of an active decision for me to murder someone than just … letting the ve people die from the train. (Dahl et al., 2018, p. 49) In addition, we examined whether it was mainly an emotionally laden aversion to pushing another from the footbridge that determines the evaluation of the act as wrong by providing alternative situational contexts. In one such alternative, pushing one person to save ve resulted only in minor injury to that person. Most judged it permissible to do so. It may be, therefore, that it is the act of “pushing someone to his death” that evokes intense emotions that determine the decisions. In order to ascertain if that is the case, participants were presented with two additional situations. In one, pushing a man to his death results in saving the lives of ve people who are family members of the one pushing. In another, the person pushed had deliberately caused the trolley to head down the track in order to kill the ve people. Majorities stated that it was permissible to push the person o

the footbridge in each condition. However, it was found that in the switch

condition, a greater percentage of adolescents than adults (though still majorities) judged that it was alright to divert the train in order to save the family members. The inclusion of family members in the equation raises considerations of perceived obligations to them: obligations to and relationships with family members were the most widely given reasons for the judgment that it is alright to save the ve. It may be that, emotionally and cognitively, adolescents are swayed more by family considerations than adults. All these ndings indicate that the trolley-car situations need to be regarded as entailing interpretations of situational contexts in di erent ways, with varying associated emotional appraisals.

p. 483

Emotional Appraisals and Moral Judgments The con ict-laden situations pitting lives against lives, therefore, involve judgments and associated emotions. Decisions about the con icts are not “driven” by emotions, neither are they irrational—nor are emotions absent. The integration of judgments and emotions within the moral domain is also evident in moral decisions that are more representative of situations faced by people in their everyday lives—starting early in life. In the context of the early development of moral judgments, the most relevant emotions are most often positive ones, such as sympathy, empathy, and a ection (Arsenio, 1988; Eisenberg et al., 2006; Ho man, 2000; Thompson, this volume), and not aversive ones like fear, anxiety, or disgust (see classic treatments of moral decisions as involving fear and anxiety: Aronfreed, 1968; Freud, 1930; and contemporary treatments of disgust: Haidt, 2001; Haidt & Graham, 2007). Research supports the proposition that positive emotions are the most relevant in that empathy has its origins in the rst two years of life (Eisenberg et al., 2010), and that it is intertwined with early emerging morality (Smetana, 2018). Moreover, with increasing age, children more clearly di erentiate another’s distress from their own, and thereby more consistently show the emotion of sympathy (Eisenberg, et al., 2010; Eisenberg & Fabes, 1998). In the development of moral judgments, an aversive emotion, like disgust, does not automatically lead to moral evaluations, but instead can sometimes result from the application of those moral judgments to a moral violation. For example, seeing someone in icting physical harm on a helpless child might produce feelings of disgust as a consequence of the judgment that the act is morally wrong. Similarly, a ubiquitous construct like guilt as an aversive moral emotion needs to be reformulated. In the psychological literature, the idea of guilt stems from psychoanalytic theorists, who proposed that it is a

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because … for the one guy I would be actively pushing him in front of the train and murdering him

largely unconscious process of redirecting aggression to the self (Freud, 1930). Some behaviorist and sociallearning theorists also appropriated the term, explaining it as a form of conditioned anxiety (Aronfreed, 1968). From the perspective of an integration of emotions and judgments (rather than a cleavage), the idea of guilt would best be replaced by explanations of processes involving regret and re ections upon social relationships, especially the e ects of one’s actions on others, as well as e orts at reparation. Research is these propositions receive some support from research in which participants were asked to relate events in which they had been perpetrators of harm on others (Wainryb et al., 2005; Wainryb & Recchia, 2012). The research showed that, indeed, children and adolescents re ect on the e ects of their actions on others (see Kramer & Lagattuta, this volume). The research also revealed age di erences in ways of re ecting upon prior acts of harm and the associated feelings. First consider the following responses of a preschool boy: p. 484

I was playing with my friend Adam and I said something that really hurt him and he said, “I don’t like that.” And I stopped. I also pushed him. And I said, “I’m sorry. Because he told me he didn’t like it.” (Wainryb et al., 2005, p. 55) The 4-year-old is aware of his role in causing harm, and of the need to repair it. With age, re ections upon the feelings of others and regrets are more complex, as illustrated by the responses of an adolescent female with regard to a time she had made fun of an old friend: I was like thinking about it and I was like, “How could I do that to my former best friend,” you know? Cause she was a person too and just cause I wanted to t in with other people, I shouldn’t have done that. So, I like, this went on for a while. And after that I apologized to her and she accepted my apology although, I don’t think I would have if someone would have done that to me. I would have been really hurt. And I found out she cried all the time. And that just made me feel really bad that I did that. So ever since then, I don’t make fun of people anymore. (Wainryb et al., 2005, p. 18) In reaction to a perceived moral transgression on her part, this adolescent re ected on the relationship, the feelings of those involved, on how she should have acted, and on how she should act in the future. The mechanistic concept of guilt does not do justice to the processes involved in re ections upon one’s moral violations. Implicit in the comments of the child and the adolescent is that they have developed moral judgments about harm and fairness. Those moral judgments, which begin to be formed at an early age, are based on harm and welfare; and by middle childhood, judgments are also formed about fairness and rights (Helwig, 1995; Turiel, 1983, 2002, 2015; Turiel & Dahl, 2019). The social situations experienced by young children and primarily bearing on early moral judgments include, as examples, acts like in icting or avoiding harm, sharing or failing to share, helping or not helping, and fair or unfair treatment (see Smetana, 2018; Thompson, this volume). A large body of research has shown that morality constitutes a domain of thinking that is distinct from other domains, such as the domain of social conventions based on uniformities that serve to coordinate cooperative social interactions within social systems. Brie y stated, judgments about moral issues are based on conceptions of welfare, justice, and rights, and are judged as not contingent on rules, authority dictates, or common practices (for extensive reviews, see Killen & Smetana, 2014; Turiel, 2002, 2015). The research, conducted in many cultures, has documented that by a young age, children form reasoning in the moral domain about issues like in icting harm, theft, and fair treatment that is distinct from reasoning about social conventions like forms of address, modes of greeting, and eating habits. Whereas the distinction between the moral and conventional domains is maintained across ages, developmental changes occur

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needed to examine processes re ecting what is often labeled as the aversive emotion of guilt. However,

p. 485

within each domain (Nucci et al., 2017; Turiel, 1983). Within the moral domain,

young children rst form

concepts about harm and welfare, and later about justice (Davidson et al., 1983). Moreover, to a greater extent than children, adolescents coordinate con icting moral, or moral and nonmoral, considerations in coming to decisions about multifaceted social situations (Nucci et al., 2017). Moral judgments are intertwined with emotions around actions in the moral domain. As an example, the judgment that it is positive feelings. Research also shows that the emotions children attribute to the moral domain are distinct from those they attribute to other domains, such as that of social conventions. For example, children attribute positive emotions to actors, recipients, and observers in connection with positive actions, such as helping and sharing (Arsenio, 1988; Arsenio & Fliess, 1996; Arsenio & Ford, 1985). In turn, negative emotions are attributed to victims of moral transgressions. Although kindergarten children do attribute some negative emotions to victims of physical aggression, older children do so with greater accuracy (Arsenio, 1988). By contrast, the emotions attributed to transgressors in the conventional domain are neutral emotions or feelings of sadness. In the theoretical perspective on distinct domains, it is proposed that emotions are connected with thinking and involve evaluative appraisals of the types elaborated upon by others (e.g., Frijda, 1986; Lazarus, 1991; Moors & Scherer, 2013; Nussbaum, 2001; see Walle et al., this volume). Writing from a philosophical perspective, but yet taking psychological analyses into account, Nussbaum aptly characterized the nature of evaluative appraisals in a “cognitive/evaluative theory of emotions” as follows: Emotions such as fear, anger, compassion, and grief involve evaluative appraisals, in which people (or animals) survey objects in the world with an eye to how important goals and projects are doing. If one holds some such view of what emotions involve, the entire distinction between reason and emotion begins to be called into question, and one can no longer assume that a thinker who focuses on reason is by that move excluding emotion. (Nussbaum, 1999, p. 72) As a means of illustrating how emotions entail appraisals that include concerns with goals and thoughts, Nussbaum considered the emotion of grief—actually drawing on her own experience around the circumstances of the death of her mother (Nussbaum, 2001, Chapter 1). In Nussbaum’s account, intense feelings of grief are connected in complex ways to importance invested in persons, in parents, and in the particular person lost. Sadness is also felt for the loss of a person, especially a person one knows, because of the intrinsic worth of human beings. This example speci es the features of emotions as evaluative appraisals in that it shows how emotions involve judgments and perceptions of value. As summarized by Nussbaum (2001), emotions have an object (i.e., they are about something in the world); the object is intentional, in that the person experiencing the emotion perceives and interprets the object (e.g., the qualities of the person and the loss of the person); and the emotions are connected to complex beliefs about the person. p. 486

The example was used by Nussbaum to elaborate on how emotions involve thought of an object combined with thought of the object’s salience or importance, and that they are guided by ways of judging social relationships and can be part of people’s aims, purposes, and goals. Nussbaum’s largely philosophical analyses dovetail with those of psychologists, who also proposed that appraisals entail evaluations of experiences with the environment relevant to one’s concerns and goals (Lazarus, 1991; see De France & Hollenstein, this volume). A salient example is that, in response to perceived injustices, emotional reactions of anger, outrage, and compassion with victims are intertwined with judgments of what constitutes unfair treatment of people (Turiel et al., 2019).

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wrong to hit others is interconnected with concerns of avoiding feelings of hurt, as well as promoting

Conclusion: What About General Sentiments? In the perspective I have presented, morality entails understandings of welfare, justice, and rights, and I have referred to concomitant emotions like sympathy, empathy, a ection, and regret as contributing to another aspect of morality not yet discussed. I am referring to three general orientations that appear to be centrally related to morality, discussed by philosophers, by analysts of human rights, and, in isolated cases, by psychologists. These orientations, serving as backgrounds to morality, are the value of life, respect for persons, and human dignity—which we have termed “sentiments” (Turiel et al., 2019; Turiel & Killen, 2010). The idea of general sentiments is in line with Nussbaum’s distinction between “background and situational emotion-judgments” (2001, p. 69). Considerations bearing on the value of life are clearly involved in the research on judgments about the trolley-car situations discussed here (Dahl et al., 2018; Greene et al., 2001). Although the original research did not explicitly consider the value of life, it is implicit in that the questions posed to participants would make little sense without the assumption that they value life. The value of life was also included in Kohlberg’s (1963, 1971) research on the development of moral judgments. One emphasis of his research was on decisions entailing con icts among saving a life, property rights, and law (i.e., in his well-known dilemma as to whether a husband should steal a drug in order to save his wife’s life). Extensive analyses of the role of the value of life come from philosophers (Dworkin, 1993; Foot, 1967; Walzer, 2007; Williams, 1973). Dworkin has maintained that, as a general-background orientation, the intrinsic value of life includes a strong sense of the sacredness or inviolability of life. Dworkin’s treatise focused on the sacredness of life as central in debates about abortion and euthanasia, but was intended to provide a general formulation of “a fundamental idea that almost all share in some form: that the individual p. 487

human life is sacred” (Dworkin, 1993, p. 13). He also noted that the term “sacred”

has religious

connotations, and the term “inviolable” has secular connotations. Across religious commitments and cultural contexts, people feel strongly about maintaining their own lives, the lives of close others (e.g., family, friends), and in a general way, human life. A second sentiment, respect for persons, was prevalent in Piaget’s (1932) analyses of the development of moral judgments. Piaget maintained that respect for persons in relationships of mutuality and reciprocity is essential for moral concepts of equality and justice. In Piaget’s formulation, the respect developed by young children is not mutual but one-way or unilateral. It is not until late childhood or early adolescence that there develops a morality guided by mutual respect. The third sentiment of human dignity is prominent in discussions of human rights and is part of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Human dignity is regarded as inherent to being human and therefore a basis for the universal application of justice and rights. Evidence for the relevance of the notion of human dignity as part of judgments about welfare, justice, and rights comes from studies on adolescent and adult conceptions about human rights. The research, conducted in the United States (Besirevic & Turiel, 2020), as well as in Bosnia and Turkey (Besirevic, 2018), showed that negative evaluations of violations of human rights are tied to maintaining human dignity. The sentiments of the value of life, respect for persons, and human dignity might all be intertwined as general, ongoing background considerations in moral evaluations and reasoning. However, much more research is required to elaborate on the nature of these sentiments, their developmental sequences, and how they are related to moral judgments and emotions as evaluative appraisals.

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children’s development of morality and as appraisals of experienced social situations. However, there is

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The Oxford Handbook of Emotional Development Daniel Dukes (ed.) et al. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/978019 8855903.001.0001 9780191889516

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CHAPTER

34 Inequality and the Development of Moral Emotions  Steven Hitlin, Sarah K. Harkness https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198855903.013.1 Published: 13 January 2022

Pages 491–502

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Published: 2022

Abstract This chapter outlines the authors’ thesis that the level of economic inequality in a society is re ected in its members’ moral emotional experiences. Those living in societies with more equality regularly signi cantly more likely to experience negative, sanctioning moral emotions. Growing up and living under these various social structures a ects emotional development in these directions. This chapter explores the links between societal structure and individual emotion, contending that individual moral emotions represent the distal structures of society. The authors outline a broad theory linking individual emotional development to cultural patterns and structural economic inequality, supporting a thesis that sanctioning is generated by and reinforces a pronounced social hierarchy. Their focus is not only on people’s location within social structure, but on the nature of that structure itself.

Keywords: morality, inequality, emotions, a ect, cross-cultural research Subject: Psychology, Developmental Psychology Series: Oxford Library of Psychology Collection: Oxford Handbooks Online

Introduction THE

linkage between inequality and what we consider moral emotions—largely the socialized, second-order

emotions that are considered endemic only to intersubjective species like humans—has two component processes that we will (brie y) outline here. The rst involves one’s location within a strati cation system shaped by economic, racial, gender, religious, and other axes of inequality relevant to a particular society. This importantly shapes emotional predispositions (and accordant schematic understandings of the social world) within and across situations. We will go on to argue that growing up in a society marked with greater degrees of structural inequality leads to the development of populaces whose moral emotional predispositions are markedly di erent than those who were socialized in societies with greater equality and less division. Secondly, we suggest (following Fiske, 2011) that moral emotions serve as situational signals channeling interpretations and maintaining current societal inequalities, whether they be based on class (Sayer, 2005), race (Bonilla–Silva, 1997; Ray, 2019), gender (Ridgeway, 2011), or other factors (see Carlo et al., this volume). We include moral emotions among the many factors, including tangible resources and legal and social power (e.g., Sewell, 1992), serving to perpetuate current social systems over time. These models are fundamentally interdisciplinary, with core insights developing within both psychological and sociological understandings of the relationship between social structure, cultural beliefs, and individual cognitiveemotional processing.

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experience more positive, binding emotions. Conversely, those living in unequal societies are

p. 492

What Are Moral Emotions and How Do They Work? Moral emotions are the subset of emotions linked to social psychological concepts like norms and values. They are considered the “self-conscious” emotions (Eisenberg, 2000) dealing with social relationships (Rai and are linked to cultural frames about how the world is and how it should be (Turner & Stets, 2006). Moral emotions include feelings like guilt (see Vaish, this volume), shame, pride, empathy, and sympathy, though a sociological perspective (e.g., Abend, 2011) suggests there needs to be more work on richer emotional concepts—like retribution, exploitation, and dignity—beyond these most typically studied emotions. Moral emotions, from a societal point of view, are internalized “teeth” (Turner, 2007) that allow societal norms and expectations to “sink in” and feel important to individuals. When one lives up to important standards (pride), or violates them (shame, embarrassment), emotions serve as internalized signals and guides to show us the societal way (Blasi, 1999). For classic sociological and economic thinkers, the terms “moral” and “social” were interchangeable (Jahoda, 2007), suggesting how fundamental these beliefs and emotions are to social life and interaction. While the basic emotions appear relatively cross-cultural, the meanings, triggers, and interpretations of these emotions are linked to the history and culture within which a person develops their view of the world (see Kagan, 2007 and Menon & Shweder, 1994 for examples of the subtle distinctions of even these core emotions, like shame, in di erent societies). Moral emotions may be more positively valenced, like gratitude and elevation, or more negative, such as disgust and shame (Haidt, 2003; Tangney et al., 2007; Turner & Stets, 2006). Turner and Stets (2006) and Haidt (2003) divide moral emotions into four general categories: (1) the self-critical emotions of shame and guilt; (2) the other-critical emotions of contempt, anger, and disgust; (3) the other-su ering emotions related to empathy, sympathy, and compassion; and (4) the other-praising emotions of gratitude and elevation. It has been argued that many of these emotions be considered primary emotions that are recognized cross-culturally (Ekman, 1994; Ekman & Friesen, 1971; Haidt & Keltner, 1999), with moral expressions related to anger and disgust generally having the highest rate of consistent recognition across societies and being even coded into our neuroanatomy (Turner & Stets, 2005). Although these four moral emotional categories appear to be predominant across societies, the nuance of these emotional experiences and meanings does vary considerably cross-culturally. Eastern and Western cultures, for instance, di er with respect to the types of guilt and shame they experience and the types of situations that elicit these responses. Japanese people have many di erent expressions for being sorry. This includes makotoni-moushiwake-gozaimasen-deshita, conveying that the person is deeply sorry and takes

p. 493

full responsibility for their actions, which is typically reserved for

major wrongdoings or mistakes. Many

Eastern cultures do not distinguish between the sensations of shame, embarrassment, shyness, and modesty (Menon & Shweder, 1994; Shweder et al., 2008); any violation of a norm in front of others or the threat of doing so triggers self-conscious feelings of shame and embarrassment, as it threatens one’s social identity and face (Go man, 1959; Haidt, 2003).

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& Fiske, 2011) and wider societal concerns (Haidt, 2003). Moral emotions are evaluative of self and others

How Do Moral Emotions Operate? The two dominant models of how moral emotions operate incorporate rationalist models, classically found in the work of Kohlberg (1971), and the social intuitionist models (Haidt, 2001). Focusing rst on the former, much early developmental work on moral emotions, especially feelings of fairness and justice, trace highest form of moral action. The only grounded possible basis for an established moral system was to nd a logical (i.e., not emotional) system anchoring moral understanding. Kohlberg’s typology suggests that humans develop along a speci c set of stages, beginning with behavior motivated by a fear of punishment, on through to people who learn to do what other members of society do, and nally up to the smaller subset of people (largely men, in his work) who were able to use abstract understandings of morality to motivate their behavior. In addition to the apparent gender issues here (Ja ee & Hyde, 2000; see Gilligan, 1982 for the most notable response), Kohlberg’s scheme appears not to be related to moral behavior but to cognitive ability: even immoral people are able to score well on the scheme—they just develop more complicated justi cations for their untoward behavior. The scales do not work well when tested on children (Killen, 2007; Smetana & Turiel, 2003) and do not translate well across cultures (Menon & Shweder, 1994; Shweder et al., 2008). Although the details of Kohlberg’s approach have not stood up well to empirical and theoretical scrutiny, they were quite generative for others, and the idea that harm and injustice motivate moral reasoning has spread to other in uential approaches (Nucci, 1981; Nucci & Turiel, 1978; Turiel, 1983). Developmentally, these scholars argued, children learn that stealing is wrong, for example, by viewing the pain it causes others; emotions become the motivational foundation for the logical principles people develop as they age. Subsequent cross-cultural research suggests this focus on harm and justice as a core moral principle is found across cultures, including North America (Turiel et al., 1987, 1991), Korea (Song et al., 1987), Nigeria (Hollos et al., 1986), and the United States Virgin Islands (Nucci et al., 1983). Jonathan Haidt, conversely, traces his notion of social intuitionism back to the philosopher Hume, who famously suggested that reason should be a tool of our emotions, not the nal answer (Haidt, 2001). Haidt draws on dual-process psychology (Chaiken & Trope, 1999; Evans, 2008; Greene et al., 2004) to suggest that moral processing occurs instantly and intuitively, and not as the result of rational deliberation (see Haidt, p. 494

2006, 2012 for extended discussions). In the social intuitionist framework, people may use

reason to

solve a moral dilemma, but this occurs after the original emotional reaction to the dilemma has been made. People may seek out logical-enough arguments that support an intuitively derived conclusion after the fact, as opposed to being unbiased scientists following the data where it leads (Haidt, 2001). If your “gut” reaction tells you something is wrong, you are motivated to nd reasons to support that, with most adhering to their moral decision even when all logical supporting reasons are removed (Haidt, 2001).

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back to Kohlberg, Piaget (1932), and even Kant (1785), arguing that rationalized decision-making is the

The Development of Moral Emotions Within psychology, developmental literature largely focuses on the interplay between individual experiences and developmental stages. Moral emotional development is intricately tied up with moral emotions and moral cognition support early development of tendencies for more or less conventionally moral action (Ho man, 20010); emotions like shame can serve to restrict aggression, for example (Tangeny et al., 2007). Malti and Ongley (2014) suggest that children’s moral emotions are central for the development of moral reasoning, as they develop earlier than more cognitively advanced aspects of judgment (as the social intuitionist work would also indicate), but after the development of more primary emotions (see Turiel, this volume). When individuals are born, however, they arrive with a capacity for a range of possible bases of moral intuitions and capacities for emotion; yet only those intuitions that are backed by codes and ethics learned while growing up in a particular society persist into adulthood (Higgins, 1996; Huttenlocher, 1994, 2009; Spear, 2000). Morality is necessary for social life, and scholars like Haidt (2012) suggest that the development of societally delimited moral systems is evolutionarily adaptive; if individuals never pruned their moral intuitions from the range of evolved human possibilities, they would become frozen when confronted with situations evoking contradicting moral intuitions. Given that any social object (i.e., an idea, a person, a thing) has the potential to be moralized, based on a culture’s de nitions and priorities, human societies evidence variation on the amount of “sacredness” attached to such objects (see Thompson, this volume). Instead, cultures specialize in certain bases of morality while deemphasizing or disregarding others, such as when accentuating autonomy over sanctity. These priorities de ne the particular moral culture of a society, thereby forming foundations for common intuitive understandings of the social world (e.g., Inglehart & Baker, 2000, discussed later). Emotionally based intuitions that are prominent in a particular society as part of the moral discourse are strengthened, become more nuanced, and are deeply internalized across members’ life course, while those that are not societally reinforced fall by the wayside (Higgins, 1996). Perhaps the most in uential perspective linking individual functioning to the wider cultural context p. 495

involves the ubiquitous distinction between “Eastern” and “Western”

cultures: the

individualist/collectivist dimension. This perspective argues that people in these two types of cultures fundamentally perceive the world in di erent ways (Nisbett, 2004; Nisbett et al., 2001), with Easterners being holistic thinkers—paying more attention to the entire situation and using fewer analytic categories and less formal logic—in comparison to Westerners, who are more analytic thinkers. Yet others have argued for a focus on how wide-sweeping structural changes may alter the moral codes within the same society over time. Inglehart’s modernization thesis (Inglehart, 1990, 1995) connects trends in individual values to broad structural changes empirically linked with economic development. This tradition essentially nds that less-developed countries report concerns about law, order, and economic stability; as countries develop, their values shift in a more “modern” direction toward quality-of-life issues, as economic security feels more certain. This general trend is moderated by the particular cultural history of a nation (Inglehart & Baker, 2000), such that religious tradition shapes the form of the value shift toward modern and postmodern values; the trend in Muslim countries, for example, mirrors the general shift in Judeo-Christian nations, but with its own anchoring in di erent traditions and priorities. Moral priorities, and the attendant emotional force pointing the way toward which action possibilities “feel” right, are thus linked to both structure and cultural tradition.

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reasoning (e.g., the Kohlberg work discussed earlier; for a review, see Malti et al., 2014). On the whole, moral

Structures of Inequality and Moral Emotions As individuals develop their sense of morality, external forces are continually guiding and shaping their path. The dominant culture of a society is important here, as are the more nuanced and speci c issues, like the overall economic development of a country as per Inglehart, or where one is located within a society’s economic class system, are likewise developmentally important. People who grow up with more wealth, for example, may be more likely to engage in what is typically considered to be unethical behavior and have less empathy (Côté et al., 2013; Pi prosocial (Pi

et al., 2012), while those who grow up with less may be more

et al., 2010). This creates the context and regular features of children’s and adolescents’

everyday lives (Turiel, 1983, 2002), thereby continually serving as guides for the moral norms and values essential for their social group as located within the societal hierarchy.

Bases of Inequality in Society Elsewhere, we advance the argument that the environment of economic inequality also fundamentally shapes a society’s moral code (Hitlin & Harkness, 2018). We turn a light on inequality beyond one’s place in p. 496

the hierarchy to the e ects of being socialized in a

particular hierarchical structure. Coincidentally, our

work helps to answer Smetana’s call for more research on “how experiences in hierarchical structures and di erent social arrangements lead to variations in moral and social judgments” (Smetana, 2013, p. 41). Societies can be arrayed according to their relative levels of income inequality, with some experiencing exceedingly more inequality than others. This degree of inequality is important for everyday social interactions—of which morality is a huge component—because it gives form and contour to daily experience. Some societies are relatively equal; the people at the top of the system have more money and wealth than others, but not as signi cantly more as in highly unequal societies. More unequal nations tend to concentrate incomes and wealth within a comparatively few people, who may amass as much money as the rest of the whole of society, as in the notion of the “one percent” or even the “0.01%.” Traditionally, sociologists have focused either on the nature of inequality across societies or the ways that holding a particular level within a society a ects outcomes like health, occupational attainment, and family status. Where you fall in a system a ects your life, as we know from decades of sociological study, and this place in a drastically unequal society may have di erent e ects to being in that same place but in a more equal society. No matter where you fall in the economic hierarchy, the level of inequality changes the fabric of your culture and thereby a ects us all. Inequality is a large component of the backdrop or foundation against which people nd common ground. It is always “in the air,” so to speak, a ecting our cultural meanings, language, norms, and social action. Developmentally, it is important to focus on societal environments of inequality, as humans attune to inequality as social beings from a very, very early age. Even by age 10, children understand and apply principles of equality (Damon, 1984); however, some work suggests that at this early stage, “children are sensitive to inequality then, but it seems to upset them only when they themselves are the ones getting less” (Bloom, 2013, p. 80). Several theorists of morality posit that equality/inequality are foundational to the development of moral judgments. Piaget’s (1960/1932) work, for example, suggests two types of morality, the rst based on domination (from parents to children), the second on equality, a wider morality (Ossowska, 1970). Also, as a basis of morality, equality relationships are one of the four types of moral motives across cultures, as argued by Rai and Fiske (2011). Concerns about equality may therefore be fundamental to the development of our moral systems.

