Emotional Development and Families

Socialization across the lifespan

Julie Hakim-Larson

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781137356321
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781350312296
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Developmental Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This lively and engaging book conducts a thorough review of the current research literature in developmental psychology and socialisation, and then clearly links theory to practical applications in both clinical and everyday situations. Life's first important lessons on how to handle emotions often emerge early on within family relationships, forming the foundation for emotional development over the life-span. Couples, siblings, parents and extended family members all have profound influences on each other's emotional lives as well as on the lives of the children they are socialising. Students can expect to learn a wide range of relevant topics bringing together theory, practice and research in a comprehensive and lucid way.

Covering the main topics of emotional development, this textbook reviews contemporary research and makes recommendations for how students might practically use the findings in their future studies or in practice. Filled with a wealth of resources and suggestions for further reading, this book is an ideal supplementary text, suitable for students taking undergraduate and postgraduate courses on developmental psychology, family psychology, and child clinical psychology. This book may also be helpful for those taking undergraduate and postgraduate courses on social work, counselling, education studies and family studies.

© Julie Hakim-Larson 2018

Julie Hakim-LarsonEmotional Development and Familieshttps://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-35014-5_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: Emotional Development and Socialization in Families

Julie Hakim-Larson¹

(1)

University of Windsor, Department of Psychology University of Windsor, Windsor, Prince Edward Island, Canada

Julie Hakim-Larson

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

One day, while working for a research corporation, my work wasn’t going well. Discouraged, I left work early. When I arrived home and walked into the kitchen, my son was already home from school. He was having some corn flakes and milk, and I noticed the refrigerator door had been left slightly open. I started scolding him for being thoughtless, and how all of the food in the refrigerator would spoil, and how we couldn’t afford that kind of waste. Suddenly, David started to cry.

“What are you crying about?” I shouted.

“I didn’t do it on purpose; you act like I’m some sort of criminal,” he replied.

“What a big baby!” I exclaimed, and left the house. (Newmark, 2008, p. 9)

Source: How to Raise Emotionally Healthy Children, G. Newmark. Copyright ©2008, NMI Publishers. Reproduced with permission from NMI Publishers.

1.1 Overview of Emotion Socialization in Families

As family members have conversations and arguments with each other, such as the one in the example given by Newmark (2008), they are also teaching or socializing each other about emotions. This process goes in multiple directions from parent to child, and from child to parent, as well as between and among grandparents, spouses, brothers, sisters, cousins, aunts, uncles, and other extended family members. Later in the day, this father, educator and author reflected upon what happened and realized that he had displaced his feelings about himself and work onto his son. Thus, he became consciously aware that he had treated his son quite disrespectfully during this emotional interchange. Indeed, Newmark (2008), who cites this personal example in his book on emotions, was concerned about what he was teaching his son in this encounter. Towards his own efforts at self-improvement during such emotional family encounters, Newmark identified five ways that parents can foster their children’s emotional health. One of these is by treating children with the same high levels of respect and consideration that they would afford to adults or even strangers. In addition to feeling respected, children need to feel important, accepted, included and secure (Newmark, 2008). Although we often treat emotions, such as the anger and sadness experienced by the father and son in this example, as taking place within individuals, emotions clearly have something to do with how we relate interpersonally with each other or with objects, events or situations in the environment. So just what, then, are emotions per se, and how does the definition of “emotion” differ from that of related terms such as “feelings”, “affect”, emotional “states” and “traits”?

Lewis (2014) provides a concise definition of emotions as “thoughts about our evolutionary-derived action patterns that occur within and are molded by our social niche” (p.1). Because the terms “emotion”, “feelings” and “affect” are used very often in the literature on emotional development, it is important to consider how they are defined. Although sometimes used interchangeably throughout history, they do have distinct meanings; therefore, care should be taken in how each term is used (Lazarus, 1991). The broadest category in use is that of emotion, which Lazarus (1991) has described as a complex configuration involving two primary components, one that includes observable behaviours that have resulted from our evolutionary heritage and the other that includes our personal experiences, human capacity for self-reflection, and the conscious appraisal of events. Thus, the first component involves phylogenetic development (changes in species over time) and has an evolutionary basis stemming from the work of Charles Darwin (1872/2008) on emotional expressions in both animals and humans. This includes observable and measurable behavioural reactions to the environment, such as physiological and muscular bodily reactions (e.g., hormonal secretions, facial expressions), and action-tendency responses (e.g., to approach or avoid) that have developed over the course of many generations. With ontogenetic development (changes within individuals over their lifespans), we experience emotional changes based on our maturation and evolutionary heritage. The result is that our emotions place us in a state of action readiness to either approach or withdraw from others and the situation (e.g., Frijda, 2008).

