Understanding Emotional Development

Providing insight into human lives

Robert Lewis Wilson, Rachel Wilson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781848723030
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317909552
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Developmental Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Understanding Emotional Development provides an insightful and comprehensive account of the development and impact of our emotions through infancy, childhood and adolescence. The book covers a number of key topics:

• The nature and diversity of emotion and its role in our lives
• Differences between basic emotions, which we are all born with, and secondary social emotions which develop during early social interactions
• The development of secondary social emotions; and the role of attachmentand other factors in this process which determine a childs' emotional history and consequental emotional wellbeing or difficulties.
• Analysing, understanding and empathising with children experiencing emotional difficulties.

Drawing on research from neuroscience, psychology, education and social welfare, the book offers an integrated overview of recent research on the development of emotion. The chapters also consider child welfare in clinical and educational practice, presenting case studies of individual children to illustrate the practical relevance of theory and research.

Written in an engaging and accessible style, the book includes a number of useful pedagogical features to assist student learning, including chapter summaries, discussion questions, and suggested reading. Understanding Emotional Development will provide valuable reading for students and professionals in the fields of psychology, social work, education, medicine, law and health.

Chapter 1 The importance of emotion

DOI: 10.4324/9781315849331-1

• How we feel is of utmost importance – it determines what we can learn and how decisions are made.
• Psychology has taken a long time to make this realisation and shift focus from cognition (how we think) and behaviour (how we act) towards emotions (how we feel).
• Emotions are not only important givens in life (basic emotions) but many of them are a product of the very social interactions that they serve (secondary/social emotions).
• Healthy emotional development has been shown to predict success in personal and professional life.
• Understanding emotional development and how it is affected by adverse situations is often the key to helping children who end up failing in education and/or breaking the law.

What is of ultimate importance to children in any situation is how they feel. Children are usually not concerned to any degree with how they think or with what has motivated them. They are, like most of us, preoccupied with how they feel in any situation. They are concerned with the emotions that they experience. This concentration on emotion is general in human beings and to give it emphasis is not a new idea.

Following a tradition that stretches back to the Jewish philosopher David Hume and earlier still to Saint Augustine, Jon Elster in his book Alchemies of the Mind: Rationality and the Emotions (1999), claimed that:

emotions matter because if we did not have them nothing else would matter . . . emotions are the stuff of life. (p. 403)

Emotion and psychology

Emotion is undoubtedly a prime factor in human life. Most of human life is involved with emotion. William James recognised the importance of emotion early in the history of modern psychology (1884), yet for most of the twentieth century, psychology, the science of the mind, did not regarded emotion as an important area of study. This was despite the fact that every human mind has probably been continually subject to mood or emotion in some form since the beginnings of history.

Though the origins of psychology late in the nineteenth century involved an introspective analysis of emotion, for the first seven decades of the last century, the focus of psychology was not on emotion; rather it was first on behaviour, and later on cognition. Because an introspective analysis of mental events could not be seen as objective, and therefore not scientific, all introspective views of emotion were cast aside during the middle part of the twentieth century. There are some exceptions to this trend, including Freudian psychology, arising from psychiatry, which was more concerned with unconscious motivation than with conscious emotional experience. Gendron and Barrett (2009) provide a detailed account of this history.

Behaviourism gained a significant hold and emotion was seen as disruptive of human processes. It was best dealt with by eliminating its influence. Thus, although some researchers maintained their interest in emotion, it was largely ignored as a human experience or as a factor in psychological experiments. The problem was that inner states of mind including emotion were deemed unobservable and uncontrollable, and could not therefore be considered as part of scientific psychology. Even in the late 1980s Skinner, the leading behaviourist, continued to maintain that it was difficult to do much with feeling and states of mind because of their inaccessibility (Skinner, 1989). It seems that the discipline of psychology took delight in spurning the influence of emotional processes, because by doing so matters could be considered rationally, and the discipline could lay claim to an objective scientific approach. Yet what was scientific about leaving out processes that so profoundly affected human beings, the objects of psychological theory and experiment? Emotional processes affect people at every level of their functioning, from the physiological, to the cognitive, to the social and the spiritual.