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microcultural climates a ected by locality, race, religion, and so on, within which children grow. Structural

Theory of Inequality and Moral Emotions Adam Smith recognized the stigmatization of poverty and the desire to appear respectable to the point of it being a basic life necessity (e.g. Smith 1982/1759). Keeping up appearances, however, is expensive and timecompare oneself. These comparisons do not simply disappear as one moves out of poverty; instead, individuals are constantly comparing themselves to others ascertaining their relative personal worth (Festinger, 1954). p. 497

Class-based comparisons also generate class identities and evaluations (Hout, 2008), further drawing boundaries around socioeconomic groups. This solidi es notions of “us” versus “them,” closing o

social

groups to outsiders (Milkie et al., 2014) and making the social-class hierarchy even more divisive (DiMaggio & Garip, 2012). The more unequal a society is, the more class closures are formed. This divisiveness leads to more exclusionary social networks, reduced engagement with others (loss of social capital), and lower trust, all of which may be particularly damaging to the taken-for-granted social fabric that holds a social group together (Uslane, 2002; Putnam, 2000). Being able to trust others allows us to form deeper connections with people and, through these connections, gain information, material resources, services, collective engagement, and e

cacy. All this leads to greater reciprocity, interdependence, solidarity, and donation of

time and money to helping others, and simply makes our communities stronger (i.e., social capital; see Cook, 2014). Without trust, strangers do not have the opportunity to become our acquaintances or friends, and people lose all the bene ts these potential connections may have provided, and our communities experience a loss of civic engagement. On one level, these inequalities represent di erential access to resources—money, power—serving to bene t some over others. People with more education and nancial means are linked to having better health, for example (Link & Phelan, 1995; Willson et al., 2007). However, we are focusing on the more social psychological aspects of these processes—the ways unequal economic systems lter down into the behaviors, beliefs, feelings, and understandings that people have that serve to reproduce those systems. Inequality creates legitimated social divisions, leading to constant comparisons and competitions between various points along the hierarchy—however steep the hierarchy may be. More equal societies have fewer points of comparison and more similarities: it is easier to “keep up with the Joneses’ ” and stay in good social standing. Unequal societies, however, have many points of comparison, no matter one’s place in the distribution. Coming up short gets “under the skin” and leads to feelings of inferiority, disengagement, a diminishment of self-esteem and e

cacy, more negative emotions, increased stress, and lowered trust—all while the

system remains socially valid, legitimate, and largely uncontested (though see Snow & Owens, 2014, for a review of inequality and social movements). Even in the face of modern political movements aimed at reducing such inequalities, change is slow, and the resistance to such political movements is strong (with resistance often having a strong moral basis). Further, these structural inequalities are wrapped up in and help to constitute our cultural meanings and rules for interaction. Thus, not only do unequal structural arrangements cause harm, but they also a ect the cultural information that is passed down through our generations, to recreate these very inequalities for decades, if not centuries to come. It is this point—that structure informs culture and culture a ects structure—that is crucial for understanding how societal levels of inequality a ect moral codes of action and reaction. The often overlooked issue is that these ways of understanding the world have a moral component; people do not just learn that the world “is” a certain way, but many of these structural and cultural forces shaped our belief that the world “should” be that way. Individuals develop this sense of “rightness.”

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intensive—resources few can easily a ord. More rungs on the ladder mean more Jones’ to whom one can

More inequality, we argue, leads to more opportunities for interactions shaped by di erences in status, p. 498

more emotionally loaded categorizations, and thus more negatively

valenced moral content. In societies

with a highly diversi ed strati cation hierarchy—where the disparities between the top, middle, and bottom of the ladder are vast—there is the constant threat of losing one’s place and falling below. Also, people know what this “below” looks like because it is already there for us to see, even if just in media position and, when mobility is blocked, strive to at least secure their current position. This valorizes those above while simultaneously raising awareness of threats from all other sides. When this occurs in societies with more perceived possibilities to move up and down the economic ladder, sanctioning oneself and others may be the more common moral emotional experience, because sanctioning maintains hierarchy and one’s pursuit of more. Sanctioning yourself keeps you on the righteous path of advancement by noting your faults. Sanctioning others keeps them in line and below—and in highly unequal societies, most people are probably below. Inequality can be highly divisive. As psychologist Susan Fiske argues (2011), individuals have perhaps an innate drive to pay automatic attention to the things that divide us hierarchically, with income inequality being a prime example. When this occurs, she argues, people tend to envy those above them and scorn those below. No one is immune to these general processes of social comparison, but with increasing income inequality, these threats to self and others become ever more acute. By envying others, individuals may long for their superior place in the hierarchy but feel bitter about it all the same, while scorning others entails either actively or passively denying the legitimacy of those beneath us. Both envy and scorn are associated with sanctioning moral emotions: envy with feelings of anger and shame, and scorn with disgust and disdain. Shame, in particular, becomes more intense when experienced as a result of the judgments of those with more social distance (Tang et al., 2008). Contempt and disdain may arise from breaking community norms, such as disobeying the hierarchical structure of the society (Fiske, 2011; Rozin et al., 1999). In more equal societies, people are more similarly arrayed and the divisions between social groups are, by de nition, less vast. This allows for less threat and a greater sense of similarity of experience and position, allowing for greater understanding, empathy, and compassion. One does not need to worry so much about “falling” or “rising”—there simply is not that far to go, and basic, comparable living standards are generally assured. If one does transgress, the rami cations are not nearly so threatening as in a more unequal society, where one’s livelihood and future opportunities could very well be at stake.

Future Directions and Conclusions In sum, we argue that societal levels of inequality fundamentally shift the type of moral-emotion reactions its members experience and utilize, and, importantly, develop. Members of more equal cultures tend to be more prosocial and communal, resulting in a greater use of compassionate and praising moral emotions. p. 499

Conversely, members of

more inequitable cultures, where the hierarchical environment is an everyday

presence, will be more likely to sanction both themselves and others for moral acts: order must be maintained, people kept in their appropriate place, while the threat of falling lower in the hierarchy and the pressure to advance is omnipresent. We take the strong position of linking economic inequality “all the way down” to the individual in part to motivate other scholars to examine these wide-ranging links with di erent tools. In our own work, we nd empirical support for this theory of inequality and moral emotion (Hitlin & Harkness, 2018), but much more work remains to be done. First, there are several “types” of potential inequality in a society; we have focused on the broadest and most commonly measured economic type. However, societies di er by race, religion, gender composition, degree of urbanization, and other factors that stratify power and resources.

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portrayals. The specter is real. Those at the top ght to keep their place, while many others ght for a higher

We know that people can be shaped by their access to power, status, or resources in a society; we know less about how each particular social structure in uences us. Second, we know even less about how these structural factors become embedded in new members of a society, like children. Finally, we end with a call for more research on this topic using a variety of methodological techniques. Our empirical support, using a wide array of data, is necessary to better understand the morality link between structure and the moral self.

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own empirical work draws largely on empirically grounded, culturally speci c simulation data, but more

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The Oxford Handbook of Emotional Development Daniel Dukes (ed.) et al. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/978019 8855903.001.0001 9780191889516

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CHAPTER

35 Emotional Skillfulness and Virtue Acquisition  Mario De Caro, Maria Silvia Vaccarezza, Ariele Niccoli https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198855903.013.3 Published: 13 January 2022

Pages 503–512

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Published: 2022

Abstract In this chapter, the authors o er a sketch of the state of the art as concerns existing accounts of virtue acquisition in relation to automaticity. In particular, the chapter focuses on the so-called “skill picture of the mind. Then, the authors propose an account of skillful emotions by identifying the features that make them both automatic and embedded in an intelligent practice. Finally, the authors show how this view can help the skill model by o ering a better description of emotion shaping in virtue acquisition. By doing so, they contend that emotions contribute autonomously and actively to the skillfulness of the habits in which they are embedded.

Keywords: virtue acquisition, skill model, automaticity challenge, emotion shaping, emotional skillfulness Subject: Psychology, Developmental Psychology Series: Oxford Library of Psychology Collection: Oxford Handbooks Online

Automatic Processes and Moral Development IN

the current debate over moral habits, within and beyond virtue ethics, a defense of the rationality of the

automatic processes involved in habits has emerged. Promoters of the so-called “automaticity challenge” hold a broadly sentimentalist account of moral judgment and cognition that aims to o er “an empirical refutation of rationalist models of moral judgement” (Sauer, 2012, p. 256). Therefore, because of the automaticity of habits, they deny that habits encompass deliberation and that they can count as rational. For example, Haidt’s social intuitionism and Prinz’s sentimentalism exclude any genuine role of moral reasoning for moral judgment formation and make it explanatorily inert by claiming that it can, at most, provide post hoc rationalizations, more similar to confabulations than to verbalizations of previous reasoning toward moral judgment. This challenge to rationalist explanations of judgment formation equates the automaticity of moral judgments with their being intuitive and issued by System I—the evolutionarily older, emotionally hot, fast, and mostly preconscious mental subsystem (cf. Sauer, 2012)— that is, with their being products of “mere habits.” In response, several authors have o ered accounts of moral habits according to which, despite their being nondeliberative and largely constituted by automatic processes, habits can count as intelligent and bring about virtuous, or moral, overt actions after a history of practice and repetition (e.g., Sherman, 1999; Pollard, 2003; Snow, 2006; Sauer, 2018). In arguing for this thesis, most of the authors involved focus on the underlying reasons for action, and on the long-term goals encompassed by habits, and hold that it is the p. 504

rationality of such reasons and goals that, in turn, makes the related automatic

processes intelligent,

albeit deliberation-free (cf. Kurth, 2018). To put it more clearly, according to this picture, automatic processes count as intelligent when they are brought in line with reasons and goals provided by moral reasoning and deliberation. The diverse positions on the market can be thus traced back to a common underlying argumentative strategy that can be summarized as follows: 1) There are di erent components of automatic processes and moral habits, one of which is potentially irrational or blind; and this component is the emotional one.

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model,” which the authors aim to improve by questioning its rather common underlying dualistic

2) However, emotions can be shaped or reformed by being brought in line with judgments and deliberations issued by moral reasoning. 3) Thus, automatic processes and habits can be rational.

(re)formation of emotions and, more generally, of intuitive and automatic processes, that aims at bringing them in line with correct moral judgments reached through deliberation. A revealing example of this is what Sherman states: Many morally problematic attitudes have at their core emotions that require reform … Change that penetrates not merely conduct but attitude must work on those emotions and their constitutive evaluations. The aim is to bring these constitutive evaluations in line with re ective and justi ed beliefs. (Sherman, 1999, p. 46 [emphasis in original]; see also Sauer, 2012, 2017) Among virtue ethicists, Kristjánsson has partially mitigated this stance and devoted much e ort to showing that emotions can “to varying degrees, ‘share in reason’—which is di erent from merely being controlled or policed by reason” (2018, p. 19). The cognitive content of emotions, expressible in propositional form, remains the key marker of their (good) development (for a discussion on the development of cognitive reappraisal, see De France & Hollenstein, this volume). Being, like Kristjánsson, among the virtue ethicists who attempt to defend the intelligence of (good) habits despite their automaticity, we think it is worth spending a few more words on proposers of the skill model of virtue. Roughly, the skill analogy holds that moral development (i.e., virtue acquisition) can be fruitfully modeled on the acquisition of a practical skill, which implies a gradual re nement and adjustment of actions, feelings, and thoughts through a history of practice and repetition. This model, developed within a neo-Aristotelian virtue-ethical framework, directly addresses the problem of the interplay among skillful agents between the deliberative, articulated, e ortful intellectual activity and the intuitive, immediate, e ortless (i.e., automatic) way to face a situation. Depending on the emphasis placed on deliberative or automatic processes, di erent accounts of skilled performance and expertise (and, by extension, of virtue as skill and ethical expertise) take an intellectualistic stance (e.g., Stanley, 2001, 2011; Annas, 1995, 2011) or an anti-intellectualistic one (e.g., Dreyfus & Dreyfus, 1986, 1991), both reproducing a pyramidal picture of the p. 505

1

mind. A more balanced version of

the skill model of virtue has recently been put forward by Stichter

(2018), who grounds his work in self-regulation theory (i.e., goal setting and striving) and attempts to o er a nuanced account of skillfulness as a ne-grained and synergistic integration of deliberative and automatic processes. Also, against the view that locates the automaticity of virtuous action in its skillfulness, Rees and Webber (2014) argue that one should distinguish among di erent kinds of automaticity, and that ndings of empirical psychology support a view according to which the automaticity of virtuous action is automaticity not of technique, but of motivation. Anyway, among the proponents of the skill model of virtue, emotions as a key component of the automatic processes involved in moral habits have received relatively little attention (but see Fridland, 2017). In sum, besides their relevant di erences, both opposers and defenders of the rationality of habits place emotions and reason in opposition, as if they were independent and incompatible explanations of moraljudgment formation, the former leading to a denial and the latter to a defense of the intelligence of habits; however, by doing so, the two groups appeal to very dubious hierarchical, or pyramidical, views of the mind. The idea that cognitive functions and emotions are clearly separated, and that between them there is a hierarchical relation (in either direction), is at odds with the results of some very interesting work in cognitive science and neurobiology. In this light, a more preferable view, and one that is gaining traction in cognitive science, sees the emotional and the rational component of the mind as working synergistically,

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Along this line of thought, most virtue-ethical accounts of emotional development comprise a

without one being superior to the other. In a recent article, Okon–Singer et al. (2015) have convincingly argued that: the distinction between the ‘emotional’ and the ‘cognitive’ brain is fuzzy and context-dependent… [E]motion and cognition are deeply interwoven in the fabric of the brain, suggesting that widely fundamentally awed. (Okon–Singer et al., 2015, p. 1) Evidence of the constantly nonhierarchical interaction between cognition and emotion is o ered in regard to mental phenomena such as memory, attention, control, drive, and motivation, and increasingly also in regard to neuropsychiatric disorders such as anxiety disorders, depression, schizophrenia, substance abuse, chronic pain, and autism (Pessoa, 2008; De Oliveira–Souza et al., 2011; De Caro & Marra a, 2015). It is time that moral psychology also accepts the idea that cognition and emotion, far from being in a hierarchical relation, constantly interact in a synergic way (see Reddy & Vanello, this volume; Turiel, this volume; Walle et al., this volume). In the next section, we argue for the existence of skillful emotions that are intelligent despite their automaticity (Fridland, 2015) and that represent the emotional components of the virtues. Finally, we illustrate our account by looking at the processes of habitualization and virtue acquisition from the point of view of the emotions, and by seeing how they become intelligent, not only by internalizing reasons, but mostly by developing their own inner skillfulness.

p. 506

How Emotions Become Skillful A key move toward understanding the skillfulness of emotions is to take a closer look at the notion of automaticity. In psychology, emotions have long been studied as a mixture of automatic and controlled processes (see Barrett et al., 2007 for a critical discussion of dual-process models in emotion theory); similarly, the philosophy of emotions has mostly identi ed features that emotions share with automatic processes. For the purposes of this chapter, we need to recall three basic features of emotions: (1) typically, they are experienced as passive a ective states, which often occur to us involuntarily, and are not under the direct control of deliberative processes; (2) they involve fast activation of patterns of bodily changes; and (3) 2

they prepare us to act.

In recent years, both in psychology and in philosophy of action, much has been done to overcome a simplistic view of automaticity (e.g., Bargh, 1994; Douskos, 2019; Fridland, 2015; Logan, 1985; Moors & De Houwer, 2006; Schneider & Chein, 2003). Theoretical and empirical research convincingly shows that the category of automaticity should be unpacked into several distinct features that relate to one another in di erent ways, none of which alone de nes what counts as automatic. Accordingly, we should do our best to resist the “conceptual slip from ‘automatic’ to ‘unintelligent’ ” (Fridland, 2015, p. 4337). Before proceeding, a caveat is needed. In this chapter, we take “automaticity” as an umbrella term speci ed by features that apply to it, and we consider, among the several features of automaticity proposed by di erent scholars, only the relevant ones for the role emotions could play in the virtue-as-skill model. According to a gradual view of automaticity, the best way to account for it is to identify various continua (e.g., [un]intentional, fast-slow, [non]e

cient) that, taken together, circumscribe the set of features to

which the umbrella term “automaticity” refers. In short, the idea is that the more a given process is appropriately trained, the more it moves from one pole to the other of the continua (Logan, 1985; Moors & De Houwer, 2006). It is worth noting that the concept of gradual automaticity claims to have internal

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held beliefs about the key constituents of ‘the emotional brain’ and ‘the cognitive brain’ are

consistency (i.e., changes in various features should converge), but allows each feature to change along a continuum at its own speed and in response to di erent amounts and kinds of training. Thus, a given automatic process can be more or less intentional, fast, e

cient, and the like, depending on the kind and

amount of training. Think, for example, of learning how to drive a car. According to a gradual approach to automaticity, shifting gears may become an e

cient action but still remains, for a certain time, very slow

attention to be accomplished e

ciently; eventually (and hopefully!) speed, unintentionality, and e

ciency

in shifting gears converge and make someone a skilled driver in that respect. However, the time needed for each feature to change, and the way each change a ects the others, depend on the amount and kind of training (in addition to the characteristics of the learner). In the speci c case of emotions, we argue that there are two relevant continua: from insulated to cognitively penetrable, and from impulsive to spontaneous. It is precisely by moving from the rst of the two poles to p. 507

the second that an emotion becomes skillful.

Presenting features of emotions as distributed along

continua puts us in a position to make a few claims about substantial theoretical points. For instance, at one pole of a continuum we allow for some emotional episodes to be almost cognitively impenetrable, whereas at the opposite pole some emotional episodes are highly sensitive to their cognitive background. This strategy seems to us to be a very promising way to look at emotions from a developmental perspective and to be consistent with core claims about emotional development in most virtue-ethical accounts.

From Insulated to Cognitively Penetrable Our rst claim is that skillful emotions are (relatively) cognitively penetrable, as opposed to insulated. As Peter Goldie argues, an emotion’s “cognitive impenetrability admits of degrees, and need not be total” (2000, p. 77). The notion of cognitive (im)penetrability points to the (im)possibility for a certain psychological process (e.g., visual perception) to be in uenced by higher-order cognitive capacities (e.g., beliefs). It is important to notice here that for there to be cognitive penetrability, a mere causal relation is not su

cient. Rather, a

process is cognitively penetrable when it is sensitive to the intentional content of cognitive states in a meaningful and semantically coherent way. Imagine, for example, an expert woodcutter habituated to carefully pay attention to subtle rustles in the grass, in order to avoid vipers that spread in its territory. He has learned to ignore a wide range of noises and selectively detect the peculiar rustle of snakes, but each time he perceives that kind of rustle, he feels an appropriate fear that helps him to skillfully address the situation. Suppose, now, that our woodcutter moves to Sardinia, an island where vipers are absolutely absent. Initially, the same kind of rustle triggers the same kind of fear, but little by little his wellestablished emotional reaction starts to become milder. When he perceives the relevant stimuli, his heartbeat and blood pressure do not increase, his eyes do not immediately turn, he does not tighten his hold on the hatchet, and does not feel acute discomfort. Rather, he keeps on working and only takes a glimpse to the grass whenever a rustle occurs. His fear has been penetrated by the (true) belief that, in Sardinia, rustles in the grass cannot signal a viper. Our view presupposes a rejection of the account of emotions as “a ect programs” (e.g., Gri

ths, 1997;

Prinz, 2004), according to which systems responsible for emotions are largely modular (Fodor, 1983). That is, emotions as a ect programs are, among other things: (1) automatic; (2) triggered by a restricted class of stimuli; and (3) cognitively impenetrable (Deonna & Teroni, 2012, p. 20). Indeed, it has recently been argued that the alleged link between automaticity and cognitive impenetrability is weaker than usually supposed. Fridland (2015), for example, shows that, even if we adopt the narrowest and most demanding view of cognitive penetrability (Pylyshyn, 2000; Macpherson, 2012), some behaviors automatically performed within the exercise of motor skill exhibit meaningful sensitivity to the intentional content of cognitive

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and intentional. After a while, shifting gears becomes progressively faster but still requires a fair share of

p. 508

states. In short, “at least some automatic processes seem to be directly cognitively penetrable” (Fridland, 2015,

p. 4355). This conclusion is in line with Deonna and Teroni (2012, see p. 26), who argue that, even

for those emotions that are the most suitable instances of a ect programs (e.g., fear), it is questionable that they are in principle disconnected from the content of higher cognitive capacities (see also Vance, 2004). What is important to notice for our purposes is that not every automatic behavior turns out to be cognitively Thus, emotions can be at the same time automatic in some respect (e.g., fast and not guided by deliberative processes) and cognitively penetrable; and their meaningful connection with higher cognitive processes 3

(i.e., their cognitive penetrability) increases by training them within the practice of skill acquisition.

From Impulsive to Spontaneous Our second claim is that skillful emotions occur spontaneously, rather than impulsively. The distinction between impulsivity and spontaneousness has recently been articulated (Douskos, 2019) to discriminate di erent kinds of automaticity. Its original use is to identify habits and skills as di erent kinds of dispositions, insofar as they exhibit di erent varieties of automaticity after a history of practice and repetition, and to criticize the view that assimilates and overlaps the two dispositions (e.g., Dreyfus & Dreyfus, 1986; Pollard, 2008). This distinction, however, if conceived as a continuum rather than as an opposition, fruitfully applies to the emotions, and allows us to weaken another requirement of a ect programs—namely, the alleged link between automaticity and the dependence on a well-de ned class of stimuli. Emotions, in a manner similar to both habits and skills, exhibit automaticity to the extent that they rule out deliberation. However, unlike habits, when the agent regularly responds to a given situation in the same way, emotions can be trained to resemble skills, to the e ect that the agent experiencing them addresses a given situation by paying attention to how she is doing so. Additionally, while impulsivity, such as that displayed in habits, triggers the same emotional response in the face of a given class of stimuli, spontaneousness, embodied by skillful emotions, entails both an openness to a large variety of features and a durable engagement to nd the best way to feel in order to achieve a goal. What makes a crucial di erence for developing spontaneity out of impulsivity is the training of attention, conceived as goal-dependent sensitivity. Think about the attempt to train young children in feeling compassion and an empathetic concern for their classmates, both of which are crucial skillful emotions encompassed by the virtues of generosity and kindness. One thing, we claim, is—as the traditional skill model of virtue acquisition seems to suggest—to canalize impulsivity via the mechanical repetition of speci c actions aimed at instilling a routine where kindness has arisen (e.g., always sharing their snacks; inviting to their house a classmate who never gets invitations from anyone else). Another thing, however, is to allow them to experience genuinely what it is like to be kind by pointing their attention toward salient p. 509

features of the situation.

This attention training might include helping them notice that one of their

classmates is isolated from the rest of the group; encouraging them to imagine what it would be like to be that child; showing them examples of generous behavior outside the school environment, and of the grateful joy of its bene ciaries; and also setting an example, in the rst place, of what sharing with others means, and focusing their attention on how pleasurable it is for the giver. At some point in this process, we claim, a child acquires a skilled emotion of compassion, and an ability to notice when and where it is relevant, with an automaticity that does not require explicit deliberation but is also not blindly impulsive. The operation of disentangling varieties of automaticity shows, therefore, that emotions, despite their typical absence of deliberation, can involve attention to very di erent degrees. Thus, when moving from impulsive to spontaneous, emotions can develop from xed and stereotyped “a ect programs” (highly

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penetrable; only those that are (successfully) shaped by minded practice and learning (Fridland, 2015).

stimulus-dependent) to exible a ective phenomena capable of making speci c, value-related cues in the environment salient (De Sousa, 1987; Lance & Tanesini, 2004).

Emotional Practice and Virtue Acquisition that is, virtue acquisition—aimed at adopting the right evaluative attitudes about the world. This, in our view, should not be conceived as top–down regulation exerted by moral judgment on a ective phenomena, but as a deeply integrated developmental path along which processes usually taken as unintelligent show their own way to increase sensitivity to values. Our proposed account of skillful emotions, albeit only in outline, can help improve the description of emotion shaping in virtue acquisition and make sense of how emotional reactions gradually shift from a gross to a more subtle and re ned manner of being automatic. This is one way, we argue, that moral dispositions can become automatic despite preserving and even increasing their intelligence. Here, we can only hint brie y at such implications, which amount to two main conceptual shifts a skill model of virtue acquisition should undertake to overcome a dualistic view of the mind. These remarks should not be seen as practical strategies on how to improve training programs, but as conceptual adjustments on how to conceive the “trainee” (i.e., the emotions themselves) so as to elaborate such strategies as a consequence. First, as the proposal of skillful (i.e., intelligent) emotions suggests, rather than being brought in line with judgments and deliberations issued by moral reasoning, emotions are intrinsically penetrable by higherlevel cognitive capacities. Thus, the aim of a proper training program aimed at virtue-as-skill acquisition should not amount to “domesticating” emotional reactions by bringing them under the guidance of p. 510

reasoning and deliberation, but rather to training their penetrability and openness to the overall

set of

cognitive activities of the agent (e.g., repeatedly drawing attention to meaningful connections among a ective experiences, re ective evaluative judgments, and conduct). Secondly, our remarks on the spontaneousness, rather than impulsiveness, of skillful emotions should help reformulate an account of virtues as a spontaneous, second nature that encompasses skillful emotions made capable of attentiveness and sensitivity to a number of details through a long training period. In this respect, the idea of spontaneousness as a exible and goal-oriented attitude suggests that to successfully exercise a skill, the suitable responses related to a certain goal need to be highly di erentiated and open to innovation. The development of skillful emotions, then, requires that a ective experience be taken as a source of feedback of a deliberate practice—that is, making one’s own emotions ne-grained and tailored responses to values (D’Arms, 2013). Let us think about one of the exceptionally courageous re ghters who had to ght Notre Dame Cathedral’s devastating re. In our view, they are someone whose fear has become skillful enough to successfully incorporate informational content provided by cognitive capacities and to remain open to innovative solutions in order to display the best solution the particular circumstances call for. The skillfulness of their fear plays a crucial role in appropriately addressing questions concerning the strategies to enact, the proper 4

amount of risk to bear, and, considering other commitments, the right degree of exposure to danger. Also, it becomes part of their skillful fear to be able to respond to the situation in nonstandardized ways and balance exposure to danger with stimuli o ered by other features of the situation. It is important to note that having trained a skilled emotion of fear does not necessarily mean that one feels a reduced amount of fear; rather, it means that a proper degree (i.e., that which is adaptive) of such emotion is activated, depending on the context.

