The aim is of this research is understanding of social emotional development in the early years and its functions, the process by which infants and children experience, express and interpret emotions, effects of emotions on a child`s psychology , and social-emotional development in the school.
Social emotional development competence is defined as cooperative and pro-social behavior, initiation and maintenance of peer friendships and adult relationship management of aggression and conflict, development of a sense of mastery and self-worth and emotional regulation and reactivity (Squires, 2002).Young children (aged 0–3) depend on their relationships with adults (parents, caregivers) to teach them about themselves and the world they live in. According to Vygotsky, ‘learning is a shared-joint process in a responsive social context’ (Gindis, 1999). Child-adult relationships have a more significant impact on a child’s learning than educational toys or pre-school curricula (Thompson & Happold, 2002).
Parent/caregiver relationships often provide children with an understanding of their behaviors based on the parents/caregivers response to them. Children depend on these responses from parents/caregivers to help them identify and interpret their own feelings. Parents play a significant role in their child’s environment, and can promote development of a social-emotional competent child (NIMH, 2000).Settings that support a child’s social-emotional development consist of responsive, nurturing environments that will, among other things, properly prepare children for academic achievement. The emotional climate in the home plays a role in a child’s emotional growth, and when conflict, abuse and stress are present, emotional growth is often impaired (Thompson & Happold, 2002). Additionally, environments that are abusive, troubled or coercive place young children at risk of poor social emotional development.
Expressiveness, defined as a predominant and persistent style of exhibiting verbal and nonverbal emotional expressions (Halberstadt et al., 1995) There are several researches that aim to predict and explain effects of emotional development.The potential importance of parental emotional expressiveness to children’s emotional development has been examined in relation to three commonly assessed indicators: children’s emotion understanding, emotional expression and emotion regulation (Denham et al., 2007; Scharfe, 2000). Generally, this line of research has yielded conflicting results. One example of inconsistent findings appears in research on the association between positive and negative emotional expressiveness and children’s emotion understanding.
Some researchers have found that children of parents who express more positive emotion have an increased understanding of emotions, but parental expression of negative emotion is unrelated to children’s emotion knowledge (Camras et al., 1990; Halberstadt et al., 1999).Other researchers have found evidence that children of parents who express more negative emotion show lower emotion knowledge but report no relation between parents’ positive expressiveness and children’s emotion knowledge (Denham, 1997).
Halberstadt and Eaton (2002) conducted a meta-analysis of this body of research and found evidence for a small association between negative expressiveness and lower emotion understanding, although the studies reviewed included children at a wide range of ages and only a limited number using preschool-aged samples. To formulate theories about the development of human emotions, researchers focus on observable display of emotion, such as facial expressions and public behavior.A child’s private feelings and experiences cannot be studied by researchers, so interpretation of emotion must be limited to signs that can be observed. Although many descriptions of facial patterns appear intuitively to represent recognizable emotions, psychologists differ on the views on the range of emotions experienced by infants.
It is not clear whether infants actually experience these emotions, or if adults, using adult facial expressions as the standard, simply superimpose their own understanding of the meaning of infant facial expressions (Camras, L. A., Ribordy, S., Hill, J., Martino, S.
, Sachs, V., Spaccarelli, S., Roger, S., 1990).One of the experiments about social development is conducted by Campos and his colleagues. It’s based on the belief that is in order to grow and thrive, babies depend upon the nurturance of adult caregivers who can ‘read’ their emotional expressions and attend to their physical and emotional needs (Broderick, P.
C., & Blewitt, P., 2005). According to the experiment, ten months old infants who are able to crawl over a ‘visual cliff’ (a glass covered surface that looks like a sharp ‘drop-off’) actively seek out their mother`s responses before proceeding to crawl over the cliff.
(Campos, Barret, Lamb, Goldsmith & Sternberg, 1983)Infants whose mothers respond with fearful facial or vocal expressions do not advance, whereas those mothers respond with smiles or encouragement proceed to cross surface without fear. Interestingly infants use the emotional information provided by caregivers to help them interpret situations that are ambiguous to them (Broderick, P. C., & Blewitt, P.
, 2005). In this review, emotional development of children will be examined by steps which refer from birth to adolescent to understand the differences of emotional change between the periods.EARLY INFANCY (BIRTH TO 6 MONTHS)Between six and ten weeks, a social smile emerges, usually accompanied by other pleasure-indicative actions and sounds, including cooing and mouthing. This social smile occurs in response to adult smiles and interactions.
