History and Sociology of Emotions
This term began being used by English-speaking persons in the mid-19th century.
What is "Emotion." Other cultures have been noted to describe emotional experiences (e.g., Bhava encompassed emotion with perception, thought, or movement; rasa was a subtle bodily experience as part of the catalytic process; bhakti encompasses the religious experience associated with rasa). The term emotion is meant to characterize the establishment, evaluation, and expression of one's life
These emotions are regarded as innate.
What are fear, joy, anger, and sadness. Disgust is also there but is in a research category of its own- due largely to the ease of studying this emotion. Lewis (2016) stated that in order to understanding the emergence of human emotion, one must consider the bioconstructionist model in conjunction with consciousness. It is through consciousness, cognition, and language that meaning is given emotions and characterized the unique experience of each affective process.
This precedes emotional understanding.
What is awareness. In order to articulate what we are experiencing, we need to first be aware of what we are experiencing.
This is a common assumption about that children's understanding of emotions.
What is understanding of emotions is attributed with a child's ability to recognize "universal" facial expressions associated with specific emotions. While this holds some truth, it is vastly simplistic.
These were identified as two concurrent emotional challenges during adolescence.
What is complex decision making and independent self-regulation.
These are the six "primitive" emotions identified by Descartes.
What are wonder, love, hatred, desire, joy, and sadness. Due to the subjective experience of various emotional experiences (e.g., differences in worldviews), this has been challenged. Though the expression and parameters may look different between cultures, the following emotions were discusses as occurring at one point in time for an individual (synchronic) or evolve over time (diachronic): melancholy/depression; pity/compassion; and shame/humiliation.
We use this term to describe our emotional state, particularly when we are experiencing multiple emotions at once.
What is "feelings." When the term "feelings" is used, we are connecting the thoughts, emotions, and context into an integrated experience. We use language (verbal or non-verbal) to communicate the subjective and objective events/stimuli contributing to our emotional response, and thus generating a feeling.
This allows children to describe current emotions/feelings, as well as past emotional experiences, leading to a richer and deeper understanding of the complexity of emotions.
What is language. This usually begins to emerge around 2-yo.
This is approximately the age where children start to use emotion words.
What is 20-months. This is when they attribute emotions to themselves. Around 24-months, children start attributing emotions to others (including inanimate objects). By 3-years, children can link event with causal emotions.
This is when adolescents believe they are the target of social evaluation.
What is imaginary audience.
This is the general sociological definition of emotion.
What is "emotions are inherently social." Seminal research loosely identified emotions as barometers for an individual's experience to social events (Hochschild. 1983). Thoits (1984) went a step further to describe emotion as a four factor experience (e.g., physiology, cognition, emo. expression, and emo. words). More recent work expanded this definition to essentially say that a person experienced emotional responses to events in their body as manifested by physiological experiences and facial expressions (Lively & Heise, 2014). In any and all cases, these theories highlight the interdependent nature between emotional experience and sociological events.
Emotional life is embedded in these two domains of development.
What is social and cognitive development. As children progress through various developmental stages, their involvement in consciousness expands as they individuate from their caregiver and directly experiences their environment beyond basic needs. Through this developmental progression, children begin to experience consequences, further expanding the range in which their innate affective processes have offered thus far.
Children begin to recognize the impact of belief around this age.
What is 5-6 years old. Around this time, children can infer desires, beliefs, expectation, and misplaced expectations, usually through story telling. Children are better able to identify other's feelings and perspective shift.
With regards to valanced-based discrimination of various emotions, children around the age of 2 typically did this.
What is group all negative valanced emotions together versus separating them as distinguished responses (e.g., fear, sadness, and disgust were erroneously grouped with anger).
This is a form of emotion regulation characterized by attempts to change, reframe the meaning of an emotional cue, thus changing the emotional output for a given situation.
What is reappraisal. This process becomes more sophisticated as one transitions to later stages of adolescences into adulthood. Why is that? The frontal cortex becomes its most developed!
This theory asserts that individuals generate situations that confirm core affective sentiments about themselves, others, and various contexts. Those core affective sentiments have three components: 1) evaluation; 2) potency; and 3) activation. Affective dissonance occurs when a temporary situation challenges that core affective sentiments. This leads to deflection based on culturally defined affective experiences for various social roles, behaviors, and contexts.
What is Affect Control Theory. On the contrary, Identity theory examines the interplay between the one's self-concept and the appraisal of their identity from others. Other theories include: Justice Theory; Equity Theory; Expectations States Theory; and Exchange theory.
Attention has been linked to this experience, and as a result placed this experience in the "emotion" category.
What is interest. Interest is the result of attentional patterns producing specific responses to their environment that promote either approach or withdrawal affective processes.
As part of a study looking at the appraisal process and transgression, younger children were referred to as this, meaning that they were less likely to attribute bad feelings to a perpetrator.
What is "happy victimizers." Younger child (e.g., ages 4-5 years old) tend to associate protagonist transgressions with the achievement of a goal, thus attributing positive feelings to the protagonist's negative behavior. Around 8-years-old, child begin to identify remorse as an emotional experience one should feel for doing something bad. Moreover, around the age of reason (7-yo) children demonstrate more insight into theirs and other's behaviors, thus being able to demonstrate a wider range of self-conscious emotions.
This is one contributing factor to discrepancies between a child's ability to discern various emotion facial expressions versus an adults ability.
What is children have different implicit definitions of emotions, typically broader understandings.
This term refers to the distinct manner in which the brain develops.
What is staggered emergence of neurocircuitry. A person's brain reaches 95% capacity around middle childhood (aka the window of plasticity- roughly 10 years-old). The other 5% is responsible for executive functioning. Executive functioning encompasses the ability to regulate emotions. In other words, staggered emergence plays a significant role in the emotional "imbalances" experienced and expressed by adolescents.
Emotions play a role in social change by influencing these behaviors.
What is motivation, group solidarity, and the impact of morality on political action. Emotions and affect management have been instrumental in bringing together people for collective action, overcoming stigma and negatively valanced emotions associated with positions of oppression, and encouraging collective outrage for the betterment of marginalized populations. One the flip side- society has taken this to an extreme through the weaponization and commodification of affective experiences within social change.
This emotion requires the least amount of cognitive capacity.
What is disgust.
Maternal mental state discourse shifted for the betterment of the relationship due in large part to this perception.
What is the perception mother's had that older children were better conversationalists.
This was a limitation on the efficacy of the face inferiority effect.
What is photographs provide a static representation of emotion facial expressions, when in real life emotion facial expressions are dynamic. This may have led children to be less likely to generate recognizable causes for facial expressions (e.g., identify the emotional response associated with the facial expression being shown).
The prefrontal cortex is responsible for executive functioning skills (e.g., emotion regulation), the amygdala is responsible for eliciting emotional responses based on emotionally evocative stimuli, and this brain structure plays a part in decision-making, specifically related to anticipation and attainment of rewards and influences motivated behavior.
What is the ventral striatum. The ventral striatum is a part of the basal ganglia, containing nucleus accumbens (NAs).