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Emotions, like actions and re ective capacities, can be part of a broader enterprise of (self-) regulation—

Conclusion To sum up, the process of virtue acquisition should be reformulated in terms of a speci c training of emotions aimed at developing their inner skillfulness, rather than bringing them under the guidance of cold 5

automaticity.

Notes 1.

An exception is represented by De Caro et al.ʼs account of ethical expertise (2018; De Caro et al., 2021).

2.

These minimal assumptions about emotions are compatible with major theoretical approaches, but not with hard judgmental theories that rule out a substantial role of the body for explaining emotions.

3.

The higher cognitive capacities and the specific content that penetrate the emotions involved depend on the specific skillacquisition process. As is plain, becoming an expert at chess as opposed to firefighting encompasses di erent cognitive capacities and di erent knowledge.

4.

The case of firefightersʼ decision-making is addressed by Stichter (2018) in terms of schemas and mental models.

5.

Along these lines, De Caro & Vaccarezza (2020) outline an account of practical wisdom as ethical expertise which is based on the idea of the priority to phronesis over individual ethical virtues.

p. 511

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reasoning. This, we suspect, makes a strong case for the intelligence of moral habits, despite their

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The Oxford Handbook of Emotional Development Daniel Dukes (ed.) et al. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/978019 8855903.001.0001 9780191889516

Online ISBN: Print ISBN:

9780198855903

Search in this book

CHAPTER

36 The Prosocial Functions of Guilt in Early Childhood  Amrisha Vaish https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198855903.013.42 Published: 13 January 2022

Pages 513–525

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Published: 2022

Abstract Humans are immensely social and cooperative beings: We rely heavily on our cooperative relationships to survive and succeed as individuals and as a species. When such relationships break down, therefore, this requirement, and that a nascent guilt does so from remarkably early in development. By 3 years of age (and to some degree, even 2 years of age), when children cause someone harm, they show an increased motivation to repair that harm, and to do so themselves. This nascent guilt allows even the youngest members of our species to participate in and maintain their valuable cooperative relationships. However, future work will need to clarify the nature of early guilt and to more clearly di erentiate it from related but distinct psychological processes.

Keywords: cooperation, guilt, prosocial behavior, prosocial emotions, shame Subject: Psychology, Developmental Psychology Series: Oxford Library of Psychology Collection: Oxford Handbooks Online

Introduction HUMANS

are a highly prosocial species. Our survival and success depend on living and cooperating with one

another, such as by helping people in need, working together to build shelters and nd food, assisting each other with childcare, and so forth. Strikingly, we cooperate not only with kin but even with strangers, and often at a cost to ourselves (Sober & Wilson, 1998). Equally strikingly, cooperation is evident from early in development: Across cultures, infants and young children demonstrate a remarkable propensity for prosocial behaviors such as helping, sharing with, and comforting others (Callaghan et al., 2011; Warneken, 2015). However, cooperation can result in greater loss for cooperators than non-cooperators because they invest resources (such as time and money), whereas non-cooperators can bene t from the products of the cooperation without investing any resources at all (Fehr & Fischbacher, 2004). This raises the question: If cooperators stand to lose more than non-cooperators, how can cooperation be maintained? Why would an individual ever put aside their sel sh interests to bene t others? One answer is that natural selection has favored psychological mechanisms that help us solve the problem of cooperation (see Viana et al., this volume). In particular, we have evolved emotions that nudge us toward prosocial behaviors and away from sel sh behaviors, thereby enhancing our ability to engage in and bene t from cooperative enterprises (Fessler & Haley, 2003). A great deal of theoretical and empirical work has already laid out which emotions serve these prosocial functions, and how they do so (e.g., Fessler & Haley, 2003; Frank, 1988; Nesse, 1990; Tangney et al., 2007), but until recently, relatively little attention had been p. 514

paid to the prosocial functions of emotions in

early development. Yet, if we aim to understand the roots

and mechanisms underlying human prosociality, we must necessarily understand their ontogenetic emergence (Vaish & Hepach, 2020). This, broadly, is the aim of this chapter. In particular, I will focus on the emergence and prosocial functions of one important motivator of prosocial behavior: guilt.

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it is vital that they are repaired. This chapter argues that the prosocial emotion of guilt helps us meet

What Is Guilt? The emotion of guilt has been of interest to psychologists and clinicians for a long time. In psychoanalytic theory, for instance, guilt is viewed as the superego’s response to one’s own inappropriate impulses, often This type of guilt is typically seen as the source or symptom of psychological distress, anxiety, depression, and problems with adjustment (Eisenberg, 2000; Kroll & Egan, 2004). In behaviorist approaches, guilt is a conditioned anxiety response to anticipated punishment, or is learned by watching others being punished for particular behaviors (Katchadourian, 2010). More recently, however, some researchers have emphasized the interpersonal nature and prosocial functions of this emotion. According to this view, although guilt can be elicited by a variety of events (including simple norm transgressions or being better o

than others), the core elicitor is the in iction of

intentional or unintentional harm on another person, particularly in relationships with valuable social partners (Baumeister et al., 1994; Ho man, 1982; Keltner & Buswell, 1996). The aversive feelings of guilt after causing harm motivate transgressors to repair the damage they caused and alter their future behavior (to avoid further guilt). These actions serve in turn to maintain and strengthen our valuable relationships (Baumeister et al., 1994; Tangney & Dearing, 2002). Guilt may also become a core aspect of children’s conscience and thus contribute to the development of prosocial behavior (Dahl et al., 2011; Kochanska & Aksan, 2006). The emotion of guilt is thus nely tuned to help us sustain our valuable social relationships. Seen this way, guilt is closely related to but importantly distinct from shame. Though both emotions are aversive and both are elicited by moral transgressions, guilt involves a negative evaluation of the speci c transgressive act (“I did that terrible thing”), whereas shame involves a negative evaluation of the global self (“I did that terrible thing”) (Lewis, 1971; Tangney & Dearing, 2002). A negative evaluation of the transgressive act allows the person who feels guilty to focus on making amends, such as by confessing, apologizing, and repairing the harm or otherwise mending the valued relationship. On the other hand, a negative evaluation of the global self, as in the context of shame, is both more painful (because one’s core self is seen as defective) and less likely to motivate adaptive, reparative behavior (because simply repairing the damage cannot repair one’s whole self). Research with adults provides evidence for these di erential p. 515

e ects of shame and guilt (de Hooge et al., 2007; Tangney & Dearing, 2002). Guilt is thus generally considered an adaptive, prosocial emotion, whereas shame is seen as maladaptive and an inhibitor of prosocial behavior (but see de Hooge et al., 2008; Leach & Cidam, 2015; Sznycer, 2019; Tangney et al., 2014). Feeling guilty is also importantly distinct from the fear of punishment. Whereas guilty feelings involve distress about the transgression and its harmful consequences on a potential victim, fear of punishment involves distress about the expectation of negative consequences for the self (Baumeister et al., 1994). Furthermore, guilt can clearly be experienced in situations in which there is no likelihood of punishment, 1

such as when the victim is not in a position to retaliate or when no one will nd out who caused the harm. Of course, distinguishing the emotion of guilt from these related phenomena does not preclude the possibility that guilt co-occurs with them. Thus, we may simultaneously experience shame and guilt, or

guilt and fear, or even all three emotions. Nonetheless, guilt is the clearest prosocial motivator among them. A great deal of research with adults provides evidence of the vital prosocial functions that the emotion of guilt serves. In one study, college students were asked to carry out a task using a machine, but advised to be careful because the experimenter would not receive his degree if the machine broke. Then, participants were made to believe that they had damaged the machine, either mildly or severely. Later, the experimenter asked participants for help on an unrelated task. Participants who believed they had severely harmed the experimenter (and thus presumably experienced greater guilt) helped the experimenter more than those who caused mild harm (Brock & Becker, 1966). Similarly, individuals in another study who were made to

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rooted in childhood con icts and anxiety about parental punishment or abandonment (Eisenberg, 2000).

feel guilty after behaving uncooperatively in a decision-making game were more likely to behave cooperatively on subsequent rounds of the game than people who did not feel guilty (Ketelaar & Au, 2003; see also Carlsmith & Gross, 1969; de Hooge et al., 2007; Regan et al., 1972). Feelings of guilt thus increase the motivation to make amends or to otherwise compensate the person one has harmed, thereby helping repair and sustain valuable cooperative relationships.

prosocial functions? Does it allow even young children to repair and maintain their valuable relationships? The remainder of this chapter will review what we know so far and lay out some open questions for future work.

The Development of Guilt and Its Prosocial Functions The empirical study of the early development and functions of guilt proves to be rather challenging. One reason is that the emotion of guilt seems not to have a single, identi able facial expression; instead, transgressors who feel guilty generally express contrition and the desire to repair, sometimes accompanied by some negative a ect (Fessler & Haley, 2003; Keltner & Buswell, 1996). One also cannot rely on p. 516

conventional verbal

expressions of guilt such as “sorry” because young children rarely produce these

spontaneously (Kochanska et al., 1995). Moreover, one cannot of course simply interview toddlers or preschoolers about their experiences of guilt, as their verbal and introspective abilities are not yet well developed. To tackle this challenging question, then, researchers of early guilt generally observe children in mildly guilt-inducing situations; that is, situations in which children believe they have caused a minor mishap or 2

harmed someone. Within these situations, they measure children’s a ective and behavioral responses.

Research using this approach has revealed that as early as 2 years of age, children show guilt-like responses after they have caused someone harm. For instance, when children believe they have broken an experimenter’s favorite doll, they often respond with negative a ect, confessing, apologizing, and making reparative attempts or comments (Barrett et al., 1993; Kochanska et al., 1995; Zahn–Waxler & Kochanska, 1990). This hints that even young toddlers may experience guilt after causing harm, which may motivate them to make amends. A concern with this interpretation, however, is that in the absence of comparisons with appropriate control situations (i.e., situations that have a similar structure but are missing the critical guilt-relevant elements), it is di

cult to be con dent that these responses really do reveal the workings of guilt. For instance, young

children may show similar responses even when they did not cause the other person’s distress but only observed the other in distress and thus experienced sympathy (or feelings of concern) for the victim. There is a great deal of evidence that by 14–18 months of age, children sympathize with and act prosocially toward those in distress or victims of harm (e.g., Bischof–Köhler, 1991; Vaish et al., 2009; Zahn–Waxler et al., 1992). Moreover, in some studies in which 1.5- to 2-year-olds sometimes caused and sometimes observed another person’s distress, children displayed similar levels of prosocial and reparative behaviors in both types of situations (see Zahn–Waxler & Kochanska, 1990; Zahn–Waxler & Robinson, 1995; though see Demetriou & Hay, 2004). It is thus possible that even when young children cause another’s distress, their reparative and prosocial behaviors are motivated by sympathy rather than guilt. Interestingly, 1.5- to 2-year-old children do show some evidence of di erentiating between the caused and witnessed harm. For instance, they make more active e orts to understand the witnessed harm than the harm they caused (Zahn–Waxler et al., 1992). Though suggestive, such di erences are also inconclusive because children may simply show these distinct reactions when they cause versus witness any outcome,

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The question of interest to us here is: When in development does the emotion of guilt begin to serve its vital

whether harmful or not. For example, children may work more actively to nd out why a toy is making an interesting sound if they did not cause it to make the sound. In sum, observing young children’s responses in guilt-inducing situations is an extremely important rst step, but is not by itself su

cient to inform us about whether those responses are indeed motivated by guilt.

controlled experiments that allow us to compare children’s responses in guilt-inducing versus similar but non-guilt-inducing situations. Some recent research has begun to move in this direction. One relevant p. 517

experimental study, for example, sought to distinguish guilt

from closely related but distinct processes.

Guilt is argued to emerge from the conjunction of two key components: sympathy for a victim of harm, and 3

awareness that one is responsible for causing that harm (Ho man, 1982). Though both components may separately promote reparative and prosocial actions, neither by itself quali es as guilt, and thus neither should enhance reparative and prosocial motivations as e ectively as guilt. To test this idea, my colleagues and I designed a study that attempted to tease apart guilt from its two proposed components (Vaish et al., 2016; see Figure 36.1). Here, 2- and 3-year-old children either caused harm to a victim (the marble they were playing with rolled away and broke an intricate tower that the victim had built) or caused the identical but non-harmful outcome (their marble broke the same tower but the tower did not belong to anyone). In two other conditions, children witnessed another adult cause the same harmful or non-harmful outcome. We found that 3-year-old children made signi cantly more attempts to repair the damage and more reparative comments such as “I’ll x it” when they had caused harm to the victim than in any other condition. In other words, 3-year-olds’ motivation to repair damage was higher in the guilt-inducing situation than in both the sympathy-inducing situation (when they witnessed harm) and when they caused a non-harmful outcome. Two-year-old children, however, did not show this speci c prosocial e ect of guilt; rather, they showed an overall e ect of sympathy such that they were more prosocial toward the victim when the victim had been harmed by them or by another person, than when no one was harmed. Other measures suggested that the problem for these younger children was not a failure to keep track of cause and outcome. For instance, 2-year-olds spent more time looking at the other adult when that adult had caused the damage than when they had themselves caused it, and more time looking at the victim when the victim had been harmed than not. Nonetheless, they did not make increased reparative attempts in the guilt-inducing situation. Together, these results suggest that between 2 and 3 years of age, guilt begins to motivate reparative behavior above and beyond sympathy or the desire to x any unintended outcome of one’s actions. In a second study, my colleagues and I shifted focus to a di erent aspect of the reparative functions of early guilt—namely, repairing the damaged relationship (Hepach et al., 2017). We reasoned that if the central function of guilt is to mend the ruptured cooperative relationship, then a transgressor who feels guilty should be motivated not only to ensure that the physical damage is repaired but also to be the one to carry out that repair. By investing their own time, energy, or resources into the reparative process, transgressors can convey their concern for the victim and commitment to the relationship in a way that they cannot if someone else steps in and carries out the repair instead. To assess children’s motivation to repair and dissatisfaction when they were unable to do so, we measured their pupil dilation (i.e., the degree to which the pupils of their eyes were dilated compared to a neutral, baseline phase). Systematic changes in pupil size index activation of the sympathetic branch of the autonomous nervous system and are indicative of experienced internal arousal (Bradley et al., 2008; Loewenfeld, 1993; see also Hepach & Westermann, 2016), and have recently been shown to index children’s p. 518 p. 519

motivation to help. Speci cally, children’s pupil dilation increases in response to seeing

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To draw somewhat more con dent conclusions, we must build on this foundational step and conduct

others in need of help; and the greater the increase, the likelier and faster children are to subsequently provide help to that person (Hepach et al., 2012, 2016, 2019).

Figure 36.1

Materials and Procedure From Vaish et al., 2016. (a) The two marble runs (one for the child and one for the other player—an experimenter), and the intricate tower that would later break. (b) A child in the guilt-inducing condition watches as her marble rolls out of her marble runʼs garage and breaks the victimʼs tower (highlighted here with a white oval and arrow); the victim is absent during this mishap. Note that in the conditions in which the childʼs marble broke the tower, the other playerʼs marble stayed securely in its garage (as shown), and vice versa. (c) The victim then returns to the scene, a er which the childʼs reparative attempts and reparative comments are assessed. Crucially, when children simply observe others in need of help, their pupil dilation decreases to a similar extent when they see help being provided by someone else and when they provide help themselves (Hepach et al., 2012, 2016). Thus, all things being equal, young children’s primary motivation is apparently not to get recognition for their helpful actions but rather to see the person in need being helped. However, in our study on children’s motivation to repair the damaged relationship, we predicted that feeling guilty should alter this motivation such that when children have caused someone harm, they should be not only motivated to see the victim being helped but also to provide the help themselves (Hepach et al., 2017). The result should be that when they have caused harm, their pupils should remain dilated if they are unable to repair the harm and someone else repairs it instead. We tested this prediction by placing 2- and 3-year-old children in a situation in which they either caused accidental harm (by spilling water on an experimenter’s work) or they witnessed an adult accidentally causing the same harm to the experimenter. Then children either had the opportunity to wipe up the spill themselves or instead watched as a di erent (second) adult wiped it up. We measured children’s pupil dilation both before the spill and after it was wiped up. As predicted, we found that 3-year-olds (and less robustly, even 2-year-olds) showed decreased arousal when they could repair harm that they had caused, but their arousal remained high if someone else repaired harm that they had caused. In contrast, and replicating prior work (Hepach et al., 2012), if the adult had caused the harm, then children’s arousal similarly decreased, regardless of whether they or the second adult repaired it. This is the rst evidence that by 2–3 years of age, children are not only motivated to see people in need being helped or the damage they caused being repaired; rather, in contexts in which their valuable relationships are at stake, they are additionally motivated to carry out the necessary repair themselves. This modi ed prosocial motivation may serve to convey their continued commitment to the victim and thus help secure the relationship. Together, these new experimental directions suggest that a nascent form of guilt may emerge and serve critical prosocial functions as early as the toddler years (see also Vaish, 2018). By age 2 years, rudimentary guilt may change children’s prosocial motivation toward people whom they have harmed (Hepach et al., 2017), though it does not yet boost children’s overt reparative behavior itself (Vaish et al., 2016). However, by age 3 years, children show a reparative motivation that is clearly in line with guilt: After they harm someone, they want to repair that harm themselves and engage in increased reparative behaviors (Hepach 4

et al., 2017; Vaish et al., 2016).

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Materials and Procedure From Vaish et al., 2016.

Do Young Children Really Experience Guilt? The above conclusions about the early prosocial functions of guilt are necessarily tentative because these p. 520

studies did not directly tap into children’s experiences of guilt (and

indeed, it is unclear how one would

studies was thus to make speci c predictions based on the hypothesized prosocial functions of guilt and to conduct controlled experiments to test those predictions. Converging support for multiple predictions allows us to be increasingly con dent that we are indeed tapping into the emotion of guilt. It is thus vital for future work to make and test additional predictions to further tease apart the functions of guilt from those of related but distinct processes. As mentioned earlier, two other emotions that might be suggested as underpinning these behaviors are shame and fear of punishment. Shame, unlike guilt, is thought to lead to withdrawal, avoidance, and lack of reparative behavior among adults (Tangney et al., 2007). Observational studies reveal such guilt-like versus shame-like responses in young children as well. For instance, when 2-year-old children believe they have broken an experimenter’s favorite doll, some show a coherent set of guilt-like responses (including approaching the victim, telling the victim about the mishap, and attempting to repair), whereas others show a coherent set of shame-like responses (including distress, averting gaze or body position from the victim, being slow to tell the victim about the mishap, and being slow to repair) (Barrett et al., 1993; Kochanska et al., 1995; Ross, 2017; Zahn–Waxler & Kochanska, 1990). A more recent observational study replicated these ndings and further showed that guilt-prone toddlers were more likely than shame-prone toddlers to help alleviate the victim’s distress in a novel situation (Drummond et al., 2017). Guilt-like responses thus seem to be distinguishable from shame-like responses from early in ontogeny, and as predicted, guilt-like responses correlate with increased prosocial behavior. However, because these studies involved observing naturally occurring di erences among children, it is possible that the behaviors used to categorize children as guilt-prone or shame-prone were in fact indices of other, more general di erences, such as children’s sociability or dispositional prosociality (Ross, 2017). That is, more sociable children may be more comfortable approaching, engaging with, and providing help to relative strangers; these behaviors might not re ect guilt proneness as such. Here again, therefore, we must complement observational studies with controlled experiments that manipulate feelings of guilt and shame. Research with adults suggests that guilt and shame are elicited in similar circumstances (Tangney et al., 2007), making it di

cult to experimentally create separate guilt- versus shame-inducing situations.

Rather, in experimental work with adults, guilt and shame are typically manipulated using verbal priming such as reporting a personal experience in which they felt guilty or ashamed (de Hooge et al., 2007; Ketelaar & Au, 2003). This kind of manipulation is unfortunately not feasible among young children (Drummond et al., 2017). Thus a crucial challenge for future work will be to nd innovative ways to elicit guilt separately from shame in order to examine whether, as predicted, it is indeed guilt and not shame that motivates young children’s reparative behavior. Equally importantly, however, given recent ndings that shame does promote prosocial behavior among adults under speci c circumstances (de Hooge et al., 2008; Leach & Cidam, 2015; Sznycer, 2019; Tangney et al., 2014), future work must ask whether, and when in ontogeny, p. 521

shame may also promote prosocial

behavior. Finally, we must also consider the possibility that guilt and

shame may be undi erentiated in early ontogeny and become separate emotions over the course of development. If that is the case, then the challenge for researchers will be to explicate the nature of the initial, undi erentiated emotion, and when and how the di erentiation occurs during development. Further research is also required to consider a second, alternative emotion: fear, and speci cally fear of punishment. To my knowledge, no existing empirical work has directly attempted to tease early guilt apart from fear of punishment, either in observational or experimental studies. However, some existing ndings may speak indirectly to this question. For instance, children’s guilt-like responses have been found to be

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do so given the constraints of measuring guilt, particularly in young children). The approach in these

unrelated to their temperamental fearfulness (Drummond et al., 2017), though other work indicates some correlation between the two (Kochanska & Aksan, 2006; Kochanska, et al., 2002). Further, in Vaish et al.’s (2016) study, the person whose tower was destroyed was looking elsewhere when the transgression happened and thus did not know who the culprit was (the child or the other person). If children were afraid of being punished by the victim, they should have been equally afraid when they caused the harm as when not the case, suggesting that young children’s guilt-like responses are not (solely) motivated by fear of punishment. Nonetheless, future work must examine this alternative possibility head-on. It may be feasible, for instance, to place children in guilt-inducing situations in which there is no likelihood of punishment and examine whether they persist in showing guilt-like behaviors (Baumeister et al., 1994). Alternatively, one could examine children’s reactions when they are accused of causing damage they did not cause. If they fear punishment, they should repair the damage despite their innocence, whereas an alternative response such as moral indignation (at being wrongly accused) should instead result in protest and less reparative behavior. These future directions will greatly help clarify the early emergence and prosocial functions of guilt, as well as related emotional processes. Finally, it is worth reiterating that while my focus here has been on the most basic—and likely ontogenetically primary—forms and functions of the emotion of guilt, more complex varieties demand attention as well. For instance, adults can experience guilt over violating norms even when no one is harmed, omissions of prosocial actions, imagined or anticipated o enses, and having more than others (e.g., Ahn et al., 2014; Baumeister et al., 1994). Though these complex forms may well be too cognitively and socially demanding for toddlers, it is vital that we begin to study their emergence and prosocial functions to gain a more comprehensive picture of guilt (Ho man, 1982, 2000; see also Thompson, this volume). Equally, if guilt and shame are one undi erentiated emotion in early development (a possibility I suggested earlier), then we may consider that common emotion to be an “early variety” of guilt (a kind of pre-guilt) that would also deserve careful study in order to complete the picture. In sum, to understand the emergence of prosociality, we must understand the emergence of prosocial emotions. Developmental research has recently made great advances towards this end. From a remarkably p. 522

early age, children seem to experience nascent

guilt, which motivates them to repair the damage they

have caused and restore their ruptured cooperative relationships. Much more work is undoubtedly needed to better clarify the nature of this nascent guilt and its developmental course. It seems clear, however, that from a young age, humans have a burgeoning capacity to participate in and sustain their vital cooperative relationships.

Notes 1.

Feelings of guilt are o en conveyed outwardly through facial and verbal expressions of remorse. Indeed, expressing remorse is an e ective way to signal feelings of guilt to victims and bystanders, by showing that the transgressor is also su ering, they did not mean harm and are not generally a harmful person, and they plan to make amends and do better in the future (Castelfranchi & Poggi, 1990; Keltner & Anderson, 2000; Leary et al., 1996; McGraw, 1987). As a result, remorseful transgressors are judged as more reliable social partners and as deserving of more forgiveness, a iliation, and cooperation than unremorseful transgressors (Darby & Schlenker, 1982, 1989; OʼMalley & Greenberg, 1983; Ohbuchi et al., 1989). It is useful to note, though, that feelings of guilt are not interchangeable with expressions of remorse; that each may occur without the other; and that guilt may alternatively or additionally be expressed in other ways such as attempts to make amends.

2.

Researchers are o en also interested in understanding the intrinsic and socialization factors that impact the development of guilt, and thus include additional measures such as childrenʼs temperament or maternal parenting styles. However, I will not delve into those aspects of this research here as my focus is on the prosocial functions of guilt. The interested reader may refer to the following papers as a starting point: Kochanska et al., 2002; Zahn–Waxler et al., 1990.

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the other person caused it, and should thus have shown similar reparative e ort in both cases. Yet this was

This definition of guilt accounts for the most basic or core form of guilt; more complex or nuanced forms of guilt will require other components and capacities. For instance, guilt about violating social norms requires some understanding and internalization of social norms, and anticipatory guilt requires the capacity for prospective thinking. However, I will be concerned here with the most basic—and thus likely ontogenetically primary—form of guilt. I will return briefly to this point at the end of the chapter.

4.

Due to space constraints, I will not delve into possible developmental mechanisms underlying the emergence of guilt around these ages. These are discussed elsewhere, including: Drummond et al., 2017; Ho man, 2000; Kochanska et al., 2002; Vaish et al., 2016.

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3.

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The Oxford Handbook of Emotional Development Daniel Dukes (ed.) et al. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/978019 8855903.001.0001 9780191889516

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CHAPTER

37 Development, Culture, and Neurobiology of Moral Emotions in Ethnic/Racial Minority Children: A Case Study of U.S. Latino/a Children  Gustavo Carlo, Paul D. Hastings, J. Logan Dicus, Elisa Ugarte https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198855903.013.2 Published: 13 January 2022

Pages 526–541

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Published: 2022

Abstract This chapter summarizes developmental theories and research on the intersection of culture, biology, and moral emotions. It proposes that cultural canalizations might be evident for the neurobiology of focusing particularly on work with U.S. Latino/a children and adolescents. Research on cultural (e.g., ethnic identity, cultural values), socialization (e.g., parenting styles, parent and peer attachment), and neurobiological mechanisms linked to moral emotions is summarized. The authors advocate for developmental scientists interested in the development of moral emotions in U.S. Latino/a children, and in other ethnic and cultural communities (e.g., African Americans, Asian Americans, Native Americans), to adopt a developmental cultural neurobiology lens in order to advance a more expansive, inclusive, and nuanced understanding of the diverse paths of the development of moral emotions.

