Development of Emotions and Emotion Regulation

by Manfred Holodynski, Wolfgang Friedlmeier

vii PREFACE It was 13 years ago that we met for the ?rst time at a German developmental psychology conference. One of us, Wolfgang Friedlmeier (WF), was interested in ontogenetic development from a cross-cultural perspective. He presented a study on the development of empathy and distress in preschool age, dealing with how far children from different cultures respond to comparable demands with different emotions and regulation strategies. The other, Manfred Holodynski (MH), was - terested in ontogenetic development from the perspective of how processes that are originally socially distributed between persons are transformed into mental processes within the individual. He presented a study on the devel- ment of the emotions pride and shame in preschool age. This led the two of us to discover our common interest in central issues of emotional What role do the emotions play in an individual’s activity regulation? What is it exactly that is “developing” when we talk about emotional development? Do emotional processes have a social genesis? And what is the role of the early social interactions between children and their caregivers, along with the obvious fact that individuals grow up and live in completely different cultures? Even at this time, we both already suspected that the social and cultural embedment of the individual would prove to be a key to understanding how the diversity of human emotions and their regulation develop.

Genres: Psychology

284 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2005

Reviews

[Alina · Rating 4 out of 5]

There's an important, philosophical idea at the heart of this book. While much of the book consists in experimental details and elaboration in applying ideas, this can be skimmed, and it's very much worth getting into this book, since its heart is so good. This key idea is as follows: We learn what our emotions are and how to regulate them in the ontogenetically original setting of being with one's caretaker and engaging with them through motor and affective mirroring. To appreciate the significance of this claim, it'd be good to go through some background. The development of particular emotions and regulation strategies is integral to our lives; emotion should be co-defined with action or practical activity. We have as many emotions as we have ways of going about accomplishing our goals and meeting obstacles.

As a whole, the authors propose that emotion be defined not only in terms of some structure of mental states or functional model. Emotion should also be defined in terms of its ontogenetic history, and thus implicitly, the overall role that it serves in an individual's life. This is important. Knowing the developmental details of how an adult's emotions have come about, from infancy, reveals what 'hidden' functions emotion may be serving, when we consciously notice only certain facets of our emotion experience (i.e., which functions emotion originally served in infancy, and still may be understood as implicitly present, or at least as having had a constraining role upon whichever contemporary functions emotion possesses for an adult). Studying this development also may inspire new ways of noticing our emotion experience, for the sake of producing further hypotheses regarding its nature.

The authors argue that emotion has a basic, expression function. Emotional expression is functionally akin to linguistic communication. A newborn infant will have precursor emotions, like general distress or relief. They won't have the cognitive capacities yet to discern what their negative or positive emotion is about, or what they want to be done exactly, to address their situation. A newborn, for example, will cry when they are distressed; this might be in fact caused by having a wet diaper, but they do not yet apprehend their situation in this way. Their caretaker will figure out what she takes the infant's emotion to be about. She will change the infant's diaper, for example, and this brings about relief in the infant. The caretaker's and infant's affective states will be in tight dialogue; the infant's state causes the caretaker to mirror their state, and vice-versa. Through this means, the infant, over psychological maturation, will learn to have more specific emotion states, about specific states of affairs, which are "handed" to them by the interpretations the caretaker makes of their situation. The infant will learn to be unhappy about having a wet diaper, for example, by picking up on what emotional states the caretaker has towards which particular objects in the world. The authors argue that through such means, a social world, full of artifacts and affordances and social norms, comes to structure an infant's experiential world.

I think this is pretty fascinating, the authors' idea of mirroring one's emotion and attitude towards the world in another, and coming to learn of one's own state by seeing the other adopt it. My main complaint/suspicion of this work is that the authors put much stress on that emotion expression itself is compositionally structured and has its own sort of syntax and semantics, so that we learn to read each other's emotion expressions, as we come to comprehend each other's natural linguistic expressions. This seems wrong. Emotion expression does not seem to be of the order of artifact that can be analyzed in this way. I can imagine why the authors propose this, however; it is puzzling how we can pick up on so much information about each other's inner states and worlds of experience, just through noticing each other's emotions. Usually, we think that the communication of rich information requires linguistic means. But I wonder whether we can get this outcome by another way of understanding emotion expression. Perhaps emotion contagion gets the other's body to contain the same basic affective arousal as that of our own body; then this affective state may have bottom-up constraining effects, upon what perceptions, feelings, and thoughts the other can have. With contextual cues, and knowledge of our interests/attentional sphere, the other may arrive at that which we were attending to, which was causing our emotion state. Then, with the affective state and attentional focus that is similar to our own, the other person in effect arrives at a similar emotion state, with the similar information that we had, which caused our state. This is all tentative and speculative, however.

Also, I'd like to explore what else may be connected to or "behind" the idea that emotion drives action regulation. To put things in phenomenological terms, it seems that when we can regulate our actions, it is because we now see some new value or significance of our situation, which replaces the old one that had tempted us into the undesirable path of action, which we're now regulating. So in saying that emotion drives action, this may amount to saying that emotion drives which particular situations show up to us, out of the physical happenings around us. Emotion, to put it metaphorically, connects the dots, draws constellations, and tells the stories of what is going on within them. With this emphasis on the "lifeworld," it is interesting to revisit the key idea of this book. An infant's caretaker, in effect, shows the infant what exists in reality (i.e., what significances, meanings, or narratives define their surroundings), by co-regulating the infant's emotions. Later, when the child "internalizes" skills from this interpersonal emotional regulation, in effect, the child has "internalized" this caretaker's voice or ways of arriving at certain sorts of meanings/narratives. This will be part of the engine in creating what shows up as real into the child's future.

[Ogi Ogas · Rating 4 out of 5]

My ratings of books on Goodreads are solely a crude ranking of their utility to me, and not an evaluation of literary merit, entertainment value, social importance, humor, insightfulness, scientific accuracy, creative vigor, suspensefulness of plot, depth of characters, vitality of theme, excitement of climax, satisfaction of ending, or any other combination of dimensions of value which we are expected to boil down through some fabulous alchemy into a single digit.