The behaviourist stance, that inner mental processes should be ignored, took a fatal blow in the 1960s once it was realised that computers could ‘think’. It became apparent that inner states of mind were explanatory elements in human affairs as well and could be inferred from observations. This led to the ‘cognitive revolution’ in psychology whereby many human actions and developments were explained on the basis of very complicated cognitive structures (indeed at this time psychology was often referred to as cognitive science). Many of the theories supporting such cognitive structures and the complex development that they entailed had little foundation either in experiment or in observable neurology. Emotion as a factor in its own right in human affairs was still largely ignored, and was relegated to a very minor aspect of human functioning under the control of cognition (Denham, 1998; Gendron and Barrett, 2009).

When psychologists were forced to consider emotion they called it by a name not normally used in common speech. They called it affect. The use of a word not normally understood by ordinary people tended to mystify psychological statements. It also reduced the influence of emotion on psychological explanations. In this way psychologists could avoid the undesirable associations of the word emotion. These associations were of the uncontrollable, the unreliable. Affect as a word seemed more scientific, more rational.

Nevertheless, the influence of emotion on human thought and behaviour remained no matter how psychologists tried to dismiss or disguise it. Neither behavioural analysis nor cognitive theory could explain how and why we had feelings and new directions in the study of emotional influences had to be developed. Thus in recent years emotion as a topic of thought and investigation in psychology has gained ground and there is now a considerable interest in the subject (Mascolo and Griffin 1998; Eisenberg 2006). This growth in interest coincided with, and perhaps was driven by, the explosion in neuroscience research. Neuroscience helped focus attention back onto emotion as work in neurology made it clear that emotional states are central to the brain's functioning. The discounting of emotional factors in psychology research has reduced somewhat in the last two decades, though it has not been completely eliminated in certain quarters. However, in general psychologists are now more willing to countenance emotional elements as factors of importance in their research.

It may seem surprising that this turn of events has taken so long but at last many psychologists are recognising the importance of emotion in explaining human beings. Indeed it has come to be recognised that if emotion is not a major element in a person's life then that person is somewhat aberrant. No normal conscious human being lives without the subjective feeling that is the essence of emotion. We all feel something all of the time even if it is a bland emptiness. We have no experiences that do not involve feeling; that do not, in fact, involve some degree of emotion. Feeling and experience are part of every conscious second that we exist. Can we envisage a mental state where we have no feelings at all, no emotional context for our thoughts? We can use computing devices that think, that do not involve emotional states, but we cannot conceive of a human being operating in the same way without ceasing to be human. In the famous TV series Star Trek Mr Spock was recognised as an alien precisely because he had no emotion. Emotion in fact defines our very humanity.

Emotion, learning and decision making

Consider two important aspects of life, learning and decision making. In the past it was thought that these were, or should be, essentially independent of emotion.

Let us consider learning first. Though emotion is not the only factor in learning, have you ever tried to learn something when you were flustered and emotionally upset? Why do students and pupils fail at tasks and subjects that they do not like? Liking or disliking a subject are emotional reactions; reactions that often appear unavoidable but usually are misplaced. People who learn well are not flustered or annoyed or anxious they are generally calm and emotionally content. Children do well at subjects they have been encouraged to like or at least not encouraged to dislike. A person's emotional state is one of the key factors in learning (Pringle, 1958; Hascher, 2010). Rewards and praise increase learning because they induce a positive emotion that children want repeated. A class of children will learn best if the classroom atmosphere is happy and calm and disruption is not alarming or exciting the class emotionally. It is not that feeling needs to be removed from learning situations rather it is the development of the right feelings that secures learning objectives. A classroom should not try to eliminate emotion rather it should cultivate feelings of security, respect and mutual obligation. Yet, when we look to research to advance education, the majority focuses upon purely cognitive aspects of the process. It is only in relatively recent times that the study of motivation has flourished and more recent still that the role of emotion in motivation has been examined (Meyer and Turner, 2002; Linnenbrink, 2006).