Keywords: culture, neurobiology, moral emotions, Latino, Latina, children, adolescents, empathy, socialization Subject: Psychology, Developmental Psychology Series: Oxford Library of Psychology Collection: Oxford Handbooks Online

Introduction ALTHOUGH

early theories of moral development emphasized cognitive, rather than emotive processes,

psychodynamic scholars highlighted the roles of moral emotions such as guilt and shame in understanding human behaviors (Carlo & Edwards, 2005). Yet, they linked these emotions more often to psychological maladjustment and pathological behaviors than to morality. Within developmental science, traditional theorists (e.g., Piaget, Kohlberg) emphasized cognitive and sociocognitive processes as predictors and indicators of moral development (Lapsley, 1996). Thus, moral emotions and socioemotive processes received secondary importance in much of the early moral development research. However, early scholars’ work on moral development posited that empathy (i.e., resonance with or sharing of another’s emotional state) had an important link to moral behaviors (Eisenberg & Strayer, 1987; Ho man, 1975). Furthermore, moral scholars suggested that guilt (i.e., aversive feeling that stems from the self or another evaluating one’s actions and their consequences negatively) was a key element of moral p. 527

conscience

(Eisenberg, 1986; Ho man, 1982; Kochanska, 2002; Zahn–Waxler & Robinson, 1995). Shame

(i.e., aversive feeling that stems from the self or another evaluating one’s self negatively) was viewed as a related construct that could undermine moral development. This early work, coupled with new biologicallybased theories of morality and social-cognitive theories, prompted a shift in attention to moral emotions (Bandura, 1986; Eisenberg, 1986; Staub, 1979; see also Lapsley, 1996). Moral emotions are now a central aspect of many contemporary theories of moral development (Bandura, 1986; Carlo, 2014; Eisenberg, 1986; Ho man, 2000; Hitlin & Harkness, this volume; Thompson, this volume; but see Turiel, this volume). Moral emotions are numerous and can include a range of positively and negatively valenced responses and traits (see Thompson, this volume), but the most studied are empathy and sympathy. Empathy involves the recognition, understanding, and sharing of another’s emotional state (Carlo, 2014; Grusec et al., 2011). This conceptualization entails at least two related yet distinguishable components. The rst component, cognitive empathy, encompasses the ability to perceive

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moral emotions, such as empathy and sympathy, in distinct U.S. ethnic/racial minority groups,

and comprehend another’s emotion from that person’s perspective. The second component, a ective empathy, involves the vicarious inducement within oneself of an emotional state that is similar to another’s emotion. A ective empathy is related to emotional contagion, experiencing an emotion that closely matches another’s emotion, but a ective empathy additionally involves a clearer distinction of self and other; an empathic emotion is an emotion that is experienced as being on behalf of another person

Closely related to empathy is sympathy; de ned as feelings of concern or sorrow arising from another’s distress, pain, or need, and often coupled with a motivation to assist or relieve the other person’s distress. Although quite similar and di

cult to distinguish, sympathy (sometimes referred to as empathic concern)

is conceptually linked more strongly to moral behaviors than empathy. This is because sympathy can move persons to engage in moral action to relieve the other’s su ering. Despite the increased interest in moral emotions, several gaps remain. First, moral-emotion scholars have devoted most research to empathy, sympathy, and related vicarious responses. Less is known about the development of other moral emotions, such as guilt, shame, embarrassment, forgiveness, pride, and gratitude (see Hitlin & Harkness, this volume). Second, this is particularly true for research focused on the biological basis of moral emotions. Also third, very few theorists and researchers have considered the conjoint roles of culture and biology in the development of moral emotions. In this chapter, we aim to present avenues that might address these gaps. We begin by discussing the importance of studying moral emotions from both neurobiological and cultural perspectives. Although most existing research on moral emotions has been conducted in White European and European American samples, a growing body of culturally-informed work examines these processes in U.S. Latino/a youth. This likely stems from the rapid growth of diverse Latino/a communities within the U.S., contributing to some states now having “majority minority” youth populations; for example, more than 50% of residents under p. 528

18 years in California identify as Latino/a (Pew

Research Center, 2011; Public Policy Institute of

California, 2019). Therefore, we focus speci cally on the growing developmental literature on moral emotions in U.S. Latinos/as.

Neurobiology, Culture, and Moral Emotions Developmental scientists have increasingly examined the neurobiological aspects of empathy and sympathy from infancy through adulthood (see Hastings et al., 2014). This research is most often framed in evolutionary and functional theories, and embedded within the bioecological-systems perspective or processes of familial socialization (Hastings et al., 2006; Miller & Hastings, 2016). Yet, despite the integral role of culture in bioecological-systems theory and the clear embeddedness of families within culture, “culture” has been largely absent from biologically-informed theories and studies of the development of moral emotions. However, over the past decade, some scholars have begun to examine the connections between cultural processes, neurobiological functioning, and prosocial behaviors such as sharing and donating (e.g., Telzer et al., 2010), which often are motivated by moral emotions (Eisenberg et al., 2016). Within this emergent eld of developmental cultural neurobiology (Doane et al., 2018), there is growing recognition that “culture and biology are the two major systems of inheritance” (Causadias et al., 2018, p. 7). Everything humans feel, think, and do is necessarily the product of both culture and biology, which are mutually embedded and interpenetrating (Overton, 2010). Culture shapes the varied experiences that contribute to the development of children’s interconnected brain and body systems, and culture is perceived, interpreted, and responded to (engaged with, internalized, rejected, modi ed) through those same systems (see Holbrook & Hahn– Holbrook, this volume).

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(Eisenberg et al., 2016; Zahn–Waxler & Robinson, 1995).

To date, this integrative and holistic framework has not been applied to moral emotions. Michalska and Davis (2019) advocated for bringing the cultural neurobiology approach to the study of emotional development, with speci c emphasis on the need to understand the contributions of the Latino/a values of respeto (i.e., respect towards authority and elders), familismo (i.e., identi cation with and loyalty to the nuclear and extended family), and simpatía (i.e., harmony, personal agreeableness) (see Carlo & de Guzman, Latino/a children and youth. They argue that “sociocultural processes inevitably interact with biological factors such as brain maturation to shape emotional responses across development” (Michalska & Davis, 2019, p. 421), but the application of this perspective to “our understanding of Latino/a children’s emotional development is still scant and preliminary” (p. 424). In this chapter, we illustrate why it is necessary to take p. 529

a page from Michalska and Davis (2019), Causadias and colleagues

(2018), and others (e.g., Khan et al.,

2017) to summarize what is known about the developmental neurobiology of moral emotions, the roles of family, culture, and cultural socialization experiences in the development of moral emotions, and the nature of moral emotions in U.S. Latino/a children and youth.

The Developmental Neurobiology of Moral Emotions Empathy is subserved by neural networks involving a number of lower and higher brain regions entailed in brain–body coordination; emotional arousal, perception, resonance, understanding, and regulation; reward and approach motivation; and self–other mentalizing and interpersonal perception (Hastings et al., 2006). These regions include the brainstem, amygdala, striatum, and multiple regions within the prefrontal cortex (PFC), many of which are anatomically and functionally connected within the “social brain network” and “mirror neuron system” (Decety, 2015; Hastings et al., 2014). Most research has involved adults, although studies with children and youth replicate several of these associations (e.g., Flournoy et al., 2016). The experience of empathy may progress from being more visceral or “bottom–up” (e.g., amygdala, striatum) in children to more regulated or “top–down” (e.g., dorsolateral and ventromedial PFC) in adults (Decety & Michalska, 2010; Decety et al., 2012). Thus, there may be neurobiologically distinct processes underlying phenotypically similar emotional capacities across di erent periods of development. Neurotransmitters are essential to brain functioning. An a

liative response to potential stressors is linked

to the neuropeptide oxytocin (OXTR; Taylor et al., 2000). Administering oxytocin increases adults’ empathy, sympathy, generosity, trust, paternal engagement with infants, and activity in brain regions associated with empathy (Hurlemann et al., 2010; Riem et al., 2012; Rilling et al., 2012; Weisman et al., 2012; Zak et al., 2007). Genotypic variation in OXTR, re ecting individual di erences in the functional e ectiveness of transmission of oxytocin across synapses, has been linked to cognitive empathy in adults (Uzefovsky et al., 2015) and children (Ben–Israel et al., 2015; Wade et al., 2014). There has been considerable developmentally informed research on the associations between activity of the autonomic nervous system (ANS) and empathy, sympathy, and related emotions. The sympathetic branch (SNS) of the ANS is tied to defensive ( ght-or- ight) responding, and greater SNS activity as re ected in elevated electrodermal activity in response to emotional stimuli has been linked with greater personal distress and less empathy or sympathy in children (Eisenberg et al., 1991; Fabes et al., 1993; Holmgren et al., 1998). Conversely, the parasympathetic branch (PNS) of the ANS has been characterized as the “social engagement system” (Porges, 2007, 2011), supporting coordinated brain–body regulation needed for cooperative behaviors by mammalian species who typically live in groups, including humans. There are numerous studies of PNS activity and children’s empathy and sympathy, but these have not produced consistent ndings (Hastings & Miller, 2014). p. 530

Recent e orts to understand these inconsistencies reveal that the connections between neurobiology and moral emotions in children might be even more subtle and complex than previously imagined. The majority

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2009; Knight et al., 2010) to the neurobiology of emotional reactivity, regulation, and resilience in U.S.

of research on the neurobiology of moral emotions (and other emotions) has treated emotions and physiology as static states, and examined the linear relations between them (Hastings & Kahle, 2019; Hastings et al., 2014; Kahle & Hastings, 2015). Emotions are transient but temporally dynamic experiences with varying properties of latency to onset, duration, intensity, attenuation, and recovery. The chronometry of emotional neurobiology, logically, should also involve nonlinear temporal dynamics (Fox et al., 2012).

parasympathetic activity, as measured by respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) or other markers of highfrequency heart-rate variability (HF-HRV), is associated with better emotion regulation (Beauchaine & Thayer, 2015; Calkins, 2007). Children’s well-regulated parasympathetic activity is predicted by some of the same aspects of positive parenting that predict moral and prosocial development (Feldman, 2012, 2015; Hastings et al., 2019). Feeling empathy and sympathy entails some degree of emotional self-regulation in order to not be focused exclusively on one’s own emotional state or needs; and empathy, sympathy, and other moral emotions are the a ective cornerstones of cooperative social engagement. Therefore, the PNS is posited to play a central role in the development of empathy, sympathy, and prosocial behavior (Miller & Hastings, 2016), with baseline parasympathetic activity positively predicting empathy and sympathy. Yet, studies have not produced consistent linear associations. Intriguingly, associations between baseline RSA or HF-HRV and empathy or sympathy are quadratic, not linear. In preschool-aged children (Miller et al., 2017), school-aged children (Acland et al., 2019), and young adults (Kogan et al., 2014), individuals with moderate to moderately high baseline parasympathetic activity are more empathic, sympathetic, and prosocial than individuals with either lower or higher baseline parasympathetic activity. Why would this be the case? The PNS does not exclusively subserve the capacity for emotion regulation; it also is a marker of the threshold for arousal in response to stimuli (Hastings et al., 2000, 2006). Individuals who approach the social world with moderate parasympathetic activity have a physiological resource to regulate their own state of arousal when they perceive others in need or distress (so that they do not experience emotional contagion leading to personal distress), but the calming or downregulatory in uence of their parasympathetic activity is not so high that the needs or distress of others fails to evoke the resonant response needed to prompt their positive social engagement (Miller et al., 2017). Supporting this argument, Miller and colleagues (2019) recently showed that baseline HF-HRV was inversely associated with adults’ brain activity in the inferior frontal gyrus, insula, and amygdala while passively viewing emotional faces in a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanner, but not while actively imitating the faces. These brain regions are key components of the social-brain network and mirror-neuron system, and support attending to and engaging with social cues like facial emotional expression. Thus, p. 531

when they were not prompted, adults with higher HF-HRV were less likely to

spontaneously detect and

mark the facial expressions as salient cues necessitating orientation and engagement; these emotional stimuli did not meet their threshold for empathic arousal (Miller et al., 2019). Conversely, when prompted to imitate faces, adults with lower and higher HF-HRV did not di er in neural activity, suggesting they were equally capable of attending to emotion when that was an explicit goal. Nonlinear patterns of dynamic change also characterize children’s parasympathetic activity while they are watching emotionally-charged video scenes (Cui et al., 2015; Miller et al., 2013, 2016). When 4- to 6-yearold children watched video scenes of a child and mother experiencing distressing events and expressing sadness, children initially showed decreasing RSA, indicative of a decline in PNS activity that could support orienting to the evocative emotional stimulus (threshold for arousal), followed by increasing RSA that could support calm engagement with a nonthreatening stimulus (regulation; Miller et al., 2016). Those children with stronger nonlinear slopes (greater decreases and increases) were more likely to report feeling sad when watching the scenes (indicative of a ective empathy), and their empathic sadness mediated the associations between nonlinear RSA slopes and children’s sympathy and prosocial behavior toward adults

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As an example of what this may mean for one neurobiological system, consider the PNS. More baseline

who simulated accidents and injuries. Further, nonlinear RSA slopes directly predicted increases in prosocial behavior over the subsequent two years (Miller et al., 2016). Thus, the developmental neurobiology of moral emotions is likely to re ect many such nonlinear and dynamic processes across brain and body systems that support the developing capacities to experience, and to incorporate cultural processes in the study of the developmental neurobiology of moral emotions, it will be important for the sophisticated and integrative theoretical framework of developmental cultural neurobiology to be paired with similarly sophisticated empirical approaches to the study of moral emotions.

The Di erent Developmental Neurobiologies of Di erent Moral Emotions The few studies of shame, guilt, and embarrassment in children and adolescents suggest these have both overlapping and distinct neurobiological features as seen for empathy and sympathy. Adolescents primed to experience guilt and embarrassment evidence activity in some of the same brain areas implicated in empathy (Burnett et al., 2009; Klapwijk et al., 2013), with more advanced pubertal maturation being associated with greater functional connectivity within the social-brain network (Klapwijk et al., 2013). This suggests that increasingly, over adolescent development, guilt and embarrassment may be tied to mentalizing and consideration of other’s experiences, supporting functional arguments that guilt motivates approach, engagement, and reparation with aggrieved others (Tangney et al., 2007). Analogously, Colasante p. 532

and colleagues (2018),

found that guilt-inducing stories provoked decreased skin conductance and

increased RSA in children, indicative of a social-engagement response, rather than a ght-or- ight response. Conversely, shame provokes physiological stress reactions in preschoolers (Lewis & Ramsay, 2002; Mills et al., 2008), indicating that shame is experienced as an aversive emotion motivating withdrawal or ight.

Conceptual and Empirical Links Between Culture and Moral Development Traditional Conceptions of Parents as Primary Socializing Agents Most families include several possible socialization agents, such as siblings and extended family members (e.g., grandparents, uncles, aunts, cousins). However, most research on the in uence of the family on moral emotional development focuses on parents. Parents are primarily responsible for transmitting beliefs and training competency skills for the positive development of their o spring. Moral socialization theorists posit various mechanisms and processes such as modeling, caregiver practices, and direct instruction that inculcate children about moral issues, emotions, and behaviors (Bandura, 1986; Carlo, 2014; Eisenberg et al., 2016; Grusec & Goodnow, 1994; Ho man, 2000). Among the many parental moral socialization mechanisms studied, parenting styles and practices are the most researched. According to parenting scholars, there are two major dimensions of parenting: support and control. Support (sometimes referred to as warmth or nurturance) is a construct that re ects a ection, respect for autonomy, and responsivity to the child’s needs. Research with predominantly White samples shows that this aspect of parenting style is conceptually linked to good self-regulation and empathic responding (Barnett, 1987; Hastings et al., 2007). Conversely, control involves both behavioral and psychological characteristics (Barber & Harmon, 2002). Psychological control refers to parents’ use of techniques aimed at guiding and manipulating children’s emotions. Common forms include love withdrawal and guilt-andshame inductions, with more extreme examples like helicopter parenting re ecting micromanagement,

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express, and act upon empathy, sympathy, and other a ects. As researchers continue to advance this eld,

overprotection, and undermining of children’s autonomy. This form of control is often associated with less empathy and higher levels of guilt and shame proneness in children (Ho man, 2000; Padilla–Walker et al., 2016). Behavioral control encompasses the “rules-and-consequences” aspects of parental authority and can involve a range of parents’ exertion of power. Lower-power strategies include inductive reasoning (by which parents explain the rationales for rules and encourage their children to take another’s viewpoint), monitoring of activities and peers, and structuring daily routines. Higher-power

strategies re ect rigid

in exibility, yelling and threatening, and imposing severe or physical punishment. Whereas low-power parental control is often linked to higher levels of moral emotions and behavior, high-power parental control predicts less empathy, sympathy, and prosocial behavior in children and adolescents (Hastings et al., 2015). However, many ndings on the relations between parenting and moral emotions do not hold in samples of families of ethnic and racial communities (e.g., Asian American, African American, U.S. Latinos/as) (e.g., Brody & Flor, 1998; Chao & Otsuki–Clutter, 2011). This undermines the veracity or applicability of many parenting theories to ethnically and racially diverse populations.

Culture-Specific Approaches to Understanding Moral Development Major cultural theorists postulate that culture-speci c human behaviors can be explained by an understanding of culture-speci c beliefs, practices, and contextual a ordances (Harkness & Super, 1997; Whiting & Edwards, 1988). However, studies on culture-speci c beliefs, practices, contextual processes, and moral emotions were sparse until recently because early theories and research on moral development assumed that moral development was universal (Kurtines & Greif, 1974; Lapsley, 1996). Contemporary moral developmental researchers have begun examining moral emotions in distinct cultural groups. Although an understudied area of research, there has been an increasing amount of empirical attention given to the links between culture, socialization, and moral emotions in U.S. Latino/a youth. Carlo and his colleagues have conducted much of the research focusing on U.S. Latino/a parents’ socialization of children’s moral emotions and behaviors (Carlo & de Guzman, 2009; Knight & Carlo, 2012). As with White European American samples, their studies with U.S. Latinos/as have shown that more sympathetic adolescents engage in more prosocial behavior, with the strength of the association varying across the di erent forms of prosocial behavior (Carlo et al., 2011, 2012, 2018; Davis et al., 2018). Some studies show that U.S. Latino/a adolescents who are more securely attached to their parents, who perceive their parents as more supportive, or who have parents that use more inductive reasoning, have more sympathy for others (Carlo et al., 2011, 2012, 2018a). Adolescents’ sympathy has also mediated associations between parent attachment or inductions and youths’ engagement in prosocial behaviors, suggesting that the socialization of moral emotions has positive behavioral consequences (Carlo et al., 2011, 2012). However, this mediation was not seen for all aspects of prosocial behavior, including altruistic (e.g., helping others at some cost to oneself) and public (e.g., helping while others are watching) prosocial behaviors (Carlo et al., 2018a). Furthermore, researchers did not replicate the associations between inductive disciplining and adolescents’ sympathy in one U.S. Latino/a sample (Shen et al., 2013) as has been found in a study of White European American youth (see e.g., Krevins & Gibbs, 1996). p. 534

Recently, Carlo and colleagues (2018b) produced evidence that a constellation of parenting that is unusual in White European American families, but more often observed in several other communities—including U.S. Latino/a, African American, and Asian American families—may bene t youths’ prosocial development. The most common parenting style of White European American parents is called authoritative, re ecting a balance of support and control that implicates being highly involved and responsive, and relying primarily on low-power control techniques (Maccoby & Martin, 1983). Authoritative parenting is often seen in other ethnic and racial families as well, but so too is a style called no-nonsense parenting, with high involvement,

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p. 533

more moderate responsiveness, and moderately high-power control techniques like strict demandingness and punishment (Brody & Flor, 1998; Kim et al., 2013; White et al., 2016). No-nonsense parenting is in some ways a blend of authoritative and authoritarian styles (i.e., harsh parenting with a relative lack of warmth; Maccoby & Martin, 1983), and may re ect a combination of traditional cultural socialization and parental adaptation to raising children within a minority or immigrant context characterized by systemic and

Carlo and colleagues (2018b) found that U.S. Latino/a adolescents of Mexican origin, raised by parents who endorsed a no-nonsense parenting style, reported just as high levels of prosocial behavior as their peers who were raised by parents who endorsed an authoritative parenting style, with both groups reporting more prosocial behavior than U.S. Latino/a adolescents of Mexican origin with less involved parents. Given that in White European American families, the higher-power control of this parenting style has been linked to less empathy, sympathy, and prosocial behavior, this study demonstrates that there might be culturally-speci c links between socialization and moral development. In another study, Knight and colleagues (2016) found support for a cultural-values transmission model in which endorsement of familismo values by U.S. Latino/a mothers of Mexican origin predicted their ethnic socialization practices. These practices were then linked positively to their adolescents’ ethnic identity and subsequent endorsement of familismo. Finally, both ethnic identity and familismo were subsequently related to the youths’ prosocial behaviors (Knight et al., 2016). This study yields evidence that parents’ cultural values can be transmitted across time to their adolescent children, which can then shape their prosocial behaviors. However, whether no-nonsense parenting, traditional values, or ethnic socialization practices by U.S. Latino/a parents also support their children’s development of moral emotions is an open question.

Conclusions This chapter summarizes theories and research on the intersection of culture, biology, and moral emotions. p. 535

We highlight the work in this area with U.S. Latino/a populations

because most of the existing research in

this area has focused on this ethnic/racial minority group. Recently, Telzer and colleagues have applied a developmental cultural neurobiology lens to their study of prosocial decision-making and behavior (as well as risk-taking and other phenomena) that identi es the neural correlates of prosociality that seem to align with cultural di erences in values and socialization for Mexican-origin and White European American adolescents (Telzer et al., 2010; see also Telzer et al., 2016). Consistent with Michalska and Davis (2019), it is reasonable to expect that similar cultural canalizations would be evident for the neurobiology of moral emotions, but this lens has not yet been applied to the development of moral emotions in ethnic/racial minority youth. Consider that the interconnected parasympathetic nervous system, oxytocin-receptor system, and mirrorneuron system likely function in integrated and coordinated ways to support a engagement. Consider also that a

liation and social

liation and social engagement conceptually align with the ethnic identity

and cultural values (particularly familismo, respeto, and simpatia) of Latinos/as. Within U.S. Latino/a families, parent–child attachment, parental support, parenting style, and cultural socialization practices contribute to the development of both ethnic identity, cultural values, and the moral emotions of empathy and sympathy, which may act as intertwined sociocognitive and a ective mechanisms of moral behavior. Therefore, U.S. Latino/a caregivers who emphasize ethnic identity and corresponding cultural values may attune and sca old this multisystem neurobiological capacity, enhancing children’s ability to feel and act on moral emotions. Children with stronger neurobiological preparedness for empathy, social engagement, and a

liation also may be more inclined to orient toward their caregivers, understand their perspectives,

and internalize the values they teach and model. Thus, the development of moral emotions in U.S. Latino/a

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structural inequality and discrimination (Garcıa Coll et al., 1996; Guerra & Williams, 2005; Nazroo, 2003).

children and youth may involve neurobiological mechanisms of reciprocal and transactional in uences within the cultural family context. This proposed model of the developmental cultural neurobiology of moral emotions is, of course, entirely hypothetical. We advocate for scholars interested in the development of moral emotions in U.S. Latino/a Americans—see Liew & Zhou, this volume), to adopt a developmental cultural neurobiology lens so that a more expansive, inclusive, and nuanced understanding of the diverse paths of the development of moral emotions may exist.

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children, and in other ethnic and cultural communities (e.g., African Americans, Native Americans, Asian

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The Oxford Handbook of Emotional Development Daniel Dukes (ed.) et al. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/978019 8855903.001.0001 9780191889516

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38 I Feel, You Feel, We Feel: The Role of Emotion in Early Prosocial Behavior  Aleksandra V. Petkova, Celia A. Brownell https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198855903.013.43 Published: 13 January 2022

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Published: 2022

Abstract Prosocial behavior emerges in the second year of life. This chapter reviews recent empirical evidence showing that both negative and positive emotion relate to emerging prosocial behavior and that their di erent functions. Moderators (recipient emotion, type of prosocial behavior, age) of associations between the young child’s emotional and prosocial responses are discussed. Data appear stronger for e ects of negative emotion on prosocial behavior; however, children’s empathic concern in response to another’s emotion is inconsistently in uenced by the recipient’s emotion and type of prosocial behavior (e.g., helping vs. comforting). Recent studies suggest that young children exhibit positive emotion following prosocial behavior; however, these ndings are limited by recipient characteristics (e.g., puppets), task demands (e.g., adult requests), lack of age comparisons, and lack of controls for temperamental emotionality. Challenges of conceptualization and measurement of emotion are highlighted and directions for future research are suggested.

Keywords: emotion, emotional development, prosocial behavior, helping, sharing, comforting, early childhood, negative emotion, positive emotion Subject: Psychology, Developmental Psychology Series: Oxford Library of Psychology Collection: Oxford Handbooks Online

Introduction PROSOCIAL

behavior describes voluntary actions that bene t another individual (Eisenberg & Fabes, 1998).

Although research in the past two decades has established that spontaneous prosocial behavior arises in the second year of life, what we know about the role of emotion in young children’s prosocial behavior remains fragmented (Eisenberg et al., 2016). The development of nascent prosocial behavior—ranging from a young child picking up something that someone else has dropped and handing it back, or clumsily helping with household chores, to hugging someone who is crying—draws attention not only to the need for young children to understand the emotions of others, but also to the role of children’s own emotional experience in their rst prosocial attempts. Does a child’s own emotion motivate helpful behavior, or does it interfere? Does helping another in need give very young children the same “warm-glow” feeling it gives adults (Dunn et al., 2014)? While the in uence of emotion on older children’s prosocial behavior has been recognized, developmental psychologists still do not have a full understanding of the unique e ects of negative and positive emotion on prosocial behavior in very young children (Eisenberg, 2000). Unlike in older children and adults, much less is known about how emotion of positive and negative valence functions in young children who are making their rst prosocial attempts. This is likely because, traditionally, two separate bodies of theory and empirical work discuss children’s negative emotion preceding and positive emotion following prosocial behavior, which highlights a striking gap in the literature. As a result, past reviews have seldom considered the roles of both negative and positive emotion on young children’s prosocial behavior (Eisenberg, 2000; Eisenberg et al., 2016; Hepach et al., 2013; Paulus, p. 543

2014). Here, we review recent studies with children aged

12–36 months in which their emotional

responses in relation to their prosocial acts were measured. We focused on laboratory studies because of the standardization and control of the methods and measures therein. Collectively, results show that negative

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associations with prosocial behavior di er, suggesting that negative and positive emotion serve

and positive emotion contribute to infants’ and toddlers’ prosocial behavior in distinct ways. However, future research is needed to con rm these ndings and to further elucidate their functions.

