a new perspective on emotions’10/campos.pdfa new perspective on emotions joseph j. campos...

Child Abuse & Neglecf, Vol. 8, pp. 147-156, 1984 Printed in the U.S.A. All rights reserved

0145-2134184 $3.00 + .oo Copyright 0 1984 Pergamon Press Ltd.

A NEW PERSPECTIVE ON EMOTIONS

JOSEPH J. CAMPOS

Department of Psychology, University of Denver, Denver, CO 80208

Abstract-This paper reviews the recent history of the study of human emotions in psychology and traces the factors that have been responsible for a remarkable increase of interest in emotions, especially in human development. In particular, it traces the rise of the study of emotions as regulators of human behavior. A partjcularly clear and powerful illustration of the regulatory role of emotional expressions on behavior is the phenomenon of social referencing. This concept deals with the use of emotional information in another’s facial, vocal or gestural expression to clarify uncertain situations. Research on social referencing is reviewed, showing the importance of social referencing with infants as young as 8.5 months. The clinical implications of the concept are briefly explored.

R&sum&-L’histoire recente de l’etude psychologique des sentiments affectifs humains a ete revue par l’auteur. On a assiste ces demieres annees a un regain d’interet tout a fait remarquable a I’egard des emotions et des sentiments humains et on s’est penche sur leur role dam le developpement de l’enfant. Un exemple particulitrement impression- nant du role rtgulateur que les expressions emotives ont dans le comportement humain est le phenomene que l’auteur appelle “social referencing” (guide visuel de reference). Dans des situations ambigues, on se guide beaucoup sur l’expression gestuelle, vocale ou faciale de son interlocuteur pour interpreter de faqon plus sure le sens de son langage. C’est la meme chose pour les enfants, meme s’ils sont encore tres jeunes (8 r/z mois). Eux et les personnes qui s’en occupent, utilisent comme guide le “social referencing.” Les implications de ce concept sont que l’enfant, en observant l’expression du visage de la personne qui est en face de lui, tome un message qui l’aide a comprendre ce qui se passe. I1 se peut d’ailleurs que le message affectif que I’on envoie B un enfant par le jeu de la mimique ne corresponde pas au message parle. Est-ce que I’enfant prete alors davantage attention a un canal qu’a l’autre? Est-ce qu’il ne donne pas la priorite au message le plus ntgatif des deux ou est-ce que le nourrisson et l’enfant choisissent le message le plus positif comme Btant le bon? Quelles sont les consequences cliniques pour un enfant dont les parents lui envoient constamment des messages affectifs contradictoires? On peut se demander egalement quelle est la duree de leur influence sur le petit enfant. Est-ce que ces messages ne jouent pas un grand role sur l’tquilibre futur de I’enfant?

AFFECT: PSYCHOLOGY’S BLIND SPOT

EVERY DECADE THE FIELD OF PSYCHOLOGY seems to undergo a major revolution, a revolution which, in part, involves a rediscovery of common sense. In the 1950s subsequent to the widespread domination of psychology by radical and methodological behaviorisms the “cognitive” revolution began. It was spawned by the realization that important factors such as consciousness, planning, symbolic processes and insight were crucial for understanding both the simplest forms of learning, and the most basic therapeutic applications of learning principles, such as those now proposed by contemporary social learning theorists [l]. In the 1960s following the emphasis within psychology on cultural relativism and on attempts to

Presented at the Children’s Institute International Conference on Infant Mental Health, February 18-19, 1983, Pasadena, California.

This paper was prepared with the assistance of NIMH Grant MH-22803, and reflects the collaborative research of the author and Dr. Robert N. Emde of the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center and Dr. Mary Klinnert of National Jewish Hospital, Denver, CO.

Please address reprint requests to Dr. Campos at the Department of Psychology, University of Denver, Denver, CO 80208.

147

148 Joseph J. Campos

equate language learning with simple operant conditioning [2], the “psycholinguistic” revolution took place. It was motivated by the belief that the principles of language acquisition had both an innate basis in the structures of the human brain, and a universality across cultures. This revolution, in contrast to the former, reflected the new interest in psychology in the biological constraints on behavior, and in those processes which are shared across cultures, rather than in those which differ from one society to the next.

In the 1970s still another revolution took place, one which has gained enormous momen- tum in the early 1980s and which is being called the “affective” revolution. This revolution is motivated by the desire to show that three neglected aspects of human psychology are crucial determinants of behavior. These aspects are the feeling states of a person (i.e., “affect”), the relatively involuntary behavioral manifestations of states such as joy, anger, sadness, surprise, and fear (the “emotional expression”), and instrumental reactions resulting from affective states (i.e., “coping”).

