ECD 2019 w2 s6

0:07 this week we're going to talk about emotional development and temperament we're going to focus on three different topic areas individual differences in temperament emotional reactivity and regulation and emotional understanding and empathy there's been a very famous study that asked are our emotional lives are they similar across cultural communities do we all express happiness and fear and anger in similar ways and paul ekman spearheaded a line of research many years ago where people were asked in many different cultural communities to identify expressions the emotional facial expressions associated with anger sadness disgust and happiness what he found is support for the idea that there's a universality to emotional understanding and expression he found

0:55 very high agreement across cultures as to which emotions were being depicted in the photos and this is an example of some of the photos facial expressions that he showed to his participants pollockman also asked adults in new guinea a context where there was no contact with the outside world he asked new guineans to show what their face would look like if their friend came to visit them their child had died they were about to fight or they had stepped on a smelly dead pig what he found is evidence again for human universality and emotional expressions so you could see in these faces there's the expression of happiness sadness anger and disgust

1:40 to those four different situations expressions that we see in cultural communities around the globe we see that babies also show lots of these emotional expressions maybe it's an age they actually pucker their face and show disgust and they show happiness and joy and anger and so forth and there are a number of basic emotional expressions that infants show from very early on which is another testament to the idea of kind of universality to emotional development and expression early on what about temperament what is temperament and how is that different than emotions well emotions vary through the course of a day a baby could be happy sad up and down as adults we go through the day and we have different emotions over the course of the day they're fleeting the difference is

2:26 temperament is a kind of predisposition toward constant way of reacting to emotional experiences that is stable over time and thought to many researchers think that temperament is actually an innate predisposition in children and you could see it from babies from the day of birth some children for example show high behavioral inhibition tendency to experience high distress in novel situations with new people even though in attachment children show this more generally some children show it to a heightened degree they're disproportionately timid and inhibited also there's differences in negative reactivity and so forth that can vary by children many years ago thomas and chess they were the first to look at a bunch of

3:13 babies and look at individual differences in infants emotional responses to their environment all of these dimensions that together were thought to comprise a baby's temperament so they rated babies on things like activity level how much motion babies had during the day regularity how predictable was their body functions and behavior the third dimension was adaptability how easy or difficult was it for the baby to adjust to new routines and changes approach did the baby approach new situations new people and so forth threshold of reactivity how much did you need to provoke a response from the baby and then intensity how extreme was that response was it positive or negative was the indicator of mood as well and then

3:59 finally distractibility how much the child was distracted by stimuli and focused attention how much they attended to stimuli from these nine dimensions they created four profiles of babies easy babies were babies who were positive and mood regular in their body function adaptable they approached new situations positively and they reacted with low or moderate intensity difficult babies were negative in mood irregular slow to adapt and they withdrew from new situations and when they were aroused they reacted with very high emotional intensity slow to warm up babies were slow to adapt they withdrew from new situations and reacted with low to moderate intensity and they were very

4:44 low in their activity level and then they were average babies who didn't fit neatly into these other three profiles thomas and just asked were those profiles associated with later development and in fact they conducted one of the most famous long-term multiple decade studies where they followed these babies into adulthood and they found that early temperament can have long-term consequences and in fact they predicted infant temperament predicted the big five personality types of extroversion agreeableness neuroticism openness and conscientiousness mary rothbart who is a more recent scholar of infant temperament has done a lot of work on the dimensions and created new dimensions has also found links from early temperament quality to

5:30 being later inhibited or open and so forth so inhibited babies tend to be less open and less extroverted as adults and those babies who are more able to focus their attention and be less distractible are more conscientious as adults but it's important to recognize that there is a goodness of fit model so what is considered to be a difficult temperament in one family or one context or cultural community might not be difficult in another so for example in u.s and european cultures where most of temperant research began fussiness anger tantrums not approaching new situations positively these are all perceived to be difficult temperaments but what about in other cultures well it could be that there's a

6:15 goodness of fit between what the baby brings and what the culture expects one example in rural kenya where shared caregiving is typical infants who are less able to adapt to multiple caregivers they're not happy at being handed off to many caregivers are considered difficult but in communities where a primary caregiver is the norm an infant being handed off to multiple caregivers who shows distress well that's not a problem that doesn't mean you're difficult in fact parents pride themselves in the fact that baby wants to be with them so we could see that what is interpreted as difficult depends on the structure of one's culture what about schedules schedule driven versus less schedule driven communities have implications for how temperament is

7:00 perceived so recall regularity is regular the dimension of regular is going to sleep at the same time eating at the same time and so forth and this is found to be very adaptive and important in schedule driven cultural communities however being regular in one schedule is not as important in less scheduled communities such as in rural india so what are the factors that might lead to developments and emotion and help facilitate understanding of emotions parents use of emotion language is very important this helps babies recognize and identify emotions so if a child throws something the parent said you're upset you're angry frustrated that actually helps child start to learn about what their emotions are and where they're coming from and how to label them and also to understand

7:46 emotions and others positive affect warmth responsiveness all of these kind of behaviors and soothing in responsive ways the negative emotions of babies lead to positive emotional development secure attachments are associated with positive emotional development and also adequate physical development can be related to emotional development so for example in conditions of malnutrition and neglect babies might show a lot of lethargy and low levels of positive emotional development