It derives its name from the unique process by which the infant engages a person in a social act, doing so by expressing pleasure (a smile), which consequently elicits a positive response. This cycle brings about a mutually reinforcing pattern in which both the infant and the other person gain pleasure from the social interaction. As infants become more aware of their environment, smiling occurs in response to a wider variety of contexts.They may smile when they see a toy they have previously enjoyed. They may smile when receiving praise for accomplishing a difficult task. Smiles such as these, like the social smile, are considered to serve a developmental function.
Mothers most often the primary caretakers and their infants engage in increasingly longer mutual gaze interactions. By the age of 3 months, actual turn taking can be observed. The mother`s responses and movements are synchrony with those of her infant. (Condon &Sander, 1974)LATER INFANCY (7-12 MONTHS) Emotional expressivity During the last half of the first year, infants begin expressing fear, disgust, and anger because of the maturation of cognitive abilities.
Anger, often expressed by crying, is a frequent emotion expressed by infants. As is the case with all emotional expressions, anger serves an adaptive function, signaling to caregivers of the infant’s discomfort or displeasure, letting them know that something needs to be changed or altered. Although some infants respond to distressing events with sadness, anger is more common. Fear also emerges during this stage as children become able to compare an unfamiliar event with what they know. Unfamiliar situations or objects often elicit fear responses in infants.
One of the most common is the presence of an adult stranger, a fear that begins to appear at about seven months. One of the most significant is the response of its mother or caregiver. Caregivers supply infants with a secure base from which to explore their world, and accordingly an exploring infant will generally not move beyond eyesight of the caregiver. Infants repeatedly check with their caregivers for emotional cues regarding safety and security of their explorations. If, for instance, they wander too close to something their caregiver perceives as dangerous, they will detect the alarm in the caregiver’s facial expression, become alarmed themselves, and retreat from the potentially perilous situation (Longe, J.
, 2011) Infants look to caregivers for facial cues for the appropriate reaction to unfamiliar adults. If the stranger is a trusted friend of the caregiver, the infant is more likely to respond favorably, whereas if the stranger is unknown to the caregiver, the infant may respond with anxiety and distress.Another factor is the infant’s temperament. A second fear of this stage is called separation anxiety. Infants seven to twelve months old may cry in fear if the mother or caregiver leaves them in an unfamiliar place. Many studies have been conducted to assess the type and quality of emotional communication between caregivers and infants.
Parents are one of the primary sources that socialize children to communicate emotional experience in culturally specific ways. That is, through such processes as modeling, direct instruction, and imitation, parents teach their children which emotional expressions are appropriate to express within their specific sub-culture and the broader social context. Socialization of emotion begins in infancy.Research indicates that when mothers interact with their infants they demonstrate emotional displays in an exaggerated slow motion, and that these types of display are highly interesting to infants. It is thought that this process is significant in the infant’s acquisition of cultural and social codes for emotional display, teaching them how to express their emotions, and the degree of acceptability associated with different types of emotional behaviors. Another process that emerges during this stage is social referencing.
Infants begin to recognize the emotions of others, and use this information when reacting to novel situations and people. As infants explore their world, they generally rely on the emotional expressions of their mothers or caregivers to determine the safety or appropriateness of a particular endeavor. Although this process has been established by several studies, there is some debate about the intentions of the infant; are infants simply imitating their mother’s emotional responses, or do they actually experience a change in mood purely from the expressive (Kochanska, G., 2001)TODDLERHOOD (1-2 years)Emotional expressivity During the second year, infants express emotions of shame or embarrassment and pride. These emotions mature in all children and adults contribute to their development.
However, the reason for the shame or pride is learned. Different cultures value different actions. One culture may teach its children to express pride upon winning a competitive event, whereas another may teach children to dampen their c children to express pride upon winning a competitive event, whereas another may teach children to dampen their cheer, or even to feel shame at another person’s loss. (Longe, J.
, 2011).Several researchers have articulated specific predictions regarding early attachment and children’s emotionality. Cassidy (1994), following Main (Main, Kaplan, & Cassidy, 1985), proposed that children’s pattern of regulating (mostly negative) emotions evolves in part as a function of the history of the relationship with the mother. In this view, the individual Organization of emotional strategies corresponds to the attachment patterns and is rooted in the child’s history of repeated experiences in affective encounters with the parent. Secure children are thought to develop open, flexible emotion expression, with a predominance of positive affect.
