Emotional Development

What are emotions?

Infants are emotional beings. Although they can’t use language to express their feelings and emotions, they are extremely sensitive to other people’s emotional states. Understanding what an emotion is and how to respond to an infant’s emotional state is crucial.

An emotion is a feeling or an affect. It can be positive or negative. It varies in intensity and is influenced by one’s perceptions. Functionalists believe that emotions are relational and are linked with an individual’s goals.

Primary and secondary emotions

Newborns and infants display eight primary emotions. By referring to them as primary emotions, it means that they are apparent early in life, are hardwired, universal, and likely serve an evolutionary purpose.

Secondary emotions emerge between the first and second birthday. Secondary emotions are various combinations of the primary emotions and include a self-reflective aspect (i.e., it is a new feeling based upon a cognitive appraisal of the situation and current emotions). Instead of being universal, these emotions can be culture specific. Said another way, secondary emotions are not hardwired; instead, they are learned through our experiences in the world and with others. Two examples of secondary emotions are pride and shame.In infancy, the child is experiencing emotions in the here and now. With cognitive and language development, a child becomes able to discuss emotions experienced in the past, and share anticipated emotions in the future. But this is not the only change we see in emotional experiences across childhood.

Early Emotional Development

At birth, infants exhibit two emotional responses: attraction and withdrawal. They show attraction to pleasant situations that bring comfort, stimulation, and pleasure, and they withdraw from unpleasant stimulation such as bitter flavors or physical discomfort. At around two months, infants exhibit social engagement in the form of social smiling as they respond with smiles to those who engage their positive attention. Prior to this age, smiling is merely reflexive and does not occur in response to external stimuli. Pleasure is expressed as laughter at 3 to 5 months of age, and displeasure becomes more specific to fear, sadness, or anger (usually triggered by frustration) between ages 6 and 8 months. Where anger is a healthy response to frustration, sadness, which appears in the first months as well, usually indicates withdrawal (Thiam et al., 2017).

Infants progress from reactive pain and pleasure to complex patterns of socioemotional awareness, which is a transition from basic instincts to learned responses. Fear is not always focused on things and events; it can also involve social responses and relationships. The fear is often associated with the presence of strangers or the departure of significant others known respectively as stranger anxiety and separation anxiety, which appear sometime between 6 and 15 months. And there is even some indication that infants may experience jealousy as young as 6 months of age (Hart & Carrington, 2002).

Stranger anxiety indicates that brain development and increased cognitive abilities have taken place. As an infant’s memory develops, they are able to separate the people that they know from the people that they do not. The same cognitive advances allow infants to respond positively to familiar people and recognize those that are not familiar. Separation anxiety also indicates cognitive advances and is universal across cultures. Due to the infant’s increased cognitive skills, they are able to ask reasonable questions like “Where is my caregiver going?” “Why are they leaving?” or “Will they come back?” Separation anxiety usually begins around 7-8 months and peaks around 14 months, and then decreases. Both stranger anxiety and separation anxiety represent important social progress because they not only reflect cognitive advances but also growing social and emotional bonds between infants and their caregivers.

Social Referencing

Facial expressions of emotion are important regulators of social interaction. In the developmental literature, this has been investigated under the concept of social referencing; that is, the process whereby infants seek out information from others to clarify a situation and then use that information to act (Klinnert et al., 1983). To date, the strongest demonstration of social referencing comes from work on the visual cliff. In the first study to investigate this concept, Sorce et al. (1985) placed mothers on the far end of the “cliff” from the infant. Mothers first smiled to the infants and placed a toy on top of the safety glass to attract them; infants invariably began crawling to their mothers. When the infants were in the center of the table, however, the mother then posed an expression of fear, sadness, anger, interest, or joy. The results were clearly different for the different faces; no infant crossed the table when the mother showed fear; only 6% did when the mother posed anger, 33% crossed when the mother posed sadness, and approximately 75% of the infants crossed when the mother posed joy or interest.

Other studies provide similar support for facial expressions as regulators of social interaction. Experimenters posed facial expressions of neutral, anger, or disgust toward babies as they moved toward an object and measured the amount of inhibition the babies showed in touching the object (Bradshaw, 1986). The results for 10- and 15-month olds were the same: Anger produced the greatest inhibition, followed by disgust, with neutral the least. This study was later replicated using joy and disgust expressions, altering the method so that the infants were not allowed to touch the toy (compared with a distractor object) until one hour after exposure to the expression (Hertenstein & Campos, 2004). At 14 months of age, significantly more infants touched the toy when they saw joyful expressions, but fewer touched the toy when the infants saw disgust.

