Development of Emotions Essay
It goes without saying that emotions play a great role in life of a child. At the moment there is not doubt in the scientific world as for the fact that human beings enter the world being already equipped with particular biological predispositions for emotional cues. Still, there is still little knowledge on emotional development in preschools as emotion is an internal process that is difficult to study. However, the last few decades have been marked for renewed interest of researchers to this subject and more sophisticated methods are now applied.
As Campos, Bertenthal, and Kermoian reveal, emotions are bound with intention to set up, preserve, or alter the relationships with environment. They investigate that “emotions organize and coordinate both intrapsychic (e.g., thoughts and motivations) and interpersonal (e.g., social interactions) processes” (Campos, Bertenthal, & Kermoian, 1992). Michael Lewis (2005) conducted experiments with mirror to study self-conscious emotions like shame, pride and embarrassment in toddlers. Richard A. Fabes, Cynthia A. Frosch, & Amy Buchanan (2002), in their turn, explore how children under six respond to emotions of other people: “This type of emotional responding is known as vicarious emotional responding—responses that occur because of exposure to someone else’s emotional state.” Different vicarious emotional responses also attracted attention of Martin Hoffman (1978), and Janet Strayer and Nancy Eisenberg (1987).
Reaching the age of three children become able to better express, regulate and explain their emotions. When vocal ways of expression are acquired, Lois Bloom (1987) notes, children actively integrate corresponding words into conversation. This fact proves that emotion play a significant role in their development.
Curious investigations are concentrated around anger. It is proved that anger is traced at any age, but causes of anger, however, do change as well as the ways children express this emotion. At the age of five, for instance, anger appears when the basic needs of a child are not satisfied. In fact, between 36 months and six years anger is typically coming from “conflicts over materials, resources, and space” (DeSteno et al., 2004). At the age of six a child is already able to speak about his emotions and explain their reasons. It is also notable how conventional gender differences arise: boys are more likely to express anger, while girls are more likely to express sadness.
In developmental context, social psychology states a number of questions including not only where emotions take their roots, but also in what way emotions are learnt from outside; then, how emotion systems alter or stay flexible and stable under the influence of experience; what mechanisms work in development of emotional systems under the influence of experience; and how organism adjusts to environment under this impact. In other words, these questions deal with the character of interaction with the environment in the terms of its effects on emotional development. These issues are studied by different scholars, including developmental psychologists, sociologists and anthropologists. Seth Pollak, Dante Cicchetti, and Rafael Klorman, for example, explore emotion and memory within a developmental framework. In particular, they examine traumatic experiences of maltreated children and results of those experiences revealed in difficulties that refer to emotional development. They found out that emotions of children change according to associative shifts coming from maltreatment and other traumatic experiences. Overall, Seth Pollak, Dante Cicchetti, and Rafael Klorman state that experience and learning make up a crucial component in emotional development.