Decision making, especially in regard to human relationships, is likewise enhanced, not by a lack of emotion, but by the development of the appropriate emotions. Damasio (1994) refers to a patient who, due to a tumour, had a large section of his brain removed the result of which was that he could no longer feel emotion. The problem faced by Damasio and his patient was that the patient could no longer make decisions. Though his intelligence was intact he could no longer decide on anything. He was free of emotion and had all his rational powers yet decisions were beyond him. This is in stark contrast to the view that the best decisions are made when emotions are eliminated and pure rationality is employed. For Damasio's patient, faced with a number of alternatives, decisions were impossible because none of the alternatives ‘felt’ right. Even decisions in financial matters will be advanced in the long term by emotions like respect, trust and empathy. This has been recognised by the Nobel Prize winner and economist Daniel Kahneman (2000) who has challenged the pure rationality assumption as the correct basis for business decisions. Business and financial dealings depend on the trust of strangers and this trust arises from one's emotional experience and one's respect and empathy for others. In general business cannot proceed unless the majority of business people expect others in their trade to treat them well, that is, with empathy and honesty. This is borne out at times of financial crisis when trust breaks down. Trust and its concomitant confidence are hard to re-establish as the 2008 financial crisis has shown. In normal times most business people expect the same positive feelings towards them as they have towards those they deal with. Of course there are exceptions, but, on the whole, business and financial affairs depend on the exercise of the appropriate positive emotions between people. Such affairs are not an emotional free zone (Gabriel and Griffiths, 2002). The right emotions are central for business to succeed. No wonder deals are confirmed with a smile and a handshake!

Emotion and personal success

The importance of emotion in dealings between people was emphasised by Goleman (1996). In his bestselling book Emotional intelligence he put forward the thesis (based on a survey of research) that a child's ability to control positive desires and delay gratification was twice as powerful a predictor of academic and worldly success for that child as the child's IQ score. Goleman's book followed closely the views of Howard Gardner (1984) who first developed the idea of multiple intelligences and emphasised the crucial importance of understanding ourselves and others for success in life. By developing the concept of emotional intelligence (EI), Goleman showed how, in many aspects of life, the exercise of appropriate emotional understanding was more important than the exercise of pure intellect. According to Goleman succeeding in this world and getting on in society are more determined by EI than by IQ. In this book we hope to provide clear explanations of different pathways in emotional development and how they impact upon later life.

Emotions, social relationships and development

Goleman's finding is hardly surprising because people are dependent on one another for success or failure in life. Relationships between people are the key factors and emotions are of central importance in these relationships. Emotions are the necessary mental elements to allow us to do things together (Oatley, 2000). A teacher cannot deal with students except on an emotional basis, nor can a boss deal with employees without using or evoking feelings. As Keith Oatley has concluded “emotions are the very heart of social cognition; without them we wouldn’t be able to do anything at all” (Oatley, 2000, p. 291). Emotions are the enabling factors in human relationships.

The most important emotions that facilitate human relationships are those that develop in children under the influence of their social environment. Emotions are not only important givens in life (basic emotions) but many of them are a product of the very social interactions that they serve (secondary emotions). This increases the significance of emotion as far as development is concerned. From a neurological perspective, Lise Eliot neatly sums up this importance “Yet this aspect of development [emotional] is in many ways the most important one of all, because it establishes the critical foundation on which every other mental skill can flourish” (Eliot, 2001, p. 290).

The central importance of emotion in child development is increasingly being emphasised (Eisenberg, 2006). In the last two decades new neurological scanning methods have allowed the study of the developing infant brain. What has been learnt from these observations has revolutionised our knowledge of child development. We now know much more about the development of the physical structure of an infant's brain. The most dramatic findings from such studies indicate clearly that an infant's environment and his or her interaction within this environment actually change the physical structure of the infant's brain (National Scientific Council on the Developing Child (2007). The environmental influence establishes and confirms certain connections between neurons (brain cells). Alternatively if no environmental influence is present certain neural connections will wither and be discarded. After infancy these processes of establishment and elimination continue under environmental influences but the physical changes to brain structure will decrease as the child grows older. A very important part of a child's environment is his or her social environment. From an infant's earliest days social interactions are fuelled and developed in many ways by emotional exchanges. This means that as the infant interacts with other people his or her brain is actually changing physically according to the emotions that he or she is experiencing. The most important social interactions that a child has are between the child and those who care for him or her, normally the parents. A child's physica...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Epigraph
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table Of Contents
• List of figures
• Preface
• 1 The importance of emotion
• 2 What is emotion?
• 3 The basis of development
• 4 Emotional development in infancy
• 5 Emotional development in toddlerhood
• 6 Dependency, attachment and temperament
• 7 Parenting, care and the development of secondary emotions
• 8 Emotional development in early and middle childhood
• 9 Oppositional behaviour, aggression and anxious behaviour
• 10 Emotional development in adolescence
• 11 Understanding children in social/emotional difficulty
• Answers to chapter questions
• References
• Index