Development of Cognition, Affect, and Social Relations

The Minnesota Symposia on Child Psychology, Volume 13

W. A. Collins

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317770299
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Developmental Psychology
• Index: Psychology

First published in 1982. This thirteenth volume in The Minnesota Symposia on Child Psychology set invites six developmental scholars were to present their work within the programmatic perspective in which it was conceived. The contributors to this volume work within the area of developmental social psychology, encompassing the range of problems surrounding the development of social relations, social cognition, and affective systems. There is variation not only in the domains of interest but in the methods and the ages of the participants in the research within this volume.

1	Levels of Meaning for Infant Emotions: A Biosocial View

Robert N. Emde

University of Colorado Medical Center

I believe we stand on the threshold of a new era in our scientific understanding of the emotional life of the infant. Cross-cultural studies of adult facial expression and a renewed emphasis on analyzing patterned emotional responses (Ekman, Friesen, & Ellsworth, 1972; Izard, 1971) have given a dramatic impetus to the psychological study of emotions. At the same time, our burgeoning knowledge of the human infant as a biologically active and socially interactive being has increased our awareness of a lag in our knowledge of emotional development. We know much more about the domains of perception and cognition than we do about emotion, as several recent reviews have documented (Charlesworth & Kreutzer, 1973; Haith & Campos, 1977; Lewis & Rosenblum, 1978; Oster & Ekman, 1978; Sroufe, 1979). This lag is especially dramatic for clinicians, for whom emotional expressions are an essential orienting feature of our everyday work with patients of all ages. Even though infants cannot tell us how they feel, they have other ways of communicating emotions; and we should be able to understand more.

But a lag in knowledge does not ensure an advance, and the reader may wonder about the source of my optimism. More than anything else, such optimism stems from today’s scientific climate of multidisciplinary endeavor. Kessen (1965) has documented how, earlier in this century, different theoretical approaches to child study selfconsciously fostered isolation and polemicism. In contrast, as I see it, progress today in a discipline is most often facilitated by challenges from other disciplines. Alternative points of view are sought not just for critical tests of hypotheses, but for novel ideas and for approaches found only at the boundaries between disciplines.

This essay presents a view about infant emotions that has emerged from our laboratory in recent years. It is entitled “biosocial” for simplicity (our frame of reference obviously being developmental psychology) and for emphasis of a neglected interface between biological and social aspects of emotional development. In appreciation of the high degree of organized complexity in human functioning, I argue for the usefulness of a “levels of meaning” approach for understanding infant emotional development. Although the paper highlights aspects of our own work, a special plea is made for interdisciplinary collaborative research efforts at a critical time in the development of our field. I conclude with some thoughts about the adaptive nature of infant emotions and their signaling functions.

THE EVOLUTION OF ORGANIZED COMPLEXITY AND VIEWING EMOTIONS

The extraordinary extent of organized complexity in human functioning is an essential background for our thinking about development. Indeed, modern biology has been characterized as the biology of organized complexity, in contrast to a biology of former times that was mainly concerned with linear and noninteractive effects. Platt (1966) has emphasized that an evolutionary perspective shows man to be the most complex entity of the universe; and, for scientists, such complexity forever ensures a large amount of indeterminacy and privacy with respect to understanding human behavior. As aspects of an individual’s complex functioning, it is not surprising that human emotions elude precise or comprehensive definition.

One thing is certain: In the field of infant emotions, in the study of increasingly organized complexity, we cannot proceed from isolation. We need multiple views that tap different levels of meaning. Emotions are parts of an array of complex human systems that are in continuous interaction, that are often hierarchically arranged at different levels of organization, and that can be characterized as having varying degrees of stability or change.

In this connection, I believe there is one view about emotions that can be misleading. In this view, verbal designations of emotion states offer temporary shortcuts for description before scientific specification is possible. In one form or another, this has been put forth by Hebb (1946) and his work with chimpanzees, by Mandler (1975) in a general way, and by Bowlby (1969) and Kagan (1978) in consideration of work with human infants. An implication of this view is that emotion terms are useful only at an early stage of investigation, that they represent only global, intuitive, and inexact formulations, and that with the advance of science, designation of “emotion states” will become unnecessary. We think there is more to it (Emde & Gaensbauer, in press). A biosocial view, incorporated by many (e.g., Chevalier-Skolnikoff, 1973; Darwin, 1872; Izard, 1977; Kaufman & Rosenblum, 1967; Tomkins, 1962, 1963) leads to the conclusion that emotional states represent complex systems of organized functioning inherent in the human person, states that are generally advantageous to the species as well as to the individual in the course of development. Evolutionary considerations seem to highlight both the complexity of emotions and their centrality in social adaptation.