Young Childrenʼs Negative Emotion in Relation to Prosocial Behavior another. Empathic concern and personal distress are the most frequently studied manifestations of young children’s negative emotion. Conceptually, concern re ects other-oriented, caring emotion, whereas distress is self-oriented and can re ect either emotional contagion or becoming overwhelmed by the other’s emotion (Batson, 1991; Eisenberg et al., 1989; Ho man, 1990). Thus, empathic concern, but not personal distress, is held to motivate prosocial behavior. Empirical research with older children and adults has con rmed this pattern (Eisenberg et al., 2016). In very young children, negative-emotion studies have employed a well-established manipulation in which a parent or experimenter feigns pain and distress after an accidental injury (Zahn–Waxler et al., 1992), thus allowing for the examination of children’s responses toward a hurt parent (Nichols et al., 2009), experimenter (Bandstra et al., 2011; Edwards et al., 2015), or both (Spinrad & Stifter, 2006). In some studies, the distressed other was a crying infant (Spinrad & Stifter, 2006; Nichols et al., 2009, 2014); in several others, an experimenter displayed distress caused by something besides a feigned injury (Drummond et al., 2017; Hepach et al., 2013; Svetlova et al., 2010; Vaish et al., 2009). Overall, results have provided nuanced ndings regarding negative emotion as a possible motivator of young children’s prosocial behavior. Speci cally, the nature of the recipient’s negative emotion, the child’s age, and the type of prosocial behavior appear to in uence relations between young children’s negative emotion and their prosocial behavior. To illustrate, in a study by Spinrad and Stifter (2006), 18-month-old children’s empathic concern, but not personal distress or other negative emotion, was associated with prosocial behavior toward the mother; however, neither empathic concern nor personal distress related to prosocial behavior toward the experimenter. Similarly, Edwards et al. (2015) found that empathic concern in 18-month-old children was unrelated to prosocial behavior toward the experimenter; yet, by 30 months, children’s empathic concern positively related to prosocial behavior toward the experimenter. These ndings suggest that, with age, prosocial behavior in response to others’ distress generalizes from parent to unfamiliar adult. Moreover, p. 544

they indicate not only that personal distress does

not motivate prosocial behavior, but also that empathic

concern may not do so early in development. Additionally, relations between emotion and prosocial behavior vary based on the other person’s expressed emotion, as well as the type of need. Speci cally, 12-month-old children pointed towards an aversive object to warn an experimenter about it after the experimenter had previously shown disgust towards the object, but not when the experimenter had been surprised (Knudsen & Liszkowski, 2013). Slightly older 18- to 20month-old children were more likely to help an experimenter after she indicated need for assistance than when she did not (Newton et al., 2014), and, relatedly, 25-month-old children shared more readily when the experimenter vocalized her need than when she was neutral (Brownell et al., 2009). Although these ndings show that even quite young children’s prosocial behavior is appropriately responsive to others’ emotions and needs, other ndings are inconsistent with this conclusion. For example, Bandstra et al. (2011) found that 18- to 36-month-old children expressed more personal distress, empathic concern, and comforting toward an experimenter who was sad than in physical pain, even though both were in need of a prosocial intervention. Svetlova and colleagues (2010) showed that 18and 30-month-old children helped more readily when a neutral experimenter needed instrumental help than when a sad experimenter needed comforting. Newton and colleagues (2014) found that whether the

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By the end of the second year of life, infants and toddlers exhibit negative emotion toward the distress of

experimenter showed a sad or a neutral facial expression did not in uence 18- to 20-month-old children’s instrumental helping. Similarly, Vaish et al. (2009) showed that among 18- to 23-month-old children, the experimenter’s neutral or distressed emotion expression did not a ect whether children exhibited concern and prosocial behavior when the experimenter’s property was harmed. Also, Walle and Campos (2014) found that 16-month-olds, but not 19-month-olds, were more likely to behave prosocially toward a parent paint a picture of young children’s prosocial behavior often being unresponsive to variations in others’ expressed emotion, calling into question the degree to which empathic concern may be a signi cant motivator of nascent prosocial behavior when children’s emotion regulation and recognition capabilities are so immature (see De France & Hollenstein, this volume, for an overview of emotion regulation across childhood; see Kramer & Lagatutta, this volume, for a discussion on emotion recognition). In contrast, Hepach et al. (2013b) found that at 36–38 months, children exhibited more concern and were faster to help an experimenter when her distress was appropriate to the situation, suggesting that older children are better able to understand and respond suitably, both emotionally and behaviorally, to others’ emotions and needs. Overall, these studies show that young children understand at least some of the circumstances in which another’s emotion warrants prosocial behavior, and that as emotion understanding develops, so does prosocial behavior. However, the contradictory ndings across some of the studies suggest that a full understanding of the role of young children’s negative emotion, especially empathic concern, in early prosocial behavior remains elusive. p. 545

It also appears that characteristics of the recipient’s distress may interact with age (perhaps as a stand-in for emotion understanding), but this relationship is complex and likely also in uenced by the type of prosocial behavior children had to provide. In Brownell et al. (2009), 25-month-old children, but not 18month-old children, shared more treats with the experimenter when she vocalized her desire for a treat (“I’m hungry! I want a gold sh too.”) than when she was neutral. However, in Knudsen and Liszkowski (2013), children’s attempts to warn the experimenter of the location of an aversive object were not quali ed by age; both 12- and 18-month-old children were likely to point to the location of the aversive object when the experimenter had previously shown disgust rather than surprise. Newer results continue to highlight an intricate relationship between children’s prosocial behavior and a recipient’s emotion (Walle et al., 2020). Researchers found that 16- to 24-month-old children helped more frequently in response to a recipient’s sadness (but not disgust, fear, or anger) and, by 24 months, children also helped in response to a recipient’s joy. Additionally, comforting increased with age in response to fear and anger, but not joy or disgust. Given the complexity of existing ndings, further research is clearly needed to identify when, in early development, speci c negative emotions in both child and recipient become reliable motivators of prosocial responding, and in what contexts (see Erickson & Cottingham, this volume, for a discussion of emotional development in social contexts). Similarly, more research is needed to ascertain whether the perception or experience of negative emotion relates to prosocial behavior similarly or di erently across the second and third years (i.e., in infants vs. toddlers). Conclusions about the role of negative emotion in early prosocial behavior are also constrained by variations and limitations in method and analytic approaches. For example, few studies have examined relations between young children’s personal distress or empathic concern and their prosocial behavior toward recipients varying in familiarity (cf., Spinrad & Stifter, 2006). Likewise, studies seldom assess how age moderates relations between a young child’s negative emotion and their prosocial behavior (cf., Edwards et al., 2015). Nor has research examined time-linked emotion changes in child and recipient before, during, and after a prosocial act; therefore, it is not possible to evaluate whether young children’s negative emotional responses are evoked through emotion contagion processes immediately triggered by the distress of another, or by other, possibly slower-emerging, processes based in emotion understanding and

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whose distress was justi ed than toward a parent exhibiting unjusti ed distress. Together, these studies

empathy (Ho man, 2007). Also, the credibility of the recipient’s emotion expressions has seldom been assessed (cf., Bandstra et al., 2011; Drummond et al., 2017; Hepach et al., 2013b; Nichols et al., 2009), thus limiting conclusions about how young children perceive the emotion of the needy or distressed other. Additionally, there is notable variability in how precisely and consistently authors have de ned young children’s negative emotion (e.g., concern and distress sometimes overlap in both terminology and coding) aspects of young children’s negative emotion relate to their prosocial behavior when prosocial responsiveness is rst emerging, or under what circumstances, or how such relations may change with age. p. 546

In summary, across a variety of paradigms, results appear consistent with the suggestion that empathic concern precedes and begins to serve as a motivating factor in very young children’s prosocial behavior. However, expressions of concern in this age group do not consistently predict prosocial behavior (e.g., Edwards, 2015; Spinrad & Stifter, 2006). Moreover, unlike in older children and adults, expressions of concern occurred with low frequency in 12- to 36-month-old children (Eisenberg, 2000; Liew et al., 2011). In addition, it is also possible that very young children’s negative emotion in response to a needy, emotional other re ects fearfulness, shyness, or inhibition, and is not speci c to the other’s need, and is also in uenced by the type of prosocial behavior required. Yet, by the second year of life, children are able to comfort an adult in distress, even when they themselves appear distressed (e.g., Brownell et al., 2009; Nichols et al., 2009; Spinrad & Stifter, 2006; Zahn–Waxler et al., 1992). Although the ndings are more limited, these studies also suggest that the e ects of negative emotion on prosocial behavior are moderated by age, characteristics of the other’s distress, and type of prosocial behavior needed. This, in turn, implies that the e ects of emotion on emerging prosocial behavior may be mediated by young children’s developing emotion understanding and regulation, as they are among older children for whom they explain individual di erences in prosocial responding (Eisenberg et al., 2016).

Young Childrenʼs Positive Emotion in Relation to Prosocial Behavior Existing empirical research on prosocial behavior with young children focuses on young children’s negative emotion as a motivator of prosocial behavior; questions about relations between positive emotion and prosocial behavior are much more recent and the research is sparse. This is surprising given that social psychology research provides support for the role of positive emotion in motivating prosociality in adulthood. In adults, prosocial behavior such as volunteering, caring for a loved one, or spending money on someone else are associated with subsequent positive emotion (Dunn et al., 2014; Dillard et al., 2008; Otake et al., 2006). Stemming from these ndings, researchers have proposed that positive emotion sustains prosocial behavior in adults through feelings of “warm glow” (feelings of joy, warmth, and connectedness; e.g., Dunn et al., 2014). In recent years, investigators have begun to assess positive emotion in relation to prosocial behavior in 22to 36-month-olds (Hepach et al., 2017; Wu et al., 2017; Aknin et al., 2012). In these studies, measures of positive emotion have included observer ratings of positivity or counts of how many times children smiled while helping the experimenter. However, using a novel approach, Hepach et al. (2017) also assessed change in upper-body elevation as an index of children’s positive emotion in two samples, given that upright gait p. 547

and posture have been shown to relate to positive emotion in adults (e.g., Dael

et al., 2012). Although this

is a relatively well-established index of positivity in adults, these investigators are the rst to use motionsensing technology in this age group. If this technology appears consistent with traditional measures of emotion in young children and provides robust results across di erent manipulations, the assessment of children’s body elevation could add to understanding relations between positive emotion and emerging prosocial behavior. In this handful of studies addressing relations between prosocial behavior and positive emotion in young children, prosocial behavior has been assessed in just one of two ways: by sharing desired

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(Decety & Cowell, 2014; Jordan et al., 2016). Thus, we do not yet know with certainty which particular

stickers or treats with a puppet or imaginary child (Wu et al., 2017; Aknin et al., 2012), or by helping an adult experimenter achieve an instrumental goal during a game (Hepach et al., 2017). In relation to sharing, 22- to 36-month-old children were rated as more positive after sharing with a puppet who vocalized its liking for treats (Aknin et al., 2012). However, since children were verbally the experimenter’s request rather than because they intended to be prosocial, and that their positivity was, in fact, a mastery or pride response. Sharing with puppets rather than with actual people in need (unlike the research on negative emotion) may have also in uenced children’s perception or understanding of the situation; for example, perhaps they did not recognize it as a situation requiring a prosocial act but instead perceived it as a situation requiring compliance with an adult’s request. Among somewhat older children, Wu et al. (2017) found that 33- to 36-month-old Chinese children were happier when they voluntarily shared stickers with an imaginary child compared to when they were obligated to share, but the absence of this contrast in Aknin et al.’s (2012) study leaves this question open for younger children. In sum, while the results from both studies are suggestive of the rewarding e ects of positive emotion after sharing in early childhood, research to date is inconclusive. In relation to helping, Hepach et al. (2017) found that 29- to 31-month-old children’s upper-body elevation increased both after they helped an experimenter achieve an instrumental goal ( nish hanging clothes upon receiving clothes pegs from the child) and when they achieved their own goal (complete a fun game with marbles and wooden tubes), but not when either the adult’s or the child’s own goals remained unachieved. Children who either helped the experimenter or who helped themselves also smiled more frequently and were rated as expressing more positivity than children who did not help. However, unlike the distress paradigms used in the studies on negative emotion, the experimenter did not emote during the experimental procedure. Associations between each of the measures of emotion (upper-body elevation, lower-body elevation, rated positive emotion, and number of smiles) and children’s helping had medium to large e ect sizes, but with substantial variability in the magnitude of mean di erences in the positive emotion between children who helped and those who did not. In particular, they were consistently higher in upper-body (chest) and lower-body (hip) elevation when they helped themselves than when they helped the adult, but there were no di erences in lower-body (hip) elevation between helping the adult and the condition in which no goals were achieved. These results suggest that young children exhibit positive p. 548

emotion after helping another person. However, because children also

expressed positive emotion after

they achieved their own goal, it is also possible that the positive-emotion e ects were not speci c to the prosocial act, but rather a response to completing a goal, regardless of whose goal it was. Because masteryrelated behavior and pride begin to emerge in the second year of life (Stipek et al., 1992), it will be important for future research to distinguish prosocially-induced from achievement- or mastery-related positive emotion in young children. Few studies of young children’s positive emotion in relation to prosocial behavior have been conducted to date, and age-related change in children’s experience of positive emotion after helping or sharing has not yet been established. This limits our understanding of positive emotion as a potential contributor to di erent types of prosocial behavior. Moreover, whereas studies of negative emotion in relation to prosocial behavior have included infants as young as 12 months, and toddlers as old as 42 months, studies of positive emotion have been conducted with children between 22 and 36 months of age, precluding consideration of whether positive emotion follows prosocial behavior when prosocial behavior is rst emerging early in the second year, and whether it becomes more robust over the third and fourth years. Finally, children’s temperamental or dispositional positivity has not been considered in these studies. Future research should do so, using within- rather than between-subjects designs. Indeed, a recently completed study found consistent e ects of young children’s baseline emotionality (i.e., positivity/negativity during relaxed free play) on their positivity following prosocial behavior (Petkova, 2020). Over 200 16- to 28-month-old

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prompted to share, it is possible that they shared treats with the puppet because they were complying with

children who expressed more positive emotion during free play also expressed more positive emotion after helping an adult who had accidentally dropped some pencils out of reach (instrumental helping) or who was cold and needed a blanket (empathic helping). Importantly, positive-emotion expression during free play (baseline emotionality) accounted for children’s positivity following instrumental helping, but not following empathic helping. Additionally, controlling baseline emotionality did not remove age e ects; demonstrate that the “warm-glow” e ects observed in adults likely develop later than prosocial behavior itself, and that they may occur following only some types of prosocial responding. In summary, current studies provide initial evidence that young children experience increased positive emotion after helping or sharing, much like adults’ “warm glow.” However, conclusions are constrained by the fact that children did not share with a human recipient in two of the studies, there were no age comparisons, and they were prompted to share (which could mean that they perceived the experimenter’s prompts as requests). Results also suggest that positive emotion increases following unprompted helping of an adult; but the e ect might not have been speci c to helping, because children also expressed more positive emotion after they had achieved their own goal. Borrowing from the studies on negative emotion and prosocial behavior in young children, future research would bene t from examining di erences in children’s positive emotion after sharing with a human recipient in more natural social situations (see Halberstadt et al., this volume, for a discussion on the link between parental emotion expression and the p. 549

development of moral emotions), as well as after di erent types of

helping that do not involve goal

achievement. Also, like some studies on relations between negative emotion and prosocial behavior, children’s temperamental positivity and negativity must be considered and controlled.

Conclusions As studied in 1- to 3-year-old children, empirical ndings suggest that in relation to their prosocial behavior, children’s negative emotion, operationalized as personal distress and empathic concern, most frequently occurs in response to another’s emotion or overtly expressed need. While this pattern has led to a theoretical conceptualization of children’s negative emotion as a motivator of emerging prosocial behavior, this review highlights two important considerations. First, expressions of empathic concern and personal distress occur with variable frequency and do not consistently predict prosocial behaviors in this age group. Second, personal distress and empathic concern have each been operationally de ned by constellations of behaviors, often di ering across studies, resulting in a lack of consistency and speci city regarding which emotion-relevant behaviors, and with what intensity, describe children’s negativity preceding prosocial behavior. Empirical research on young children’s positive emotion and prosocial behavior is much more recent, the body of ndings is small, and results are distinct from one another in terms of measures, ages, and recipient characteristics (e.g., real vs. pretend recipient). Nevertheless, results demonstrate that young children show signs of positive emotion, such as smiling and an elevated body posture, following sharing or helping an adult achieve a goal. It is possible that, much like adults, very young children also experience a “warm glow” following prosocial behavior; however, this speculation is constrained by the small number of studies, the use of novel measures of emotion (e.g., postural elevation) and nonhuman recipients (e.g., puppets), as well as the failure to examine the speci c conditions under which children experience positive emotion (i.e., toward any “needy” recipient or only toward those who are not overtly distressed). Further, in none of the included studies on children’s emotion in relation to prosocial behavior was children’s temperamental positivity or negativity assessed and controlled. This is important since individual di erences relating to children’s emotional reactivity and regulatory abilities (e.g.,

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older children expressed more positive emotion after helping than did younger children. These data

extraversion/surgency, negative a ectivity, self-regulation) can be reliably detected during the rst few years of childhood (Rothbart et al., 2001), and are likely to a ect both young children’s emotional responses to prosocial situations and their prosocial behavior (Petkova, 2020). That is, it is possible that associations between young children’s negative and positive emotion and prosocial behavior might be, at least in part, accounted for by children’s temperamental predisposition toward positivity or negativity. Thus, without following di erent types of prosocial behavior, strong inferences cannot be drawn about the role of young children’s immediate emotion in relation to emerging prosociality.

p. 550

Future Directions Studies on negative emotion paint an intricate picture of associations between very young children’s negative emotion and prosocial behavior, likely in uenced by the child’s age, the emotion displayed by the recipient, and the type of prosocial behavior. Further investigation is warranted to test the theory that young children’s negative emotion, in the form of empathic concern, serves as a precursor and motivator in the earliest forms of prosocial behavior. Future research also needs to consider the role of children’s positive emotion in their prosocial behavior, by including diverse prosocial tasks and multiple age groups and by taking into account their temperamental emotionality. Most importantly, to extend what we know about children’s negative and positive emotion in respect to helping, sharing, and comforting, future studies need to include measurement of children’s emotion both preceding and following prosocial behavior in the same samples. It should be noted that issues of conceptualization and measurement of emotion are not speci c to studies of prosocial behavior in young children; rather, emotion researchers have long recognized the di

culties of

measuring emotion-based processes objectively (Ekman & Rosenberg, 2005; Camras et al., 2002). Studies that have measured emotion in relation to young children’s prosocial behavior have varied in how emotions were de ned and measured, often without attention to the frequency and reliable detection of individual indices. This has been particularly true for studies on children’s negative emotion and prosocial behavior. For example, children’s negative emotion has been operationalized as gaze aversion and bodily avoidance of the experimenter (Drummond et al., 2017); facial and vocal concern, and personal distress such as freezing, crying, appearing wary, looking for one’s parent (Nichols et al., 2014); personal distress and concern (Spinrad & Stifter, 2006); and expressions of distress, self-oriented behavior, accompanied by physiological change (Liew et al., 2011). These may not all be equally valid indicators of the amount or intensity of negative emotion that children experience in relation to another’s distress or need, thus limiting conclusions about the role of negative emotion as a motivator of prosocial behavior. Moreover, very young children tend to show generalized, rather than speci c, facial expressions of emotion, and their facial expressions often do not coincide with the emotion context; for example, they might exhibit facial disgust in a fear-inducing context, or might blend sadness and fear (Camras et al., 1998). Therefore, coding discrete expressions is likely to be less productive than coding emotions more holistically (Camras et al., 2002). Further, operationalizing emotion exclusively with respect to discrete indices con nes children’s emotion to singular time points (e.g., a smile) or expressions. Importantly, expressed emotion is conveyed across multiple bodily dimensions (posture, voice, face) over time and at varying levels of intensity. Because of such challenges, future research could bene t by measuring young children’s emotion holistically, in terms of both valence (positive/negative) and intensity, rather than focusing on discrete indices. p. 551

We conclude by drawing attention to the fact that, as far as we are aware, no laboratory study has studied children’s negative and positive emotion together in the same context and task. We do not know, therefore, whether negative and positive emotion a ect one another in this context. For example, are young children

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examining children’s baseline negative and positive emotionality in relation to their emotion preceding and

who experience greater negativity preceding a prosocial act also happier afterwards, or is their emotion following prosocial behavior diminished relative to children who experience less or no negative emotion preceding prosocial behavior? Are such relations a ected by the prosocial situation itself, including type of prosocial behavior (e.g., helping vs. sharing vs. comforting), type of recipient (e.g., peer vs. adult; familiar vs. unfamiliar recipient), and the recipient’s own emotion? Measuring children’s emotion continuously, on negative and positive emotion in prosocial contexts. This will enable us to answer novel questions, such as whether children experience positive emotion following witnessing the distress of another, and whether a reduction of children’s negative emotion, and not only experiencing positive emotion, might sustain prosocial behavior in emotionally demanding situations. In closing, how, when, and under what circumstances very young children’s own emotion motivates and sustains prosocial behavior in its nascent forms is not yet well understood. Much remains to be learned, and the eld will bene t from further focused inquiry.

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both preceding and following prosocial behavior, can bridge these two seemingly disparate lines of research

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The Oxford Handbook of Emotional Development Daniel Dukes (ed.) et al. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/978019 8855903.001.0001 9780191889516

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CHAPTER

39 Emotional Development and the Growth of Moral SelfAwareness  Ross A. Thompson https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198855903.013.40 Published: 13 January 2022

Pages 554–565

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Published: 2022

Abstract Traditional moral development theories ascribe a signi cant role for emotion in moral development. Fear and anxiety over anticipated punishment are precursors to the internalization of moral values, for argues that other emotions are also signi cant. These include (1) indignation or displeasure when young children observe harm to another; (2) empathic responding to another’s distress, contributing to guilt if the child is aware of culpability for that distress; (3) (empathic) happiness from sharing with another, together with the anticipation of positive a ect in both benefactor and recipient from sharing; and (4) moral pride derived from self-initiated prosocial acts. Multiple emotions thus contribute to the development of moral self-awareness in young children, supporting the broader view that early morality is not just a punishment-based system of sanctions and rewards but also derives from young children’s sensitivity to human needs and feelings and their own emotional response to these conditions.

Keywords: moral emotion, guilt, shame, empathy, moral pride Subject: Psychology, Developmental Psychology Series: Oxford Library of Psychology Collection: Oxford Handbooks Online

Emerging New Views of Early Moral Emotions MORAL

emotions have a signi cant place in traditional theories of moral development. Emotions such as

fear and anxiety about anticipated punishment are viewed as precursors to the emergence of more complex self-referential emotions such as guilt and shame that occur when young children violate parental rules. These and other classic formulations emerge from a view that moral growth derives from the progressive socialization of behavior, achieved through children’s gradual internalization of values. Although such a view is important, it is increasingly regarded as incomplete. Moral development is about much more than internalized compliance to rules (see Turiel, this volume). It also includes a sense of fairness or justice in how people are treated according to their needs, deservingness, or other qualities; nonobligatory actions that bene t others, such as helping and sharing; the development of a sense of self that is motivated to act appropriately and decently; and the growth of character consistent with these aims. This broader view of moral development suggests that there may also be a wider range of relevant emotions with moral e ects (Haidt, 2003). Emotions like empathy and compassion for another’s distress, contempt or anger over another’s harmful conduct, pride in one’s morally admirable behavior, and happiness from promoting another’s well-being may be among the range of emotions that contribute to the development of a broad variety of moral characteristics. Like moral emotions in traditional moral development theories, these emotions motivate morally relevant conduct, are related to broader values, and (the focus of this chapter) contribute to moral self-awareness when elicited. p. 555

There has been considerable study of the development of shame, guilt, and other compliance-oriented moral emotions, but there has been much less attention devoted to how other moral emotions develop. When considered in the context of research on early psychological development, however, there is every reason to believe that these emotions are elicited in morally relevant contexts, and this occurs during the same period of development when young children are also showing indications of feeling shameful or guilty

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example, resulting in guilt or shame when children violate these internalized rules. This chapter

about their own conduct. Taken together, it seems likely that the arousal of these emotions in everyday situations contributes to young children’s dawning self-awareness as moral actors. If this is true, it suggests the need for signi cant rethinking of the role of emotion in early moral development—and indeed, of the nature of moral development itself in the early years.

