What Develops in Emotional Development?

Transcription

1 What Develops in Emotional Development?

2 EMOTIONS, PERSONALITY, AND PSYCHOTHERAPY Series Editors: Carroll E. Izard, University of Delaware, Newark, Delaware and Jerome L. Singer, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut Current volumes in the series THE COGNITIVE FOUNDATIONS OF PERSONALITY TRAITS Shulamith Kreitler and Hans Kreitler FINDING MEANING IN DREAMS: A Quantitative Approach G. William Domhoff FROM MEMORIES TO MENTAL ILLNESS: A Conceptual Journey William M. Hall IMAGERY AND VISUAL EXPRESSION IN THERAPY Vija Bergs Lusebrink THE PSYCHOLOGY OF EMOTIONS Carroll E. Izard QUANTIFYING CONSCIOUSNESS: An Empirical Approach Ronald J. Pekala THE ROLE OF EMOTIONS IN SOCIAL AND PERSONALITY DEVELOPMENT: History, Theory, and Research Carol Magai and Susan H. McFadden SAMPLING INNER EXPERIENCE IN DISTURBED AFFECT Russell T. Hurlburt SAMPLING NORMAL AND SCHIZOPHRENIC INNER EXPERIENCE Russell T. Hurlburt WHAT DEVELOPS IN EMOTIONAL DEVELOPMENT? Edited by Michael F. Mascolo and Sharon Griffin A Continuation Order Plan is available for this series. A continuation order will bring delivery of each new volume immediately upon publication. Volumes are billed only upon actual shipment. For further information please contact the publisher.

3 What Develops in Emotional Development? Edited by Michael F. Mascolo Merrimack College North Andover, Massachusetts and Sharon Griffin Clark University Worcester, Massachusetts Springer Science+ Business Media. LLC

4 On file Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data ISBN DOI /978~ Springer Science+Business Media New York Originally published by Plenum Press, New York in 1998 Softcover reprint ofthe hardcover ISI edition 1998 ISBN (ebook) AH rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, record ing, or otherwise, without written permission from the Publisher

5 To Bonnie and Paul and to Dennis McLaughlin who inspires through his compassionate style of guidance, support, and good humor.

6 Contributors JoAnn A. Abe Department of Psychology, 220 Wolf Hall, University of Delaware, Newark, Delaware Brian P. Ackennan Department of Psychology, 220 Wolf Hall, University of Delaware, Newark, Delaware Karen Caplovitz Barrett Department of Human Development and Family Studies, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, Colorado Terrance Brown 3530 North Lake Shore Drive, 12-A, Chicago, Illinois K. Laurie Dickson Department of Psychology, Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff, Arizona Lori Douglas Ontario Institute for Educational Studies, 252 Bloor Street West, Toronto Ontario, Canada M5S 1V6 Alan Fogel Department of Psychology, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, Utah Nico H. Frijda University of Amsterdam, Roeterstraat 15, 1018 WB Amsterdam, The Netherlands Sharon Griffin Frances L. Hiatt School of Psychology, Clark University, 950 Main Street, Worcester, Massachusetts Debra Harkins Department of Psychology, Suffolk University, Boston, Massachussets Carrol E. Izard Department of Psychology, 220 Wolf Hall, University of Delaware, Newark, Delarware Brian Knutson Department of Psychology, Bowling Green State University, Bowling Green, Ohio Arnold Kozak RR1, Box 1276, Cambridge, Vermont Marc D. Lewis Ontario Institute for Educational Studies, 252 Bloor Street West, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M5S 1V6 Michael Lewis Institute for the Study of Child Development, Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, 97 Paterson Street, New Brunswick, New Jersey vii

7 viii Contributors James C. Mancuso Department of Psychology, State University of New York at Albany, 1400 Washington Avenue, Albany, New York Michael F. Mascolo Department of Psychology, Merimack College, 315 Turnpike Street, North Andover, Massachusetts Batja Mesquita Department of Psychology, Wake Forest University, Winston-Salem, North Carolina Daniel Messinger Departments of Pediatrics and Psychology, University of Miami, Miami, Florida Jaak Panksepp Department of Psychology, Bowling Green State University, Bowling Green, Ohio Douglas L. Pruitt Department of Psychology, Bowling Green State University, Bowling Green, Ohio Theodore R. Sarbin University of California, Hatton Road, Carmel, California 93923