Emotional Regulation and Self-Control

A final emotional change is in self-regulation. Emotional self-regulation refers to strategies we use to control our emotional states so that we can attain goals (Thompson & Goodvin, 2007). This requires effortful control of emotions and initially requires assistance from caregivers (Rothbart et al., 2006). Young infants have very limited capacity to adjust their emotional states and depend on their caregivers to help soothe themselves. Caregivers can offer distractions to redirect the infant’s attention and provide comfort to reduce emotional distress. As areas of the infant’s prefrontal cortex continue to develop, infants can tolerate more stimulation. By 4 to 6 months, babies can begin to shift their attention away from upsetting stimuli (Rothbart et al, 2006). Older infants and toddlers can more effectively communicate their need for help and can crawl or walk toward or away from various situations (Cole et al., 2010). This aids in their ability to self-regulate. Temperament also plays a role in children’s ability to control their emotional states, and individual differences have been noted in the emotional self-regulation of infants and toddlers.

It is in early childhood that we see the start of self-control, a process that takes many years to fully develop. According to Lecci & Magnavita (2013), “Self-regulation is the process of identifying a goal or set of goals and, in pursuing these goals, using both internal (e.g., thoughts and affect) and external (e.g., responses of anything or anyone in the environment) feedback to maximize goal attainment” (p. 6.3). Self-regulation is also known as willpower. When we talk about willpower, we tend to think of it as the ability to delay gratification. For example, Bettina’s teenage daughter made strawberry cupcakes, and they looked delicious. However, Bettina forfeited the pleasure of eating one, because she is training for a 5K race and wants to be fit and do well in the race. Would you be able to resist getting a small reward now in order to get a larger reward later? This is the question Walter Mischel investigated in his now-classic “marshmallow test.”

Mischel designed a study to assess self-regulation in young children. In the marshmallow study, Mischel and his colleagues placed a preschool child in a room with one marshmallow on the table. The child was told that he could either eat the marshmallow now or wait until the researcher returned to the room and then he could have two marshmallows (Mischel et al., 1972). This was repeated with hundreds of preschoolers. What Mischel and his team found was that young children differ in their degree of self-control. Mischel and his colleagues continued to follow this group of preschoolers through high school, and what do you think they discovered? The children who had more self-control in preschool (the ones who waited for the bigger reward) were more successful in high school. They had higher SAT scores, had positive peer relationships, and were less likely to have substance abuse issues; as adults, they also had more stable marriages (Mischel et al., 1989; Mischel et al., 2011). On the other hand, those children who had poor self-control in preschool (the ones who grabbed the one marshmallow) were not as successful in high school, and they were found to have academic and behavioral problems.

Video 10.1 Marshmallow Test

Emotional intelligence

The concept of emotional intelligence was introduced in the 60s and rose in popularity with the release of Daniel Goleman’s 2005 book Emotional Intelligence – Why it can matter more than IQ. 

Emotional Intelligence (EI) can be generally defined as how we perceive, communicate, regulate, and understand our own emotions, as well as the emotions of others. The most pivotal aspect of EI is probably related to the awareness of emotional experiences in oneself and others. Investigations of EI in children have suggested that a higher EI level appears to be an important predictive factor of health-related outcomes, such as improved well-being and social interactions during development (Andrei et al., 2014), as well as fewer somatic complaints (e.g., Jellesma et al., 2011). EI appears to have a positive impact on children’s adaptive capacities (Mavroveli et al., 2008; Davis & Humphrey, 2012).  A number of studies on EI through childhood have been conducted within educational settings; showing that EI can be important for positive adaptation within the classroom, with particular implications for social-emotional competencies and for consequent adaptive behaviors with peers (Frederickson et al., 2012). For instance, Petrides et al. (2004) showed that pupils with high EI scores were less likely to be expelled from their schools and had a lower frequency of unauthorized absences, and have higher academic performance (MacCann et al., 2020). Additional studies revealed that high EI scores were positively associated with multiple peer ratings for prosocial behavior (Mavroveli et al., 2009). Moreover, data from self-report surveys revealed that a high EI is negatively related to bullying (Mavroveli & Sánchez-Ruiz, 2011), and victimization attitude (Kokkinos & Kipritsi, 2012), and behavioral problems in general (Poulou, 2014). Overall, high EI (especially in the ability to regulate emotions) is associated with several positive outcomes for children.

From birth, parents are helping infants regulate their emotions. We know that parents are critical in the development of emotion regulation. They can teach children various strategies to cope with an array of emotional situations. This is considered extrinsic emotional control, as a child is coached on how to self-sooth when sad or control oneself when angry. While parents continue to play this role throughout their children’s life, over time, much of this extrinsic emotional control becomes internalized. Children know how to control their anger or gracefully lose when the soccer game does not go their way. Brain development (especially the prefrontal cortex), cognitive development, and language development all play a role in the development of emotion regulation. There is also new evidence the regulation of negative and positive emotions may follow different developmental pathways (Martin & Ochsner, 2016).

In summary, emotion regulation begins at birth and is largely extrinsic. Parents teach emotion regulation and being an emotion coach is the most successful and effective way to do so. Across childhood, this extrinsic emotion regulation becomes internalized. Finally, emotion regulation is key for academic and relationship success.