Traditional moral development theories are limited not only because they are based on a narrow view of morality, but also because they are predicated on an outdated understanding of child development. In particular, viewing young children as egocentric, self-interested, and externalized moral novices may have been a current portrayal when psychoanalytic, learning, and cognitive-developmental theories of moral development were formulated, but such a view is unsuitable to contemporary understanding of early moral and emotional growth (Thompson, 2012, 2015). Research on the development of emotion understanding in moral awareness is illustrative (see Thompson & Lagattuta, 2006, for a review). Contrary to their portrayal as egocentric, 12-month-olds perceive a range of emotions in others and try to understand the causes of these emotions that di er from theirs. They can use a person’s visual gaze to infer the reason for that person’s emotional expression, connecting two mental states (attention and emotion) in order to determine why a person is feeling that way (Klinnert et al., 1986). In the second year, emotional expressions become understood as indicating others’ mental states, particularly desires and preferences, and this further advances toddlers’ understanding of the causes of the emotions they observe in another (Repacholi & Gopnik, 1997). They increasingly recognize, in other words, that people feel happy when they get what they desire, disappointed when they do not, and sad when they get what they do not want. Somewhat later, young children also understand how emotions are associated with what people are thinking, such as their recall or anticipation of emotionally evocative events (Lagattuta & Wellman, 2001). These advances in emotion understanding are morally relevant because when young children talk about matters of right and wrong, their evaluations are frequently based on their observations of people’s feelings and the causes they perceive for them (Wright & Bartsch, 2008). Their appraisals of the causes of another’s feelings can lead to attributions of responsibility to the person or event that elicited that emotion in morally relevant situations, such as those involving harm to another. p. 556

These early advances in emotion understanding are associated with concurrent achievements in theory of mind. By the end of the rst year and increasingly in the second, for example, infants begin to develop an awareness that behavior is motivated by goals and intentions (Woodward, 2009). Young children perceive that others act in order to accomplish certain goals—reaching toward an object, for example, in order to grasp and use it. By the middle of the second year, toddlers imitate another’s actions on the basis of inferred intentions: they act to accomplish a goal (such as dropping objects into a cup) that they had previously observed an adult trying, but failing, to accomplish (Carpenter et al., 2005). This example also illustrates that toddlers are developing capacities for shared intentionality—that is, the ability to enter into and participate in another’s intentional state (Tomasello et al., 2005). Shared intentionality is one reason that toddlers readily engage in simple forms of helping—that is, contributing to achieving another’s goals (Newton et al., 2016). By the end of the second year, therefore, young children are developing a network of mental concepts with which to interpret the causes of people’s feelings and actions. They understand the intentionality of people’s actions and sometimes participate in their goal-directed activities, and they are interested in and adept at appraising the causes of another’s feelings. These developments in mental and emotional understanding provide a basis for young children’s intuitive appraisals of the consequences of the morally relevant actions they observe. In one study, for example, 18- and 25-month-olds were introduced to an

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Development of a Premoral Sensibility

adult who proudly displayed her possessions and the art objects she made. Shortly afterward, the toddlers witnessed a second adult either damaging those objects (harm condition) or damaging other objects (neutral condition) as the rst adult looked on impassively. Children showed more concerned looks (characterized by furrowed brow and/or a sad expression) to the rst adult in the harm compared to the neutral condition, and they subsequently o ered greater assistance to that person in an independent the violation of the experimenter’s desires (to retain valued possessions and creations) and goals (to display them) might have been su

cient for these young children to infer the adult’s distress or sadness, even

though it was not overtly expressed (Reschke et al., 2017). These inferences may have heightened concern and elicited prosocial assistance which, although incapable of ameliorating the e ects of the prior actions that the child observed, could have the bene t of improving outcomes for the victim. There are other studies that also appear to re ect young children’s sensitivity to the consequences of one actor’s actions on another’s goals, feelings, and desires. In one study of distributional justice, for example, children age 3.5 years allocated the rewards of two story characters’ shared activity to the one who had contributed the most (Baumard et al., 2012). In another study concerning reciprocity, children of the same age caused one doll to give rewards to another who had previously helped her, compared to one who had not. Further, children indicated a preference to give rewards to a doll who had previously been generous to another doll, compared to one who had not (Olson & Spelke, 2008). Yet another study showed that 3-yearp. 557

olds not only assisted the victim of

harm that they had witnessed, but also protested the harmful act and

tattled on the perpetrator (Vaish et al., 2011). Early developments in emotion understanding and theory of mind thus enable young children to construct intuitive appraisals of morally relevant behavior based on its impact on others’ goals and intentions and their emotional consequences, and these intuitive appraisals cause children to act in ways to bene t victims, reward helpers, and call out harmful behavior in another. I call this a “premoral sensibility” (Thompson, 2012, 2015). It enlists the rapidly developing psychological understanding of early childhood into simple appraisals of desirable and undesirable behavior based on the consequences of behavior for another’s goals, desires, and emotions. This premoral sensibility leads to intuitive judgments of approved and disapproved conduct, and sometimes attributions of character (e.g., niceness or meanness) to actors (Wright & Bartsch, 2008). These judgments are “premoral” because they are intuitive rather than reasoned, and are not yet connected to a broader system of values. That will come later, especially as parents enlist the young child’s intuitive sensibility into conversations about right and wrong that emphasize people’s feelings and human welfare (Smetana, 1989). This premoral sensibility is an important foundation for moral growth, and it is strikingly di erent from the kind of self-concerned, egocentric moral orientation portrayed in young children by traditional moral development theories. It portrays instead a young child who is sensitive to others’ internal states and the impact of actions on them, and who is motivated to respond to perceived unfairness in corrective ways. Most importantly, emotions have a central role in informing young children’s awareness of the e ects of behavior on another, because emotions make salient the conditions associated with morally relevant appraisals, a ectively imbue the judgments that result, and color the behaviors that follow.

Moral Emotions in Early Premoral Sensibility There are a variety of moral emotions relevant to this early emerging premoral sensibility. Unfortunately, developmental researchers who study early moral behavior have tended, with a few noteworthy exceptions, to devote little attention to the diverse emotions associated with young children’s morally relevant behavior and judgments. Consequently, this discussion helps to draw attention to much-needed research in this area.

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assessment (Vaish et al., 2009). Even though the experimenter’s facial expression was neutral, observing

Indignation Young children’s sensitivity to the harm they observe in icted on others is manifested in several ways, p. 558

including their active protest of harmful actions. In one study, for example,

3-year-olds protested the

behavior of a puppet who destroyed the artwork of another puppet, sometimes making reference to the another study, 3- and 5-year-olds protested a puppet’s misbehavior, whether it was a conventional mistake or a moral violation, in a game-playing scenario. However, 5-year-olds tattled on the puppet more for moral violations than conventional mistakes, and showed greater emotion in responding to moral violations, whereas 3-year-olds were less discriminating (Hardecker et al., 2016). There is also evidence that 5- and 6-year-old children spontaneously protest violations of distributional justice, such as when greater resources are provided to a puppet who is rich rather than one who is poor (Wörle & Paulus, 2018). Taken together, these responses re ect a simple form of indignation: anger owing to unfair or o ensive treatment. Viewed in this light, indignation is the enlistment of anger into constructive moral motivation. These studies are part of a broader literature showing that young children become sensitive to normative standards of behavior and, as preschoolers, actively conform to, communicate, and enforce these standards in their interactions with others (see Tomasello, 2018). Children’s commitment to doing so is re ected in the indignant emotion accompanying their objections to rule violations, and these studies o er suggestive evidence that with increasing age, protest is greater to violations of moral values than conventional standards. Young children’s awareness of the e ects of moral violations on another person’s feelings and goals may contribute to the displeasure these young children exhibit, although much more research is needed to better understand the reasons and circumstances in which young children object to rule violations of this kind.

Empathy Empathy has long been studied as an antecedent to prosocial assistance, but the two are not the same: children and adults experience empathy for another’s distress without helping, and helping can occur independently of empathic motivation. Empathy is important as a moral emotion, however, because it establishes an emotional connection between oneself and another’s well being. It appears that a capacity for this connection is established early (see Petkova & Brownell, this volume). Although a protoempathic capacity may be evident shortly after birth, evidence for a more genuinely empathic response is apparent later in the rst year (see Davidov et al., 2013). In a longitudinal study, Roth– Hanania et al. (2011) observed that expressions of “concerned attention” (e.g., furrowed brows, focused gaze, mouth corners downturned) and “hypothesis testing” (e.g., exploring causes of distress by looking from hurt place to mother and back, vocal expressions) increased linearly from 8 to 16 months in response to maternal simulations of distress and a distressed peer shown on video. Prosocial initiatives (e.g., verbal or behavioral comforting) were rare but increased with age, and responses of concerned attention and hypothesis testing predicted the occurrence of prosocial behavior in children at a subsequent age. p. 559

Although “concerned attention” can mean di erent things—emotional empathy, focused attention on an interesting or unexpected event, a perplexed response—it indicates an infant’s engagement with another’s emotion and its causes, which would be consistent with evidence previously discussed of infants’ interest in the causes of the emotions they observe in others. If the arousal of resonant emotion also occurs, it is likely to sharpen the salience of the events leading to another’s distress and may motivate a helpful or reparative response, especially if the child is responsible for that distress. Indeed, at slightly older ages, empathy elicited by another’s distress, combined with an awareness of culpability for that distress, has been shown to contribute to the experience of empathy-based guilt (Thompson & Ho man, 1980).

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feelings of the victim (e.g., “She will be sad then”), and tattling on the perpetrator (Vaish et al., 2011). In

Developmental study of empathy has focused exclusively on empathy elicited by distress, perhaps because this kind of empathy has been studied most frequently in adults and is believed to have the greatest implications for prosocial behavior. However, there may be value in exploring other forms of empathic experience in relation to moral conduct. As one illustration, Marsh (2019) has argued that heightened altruistic motivation in adults may derive from strong sensitivity to others’ fearful expressions. In her view, others, and these systems underlie sensitivity to cues that signal vulnerability, including fear. Empathy for another’s fear could motivate e orts to assist, although this may emerge at a much later age than distressrelated empathic responding. There has been very little research into this formulation, however, and no developmental studies of empathy to fearful expressions.

Happiness Moral compliance may elicit feelings of satisfaction from having done the right thing, but other forms of moral behavior may also be tied to positive emotion. There is evidence, for example, that toddlers exhibit happiness when sharing with a puppet, even when sharing requires the child giving up resources in order to give them away (Aknin et al., 2012). It is not clear from this study (or any other) whether toddlers’ positive expressions derived from their reactions to sharing, responses to the reactions of the recipient or the experimenter, the playfulness of the situation, or something else, and thus more research is needed (see Petkova & Brownell, this volume). However, a series of cross-cultural experimental and survey studies with adults by this research group has led them to conclude that sharing one’s resources with others is a universal elicitor of happiness (Aknin et al., 2013). By the preschool years, children understand that sharing has emotionally positive bene ts for benefactors and recipients, and that denying resources has emotionally negative consequences for each (Paulus & Moore, 2015, 2017). In these studies, moreover, children’s resource allocations were predicted by how highly they rated the expected feelings of the benefactor or recipient when resources were either shared or p. 560

denied. The more strongly they anticipated that they would feel happy when sharing or feel

negatively

when denying bene ts, the more likely, in an independent assessment, were preschoolers to share; sharing was also predicted by how positively children anticipated that the recipient would feel. These ndings suggest that anticipation of the emotional consequences of one’s generosity—or lack of it—can in uence young children’s sharing. Notably, the anticipated feelings of both the giver and the recipient of assistance seem important, whether sharing or not sharing is contemplated. The view that moral conduct is a ected by the anticipated emotional consequences of one’s behavior is, of course, a longstanding aspect of traditional moral development theories. What is di erent here is that the emotions that motivate moral conduct are not negative (e.g., anxiety, fear) but rather positive (i.e., based on bene ts for another). Although much research is needed to elucidate the mediators between emotional expectations and prosocial motivation, one possibility is that children’s vicarious experience of the recipient’s happiness, and anticipation of that experience, is in uential. Empathic happiness—vicariously sharing another’s pleasure—may contribute to prosocial motivation. With the focus of psychological inquiry on empathic distress, it is di

cult to nd research on the

development of empathic happiness. A recent exploratory study, however, sought to associate empathic concern and empathic happiness with prosocial behavior in toddlers (Davidov et al., 2018). Empathic concern was measured periodically throughout the rst 18 months in toddlers’ responses to an adult’s simulated distress and a video of a crying baby, while empathic happiness was measured in responses to an experimenter’s simulated happiness and a video of a laughing baby. Whereas measures of empathic concern predicted prosocial behavior at 18 months, measures of empathic happiness did not. One reason for this di erence may be that the measures of prosocial behavior involved helping a needy adult, like the empathic

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the neurohormonal systems that originally evolved to motivate parental care can also motivate care for

concern measure. It remains to be seen, therefore, whether empathic happiness may be better predictive of prosocial motivation in independent situations, such as of spontaneous generosity.

Moral Pride emotion: moral pride (i.e., pride speci cally derived from acting admirably.). Although parents’ morally evaluative comments to young children often seem intended to elicit relevant self-evaluative emotions— pride in approved conduct (“that was a nice thing to do”, “you were a good boy”), and guilt or shame because of disapproved conduct (“you know better than to do that”)—there has been little developmental inquiry into the origins of pride in moral conduct. Yet some have argued that moral pride may be an important source of sustained, voluntary moral activity that becomes especially in uential with the consolidation of moral identity in adolescence (Hart & Matsuba, 2007). Simpler forms of moral pride may be evident at earlier ages. Ross (2017) observed 3- and 4-year-olds with p. 561

an experimenter in a series of helping tasks and measured pride

in children using conventional

indicators: positive emotion combined with drawing attention to the act, clapping or dancing, and head held up with shoulders back. She reported that more than 60% of the children exhibited pride after spontaneous (rather than elicited) help to the experimenter, and these reactions were signi cantly correlated with an independent assessment of children’s empathy to a distressed experimenter, as well as with assistance in the helping tasks. Moral pride appeared, in other words, to be associated with self-initiated prosocial motivation. Developmental researchers have long studied individual di erences in achievement-related pride in children this young (see Pekrun, this volume), and this study suggests that further study of pride exhibited in morally relevant situations is also warranted.

Guilt and Shame Guilt and shame have been studied developmentally because of their relevance to the growth of moral compliance. Barrett et al. (1993) observed 2-year-olds in experimental situations involving staged mishaps: the child played with the experimenter’s favorite doll, and the leg of the doll was rigged to fall o

when the

child began to play with it. Subsequently the experimenter returned to the room and showed concern about her doll. Barrett distinguished two kinds of responses. Some children spontaneously confessed what had happened and engaged in e orts to repair the doll’s leg. Others avoided interacting with the experimenter entirely, showed anxious behavior, and were slow to acknowledge what they had done. These laboratory di erences between children showing guilt-related behavior and shame-related behavior paralleled di erences in maternal reports of children’s responses to misbehavior at home. Other researchers have been less committed to distinguishing shame from guilt in young children and have focused instead on understanding the correlates of toddlers’ responses of discomfort or unease following misbehavior. In a longitudinal study, Kochanska et al. (2002) observed children at 22, 33, and 45 months in rigged mishap situations like the one described above, and assessed children’s avoidance of the experimenter and signs of tension as indicators of guilt. Individual di erences in young children’s guilt responses were stable across these ages, were negatively associated with observed and self-reported use of power-assertive discipline by mothers, and predicted children’s compliance in situations involving potential rule violation and with measures of the “moral self” (described later) at age 56 months. Measures of guilt were also strongly associated with concurrent assessments of empathic responding, following an experimenter’s feigned distress at 33 and 45 months, and these combined measures of “moral emotion” at each age were associated with concurrent assessments of children’s compliance (Aksan & Kochanska, 2005).

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The ndings of the exploratory studies discussed earlier suggest another potential morally relevant

In another study, Vaish et al. (2016) observed 2- and 3-year-olds in staged mishaps in which harm to another person either did or did not occur, and the child was or was not responsible for the mishap. By contrast with 2-year-olds, who repaired whenever harm was caused, 3-year-olds showed greatest p. 562

reparative behavior when they were responsible

for a mishap that caused harm to another person. The

authors interpreted this as guilt-motivated prosocial behavior.

are associated with concurrent measures of emergent morality (empathy, rule-based compliance, reparation) and predict later age-appropriate assessments of behavior associated with moral development. This suggests that these emotional responses are becoming incorporated into a broader network of morally relevant actions. However, the circumstances eliciting these emergent feelings of guilt or shame warrant closer examination. In the studies discussed here, young children’s responses to human harm were observed: perceived damage to the experimenter’s possessions that elicited the experimenter’s concern and distress. These are the consequences, as discussed earlier, to which young children have become attuned by their early achievements in theory of mind and other forms of psychological understanding. Stated di erently, the earliest indicators of feelings of shame or guilt in young children occur in circumstances for which their premoral sensibility orients them to the human consequences of their actions (see Vaish, this volume). Much less is known of the developmental course of guilt and shame in response to other kinds of violations, such as disobeying a parental rule that does not involve human harm, even though these have been the greater focus of traditional internalization theories of moral development.

Moral Emotions and the Emergence of Moral Self-Awareness To summarize, a small but provocative research literature o ers a portrayal of the rich emotional responses of young children in morally relevant situations. By the early preschool years, children are observed to protest harm done to another, empathize with those who are upset or distressed, feel happy when sharing with another and anticipate happiness in the recipient, exhibit rudimentary indicators of moral pride when doing the right thing, and exhibit guilt or shame when they are responsible for harm to another. These emotions are exhibited in morally relevant contexts, but they are not necessarily based wholly on internalized values related to social norms. They are also based on the young child’s sensitivity to people’s feelings, goals, and desires, their capacity to enter into another’s intentions, their inquiry into the causes responsible for another’s positive or negative feelings, and their acting on these appraisals in their interactions with others. Together, these early developing advances in psychological understanding contribute to the growth of a premoral sensibility that, as noted earlier, motivates intuitive appraisals of desirable and disapproved conduct based on the consequences of behavior for another’s goals, desires, and emotions. A premoral sensibility is all that is required to protest someone’s violation of another’s goals, share vicariously another’s distress, anticipate that a recipient will be happy when resources are shared, and p. 563

feel

negative self-evaluative a ect (guilt or shame) when one is responsible for harm to another. This

sensibility imbues the young child with moral agency before a true moral sense has developed, and the emotions with which it is associated contribute a ective salience to the child’s reactions to human need and wrongdoing. This view of early moral growth is agnostic with respect to whether infants are born with an innate moral sense, as some have argued (e.g., Bloom, 2013), and it does not require it. A premoral sensibility arises naturally from early developments in emotion understanding and theory of mind in the context of everyday human interaction. How are these emotions associated with the emergence of moral self-awareness in young children? Although there is evidence for dawning moral self-awareness in these studies, as well as in children’s spontaneous conversation about morally relevant experiences (Wright & Bartsch, 2008), some of the strongest evidence comes from interviews assessing the emergent “moral self” in 4.5- to 5-year-olds (see

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Thus, behaviors in the third year re ecting young children’s spontaneous discomfort following misconduct

Kochanska, 2002). In these interviews with puppets, children were individually asked to indicate how much they endorsed statements describing their feelings and responses in morally relevant situations. The responses indexed in the interview include concern about others’ wrongdoing, empathy, emotional discomfort following misbehavior, sensitivity to violations of standards, and reparation after wrongdoing (e.g., apology, repair). These are the same moral emotions and behaviors that the research discussed here young children endorsed these feelings and responses were predictive of later moral conduct (Kochanska et al., 2010). Thus, by the age of 4.5 or 5 years, young children seem to have a rudimentary but multidimensional sense of themselves as moral actors. Moral emotions in the early years may be developmentally important not just as a derivative of the internalization of parental values, as traditional moral development theories argue, but also as an avenue by which young children are motivated to moral agency in everyday circumstances and eventually become self-aware of doing so. Parental in uences are important for encouraging these responses and eventually for enlisting these emotions, beliefs, and behaviors into a broader system of values that cause the child’s early premoral sensibility to become a genuinely moral sense (Thompson, 2020). However, parental socialization builds on a prior foundation of a ective experiences rooted in the young child’s premoral sensibility. If the moral emotions that emerge early in development have such a signi cant in uence on moral development, it suggests that the origins of a constructive, humanistic moral orientation is not an achievement of middle childhood, but is based on developing psychological understanding during the rst ve years.

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documents in young children, beginning in the early years. Individual di erences in the extent to which

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The Oxford Handbook of Emotional Development Daniel Dukes (ed.) et al. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/978019 8855903.001.0001 9780191889516

Online ISBN: Print ISBN:

9780198855903

Search in this book

CHAPTER

40 Children’s Emotion Understanding and Cooperative Problem-Solving in Educational Settings  Karine M. P. Viana, Juliana Lucena, Imac Maria Zambrana, Paul L. Harris, Francisco Pons https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198855903.013.41 Published: 13 January 2022

Pages 566–580

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Published: 2022

Abstract Recent research has shown that emotion understanding (EU)—the capacity to understand the nature, causes, and consequences of emotions—plays a crucial role in the development of emotional, social, which EU facilitates children’s cooperative problem-solving in educational settings. For instance, it is not yet clear how understanding emotions positively impacts children’s interaction both when they play freely with peers and when they are engaged in problem-solving tasks. In addition, there is no conclusive answer about whether the impact of EU on cooperative problem-solving varies depending on children’s age. This chapter aims to address this shortfall. Building on empirical ndings, the usefulness of EU for children engaged in di erent types of cooperation (dyadic, triadic, free play), and at di erent ages (from toddlerhood to middle childhood) is discussed.

Keywords: emotion understanding, emotional development, social interaction, cooperative problemsolving, peer-action coordination, children Subject: Psychology, Developmental Psychology Series: Oxford Library of Psychology Collection: Oxford Handbooks Online

Introduction THIS

chapter aims to explore the role of emotion understanding (EU) for cooperative problem-solving. This

issue has recently received more attention from scholars, but the ndings remain scarce and inconsistent. For instance, it is not yet clear how understanding emotions positively impacts children’s interaction both when they play freely with peers and when they are engaged in problem-solving tasks. In addition, there is no conclusive answer about whether the impact of EU on cooperative problem-solving varies depending on children’s age. Despite the considerable knowledge produced in the past years about EU in infancy, this chapter focuses on preschoolers and school-age children because the main goal is to discuss the extent to which having EU abilities facilitates cooperation in peer interaction. The usefulness of EU for children’s peer cooperation is therefore discussed in terms of four main issues: (1) what EU is, and what it is for; (2) EU as a mechanism underlying peer cooperation in preschoolers and school-age children; (3) the links between having EU competences and using these competences in social interaction; and (4) nal considerations and prospects for future studies.

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and cognitive competences. However, there are still many unanswered questions about the extent to

p. 567

What Is Emotion Understanding—and What Is It For? Emotion understanding (EU) can be de ned as the ability to understand the nature, causes, and consequences of emotional experiences (e.g., Pons & Harris, 2019). It therefore comprises emotion their causes, consequences, cultural rules) (Castro et al., 2016). By developing an understanding of emotions, children become gradually more able to explain, predict, and control their emotional expression and experience in everyday life. Based on this de nition, two di erent dimensions of EU can be conceptualized, although the literature is inconsistent about the terminology used to refer to them: EU displayed in standard tasks (explicit, deliberate, declarative, abstract, content/context nonspeci c), and EU used in a more spontaneous way (implicit, automatic, procedural, concrete, content/context speci c) (e.g., Schneider et al., 2017; Pons & Harris, 2019). In this chapter, we use the terms declarative and procedural EU. Table 40.1 gives de nitions and examples of these concepts. EU as declarative knowledge refers to knowledge that is content/situation/context independent, and it is frequently assessed in individual settings (e.g., children have to think from the perspective of a story character in a ctional narrative by explicitly answering a sentence-like question) (Astington & Hughes, 2013; Ru man, 2014; Pons & Harris, 2019). On the other hand, procedural EU can be linked to a usage-based approach (Liszkowski, 2013), being a type of knowledge that is more content/situation/context dependent (e.g., a child recognizes another’s emotions during a con ict resolution). This is frequently assessed during direct/natural social interaction through behaviors, gestures, and verbal communications that indicate, for instance, that the child is taking another’s emotional perspective in cooperative activities. One of the aims

p. 568

of this chapter is to discuss the potential relations between EU at the declarative and procedural levels.

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recognition and emotion knowledge, which is related to the information that one has about emotions (e.g.,

Declarative EU

Procedural EU

Definition

Example

Definition

Example

More or less conscious knowledge about the nature, causes, and consequences of emotions in the self and others

The child declares the knowledge he/she has about the emotions of a story character

More or less conscious activities of recognizing, expressing, and controlling the emotions of the self and others

The child acknowledges the partnerʼs point of view and emotions during disagreement

Situation-/content-/context-free

No conflicting perspectives

Situation-/content-/context-specific

Cooperative problem-solving situation

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Table 40.1 Declarative and Procedural Emotional Understanding (EU)

Most of the studies on the development of EU have been conducted in experimental and individual settings, thereby assessing the declarative dimension of this competence. Moreover, although a strong emphasis has been placed on the emergence of EU during early childhood, there is evidence indicating clear quantitative and qualitative developmental changes in this ability from infancy to adolescence (see Kramer & Lagattuta, this volume). Not only do children understand an increasing number of components of emotions with age, have identi ed three qualitative hierarchical stages in the development of EU during childhood: external (2–3 to 4–5 years), mental (5–6 to 7–8 years), and re ective (8–9 to 10–11 years). The ability to comprehend emotions develops from a “peripheral and super cial” understanding of rather visible or nonre ective dimensions of emotions (e.g., recognition of basic emotions, understanding the impact of external causes and desires on emotions), passing through a phase where children can understand the di erence between expressed and felt emotions, and the impact of beliefs and memories on emotions, until reaching a “central and deeper” understanding of the more invisible or re ective dimensions of emotions (e.g., understanding of moral and mixed emotions and the possibility of emotion regulation by means of psychological strategies). Several studies have shown that the earlier stages in this development are a necessary (but not su

cient) condition for the emergence of the later stages (for a review see Molina et al.,

2014). Despite individual and cultural variations in emotion development (see Broesch & Carpendale, this volume), this hierarchical organization has been found across many di erent cultures (for a review, see Tang et al., 2018), suggesting that there is a universal pattern for EU development. There is also substantial evidence showing that the child’s language (see Widen & Nelson, this volume), working memory, executive functions (see Kramer & Lagattuta, this volume), and nonverbal intelligence; the family’s conversations about emotions; the child’s attachment to the mother; and the mother’s sensitivity and responsiveness to her child’s emotional needs are positively related to the development of EU. These factors explain some of the individual di erences in this development (for a review, see Pons & Harris, 2019). Recent studies have also indicated that children’s EU is an important predictor of their psychological well-being (e.g., Bender et al., 2015; Farina & Belacchi, 2014), social competence (e.g., Trentacosta & Fine, 2010), and school achievement (e.g., Lecce et al., 2017; von Salisch et al., 2015). EU appears to be strongly associated with social understanding (see Reddy & Vanello, this volume), since the capacity to understand our own and others’ emotions is intrinsically embedded in social interaction. Because mental, emotional and social worlds form an intertwined relationship (see Erickson & Cottingham, this volume), it is relevant to understand not only how social interaction shapes social cognition, but also the extent to which—and if so how—EU impacts social interaction more speci cally. Social interaction can be de ned as a context characterized by the regulation between individuals; this p. 569

regulation implies that understanding an individual’s action requires,

among other things, the

consideration of the actions of the other members in the group (Carvalho et al., 1998). From this perspective, we can identify di erent levels or ways of interacting, such as a child’s responsiveness to emotional clues at a very early age (e.g., Ru man et al., 2017), reciprocal regulations in cooperative activities (e.g., Viana & Pedrosa, 2014), and complex rituals in which several individuals in a group regulate each other’s behaviors (Carvalho et al., 1998). In this chapter, the focus is on cooperation and, more speci cally, on cooperative problem-solving, which is a type of social and cognitive activity common in both kindergartens and formal school settings. Despite the signi cant number of studies on EU and peer relations (e.g., friendship, popularity, social con ict resolution, prosocial behavior), it is still unclear whether EU is one of the potential mechanisms explaining the ability to cooperate with others in problemsolving situations (e.g., Vesper et al., 2017; Zhang et al., 2016).

