Emotion development
Generally, emotion is a strong feeling resonating with our immediate surroundings, moods, or relationships. These changes are expressed through our behavioral changes in facial expressions and body posture, and thoughts and expressions. Every individual expresses emotion; infants are no exception. Developmental changes cause a difference in emotional experience for the children. At the age of three, children can clearly comprehend their emotions, such as happiness and sadness. By the time they are in school-age years, their ability to differentiate emotion is accurate, like that of an adult. The emotional difference in children shows their ability to interpret the emotional clues of others.
Social referencing is defined as the procedure whereby the infants use the effective display of a grownup to control and regulate their behavior change toward new environments, people, and situations. Through social referencing, the child gets to learn and understand the environment around them. Social referencing commerces at the age of 12 months, and children develop a habit of using adults’ emotions to guide behavior in ambiguous circumstances such as visual cliff and strangers. Social referencing is important for the children because it shows the toddler’s ability to evaluate the safety and security of the world around them. Furthermore, children can comprehend other individual intentions and preferences. Notably, social reference experiences and cognitive and language advancement aid the infant in refining the meaning of the same valence’s emotions. For instance, the ability to differentiate anger verse fear.
Emotion understanding is demonstrated differently across their age. For instance, at the age of three months, toddles are sensitive to sensitive and face-to-face interactions. They only express their emotions through, gazing smiling, or vocalization. By five months, they can now distinguish positive from negative emotion in voices and, consequently, show some development in facial expressions. At the age pre-school the children understand the behavior that causes emotions. Later on, as they age, they develop more accurate behavior of defining the emotion and comprehend that thought has consequences. For example, they know that if they fall and show the behavior of being in pain, they will get attention. Older kids show a wide range of emotions and are advanced at controlling and coping with their emotions.
According to (Grazzani, Ornaghi, Conte, Pepe, Caprin, 2018)), emotion self-regulation is defined as an infant’s strategies to adjust the emotional state to a comfortable level of intensity. Emotion regulations are caused by several factors, including gender, age, and risk factors. Infants use expansive emotion regulation to express behavior such as self-soothing, distraction, and breathing. However, the kid in pre-schools expresses emotion regulation through their thinking. Then they can redirect their emotions or suppress them to inhibit the emotions.
In the study (Strelau, 2020)), temperament is the consistent behavior differences that determine how a child reacts to the surrounding environment. It indicates if the toddler is quiet, easygoing, apprehensive, or turbulent. It is often measured through questionnaires given to parents and caregivers. According to (Zwir et al., 2018), temperament traits are innate behavior influenced by our families, culture, or experiences. There are three primary classifications of temperament. To begin is easy temperament, which entails positive emotions, regular and predictable nature. Secondly, there is a difficult temperament that involves negative emotion, frustration, and unpredictability. Lastly, there is slow-to-warm temperament, which is the milder version of feisty and flexible.
In the study of (Strelau, J. 2020), there are three main components of temperament. The sensory threshold explains the level of stimulation required for a toddler to show a response to the environment. The activity level describes an infant’s motor reactivity. There is a mood, which shows the level of emotion, which could be positive or negative. There is an attention span when an infant will keep at a difficult task without giving up. Finally, self-regulation is the frequency of expression of the emotion of happiness and pleasure.
The goodness of fit is referred to as the compatibility of a child’s temperament with the world around them. According to (Newland, Parade, Dickstein, & Seifer, 2016), the goodness of fit is the key factor in assisting the toddler feel good about themselves and be adaptable in creating an environment that accommodates their temperaments. This is achievable by helping the children discover how to interact with the environment and relate with the humans in their world.
Grazzani, I., Ornaghi, V., Conte, E., Pepe, A., & Caprin, C. (2018). The relation between emotion understanding and theory of mind in children aged 3 to 8: The key role of language. Frontiers in psychology, 9, 724.
Strelau, J. (2020). Temperament. Encyclopedia of Personality and Individual Differences, 5388-5407.
Zwir, I., Arnedo, J., Del-Val, C., Pulkki-Råback, L., Konte, B., Yang, S. S., … & Svrakic, D. M. (2018). Uncovering the complex genetics of human temperament. Molecular psychiatry, 1-20.
Newland, R. P., Parade, S. H., Dickstein, S., & Seifer, R. (2016). The goodness of fit between prenatal maternal sleep and infant sleep: Associations with maternal depression and attachment security. Infant Behavior and Development, 44, 179-188.