8 Foreword The problem of development is central in the study of emotional life for two basic reasons. First, emotional life so clearly changes (dramatically in the early years) with new emotional reactions emerging against the backdrop of an increasing sensitivity to context and with self-regulation of emotion emerging from a striking dependence on regulatory assistance from caregivers. Such changes demand developmental analysis. At the same time, understanding such profound changes will surely inform our understanding of the nature of development more generally. The complexity of emotional change, when grasped, will reveal the elusive nature of development itself. At the outset, we know that development is complex. We must take seriously what is present at any given phase, including the newborn period, because a developmental analysis disallows something emerging from nothing. Still, it is equally nondevelopmental to posit that new forms of new processes were simply present in their precursors. Rather, development is characterized by transformations in which more complex structures and organization "emerge" from new integration of prior components and new capacities. These new forms and organizations cannot be specified from prior conditions but are due to transactions of the evolving organism with its environment over time. They are not simply in the genome, and they are not simply conditioned by the environment. They are the result of the developmental process. Thus, positing a simple differentiation mechanism, in which mature forms simply "come out of" earlier forms, without specifying the nature of the interactive process is not adequate; nor is a position in which mature forms are assumed to have always been present. Development, then, implies increasing complexity and organization, often accompanied by a more precise coordination of components and a more precise coordination between organism and environment. There are distinctive patterns of infant-environment transaction, even in the newborn. These set the stage for later processes involving subjective engagement, evaluation, and (ultimately) represented subjectivity. It is differentiation in this sense, not ix

9 X Foreword in the sense of more differentiated components only, that defines a developmental analysis. Yet understanding and specifying this type of developmental change is extraordinarily challenging. The authors in this volume grapple with this complexity from many points of view, with varying emphases that sometimes seem difficult to integrate; yet integration remains the goal of all. Emotional development includes the emergence of specific affects, the growth of emotional regulation, and the increasing integration of emotion with social and cognitive development. It also includes changes in experience and changes in the narratives children and others construct of these experiences. It is all of this and more. Each of these aspects of emotional development is taken up by one contributor or another, in the knowledge that greater understanding of these various features of emotional life will contribute to the integration we seek. Some explicitly move toward an overarching integration. In their view, as in mine, what develops are not just components or facets of emotions, but changes in systemic organization of emotional life itself. This is the challenge confronted in this volume. L. ALAN SROUFE Institute of Child Development University of Minnesota

10 Preface The idea for this volume developed from several sources. The first involved a discussion that occurred one evening among members of a Harvard discussion group about the nature of emotional development. In that discussion, one participant expressed puzzlement over the very idea of "emotional development." He said something like "I never really understand what people mean when they talk about emotional development. Does this mean that emotions develop? I know what it means to say that thinking develops. But what does it mean to say that emotions develop?" This comment sparked much debate. One individual expressed the position that emotions, as feeling states, were largely impervious to a developmental analysis. How can something as basic as a sensory experience undergo developmental change? Another individual, with passion to match the first, said something like "but everything about emotion develops-our perceptions of the situations that elicit emotion, emotional expressions, what we do when we have an emotion, the experience of emotion, our understanding of emotion. How can we say that everything about emotion develops except the emotion? All psychological processes undergo development." It was clear that debaters advocated very different positions on the nature of emotion and emotional development. This book also had its origins in our own work as emotion researchers attempting to make sense of the burgeoning literature on emotional development, and in our experiences with students who have struggled with this same literature. Even a casual perusal of the literature on emotions and emotional development indicates a lack of consensus or even clarity about the meaning of such concepts. Some researchers have provided clear definitions of what they have in mind when they speak of emotion; others, in failing to define it at all, have written as if the concept were clear and transparent. In our courses, we have led students through discussions of theoretical and empirical treatments of the nature of emotion and emotional development. In particular, for any given set of readings, we have asked students to infer how the theorist defined emotion and whether emotions could be said to develop xi

11 xii Preface over any period of the life span. Constructing answers to these questions has provided a considerable challenge to several groups of students over a period of several years. Although students and their professors have been able to construct answers for each theorist that were reasonably consistent from year to year, the amount of inference involved always raised questions about the faithfulness of our answers to the theorists' own conceptions. Would they agree with our renditions of their positions? This volume was conceived as an attempt to clarify the diversity of perspectives that researchers adopt when approaching the study of emotional development. Theorists and researchers working in the field today were asked to define their positions with respect to three fundamental questions: To what do we refer when we speak of emotion? What develops in emotional development? What roles do developing emotions play in the lives of individuals? The responses they provided form the body of this volume. In posing these questions, we hoped to clarify points of agreement and disagreement about the nature of emotional development, provide examples of developmental trajectories in emotional processes, and raise further issues and questions for researchers addressing what it means to speak of emotions in the context of human development. We are grateful to many individuals for the roles they have played in shaping this volume. We thank Carroll Izard and Jerome Singer for their helpful commentary in the early stages of the project, and for their contributions in bringing the project to fruition. Terry Brown, Robbie Case, Laura Craig-Bray, Kurt Fischer, Jerome Kagan, Bonnie Kanner, Jim Mancuso, and Theodore Sarbin provided helpful comments and encouragement at various stages of the project. Thomas Schoenfeld offered invaluable assistance in the review of Panksepp, Knutson, and Pruitt's thoroughgoing chapter on affective neuroscience and emotional development. We thank Pat Bowman Skeffington, Mary O'Connell, and Bethany Parker for their able assistance in the coordination and preparation of manuscripts and correspondence with contributors. We would also like to thank Susan Haas for the splendid artwork that embellishes the cover of this volume. We would also like to express our thanks to Eliot Werner for his astute help and support throughout the development of this manuscript, and to Herman Makler for his able assistance in bringing the volume to print. Finally, we wish to thank our many graduate and undergraduate students and colleagues at Merrimack College and Clark University for their roles in learning with us about the development of emotions. Work on this project was supported by grants from Merrimack College to the first editor and from Clark University to the second editor.