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but they also understand them in a di erent way (for a review, see Pons & Harris, 2019). Pons et al. (2004)

Cooperation is an activity where participants share a joint goal, take complementary roles, and are motivated to help one another in order to achieve a given task (Moll & Tomasello, 2007). Children’s everyday social life demands that they align their behavior and thoughts with the behavior and thoughts of others in order to work on shared goals (Schmidt et al., 2011), making cooperation a fundamental part of preschool and school activities. In addition, cooperation is strongly related to important social middle childhood. Understanding the relation between children’s EU and their cooperation can, therefore, provide more knowledge about the skills that children apply to cooperate more e ectively, and can consequently contribute to the debate about the relation between declarative and procedural EU.

Emotion Understanding As a Mechanism Underlying Peer Cooperation in Preschoolers and School-Age Children Cognitive processes essential for peer cooperation in infancy and toddlerhood—such as representation sharing, joint attention, and intention attribution (Tomasello, 2019; Warneken et al., 2006)—have been studied extensively in the past years (Sebanz et al., 2006). Previous studies have shown that already from their second year, children begin to succeed in cooperative problem-solving tasks that demand behavioral coordination (e.g., Brownell et al., 2006), and that from this age they start to coordinate complementary roles without the support of adults (Eckerman & Peterman, 2001). There is also evidence indicating that 2year-old children seem to understand others’ intentions while coordinating actions with peers during free play (Lucena & Pedrosa, 2014; Viana & Pedrosa, 2014). By the age of 3 years, they become capable of helping p. 570

each other in

solving a task that they cannot complete alone (Hamann et al., 2012), whereas the ability to

plan an action by taking the other’s perspective into account ahead of time does not appear before the ages of 5 to 7 years (Meyer et al., 2015). In addition, a large body of studies has found that on a wide range of cognitive problems, children perform better when working with a partner compared to when they work on the same problem alone (e.g., Doise & Mugny, 1984; Satta et al., 2017; Zapiti & Psaltis, 2012). The level of a child’s expertise on the task, the generation of sociocognitive con icts, the quality of the verbal discussions, and their imitative strategies (e.g., Azmitia, 1988; Butera et al., 2011) are among the cognitive and social factors explaining better performance in cooperative situations. For instance, Satta and colleagues (2017) have recently shown that improvement in inhibitory control reduces egocentric bias and facilitates the monitoring of peers’ actions and the implementation of a common action plan (Meyer et al., 2015). Recently, there has also been an increasing interest in studying the potential in uences of Theory of Mind (ToM) on peer cooperation (e.g., Etel & Slaughter 2019), but these studies typically only consider the understanding of the cognitive side of the mind (beliefs, intentions, perspectives). For instance, it has been demonstrated that 6- to 10-year-olds are capable of using rst- and second-order false beliefs to make predictions and coordinate their actions with peers, thereby producing better outcomes in cooperative activities (e.g., Curry & Chesters, 2012; Flobbe et al., 2008; Grüeneisen et al., 2015). Etel and Slaughter (2019) have also found that better performance on ToM scale was associated with coordination and communication during cooperation.

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competences, such as helping behaviors (e.g., Cirelli et al., 2014), in early (see Vaish, this volume) and

The increased understanding of the cognitive mechanisms underlying cooperative activities has led some researchers to argue that body and mind should move together in successful cooperation (e.g., Sebanz et al., 2006). This chapter intends to extend this statement by suggesting that successful cooperation demands that body, mind, and emotions move together. Importantly, there are still limitations to our understanding of which aspects of emotional competence are related to cooperation and whether these relations vary the importance of expressing emotions during peer cooperation. For instance, studies with infants have shown that children can use emotional communication to anticipate others’ actions and therefore to coordinate behaviors in interactional contexts. From around 10 months of age, infants are able to demonstrate an understanding of the emotional consequences of successful goals (Skerry & Spelke, 2014), and after the rst year of life, they can regulate their behavior as a function of a partner’s emotional reaction (Repacholi et al., 2014). Studies with older children and adults have shown that cooperative individuals display higher levels of positive emotions than non-cooperators (Mehu et al., 2007), and that emotional expressivity signals cooperativeness. Sharing emotions with others provides motivational cues that facilitate the initiation and maintenance of coordination (Vesper et al., 2017). In a recent study, Zhang et al. (2016) found that when participants perceive themselves as interacting with a human rather than a computer, they experience more emotional arousal, and that this emotional arousal is positively correlated with the stability of the coordination. p. 571

However, knowledge of the impact of understanding emotions on cooperation is scarce and inconsistent. In addition, the studies are often conducted in experimental settings where the child interacts with the experimenter or with a peer-like puppet (de Rosnay et al., 2014; Melis & Warneken, 2016; Ramani & Brownell, 2013; Warneken et al., 2014), which underscores the need for studies looking at actual cooperative situations involving peers. It is also unclear how the potential impact of EU on peer cooperation changes dependent on the nature of the interaction and the ages of the children. This section explores these knowledge gaps in the literature. In a study conducted by Lucena (2018), Brazilian children from age 3 to 5 years were assessed for their EU through the Test of Emotion Comprehension (TEC) and their behaviors during free play, a context which signi cantly elicits a variety of both positive and negative emotions (see Zaharia et al., this volume) The TEC assesses nine di erent core components of EU: recognition of basic emotions ( ve items), understanding the impact of situational variations on emotions ( ve items), understanding desire-based emotions (four items), understanding the impact of beliefs on emotions (one item), understanding the impact of memories on emotions (one item), understanding the control of the expression of emotions (one item), understanding that the experience of emotions can be regulated by means of re ective psychological strategies (one item), understanding the mixed nature of emotions (one item), and understanding moral and re ective emotions (two items). In the play setting, two children were already playing together when a third child entered the room and tried to engage in the ongoing interaction. Under these circumstances, the third child potentially needed to negotiate their entering into a play activity already established by the two other children, creating a suitable scenario for the emergence of sociocognitive con ict and cooperation. The behaviors were coded as imitation, cooperative coordinated play, approach without con ict, and invitation to play. First, the ndings showed that older children demonstrated more cooperative coordinated actions with the partners than younger children did. However, no signi cant correlation between EU and cooperative coordinated actions was found. Other studies have also shown that although social interaction among preschool-age peers seems to demand the understanding of others’ thoughts and emotions, as well as shared intentionality during social pretend play (Hughes, 2011; Maguire & Dunn, 1997; Pellegrini & Bjorklund, 2004), this does not necessarily mean that they have acquired EU at the declarative and meta-representational level. Children could use EU competences in social interaction without necessarily understanding the nature, causes, and consequences of emotions at the declarative level (Lillard et al., 2013).

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across age. Most of the studies examining emotional mechanisms underlying cooperation have focused on

Studies with older children, however, have found a positive correlation between scores on the TEC and cooperation among school-age children (Viana et al., 2016, 2019). In these studies, children between 5 and 9 years of age were assessed in two cooperative-dyadic problem-solving tasks: a spatial transformation and a sensorimotor task. The dyads were composed of children of the same sex, from the same classroom, and with similar EU levels. Based on a composite score of ToM that included items extracted from the Theory of Mind Test (TMT; Pons & Harris, 2002) (i.e., cognitive aspects of

ToM such as false belief and perspective

taking), and the TEC (Pons & Harris, 2000), the results showed that children with higher scores on the TEC and TMT performed better on the spatial problem (Viana et al., 2016). In addition, EU and ToM predicted children’s cognitive openness to the partner’s perspective on problem solution when facing sociocognitive con icts in the context of solving the spatial task (Viana et al., 2019b). When assessing performance in the sensorimotor task, EU also predicted better performance when children solved the task together (Viana et al., 2019). Interestingly, when children solved the sensorimotor task individually, EU did not explain variance in their performance (see Zaharia et al., this volume, for a discussion on the relation between board games and emotion regulation). Based on the studies of Viana et al. (2016, 2019), it seems that it is the social aspect of the cooperative condition (which calls for adjustment, coordination, and collaboration) that explains the role of ToM and EU on ultimate task performance, regardless of whether the cognitive demand of the task is more cognitive (spatial task) or more motoric (sensorimotor task). These results are also in line with previous empirical studies showing that ToM has positive implications for coordinating actions with others (Curry & Chester, 2012; Flobbe et al., 2008; Grueneisen et al., 2015). However, it expands those earlier results by going beyond false-belief and perspective-taking concepts in showing the role of understanding the emotional side of the mind in the context of action coordination. Consequently, it suggests that it is not only the expression and sharing of emotions that facilitate cooperation (Eligio et al., 2012; Mehu et al., 2007; Zhang et al., 2016), but also the child’s ability to understand emotions. These results suggest that children are especially able to take advantage of a cooperative situation when they can understand each other’s minds in terms of beliefs, perspectives, desires, and emotions.

Potential Links Between Having Emotion Understanding and Using Emotion Understanding in Social Interaction In light of the ndings presented previously, we now address the question of the extent to which the relations between EU and children’s performance and behaviors in the context of cooperation contribute to the debate about declarative and procedural EU. This debate has a long tradition in developmental psychology, particularly in the eld of social cognition. The main question has been whether these two types of knowledge are related to each other, and if so, to what extent one is a precondition of the other (see Christensen & Michael, 2016; Pons et al., 2012, for discussion). Currently, two main hypotheses for the p. 573

potential relations between these two types of knowledge have been

proposed: (1) a discontinuous

relationship (independent modularity) in which there is no interaction or relation between declarative and procedural knowledge; (2) a continuous relationship (dependent modularity) in which the two systems are somehow related to each other (in a more or less circular way). A continuous relationship can be equivalent, for example, to the bidirectional relationship between children’s EU and their social relationships: children with higher EU have better quality of play with friends, and playing with friends facilitates the continued growth in their EU skills (e.g., it contributes to the understanding of mixed emotions) (Maguire & Dunn, 1997).

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p. 572

Based on the empirical data presented earlier in this chapter, as well as the notion proposed by Pons and Harris (2019) of a spiral relationship between EU and emotion experience (feeling, expressing, and regulating emotions), the core argument here is that the use of emotional knowledge in social interaction, initially more automatic and less conscious, is transformed by improvement in children’s declarative knowledge about emotions that, in turn, results in new ways of applying EU in social interaction. At the and will, therefore, become more sophisticated at the representational level. The spiral shape represented in Figure 40.1 thus indicates that the development of EU goes through a succession of phases that happen concomitantly in top–down (procedural EU is improved by advances in declarative EU) and bottom–up (declarative EU is improved by procedural EU) fashion (see Pons & Harris, 2019, for discussion). Note that the spiral relation between declarative and procedural knowledge is potentially in uenced by di erent factors, such as the age of the participants, the nature of the task—being more or less cognitively and emotionally demanding—and the nature of the study design in terms of the dyad/group composition (i.e., child–child versus child–adult, dyadic versus group interaction, symmetrical or asymmetrical with regard to developmental level or gender). For instance, in the study by Viana et al. (2019b), children with higher ToM and EU were also those who more often took the other’s perspective into account when resolving a disagreement with the other child (“I see your point” reasoning), whereas children with lower ToM and EU were more likely to promptly reject their partner’s proposals for problem solution (“I am right, you are wrong” reasoning). This indicates that the attitude toward another’s viewpoint during sociocognitive con icts varies not only as a function of age, but also as a function of ToM and EU. However, there are studies suggesting that knowing and doing can be unrelated competences. Surtees and Apperly (2012) have shown that adopting others’ perspectives remains cognitively demanding even for adults, especially when the perspectives are con icting (Keysar et al., 2000; Epley et al., 2004; Qureshi et al., 2010), indicating that even adults might not use their sociocognitive skills when interacting with others. According to Surtees and Apperly (2012), in contrast to individual-task situations, two or more cognitive and emotional perspectives are simultaneously engaged during social interactions, which might require other skills such as language and executive functions.

Figure 40.1 Spiral Relationship Between Declarative and Procedural Emotion Understanding. Spiral Relationship Between Declarative and Procedural Emotion Understanding. Most of the studies conducted by Apperly and colleagues took place in an experimental setting where the p. 574

participants interacted with an avatar, whereas in the studies

by Viana et al. (2016, 2019) and Lucena

(2018) children interacted with a familiar same-aged partner in their kindergarten and school environment. Symmetry and familiarity with the partners and the place of the interaction might increase the propensity to use EU and ToM abilities, as the demands of dealing with an unknown environment are reduced. However, this being said, Lucena (2018) did not nd a relation between EU and 3- to 5-year-old children’s strategies to enter in a play activity already established by two other children in their day-care center. In this case, although children were familiar with each other, they were younger than the children in the studies by Viana et al., and the interaction was more complex as it required one child to engage in an ongoing play situation and two children to reorient to include this third child in the ongoing interaction. This latter task appears to be more cognitively demanding because the child needed to understand the topic of the game, the role of the two other children, and potentially anticipate their behaviors in order to nd a way to enter the play activity, interact, and be accepted by the group.

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same time, less sophisticated declarative EU is transformed by the use of those abilities in social interaction

In sum, a spiral relationship between the two types of knowledge seems more plausible as an explanation of p. 575

the variety of ways EU can be needed and used across di erent

age groups and contexts of interaction,

indicating that in some stages and circumstances declarative EU directs procedural EU, while in other phases and circumstances, procedural EU directs declarative EU (see Pons & Harris, 2019, for discussion).

The discussion provided in this chapter suggests that EU can be seen as one of the factors underlying peer cooperation. Understanding emotional states and processes seems necessary (although not su

cient) to

cooperate with a partner in di erent kinds of problem-solving situations. This has theoretical and methodological implications for the debate about the relationship between EU as declarative knowledge and EU as procedural skill by proposing that a spiral relationship might exist between these two types of knowledge. If children become more capable of understanding their own and others’ minds by interacting with others (e.g., Carpendale & Lewis, 2004; Pons & Harris, 2019), they may become more competent at cooperating with others by achieving a better understanding of emotional states at the declarative level. However, this proposal needs a more in-depth investigation. Longitudinal studies might contribute to our understanding of the developmental changes in the associations between EU and children’s interactions and outcomes in cooperative tasks. A training approach could also be useful for this purpose. For instance, one could implement a pretest–intervention–post-test–follow-up study where children (after being matched for age, gender, cognitive level, EU level at the pretest) would be divided into di erent intervention groups: (1) promotion of social interaction; (2) promotion of EU; (3) promotion of both; and (4) promotion of neither. In addition, this chapter suggests that EU may not always be needed and used in social interactions, because the spiral relation between declarative and procedural knowledge is potentially in uenced by di erent contextual factors. These factors include the age of the participants, the nature of the task (being less or more cognitively and emotionally demanding), and the nature of the social interaction and dyad (e.g., child–child versus child–adult, dyadic versus group interaction). It would therefore be interesting to examine whether EU explains cooperation when dyads are composed asymmetrically (e.g., cross-gender dyads, children with di erent levels of EU). This could shed light on whether children bene t more from cooperation when they interact with a more or less competent other in terms of the partner’s EU abilities. One potential path for future investigations would be to combine measures of emotion expressivity, emotion regulation, and EU. This could provide a better understanding of the power of di erent emotional competencies in explaining peer cooperation in di erent problem-solving contexts (see Vaish, this volume). It is particularly relevant to explore these issues in situations where children interact with other children in everyday activities. This also highlights the importance of multimethod studies that allow for the examination of the ways that children use EU in social interaction across di erent contexts. p. 576

Educational implications can also be expected, because such settings increasingly depend upon the ability to cooperate and solve problems with others. Several social and emotional learning programs have been implemented recently (e.g., Nathanson et al., 2016; Izard, 2002; Pons et al., 2019; Sprung et al., 2015) showing that how educators and students process and respond to emotions can improve or hinder a child’s development, including school success (Yang et al., 2019; Denham et al., 2013; Denham & Brown, 2010). This indicates the need to investigate whether the promotion of EU could facilitate cooperation in preschool and school settings; for example, by explicitly talking about mental and emotional states during such classroom activities as book reading, or by making children explicitly re ect on others’ perspectives and emotions prior to, during, and after they have been involved in cooperative tasks and everyday interactions.

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Final Considerations and Prospects for Future Studies

To sum up, an integrative approach toward the understanding of EU development suggests that EU has a broader scope, considering that the developmental changes in children’s declarative EU are anchored in procedural EU skills, and, at the same time, children’s procedural EU skills rely on their declarative EU achievements. Cooperation during free play and cooperative problem-solving among preschool and schoolage children seem to be a relevant context in which EU abilities at the declarative and procedural levels are Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/edited-volume/38848/chapter/337802283 by University of California Library - Berkeley Library user on 13 March 2024

simultaneously applied and developed in social interaction.

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The Oxford Handbook of Emotional Development Daniel Dukes (ed.) et al. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/978019 8855903.001.0001 9780191889516 9780198855903

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Index  Published: January 2022

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Published: 2022

581Index achievement emotions cognitive quality of environments 450 consequences of achievement 452–53 control-value theory (CVT) of 446–47 emotion regulation, and 454 emotion transmissions, quality of 452 feedback, quality of 452–53 frequency of 446 future research, areas for 455–56 goal structures, and 452 group-level abilities, in uence of 453 importance of 455 individual origins and developmental trajectories 448–50 learning, and 453–54 motivational quality 450–52 reciprocal developmental causation 454 recommendations for good practice as to 453 research on 446 social environments, role of 450 social expectations, and 452 universality of 454–55 active inference 51–52 activity emotions 447–48 adaptive behavior and statistical learning 85–86 a ect a ective information processing 101 a ective observation 393–94 categorical a ects 251–52 interactive positive a ect 308 vitality a ects 251–53 a ective social learning a ective observation 393–94 computational modeling of see computational modeling emotion contagion 394–95 habitus theory (Bourdieu) 388 imitation of appropriate behaviors 388–89 model of 390 natural pedagogy 390–92 non-pedagogical mechanisms 392–93 perpetuation of cultural forms 387 social appraisal 392–93 social referencing 393 agency anger directed at agents 69 co-development with emotion 64 contexts of emotional development 373376–78380–81

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concept of 447–48

emotional capital, over 381 emotions associated with 64 misattribution of 64 perception of 64 self-regulation of emotions 202–3 algorithms  See computational modeling amusement expression of 189257 laughter, and 190191 play 356–57359 p. 582

anger achievement emotions 446447–48449454–56 a ective social learning 393 agency, and 64 autism 225–26 cognitive psychology 6970–71 emotion as xative 408–9413–14 emotion category di erentiation 175176 emotion development 380 evolution 2932–3335–38261 gender di erences 20 hearing loss 235–36 history of emotional standards 2024 moral emotions 492498 moral judgments 485486 play 356–59 primates 134 prosocial behavior 545 relational-developmental approach 263–64 socialization through emotion 408 statistical learning 8182 anthropology a ective social learning 387392 contexts of emotional development 377–78 historical contingency of emotional development 146147148–49 anxiety achievement emotions 446447448–53454–58 a ective social learning 394 autism 222225–26228 computational modeling 51–52 emotion dynamics 295–96 emotion regulation by couples 325 emotion understanding 159 emotional development 152 emotions as xatives for understandings 410 empathy development 285–86 evolution 6–7 guilt, and 514

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aggression  See anger

hearing loss 234–35 history of emotional standards 19–202426–27 moral judgments 483 moral self-awareness 554560561 neuroscience insights 205207208209 psychosocial adjustment 426 skillful emotion 505 statistical learning 86 apes  See great apes appraisal co-development of emotion and agency 64 co-development of emotion and expectedness 64–65 conceptions of 63 consciousness, and 63–64 modeling 50 research on 63–64 social appraisal 392–93 See also reappraisal appropriate behaviors, imitation of 388–89 arti cial agent modeling  See computational modeling arti cial intelligence  See computational modeling ASD  See autism attachment security, coding of 310–11 attention seeking  See showing o atypical development, computational modeling of 315 autism arousal, automated tracking of 315 atypical development, computational modeling of 315 de nition of 219 diagnosis of 219 distinctive condition, as 219–20 early intervention approaches 220 electrodermal activity, automated tracking of 315–16 emotion awareness 221–22 emotion development and socialization 220–21 emotion development impairment 219 emotion expression and recognition 223–24 emotion recognition 219226228 emotion regulation 219224–26 emotional expression 219 future research, areas for 227–28 poor outcomes from 220 symptoms, automated measurement of 316–17 automated measurement  See computational modeling awareness of emotion autism 221–22 computational modeling 51–52 emotion understanding 160–61 emotional intelligence 464

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play 340–41342355–56359

emotions as xatives for understandings 413 awareness of others 254–55 p. 583

bared-teeth display

132–33

Bayesian learning active inference, and 51–52 statistical learning, and 83 behavior adaptive behavior, statistical learning and 85–86 dimension of human nature, as xxiii future research, areas for 550–51 imitation of appropriate behaviors 388–89 natural selection on behavioral capacities/propensities 37–38 negative emotion, and 543–46549550–51 positive emotion, and 546–51 prosocial behavior, de nition of 542 research on prosocial behavior 542–43 studies of primate emotional expression 131–35 belief belief systems 410–11 belief-based emotions 159–60 Belief–Desire–Intention (BDI) models 51 computational modeling 51 Deep Belief Networks 50 false beliefs 65115159–60249–50571–72 xing of 413–14 prior belief learning 47 prior expectation, as 51–52 board games  See play body brain, and 528529531 cultural di erences in emotion 399–400 embodied contexts of emotional development  See contexts of emotional development emotion development, and 374–75 emotional control, and 374 emotions, and 340–41 guilt, and 520 humor, and 193194–95 mind, and 147149340374570 play, and 345347 prosocial behavior 546–48549 self, and 373377 body language 34224 bonobos  See great apes boredom achievement emotions 446447–48449450454–55456 history of emotional standards 20–21 play 357–58359 brain

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inference-based learning, and 67

body, and 528529531 ‘cognitive’ brain 505 development 97–98528–29 emotion regulation 203–4207–8 ‘emotional’ brain 505 generation of emotions 4–5149159 great apes 136 humor, and 189190–91194 moral emotions 529–32 play, and 356 reappraisal, and 112 serial emotion homologues 9 skillful emotion 505 ‘social brain network’ 529531–32 See also neuroscience categorical a ects 251–52 category di erentiation 183 causation internal versus external 449 reasoning 78 reciprocal causation and emotion regulation 455–56 reciprocal developmental 454 change development, and xxiv emotion, change of xxv history of emotional standards 18 cheerfulness 1920–21222326152 chimpanzees  See great apes p. 584

Chinese and Chinese-immigrant families bilingualism 426 class di erences in cultural change 425430–31 collectivistic culture 424430–31 cultural context of parenting 423–24 cultural context of socialization of children 421–22430–31 culture and parenting in relation 428–29 economic growth and cultural change 425430–31 emotion regulation 428–30 face and face-saving (mianzi), concepts of 424425430–31 familism 424430–31 lial piety, concept of 424430–31 food and eating practices 427–28 future research, areas for 431 guanxi (harmony) concept 424430–31 heritage-language practices 426–27 language gaps between parents and children 427 “open-door” policy and cultural change 425 parental socialization of emotion regulation 428429–31 psychosocial adjustment and emotional self-regulation 430 research on 422

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evolution 31–42

transactional relations between child temperament and parenting 430–31 urbanization and cultural change 425–26 yin-yang concept 424430–31 cladistic analysis  See evolution class di erences in cultural change 425430–31 achievement emotions 450 appraisal dimensions of emotion, development of 63–65 bridging of cognitive and emotional development 6671 co-development of emotion and cognition 63–69 cognition as dimension of human nature xxiii ‘cognitive’ brain 505 cognitive revolution 61 early applications to emotional development 62 emotions and cognitions, separability of 250–51 empathy 236 executive functioning in emotional development 65–67 inference-based learning and emotional development 67–69 pathways for research on emotional and cognitive development 69–71 progress compared to emotional development 62–63 See also appraisal; See also emotion understanding; See also reappraisal; See also theory of mind communication  See language compassion achievement emotions 447–48 emotion category di erentiation 176–77 moral emotions 492498–99 moral judgments 485486 moral self-awareness 554 skillful emotion 508–9 computational modeling active inference 51–52 application to emotional development 46–52 application to psychological research 46 appraisal modeling 50 atypical development, of 315 Belief–Desire–Intention (BDI) models 51 deep learning 50 early interaction  See early interaction embodiment of algorithms into arti cial agents for simulations of behavior 51 free energy, principle of 51–52 human-level general arti cial intelligence, achievement of 48 imagination, modeling of 49 limits of human psychological experimentation 45–46 machine consciousness, concept of 48–49 multi-agent modeling 51 potential bene ts of 55–56 Projective Consciousness Model 52–54 reinforcement learning 49 connection

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cognitive psychology

empathy, and 558 humor, and 189–90 social understanding, and 250254–55 p. 585

consciousness appraisal, and 63–64 e ort, and 202–3 machine consciousness 48–4950–51 motive–event relations, and 263–64 practical consciousness 377 Projective Consciousness Model (PCM) 52–54 streams of 257 consolation  See empathy consumerism, rise of 23 contexts of emotional development agency, and 373376–78380–81 cultural contexts 373 embodied contexts 373374–76381 embodied emotional selves 378–81 emergent emotional self 376–78 emotional capital 376379380–81 hierarchies of 378–81 social contexts 373 socialization process 373374381 structural contexts 373 studies of 374 control-value theory (CVT) 446–47 cooperation cultural contingency 7–9 emotion understanding, and 569–72575576 play 343362–63 prosocial behavior 6513–14 counterfactual thinking, emotion understanding and 162–63 couples, emotion regulation changes across life span 327–29 de nition 324 emotional expression 323 future research, areas for 331–32 happiness and health 329–31 origins in infant/caregiver relations 326–27 social context 323 studies 324–26 cross-cultural emotional development attachment theory 399 cultural embodiment of emotions 398–99 emotion regulation 403–4 emotion responsiveness across cultures 399–401 emotion talk across cultures 402–3 rst year of life 399

