Emotional Development

Emotions Do Matter

by Victoria Shukaeva  

Emotions – are the feelings, physiological and psychological, that people have in response to events that are personally relevant to their needs and goals.  

Remember this loop:

Feelings à Thinking à Acting à Feelings àThinking àActing à Feelings àetc.

Know the function of some very common emotions: 

Happiness : Helps enjoy life and seek similar pleasurable experiences;

Sadness : Leads a child to find comfort from others and reassess whether a goal is possible;

Anger : Helps deal with obstacles to their goals, often spurring them to try new tactics;

Fear: Motivates to flee, escape from harm, seek reassurance, and perhaps fight back;

Shame: Helps kids to be aware of other’s people standards for behavior and know they are not meeting those standards; it motivates kids to try harder;

Guilt : Causes people to behave in socially appropriate ways that protect others from harm; leads people to right the wrong;

Pride: Fosters  continued commitment to achieving high standards;

 Developmental Process of Emotions:

The way kids express, understand and cope with emotions changes with age and experience. 

We start our life with basic set of emotions and then we gradually add new ones. 

Within first 6 months infants are able to experience content, interest, and distress. As they mature, they are able to experience new emotions such as simple distress can be transferred and become true anger when infants’ desires are obstructed. Infants tend to show fear during the second half of the first year when they experience stranger anxiety and when objects move in unexpected ways. At the same time, Infants are able to respond to other people’s emotions. 

 This ability is illustrated by the emotional contagion, which is a tendency for infants to cry spontaneously when they hear other infants crying. Between 3 and 19 months, infants may respond to their parent’s deadpan face by crying, looking away, and using self-soothing behaviors such as sucking their thumbs.

In the first two years of life, children learn other people’s emotions by observing and monitoring their parents and trusted caregivers. They look at parents’ faces and body language and listen to emotional tones in their voices, especially in a novel or puzzling situation.

In early childhood, simple emotions as fear, anger, and pleasure in infancy are joined by self-conscious emotions such as guilt, embarrassment, and pride. They are reflecting the awareness of social standards. 

As early as 2 or 3 years of age, kids are able to talk about the emotions of others and their own as well. They are constantly reflect on them, which make them realize that emotions are connected to people’s desires.

 

By the middle childhood, kids realize that their interpretations of a situation determine how they feel about it and other people may have different views and, as result, different feelings. They also become aware that emotional expressions do not always reflect people’s true feelings. During the end of the middle childhood, children understand that they and other people can have ambivalent and conflicting feelings.

Adolescence is the time when kids learn to regulate their emotions.

What is Emotional regulation? Can it be learn ?

Emotional Regulation is the strategies that help people to manage and cope with their feelings

and deal with stressful situations.

Emotional regulation go through 3 levels: neurophysiological/biochemical reactions, behavioral, and cognitive. 

All the children express and react to the stimuli in a different ways, at the same time, their range of reaction and their frequency varies across all kids. Kids also vary widely in the subtlety of their understanding of emotions (both their own and others), in the degree of pleasure they show when they share positive emotions , and in their ability to regulate  or control their negative responses to frustrating situations. So, when we are talking about emotional regulation we are talking about our ability to control those emotional responses on different levels.

There are differences in kids’ ability to acquire to regulate their emotions. However, this ability is a learned one and it’s learning process originally comes from the environment and it starts in the infancy period. 

Parents and caregivers play important role in teaching how to manage affective states. When it is an infant, parents and other family members can come to help to the baby and offer a soothing touch, and reassure them verbally, which helps them to calm down that way they learn that distress can be relieved with certain technics suitable for each situation.  

As a child grows older, parents serve an important role by modeling particular behavior, or responses in stressful situation. Many young kids realize that they can substitute one activity for another, ask for support from peers or adults, or change they way they think about troubling situation.

It is important to teach kids to regulate their emotions in an effective manner.

Effective emotional regulation provides successful experience in any situations and helps with learning. Kids can successfully learn to communicate their emotions to others, calm themselves down, at the same time, they are able to learn from new experiences, understand better others and their own emotions, prevent conflictive situations, or resolve better those situations, and express their own emotions in a more effective and socially accepted ways. 

In early childhood, those kids who can regulate their emotions have more chances to learn new things, able to focus better, can use their listening skills more effectively, and they are socially more engaged with their classmates, therefore, they have better chances to succeed in school environment.  

For all kids, the classroom is the place where they practice to regulate their emotions, and those who do it in a socially accepted way are those most likely to be popular with peers.     

What can you do?  

-       Help crying infants find comfort

-       Create an atmosphere of warmth, acceptance, and trust

-       Consider using a research-based curriculum for fostering emotional development

-       Offer age-appropriate outlets for emotional expression

-       Discuss emotions experienced by characters in literature and history

-       Ask children to guess what emotions people may feel in particular scenarios;

-       Take cultural differences into account

-       Pay attention to your own emotions and their expression

-       Model appropriate way s of dealing with negative emotions

     

Thank you for Reading