Avoidant children display a pattern of minimizing the expression of negative effect, mostly fear and anger, whereas resistant children develop heightened expressions of those emotions.PRESCHOOL (3-6 YEARS) Emotional expressivity Children’s capacity to regulate their emotional behavior continues to advance during this stage of development Parents help preschoolers acquire skills to cope with negative emotional states by teaching and modeling use of verbal reasoning and explanation. Carolyn Saarni, an innovator in the exploration of emotional development, has identified two types of emotional two types of emotional display rules, prosocial and self-protective.Prosocial display rules involve altering emotional displays in order to protect another’s feelings. For example, a child not wants to make her aunt feel badly.
On the other hand, self-protective display rules involve masking emotion in order to save face or to protect oneself from negative consequences. For instance, a child may feign toughness when he trips in front of his peers and scrapes his knee, in order to avoid teasing and further embarrassment. In 1986 research findings were mixed concerning the order in which prosocial and self-protective display rules are learned. Some studies demonstrate that knowledge of self-protective display rules emerges first, whereas other studies show the opposite effect.MIDDLE CHILDHOOD (7-11 YEARS) Emotional expressivity Children age’s seven to eleven displays a wider variety of self-regulation skills.
Sophistication in understanding and enacting cultural display rules has increased dramatically by this stage, such that by now children begin to know when to control emotional expressivity as well as have a sufficient repertoire of behavioral regulation skills allowing them to effectively mask emotions in socially appropriate ways. Research has indicated that children at this age have become sensitive to the social contextual cues which serve to guide their decisions to express or control negative emotions.ADOLESCENCE (12-18 YEARS) Emotional expressivity Emotional development continues once children reach adolescence. In fact, emotions have often been used to define the period of adolescence.
For some people, the changes associated with adolescence conjure up pictures of strong emotions—a developmental period characterized as a time when teens become moody and negative. These images, however, are accurate for only a minority of adolescents. Most adolescents cope with the changes in emotionally positive ways. Adolescents have developed a wide vocabulary with which to discuss, and thus influence, emotional states of themselves and others. They are adept at interpreting social situations as part of the process of managing emotional displays.It is widely believed that by adolescence children have developed a set of expectations, referred to as scripts, about how various people will react to their emotional displays, and regulate their displays in accordance with these scripts.
Research in this area has found that in early adolescence, children begin breaking the emotionally intimate ties with their parents and begin forming them with peers.In one study, for instance, eighth-grade students, particularly boys, reported regulating (hiding) their emotions to (from) their mothers more than did either fifth- or eleventh-grade adolescents. This dip in emotional expressivity towards mothers appeared to be due to the boys’ expectations of receiving less emotional support from their mothers. This particular finding demonstrates the validity of the script hypothesis of self regulations; children’s expectations of receiving little emotional support from their mothers, perhaps based on past experience, guide their decisions to regulate emotions more strictly in their mothers’ presence.SOCIAL EMOTIONAL DEVELOPMENT WITHIN THE SCHOOL The school setting has the potential to provide services that may have positive impact on overall academic achievement as well as he emotional development of the students. However it is important to note that teachers would have to play an expanded role in the lives of the students they teach in order social – emotional needs to be addressed in the schools.
Schools play significant role for development of social-emotional features for adolescents. This competence is an important foundation for young children’s later success and well-being.The Center on the Social Emotional Foundations for Early Learning (CSEFEL) defines social emotional development as the developing capacity of the child from birth through 5 years of age to form close and secure adult and peer relationships; experience, regulate, and express emotions in socially and culturally appropriate ways; and explore the environment and learn (Research has indicated that, in conjunction with cognitive competence (e.g., reading, writing, and critical thinking skills); social-emotional competence (e.
g., collaboration skills, motivation, and study skills) is an important predictor of academic achievement (e.g., DiPerna and Elliot, 2002).For example, based on a meta-analysis of 270 research studies, Wang et al.
(1993) found that affective and motivational factors had greater influence on school learning than peer group, school culture, or classroom instructional methods. In another study, Bernard (2004) found that social-emotional competence was a significant predictor of five-year-old children’s levels of reading achievement (Aviles, A. M., Anderson, T. R.
, & Davila, E. R., 2006). In addition, Bernard found that children considered to be ‘‘at-risk’’ for academic difficulties displayed significantly lower levels of competence in the areas of confidence, persistence and organization.
CONCLUSION Social emotional development is an important competence which provides interaction to people, gives skill of management to solve problems and conflicts in human development. It differs in human being from others with the social-emotional competences and capabilities. Therefore its effects start in early years and continue during the puberty. In this review steps and affects of Social emotional development is examined to have better knowledge and understanding in human development.