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awareness of others, and 254–55

humans as cultural species 398 mutual joy 398404 process of 398404–5 socialization goals across cultures 401–2 crying communication via 94 computational modeling 313–14 empathy, and 560 frowning, and 80–81 jealousy, and 269–70 observation of 62 prosocial behavior 542543550 re exive response, as 236 temporal and interactive dynamics of 314–15 culture class di erences in cultural change 425430–31 cultural context of parenting 423 cultural contingency of emotional development 147–49 cultural di erences in emotion, evolutionary explanations of 7–9 cultural variation in experience of moral emotions 492–93 di erent emotional standards in Western and Eastern cultures 22 economic growth and cultural change 425430–31 emotional formation, and 444 emotional frontiers, and 444 evolution of 2931–3335–3739–42 moral emotional development  See moral emotions socialization of children 421–22 See also Chinese and Chinese-immigrant families; See also crosscultural emotional development CVT  See control-value theory cybernetics  See computational modeling deafness  See hearing loss death  See grief Deep Belief Networks 50 p. 586

deep learning

50

depression autism 221–22225–26228 emotion dynamics 297–98 emotion regulation 97204207–8 emotion understanding 165–66 guilt, and 514 hearing loss 234–35 history of emotional standards 147–48152 play 342356 psychosocial adjustment 426 race, and 413 skillful emotion 505 desire Belief–Desire–Intention (BDI) models 51

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attachment security, coding of 309–10

computational modeling 51 early premoral sensibility 555 emotion understanding 571 emotional understanding 161–63165 envy, and 269 identi cation of 113–14 jealousy, and 265–66269–70271 di erentiation  See emotion category di erentiation disability physical play, and 342 See also hearing loss disappointment computational modeling 51–5253 emotion understanding 158162–63 disgust a ective social learning 390–91392–93 agency, and 64 emotion category di erentiation 175176–77 emotion regulation 329–30 evolution 5–69–10261 moral disgust 10133–34 moral emotions 492498 moral judgments 478–79483 pathogen disgust 9–10133–34 play 359 primates 131–32133–34 prosocial behavior 544545550 sexual disgust 9–10 displeasure 53–54375558 early interaction arousal, automated tracking of 315 ASD symptoms, automated measurement of 316–17 attachment security, coding of 310–11 atypical development, computational modeling of 315 computational approaches to research 311 computational modeling, advances in 305–6317 computerized replication of human coding 307–11 crying, temporal and interactive dynamics of 314–15 electrodermal activity in children with ASD, automated tracking of 315–16 emotional expressions in 305317 emotional vocalizations, computational modeling of 314–15 face-to-face interactions, computational modeling of 311–13 face-to-face interactions, development changes in 313 face-to-face interactions, developmental consequences of 313 face-to-face interactions, goals of 312 Facial Action Coding System 307–8 facial expressions, automated tracking of 306 interaction dynamics 308–9 interactive positive a ect 308

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guilt, and 515–16517

naturally occurring elicitors of emotional interactions, computational modeling of 313–14 parent/child physical interactions, automated tracking of 306 positive and negative expression, similarities between 308 process of 305317 unsupervised machine learning of 307 economic growth and cultural change 425430–31 economic inequality  See inequality p. 587

e ort causation, and 449 consciousness and 202–3 exertion of 479 investment of 454 reduction of 454 EI  See emotional intelligence embarrassment contexts of emotional development 378 emotion category di erentiation 175176–77 moral emotions 492–93527531–32 neuroscience 209 embodied contexts  See contexts of emotional development emotion achievement, and  See achievement emotions appraisal of 63–65 change of xxv concept of 129 de nition of xxiii–xxiv dimension of human nature, as xxiii emotional development, and xxv human nature, and 147 intuition, and 478–79 invalidation 238 matching of emotional states 130 mental state, and 161–63 moral emotions 236–37 perception of categories of 81–83 process of, conceptions of xxv regulation of  See emotion regulation simultaneously speci c and variable phenomenon, as xxiv skillful  See skillful emotion time, and xxv validation 237–38 emotion awareness autism 221–22226–28 de nition of 235–36 Emotion Awareness and Skills Enhancement (EASE) program 226 emotion category di erentiation arrays of expressions 179–80 development of 174–75

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vocal expressions, coding of 309–10

development of emotion understanding 175–77 existing emotion categories, modi cation of 181–82 expression category groups, building of 179–80 language acquisition, and 174–75 linking of cues to emotion categories 182183 process of elimination, by 174–75182183–84 processes of 174–75177–78183 reason for 183 emotion contagion 278394–95409545 emotion dynamics combination of research methods 297 conceptions of 291 crying, temporal and interactive dynamics of 314–15 day-to-day dynamics 295–97 future research, areas for 299–300 individual dynamics 292–93295–96 interaction dynamics 308–9 interpersonal dynamics 293–95296–97 moment-to-moment dynamics 292–95 multiple-timescale perspectives on emotional development 292300 multiple-timescale research approaches 297–99 study of 291 temporal interpersonal emotion systems (TIES), concept of 292 emotion invalidation 237238–39 emotion recognition appraisal modeling 50 autism 223–24226228 emotion understanding 567 emotional intelligence 467 play 361–62 prosocial behavior 544 social understanding 249–50 p. 588

emotion regulation achievement emotions, and 454 adolescents 96–99 adults 99–103 age-related di erences 103 age-related positivity e ect in a ective information processing 101 attachment to parents, development of 95 autism 219224–26 children 94–96 Chinese and Chinese-immigrant families 428–31 couples  See couples, emotion regulation cross-cultural emotional development 403–4 de nition of 93323422–23 developmental phenomenon, as 93–94 e ectiveness of 101–3 emotional challenges for 98

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new emotion categories, creation of 178–81

explicit regulation 204–5 family context 95–96 future research, areas for 103–4 implicit regulation 203–4 importance of 93 motivation for 99100 neurobiological accounts of transient decline in adolescents 97–98 neuroscience insights 201–2 parental modulation of 206–8 parenting, and 96 peer e ects during adolescence 208–9 play 357–59362–63 re ective and re exive systems in 422–23 self-regulation 202–3 social context for 99 social modulation of 206–9 socioemotional selectivity theory 100 See also emotion dynamics; See also reappraisal emotion understanding (EU) cognitive abilities, building of 157–58 complexity of components 166 concept of 566 cooperation, and 569–72575576 counterfactual thinking 162–63 declarative 567–68 de nition of 157–58166567 development of 175–77 developmental factors for 568 developmental mechanisms 163–66 educational implications of 576 future research, areas for 163–66575–76 integrative approach to 576 inverse relations between mental states and emotions 161–63 mixed emotions 159 motivation for 157 multiple emotion causes, of 158–61166 past emotional experiences 160–61 procedural 567–68 social interaction, and 568–69572–75576 stages of 568 See also social understanding emotion validation 237–39240241 ‘emotional’ brain 505 emotional capital 376379380–81 emotional competence autism 377 board games focused on 360361–62363 contexts of emotional development 377379 emotion regulation, and 93 emotion understanding 570

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integrated study in social contexts 210–11

emotional frontiers 437–38 emotional intelligence, and 466469 empathy 281–83 hearing loss 234–37239–40 learning, and 79 play 343344–45356–57360–61 emotional development authors’ focus on xxiii autism 219220–21 computational modeling  See computational modeling contexts  See contexts of emotional development de nition of xxv–xxvi development, and xxv–xxvi early philosophies on 62 emotion, and xxv ethos of authors’ approach xxvi–xxvii evolution, and  See evolution historical development of standards of  See history of emotional standards modern philosophies on 62 processes of 46–47 progress in research 62–63 societal aspects of theories of 261 emotional engagement and social understanding  See social understanding emotional experience, history of  See history of emotional experience p. 589

emotional expression arrays of 179–80 autism 219223–24 category groups, building of 179–80 couples 323 de nition of 129 evolution 130 evolutionary continuity of 131–32 facial communication 130 positive and negative expression, similarities between 308 primates  See primates socioecological constraints on 130–31 subtle emotional cues, perception of 137 See also early interaction; See also emotion dynamics emotional formation class barriers 441–42 concept of 437–38444 cultural context of 444 de nition of 437–38 emotional frontiers, and 438439 everyday life experiences 443–44 geographical frontiers 439–40 historical contingency of 438 occurrence of 439

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neuroscience 207–8

racialized oppression 442–43 shared experience of 438 See also history of emotional experience emotional frontiers class barriers 441–42 concept of 150437–38444 e ective crossing of 439444 emotional formation, and 438439 everyday life experiences 443–44 geographical frontiers 439–40 historical contingency of emotional development 444 racialized oppression 442–43 emotional intelligence (EI) core competencies of 464–65 educational aspects 463–64 emotion and intelligence in relation 464 future research, areas for 471–72 gaps in research on 465–66 moral aspects 463–64 operationalization issues 467–69 popular understanding of 463 scienti c aspects 463–64 social and emotional learning, and 463464469–72 terminology inconsistencies as to 466–67 emotional self embodied self 378–81 emergent self 376–78 emotive institutions, concept of 148–49 empathy a ective empathy 527 cognitive empathy 527 concept of 278–80 consolation amongst great apes 280–84 crying, and 560 de nition of 277527 developmental disturbances 285–86 early premoral sensibility 558–59 emotional contagion, and 527 evolution of 277 future research, areas for 284–85 hearing loss 236 humans and great apes compared 277–78286 sociality, and 277 sympathy, and 527 enjoyment achievement emotions 446447–49452–53454–55456–57 mutual joy 404 play 357360 Enlightenment  See history of emotional standards

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cross-cultural aspects of 444

envy evolution 4–5 higher-order relational experiences of 270–71 history of emotional standards 26 infant envy, existence of 269 relational-developmental approach 263–64265–68 symbolic mediation in development of 269–70 See also jealousy epistemic emotions, de nition of 447–48 ethnicity  See race p. 590

EU

 See emotion understanding

evolution adaptive contextual variability 5 anger, of 5–6 brain development, of 32–37 brain growth, of 38–40 cladistic analysis 29–32 contextually contingent development 5–712–13 culturally contingent development 7–9 culture, of 2931–3335–3739–42 development, and 11 developmental processes as potential adaptations 11–12 developmental systems as central units of 11 di erences in traits, moderation of emotional responses by 5–6 disgust, of 5–69–10 ecology, and 11 elevation, of 6 emotional expressions, of 130131–32 emotions, of 32–40261 emotions as core of human evolution 40–42 emotions as functional assemblages 4–5 evolutionary sequences in human development 29 genetic closeness between humans and great apes 29 language, of 32–40 last common ancestor (LCA) 29–30 meta-theory of emotions 4 natural selection on behavioral capacities/propensities 37–38 natural selection on preadaptations 32–37 perspectives on emotions 3 phenotypes, developmental plasticity of 6–7 proximate explanations of emotions 3 proximate mechanisms of emotions 45 reaction norms, adaptation development via 7–8 serial emotion homologues, concept of 9–11 social aspects of emotional development, and 7–9 social relations, of 34–42 ultimate function of emotions, explanations of 3 executive functioning cool tasks 66

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moral emotions 498

de nition of 65 elements of 65 emotional development, and 65 hot tasks 66–67 neurological functioning, and 65–66 exercise play  See play, physical expectedness, co-development with emotion 64–65 experience of emotion, history of  See history of emotional experience expertise, new sources of 23 expression  See emotional expression face-to-face interactions  See early interaction Facial Action Coding System (FACS) 307–8 facial communication  See early interaction; See emotional expression false beliefs 65115159–60249–50571–72 family changes in role of 19–202223 emotion regulation 95–96 See also Chinese and Chinese-immigrant families; See also parents and parenting fear agency, and 64 appraisal 63–64 emotion category di erentiation 174–75176181–82 emotion regulation 206–7 emotional formation 147–48 evolution 2932–3335–38261 play 357–58 primates 132–33 prosocial functions of 521 punishment, of 521 See also thrill p. 591

feedback achievement emotions 449452–53455 appraisal, and 46–4750 biofeedback 222284 emotion understanding 165–66 facial feedback 326–27 feedback loops 455–56 hearing loss 237 play 360 reciprocal causation 455–56 social feedback 4753–54284 statistical learning 8082 virtue acquisition 509–10 First World War, emotional formation in 153–54 free energy, principle of 51–52 frowning 80–81393399–400411 frustration achievement emotions 448 autism 224–25

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reappraisal 112113115116–17

cognitive psychology 6870 emotion regulation 96 hearing loss 239 play 343–44356–58 socialized learning 408 gender achievement emotions 454–55 change in children’s understanding 414–15 contexts of emotional development 375379380–81 cross-cultural emotional development 403 emotion as “ xative” for learned attitudes 409–10415 emotion dynamics 299 emotion understanding 573575 emotional frontiers 437–38439441 history of emotional standards 20 moral emotions 491493499 neuroscience 208–9 play 341 gorillas  See great apes gratitude 357448492527 great apes consolation amongst 280–84 developmental disturbances as to empathy 285–86 empathy development, future research 284–85 genetic closeness with humans 29 human empathy development compared 277–78286 natural selection on behavioral capacities/propensities 37–38 natural selection on preadaptations 32–37 social-tie strength 29–32 See also primates grief history of emotional standards 2124–2526 primates 134–35 guilt agency, and 64 anxiety, and 514 complex forms of 521 de nition of 514–15 depression, and 514 development of 515–19 early premoral sensibility 561–62 emotional formation 148 evolution 35–38 fear of punishment, and 521 future research, areas for 519–22 hearing loss 235–37 prosocial functions of 513–14521–22 shame, and 520–21 See also shame habitus theory (Bourdieu) 388

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games  See play

happiness couples, emotion regulation 329–31 early premoral sensibility 559–60 emotion category di erentiation 176178–79180–82 emotion understanding 158–60 evolution 2932–3335–38 history of emotional standards 1923 physical play, and 342 statistical learning 81 See also cheerfulness p. 592

hearing loss clinical implications 239–40 diagnosis of 234 early intervention approaches 234 emotional competence, and 234–37239–40 level of 234 limitations of research 240–41 moral emotions 236–37 parental emotion coaching 237–38 parenting stress 238–39 physical play, and 342 prevalence of 234 sign language 238 social and mental-health problems 234–35 theory of mind 236 history of emotional experience anthropology insights 148–49 emotional formation, concept of 147149–50154437–38 emotional formation in wartime 153–54 emotional formation via monitoring of well-being 151–53 emotional frontier, concept of 150 emotive institutions, concept of 148–49 historical contingency of emotional development 146147–49154 neuroscience insights 149 psychology insights 149 variations in understandings over time 146 See also emotional formation history of emotional standards adjustments in standards 24–25 consumerism, rise of 23 di erences between Western and Eastern cultures 22 Enlightenment 18–1922 expertise, new sources of 23 family, changes in role of 19–202223 forces for change 18 history and emotional development 18 impacts of changes 19–2123 Industrial and Urban Revolution 19–2022 informalization of social rules 23 relevance of historical factors 25–27

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emotional formation 151–53

social class distinctions 21–22 hominins  See evolution hope achievement emotions 446447–48449452–53454 computational modeling 51–5253 play 357 human nature dimensions of xxiii emotion, and 147 See also behaviour; See also cognition; See also development; See also emotion humor cognitive distinctions from laughter 191–94 developmental a ordances of 195–96 involuntary and voluntary laughter 189–90 laughter, and 189 smiling, and 188 social cognition of 194–95 social distinctions from laughter 190–91 imagination, modeling of 49 indignation 65151–52521557–58 Industrial Revolution  See history of emotional standards inequality avoidance of 388 axes of 491 bases of 495–96 future research, areas for 499 growth of global inequality 379 moral emotions, and 491498–99 perception of 148 structural inequality 491495 theory of 496–98 types of 499 understanding of 412–13416 inference-based learning rational inference 68–69 rationalist constructionism 67 statistical learning 67–68 intelligence arti cial  See computational modeling cognitive 468 emotion development  See emotional intelligence emotional  See emotional intelligence moral judgments 477 nonverbal 568 virtue acquisition 504–5509510 p. 593

intention attribution of 569–70 behavioral 340 Belief–Desire–Intention (BDI) models 51

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history of emotional experience 153154

computational modeling 51 inference of 68192 negative 359 reading for 153 vitality a ects 251–52 development, and xxiv evolution 261 play 356–57 time, and xxiv intimate relationships  See couples, emotion regulation intuition characteristics of 478–79480 emotion, and 478–79 indicators of 479 morality, and 478–80 involvement cognitive 261 connection, and 254 parental 534 jealousy crying, and 269–70 emotion category di erentiation 181–82 higher-order relational experiences of 270–71 history of emotional standards 24 relational origins in infancy 266–69 relational-developmental approach 263–64 symbolic mediation in development of 269–70 See also envy joy agency, and 64 evolution 261 mutual joy 398404 play 357 See also thrill language bilingualism 426 childrens’ learning ability 78 emotion category di erentiation, and 174–75 emotion talk across cultures 402–3 evolution of 2932–40 heritage-language practices 426–27 language gaps between parents and children 427 sign language 238 last common ancestor (LCA)  See evolution Latin-American children in U.S.A. moral emotional development, and 528–29 parenting and moral emotional development 533–34 research on 527–28534–35 laughter amusement, and 190191

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interest

appraisal 63–64 cognitive distinctions from humor 191–94 developmental a ordances of 195–96 early interaction 305 humor, and 189 primate play face, and 133 social cognition of 194–95 social distinctions from humor 190–91 learning achievement emotions, and 453–54 childrens’ ability 78–79 deep learning 50 inference-based learning 67–69 prior belief learning 47 purpose of 80 reinforcement learning 49 socialization, and 407 statistical learning  See statistical learning studies of 407 supervised and unsupervised learning 80 See also a ective social learning love and romance emotion regulation 207 emotional formation 147–48 history of emotional standards 19–2024 See also couples, emotion regulation machine consciousness 48–4950–51 marital satisfaction 329–30 p. 594

mental-health problems of hearing loss

234–35

migrants  See Chinese and Chinese-immigrant families mixed emotions, understanding of 159 moral decisions 478–87 moral disgust 10133–34 moral emotions acquisition of 237 characteristics of 492–94 contemporary theories of 527 cultural approaches to parenting and moral emotional development 533–34 cultural variation in experience of 492–93 cultural-neurobiological approach to research 528–29 development of 494–95 developmental neurobiology of 529–31 di erent developmental neurobiologies of di erent moral emotions 531–32 early premoral sensibility, in 557 early theories of 526–27 experience of 65237497–98 expression of 234–35237444 gaps in research on 527 importance of 554 inequality, and 491499

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involuntary and voluntary laughter 189–90

moral development, elements of 554 moral self-awareness, and 562–63 new understandings of 554–55 operation of 492–93 premoral sensibility, development of 555–57 types of 65236–37483492498527 See also empathy; See also sympathy moral psychology 478479 moral thought 478480–81484–85486487 motivational quality 450–52 motive–event relations 263–64 mutual joy 398404 natural selection  See evolution neuroscience emotion regulation 201–2 emotional formation 149 moral emotional development 529–32 neurological functioning 65–66 See also brain nonhuman primates  See primates open-mouth display by primates 133 orang-utans  See great apes organismic engagement  See relational-developmental approach outcome emotions 447–48 parents and parenting attachment to parents, development of 95 childrens’ hearing loss 237–39 cultural context of 423 culture-speci c approaches 533–34 emotion invalidation 238 emotion regulation 96206–8 emotion validation 237–38 socialization of children 421–22 See also early interaction past emotional experiences, understanding of 160–61 pathogen disgust 9–10133–34 patriotism, emotional formation of 153–54 PCM  See Projective Consciousness Model pedagogy  See a ective social learning perception agency 64 emotion categories 81–83 studies of primates 135–36137 subtle emotional cues 137 See also emotion understanding physical play  See play, physical p. 595

play activity-related emotions 357 bene ts of 355–57 board games 359–62 board games focused on emotional competences 360361–62363 de nition of 354–55

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research on 527–28555

deprivation 356 emotion development, and 354356 emotion regulation, and 357–59362–63 free play 355 guidelines for board game design and testing 360–61 outcome-related emotions 357 positive emotions during 356–57362–63 primate play face 133 primate play interactions 133 right to play 355–56 rule-based play 355 types of 355362–63 value given to 356 play, physical bene ts of 339 body and emotions, relationship between 340–41 children with disabilities or hearing loss 346–48 de nition of 341 emotional development, and 340348 exercise play 341 future research, areas for 348 happiness, and 342 observations of 339–40 research on 340 rough-and-tumble play 341–42343–45 types of 341 play face 133 pleasure computational modeling 53–54 contexts of emotional development 375 history of emotional standards 22 play 339342343–44357 sexual 34–35 shared 560 See also displeasure practical consciousness 377 preadaptation  See evolution prediction and statistical learning 83–85 pride agency, and 64 early premoral sensibility 560–61 emotion category di erentiation 181–82 hearing loss 236–37 play 356–57 primates bared-teeth display 132–33 behavioral studies of emotional expression 131–35 comparison between human and nonhuman primates 129 emotion communication capacities 130137

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negative emotions during 356–57362–63

emotion perception studies 135–36137 facial expressions 132–35137 future research, areas for 136–37 perception of subtle emotional cues 137 play interactions 133 sociocognitive capacities 130138 socioecological constraints on emotional expressions 130–31136–37 See also great apes prior belief learning 47 prior expectation as belief 51–52 Projective Consciousness Model (PCM) 52–54 prosocial behavior  See behavior prosocial functions of guilt  See guilt psychology aim of 45–46 cognition  See cognitive psychology computational modeling, application of 46 emotional formation 149 limits of human experimentation 45–46 race change in children’s understanding 414–15 emotion as “ xative” for learned attitudes 408–10415–16 future research, areas for 415–16 moral emotional development, and  See Latin-American children in U.S.A. role of emotions in consolidating messages about race 410–14415–16 socialization through emotion 408 rational inference 68–69 rationalist constructionism 67 p. 596

reappraisal adolescent development 116–18 de nition of 111 development of 110–11120 early childhood development 113–14 elements of 111–12 executive functioning 112113115116–17 future research, areas for 118–20 middle childhood development 115–16 strategy of 110 theory of mind 112113–14115117 types of 120 reciprocal causation  See causation reciprocal developmental causation 454 recognition of emotion  See emotion recognition regulation of emotion  See emotion regulation reinforcement learning 49 relational-developmental approach assertions of 271–72 developmental view 261 emotions as felt forms of organismic engagement 263–64

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positive emotional expressions 133

envy 265–71 intersubjective analysis of emotional experience 264–65 jealousy 265–71 relational approach 261–65272 relief play 357 romance  See love and romance rough-and-tumble play  See play, physical sadness emotion category di erentiation 174–75176178–79181–82 emotion understanding 158–59160 evolution 2932–3335–38261 hearing loss 235–36 play 356–57 relational-developmental approach 263–64 satisfaction computational modeling 53 guilt 517–19 happiness 559 history of emotional standards 24 humor 195–96 marital 329–30 play 356–57 reappraisal 110 relationship 330–31 SEL  See social and emotional learning self-awareness, moral  See moral emotions self-regulation  See agency sentiment, morality and 481486–87 sexual disgust 9–10 shame agency, and 64 early premoral sensibility 561–62 emotion category di erentiation 176–77 emotional formation 148 evolution 35–38 hearing loss 236–37 history of emotional standards 18–1921–2225–26 prosocial functions of 520–21 See also guilt showing o

255

shyness, smiling and 254–55 sign language 238 skillful emotion cognitive (im)penetrability of 507–8 emotions becoming skillful 506–7 spontaneous, not impulsive, occurrence 508–9 virtue acquisition, and 509–10 smiling

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computational modeling 51–52

origin in primate bared-teeth display 132–33 shyness, and 254–55 social understanding 254–55 social and emotional learning (SEL) core competencies of 464–65 gaps in research on 465–66 growth of 463 methodology issues 469–70471–72 operationalization issues 468–69 terminology inconsistencies as to 466–67 p. 597

social aspects achievement emotions  See achievement emotions autism, emotion development and socialization 220–21 class distinctions in emotional standards 21–22 couples’ emotion regulation 323 emotion as socialization “ xative” 407408–10 emotion regulation 99206–9210–11 emotional development 7–9 empathy and sociality 277 evolution of social relations 34–42 guanxi concept of social or group harmony 424 hearing loss 234–35 informalization of social rules 23 learning and socialization 407 parents’ role in socializing children 421–22 primate social play interactions 133 prosocial functions of guilt  See guilt social appraisal 392–93 ‘social brain network’ 529531–32 social cognition of laughter and humor 194–95 social contexts of emotional development 373374381 social distinctions between humor and laughter 190–91 social interaction and emotion understanding 568–69572–75576 social referencing 393 socialization goals across cultures 401–2 socialization through emotion 408 social-tie strength amongst great apes 29–32 socioecological complexity hypothesis 8 socioecological constraints on emotional expressions 130–31 socioemotional selectivity theory 100 See also a ective social learning; See also Chinese and Chineseimmigrant families; See also gender; See also play; See also race social understanding categorical a ects 251–52 conceptualization of emotions 249–50 connection, and 254–55 emotion knowledge, and 249–50 emotional engagement, and 254–55 emotional engagement, seperability from 250256–57

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emotional intelligence, and 463464

emotions and cognitions, seperability of 250–51 involvement, and 254 study of 249–50 theory of mind, and 249–50 vitality a ects 251–53 speech  See language statistical learning adaptive behavior, and 85–86 Bayesian learning, and 83 childrens’ learning ability 78–79 cognitive psychology 67–68 de nition of 80–81 emotion categories, perception of 81–83 emotional learning, and 80–81 future applications to emotional development 86–87 prediction, and 83–85 purpose of learning 80 research on 80–81 supervised and unsupervised learning 80 streams of consciousness 257 supervised learning 80 surprise 176181–82 sympathy de nition of 527 empathy, and 527 talk  See language teasing 255 temporal interpersonal emotion systems (TIES), concept of 292 theory of mind computational modeling 41 evolution 37–3841 hearing loss 236 reappraisal 112113–14115117 thrill of play 357–58 p. 598

time couples’ emotion regulation, changes across life span 327–29 development, and xxiv dimension of human nature, as xxiii emotion, and xxv interest, and xxiv multiple-timescale perspectives on emotional development 292300 temporal interpersonal emotion systems (TIES), concept of 292 See also emotion dynamics topic emotions, de nition of 447–48 understanding  See emotional understanding; See social understanding unsupervised learning 80 Urban Revolution  See history of emotional standards verbalization  See language virtue

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socioemotional competence  See emotional competence

acquisition of 504–5509–10 emotional components of 505 ethics of 503504–5506–7 skill model of 504–5506508–9 vitality a ects 251–53 wartime, emotional formation in 153–54 well-being  See happiness World War One, emotional formation in 153–54

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vocal expressions, computational modeling of 309–10314–15