12 Contents I. INTRODUCTION 1. On the Nature, Development, and Function of Emotions Sharon Griffin and Michael F. Mascolo 3 A Selective Review of Current Approaches to Emotional Development Issues in the Analysis of Emotional Development Aims and Organization of the Volume References The Development and Structure of Emotions Michael Lewis 29 Emotional Elicitors Emotional Receptors Emotional States Emotional Expressions Emotional Experiences Experiences and the Development of the Self References xiii

13 xiv Contents II. BIOLOGICAL AND DIFFERENTIAL EMOTIONS PERSPECTIVES 3. Toward a Neuroscience of Emotion: The Epigenetic Foundations of Emotional Development faak Panksepp, Brian Knutson, and Douglas L. Pruitt Natural Foundations of Emotions Developmental Patterns of Socioemotional Behaviors Developmental Progression of "Basic" Emotional Behaviors Examples of Neurochemical Changes and Their Impact on Emotional Behavior Examples of Early Emotional Interventions Conclusion References Differential Emotions Theory and Emotional Development: Mindful of Modularity Brian P. Ackerman, Jo Ann A. Abe, and Carroll E. Izard Discrete Emotions System Modularity System Connections Conclusion References III. FUNCTIONALIST PERSPECTIVES 5. A Functionalist Perspective to the Development of Emotions 109 Karen Caplovitz Barrett What Is (an) Emotion? What Does and Does Not Develop in Emotional Development? 114 The Development of Shame and Pride Factors Affecting the Development of Shame and Pride

14 Contents xv Concluding Comments References Emotion and the Possibility of Psychologists Entering into Heaven Terrance Brown and Arnold Kozak What Is Emotion? Does Emotion Develop? What Is the Function of Emotional Development? References IV. SYSTEMS PERSPECTIVES 7. A Dynamic Systems Approach to Cognition-Emotion Interactions in Development Marc D. Lewis and Lori Douglas Emotion, Cognition, and Self-Organization Emotional Development as a Changing Landscape Self-Organizing Emotional Interpretations The Development of Emotional Landscapes Emotion Regulation and Self-Organizing Defenses Developing Emotional Landscapes of Two Infants: An Empirical Analysis References Toward a Component Systems Approach to Emotional Development Michael F. Mascolo and Debra Harkins A Component Systems Approach to Emotional Development The Development of Self-Evaluative Emotional Experiences and Episodes An Empirical Analysis of the Development of Pride Conclusions References

15 xvi Contents 9. Alternative Trajectories in the Development of Anger-Related Appraisals Michael F. Mascolo and Sharon Griffin Appraisal as a Component of Emotional Episodes The Development of Appraisals in Anger Divergent and Convergent Endpoints in the Development of Emotion: Anger and Gender Alternative Trajectories in the Development of Appraisals in Anger Conclusions References V. SOCIAL AND CULTURAL PERSPECTIVES 10. The Development of Emotion from a Social Process View 253 K. Laurie Dickson, Alan Fogel, and Daniel Messinger Definitions of Emotion Social Process Theory of Emotion Infant Emotion Evidence Conclusion References The Analysis of Emotions: Dimensions of Variation Nico H. Frijda and Batja Mesquita The Nature of Emotions Emotion Components Antecedent Events Appraisal Arousal Action Readiness Behavior: Expressive Behavior Other Behavior Belief Changes Significance Regulation Emotional Experience

16 Contents xvii Concluding Remarks References The Narrative Construction of Emotional Life: Developmental Aspects fames C. Mancuso and Theodore R. Sarbin Introduction On the Embodiment of Emotional Constructs Narrative Construction: The Epistemic Processes of Emotional Life The Consequences of Regarding Emotional Life as Enactment of Narrative References VI. CONCLUSION AND INTEGRATION 13. Alternative Conceptions of Emotional Development: Controversy and Consensus Michael F. Mascolo and Sharon Griffin Alternative Approaches to Emotional Development Thinking about Emotional Development: Controversy and Consensus Conclusion References Index

17 What Develops in Emotional Development?