Hamburg (1963) concluded that human emotions evolved because of a selective advantage in facilitating social bonds. In reviewing the course of primate evolution, he speculated that group living operated as a powerful adaptive mechanism and that, because of this, the formation of social bonds has been experienced as pleasurable and their disruption as unpleasurable. He pointed to the widespread prominence of psychophysiological changes associated with the disruption of social bonds and of instrumental behaviors that are mobilized for restoring such bonds. The research of Myers (1976) involving free-ranging and laboratory macaques provides some experimental support for the close relations between emotions and social life. Myers found that emotional and social behaviors are controlled by the same forebrain areas (prefrontal, anterotemporal, and orbitofrontal cortex), and when these regions were surgically ablated, facial expressions and vocalizations ordinarily used in emotional behavior and in social communication were unavailable for these purposes. When released from captivity, ablated animals wandered through their social groups without interacting; all indications pointed to the fact that they did not survive in what amounted to an emotionless state of aloneness.

When one looks at the evolution of primate facial expressions, one perceives a continuation of this theme: Such evolution may have occurred concomitant with the enhancement of visual capacity that brought advantageous functions of social communication for group-living species (see Andrew 1964; vanHooff, 1962; and especially the extensive review of Chevalier-Skolnikoff, 1973). Chevalier-Skolnikoff points out that in monkeys there is a shift from the prosimians to the old world monkeys and beyond—a shift marked by increasing facial expressiveness and visual function concomitant with decreasing emphasis on olfaction, touch, and sound reception. Such a shift also corresponds to a change from a nocturnal to a diurnal ecological niche and to engagement in a more complex social world.

In the evolutionary step to man, facial muscles became further differentiated in connection with speech and, as Chevalier-Skolinikoff emphasizes (1973), social communication of more subtle internal states occurs more through language than through facial expression of emotion.

Nonetheless, cross-cultural evidence that a number of discrete facial expressions, representing qualitatively separable emotional response systems, are universally recognized and expressed throughout the human species would indicate that facial expressions have continued adaptive importance (Ekman, 1971; Ekman, Friesen, & Ellsworth, 1972; Izard, 1971, 1972, 1977). Indeed, the case could be made that emotional expressions persist in the human as a univeral “language,” one that is clarified and modulated by speech.

A biosocial view highlights that in human infancy, without language, emotional expressions are prominent and provide a medium of messages in the infant—caregiver system. Some messages are unequivocal and biologically necessary to the infant’s survival. Crying communicates distress and gives a universal peremptory message, “come, change something”; whereas smiling communicates pleasure to caregivers and conveys, “keep it up, I like it” (Stechler & Carpenter, 1967). Further, an expression of interest reveals a readiness for learning and, for the infant, the emotion of surprise may have a basic role in facilitating the assimilation of new information (Charlesworth, 1969). Whatever specific messages such expressions as fear, anger, sadness may give in later infancy, it is certain that cognitive development increasingly alters the meaning of emotional states both before and during language development.

MEANING AND EMOTIONAL DEVELOPMENT

More than 15 years ago at a symposium on emotions, Knapp (1963) reminded participants that emotions could be viewed from three aspects—physiology, expression, and private experience. Such a scheme is useful and points out our limitations in researching emotions of preverbal infants who cannot tell us how they feel. I would now like to offer another scheme, a developmental one, that emerges from a biosocial view and emphasizes levels of meaning useful for multidisciplinary research. This scheme can be superimposed on Knapp’s and has the advantage that levels of meaning apply to all aspects of behavior and serve as a guide for research questions.

The scheme has two major domains, the individual and the social. Each domain has three levels of meaning: the level of biological response, the level of organizational state, and the level of enduring trait. Further, each level of meaning has two aspects. The first is a description of patterns of behavior, and the second is a context analysis. Since contemporary researchers are interested in more than linear effects and concern themselves with interactions between levels, a context analysis explores the “boundary conditions” of phenomena, the operational principles of the system, and the especial defining conditions wherein the described patterns may or may not occur (Polanyi, 1965/1974). I now discuss the scheme, highlighting some thoughts emerging from our own research.

The Individual Domain of Meaning

At the Level of Biological Response

Sound, scientific understanding begins with a full des...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• 1. Levels of Meaning for Infant Emotions: A Biosocial View
• 2. Tbe Role of Ego-Control and Ego-Resiliency In the Organization of Behavior
• 3. The Development of Mastery, Emotions, and Morality from an Attrlbutional Perspective
• 4. Development of the Concept of Intention
• 5. Social Ecology of the Preschool Peer Group
• 6. A Developmental Theory of Friendship and Acquaintanceship Processes
• 7. Commentary
• List of Contributors
• Author Index
• Subject Index