The second component involves affect or inner subjective experiences, such as thoughts in the form of cognitive appraisals and judgements, and the awareness of bodily sensations in the form of feelings (e.g., bodily feelings of inner turmoil and conflict). It is not until typically developing children are about 15 to 24 months old that they have the brain maturation needed for such conscious self-awareness (Lewis, 2014). Thus, under the broad category of “emotion”, there is the subcategory of “affect”, and underneath the subcategory of affect is “feelings”. As noted by Lazarus (1991) in his cognitive-motivational-relational theory, it is our cognitive appraisal and the meaning that we ascribe to our emotional experiences that is most important in determining whether we energetically approach another person out of anger or out of passionate love. Lazarus (1991) defines core relational themes as “the central (hence core) relational harm or benefit in adaptational encounters that underlies each specific kind of emotion” (p. 121). See Table 1.1 for Lazarus’s core relational themes. As we will discuss later in the text, it is also possible to experience ambivalence about which way to act (Lewis, 2008a, 2008b).

Table 1.1

Core Relational Themes for Each Emotion (Lazarus, 1991)

Anger	A demeaning offense against me and mine.
Anxiety	Facing uncertain, existential threat.
Fright	Facing an immediate, concrete and overwhelming physical danger.
Guilt	Having transgressed a moral imperative.
Shame	Having failed to live up to an ego-ideal.
Sadness	Having experienced an irrevocable loss.
Envy	Wanting what someone else has.
Jealousy	Resenting a third party for loss or threat to another’s affection.
Disgust	Taking in or being too close to an indigestible object or idea (metaphorically speaking).
Happiness	Making reasonable progress toward the realization of a goal.
Pride	Enhancement of one’s ego-identity by taking credit for a valued object of achievement, either our own or that of someone or group with whom we identify.
Relief	A distressing goal-incongruent condition that has changed for the better or gone away.
Hope	Fearing the worst but yearning for better.
Love	Desiring or participating in affection, usually but not necessarily reciprocated.
Compassion	Being moved by another’s suffering and wanting to help.

Source: Emotion and Adaptation by Lazarus (1991) Tab 3.4. p.122 ©1991 by Oxford University Press, Inc. By permission of Oxford University Press, USA.

There are temporal qualities to emotion depending on the stability and duration of the experience. Sometimes we have emotion episodes that are limited in time and scope (Oatley & Jenkins, 1996). When an emotional encounter with the environment is transient, fleeting and depends on the situation, it is termed an emotional state, and when it is a more stable personality characteristic of a person that is less bound to the constraints of the environment, it is an emotional trait (Lazarus, 1991). In between the temporary emotional states and more stable personality patterns of emotion, are emotional moods, which can last from hours to weeks, and may become symptomatic of an emotional disorder (Oatley & Jenkins, 1996). One basic idea presented in this textbook is that this complex configuration known as emotions changes developmentally over time as the individual changes and ages, not merely due to biological foundations including genetic history, temperament or maturation, but also due to emotion socialization within family relationships and because of the social and cultural contexts.

1.2 Emotional Development and Socialization

As noted by Fabes, Valiente and Leonard (2003):

[E]motions are involved in almost every aspect of family development: from the beginnings of family formation (e.g., dating, courting, attraction, and marriage), to the transition to parenthood (e.g., pregnancy, birth, bonding, and attachment), parenting (e.g., socialization and discipline), as well as the dissolution of family relationships (e.g., divorce and death). (pp. 3–4)

As family members work on such developmental tasks, many emotions are felt and released in ways that vary along the adaptive to maladaptive spectrum. That is, some family members have been found to be more competent than others in their emotion understanding and knowledge and in their ability to appropriately control and express emotions in a manner that is consistent with their own values and the norms of their culture (Saarni, 1999). One way that such emotional competence seems to be acquired is through direct observation of competent family members who serve as role models. In other words, family members learn vicariously about emotions by watching and listening to each other during everyday life.

Though the process of emotion socialization involves the learning of emotional behaviours that vary along the dimension of emotional competence, the focus of this book is on how to foster the development of the more competent end of the spectrum. Thus, research on pathological and deviant emotional functioning in families will be integrated throughout the book with the goal of fostering the prevention of psychopathology and the improvement of our understanding of how best to socialize family emotional and social competence.

Emotional and social competence within families has been called affective social competence, and has been defined by Halberstadt, Denham and Dunsmore (2001) as the “efficacious communication of one’s own affect, one’s successful interpretation and response to others’ affective communications, and the awareness, acceptance, and management of one’s own affect” (p. 80). Children and adults learn from each other how to communicate emotions, interpret them, and respond to each other’s feelings. They also learn how to be mo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. Introduction: Emotional Development and Socialization in Families
• 2. Methodological Issues in the Study of Emotional Development in Families
• 3. The Developmental Neurobiology of Emotion and Consciousness
• 4. Variations in Temperament Among Family Members
• 5. Culture and Emotion in Families
• 6. Emotion-Related Parental Beliefs, Goals and Values
• 7. Non-Verbal Emotional Expressions in the Family Context
• 8. Self-Esteem and the Self-Conscious Emotions
• 9. Verbal Emotional Expressions and Communication in the Family Context
• 10. Emotion Regulation and Coping in Families
• 11. A Developmental Psychopathology Approach to Emotion in Families
• 12. Emotional Resilience in Families: From Research to Prevention and Everyday Life
• Backmatter