To characterize these circumstances as a revolution may come as a bit of a surprise to psychotherapists, social workers, nurses and other clinical personnel for whom dealing with the feeling states of others constitutes an everyday reality, something which they are trained to detect and respond to. Despite the importance of affect and feeling in clinical areas, it is a fact that elsewhere in psychology, affect and emotion ceased to be major topics of research interest sometime during the 1940s and 1950s. The study of emotion fell into neglect because the belief arose that emotions were neither of theoretical significance, nor capable of measurement with any degree of accuracy.

On the former issue, many psychologists [3-51 wrote that emotions were events which do not play a causal role in behavior, and which are secondary by-products of more significant processes. In short, they argued that emotions were epiphenomenal. (An example of an epiphenomenon would be the dashboard indicators on a car, which monitor the internal functioning of an engine or other mechanism in the vehicle, but in no way directly influence the operation of the car. They serve merely as “signals” to the driver. Indeed, this is often the way that clinicians treat emotions, as mere external indicators of underlying conflict states, which are more basic and important than the affects themselves. When emotions are considered in this light, the attitudes of clinicians toward emotions do not differ markedly from

those of academicians.) A thorough treatment of the issue of the epiphenomenal basis of emotion is given in

Bowlby’s chapter on “Appraising and Selecting: Feeling and Emotion” in his 1969 book on attachment [6]. Bowlby presented Langer’s view [7] that emotions are to behavior what the color white is to metal: Just as whiteness does not cause a metal to bend, but only signifies a state the metal is in, so a given emotion does not cause behavioral regulation, but only signifies a readiness to be influence by something else (such as the tendency of glass to be shattered). For many theoreticians in the 1960s cognition played the important causal role in behavior regulation, not emotion. Consider the following quote from Bowlby [6]:

We must conclude therefore that the processes of interpreting and appraising sensory input must unquestionably be assigned a causal role in producing whatever behaviour emerges. Whether the feelings experienced as a phase of

such appraising should also be assigned a causal role in a much more difficult question.

The tendency to treat emotions as processes of secondary significance also explains why the study of emotion in the 1960s and part of the 1970s revealed preciously little about the nature of emotions. The research on the social smile is a case in point: Most studies on the social smile attempted to verify Kagan’s view [X] that the infant begins to smile when he/she begins effortfully to assimilate an environmental stimulus to an internal memory store of prior encounters with the environment. The smile was of significance not because it was an affective reaction, but because it was an external manifestation of the operation of a significant internal cognitive process. Had the affective reaction been considered of importance in its

A new perspective on emotions 149

own right, Kagan and his followers would have proceeded to consider the consequences of

the smile for both cognitive processing and social regulation. To return to an earlier analogy, they would have considered emotional reactions as something different from the “idiot lights”

of the car, and something more akin to a regulatory process, like the “cruise control.” How- ever, it was left to the later work of Stern [9] and Brazelton [lo] to investigate the social

consequences of smiling. A similar history befell the study of other socioemotional processes. Stranger and separa-

tion anxiety, once deemed crucially important as indicators of the development and the intensity of the child’s attachment to his/her caregivers, fell into disfavor as evidence mounted that neither stranger nor separation distress captured the individual differences in

attachment that had clinical or predictive significance [ 111. They were studied principally as indices of the emergence of new cognitive competences like object permanence or understanding of sensorimotor principles of causality [12]. The emotional reaction or experience was again treated as secondary to an emergent cognitive skill, and it was the cognitive skill, rather than the emotion, which was the more important process to study.

Emotions were not only considered to lack theoretical explanatory power, they were also believed not to be measurable with any degree of specificity. Consider that despite herculean efforts, research on autonomic nervous system responding had revealed no consistent nor replicable pattern of autonomic responses which were unique to emotional states [ 131. Since James [14] and others had proposed that autonomic activity should be specific to discrete affective states, the failure to find such patterning created great disillusionment in emotion measurement. So did research on the facial expression patterns of emotion. The apparently thorough studies by Landis [ 151 and Sherman [ 16, 171, together with the belief that different cultures patterned their facial expressions differently (e.g., Orientals smiling at funerals of loved ones) created skepticism that there was any necessary correspondence between the emotion expressed in the face and the internal feeling state of the individual. Accordingly, most scholars seemed justified in concluding that emotions met neither of the two criteria- explanatory significance and measurement precision-required for phenomena worthy of investigation. The stage was thus set for the decline of the study of emotion.

II. FACTORS ACCOUNTING FOR THE RESURGENCE OF THE INTEREST IN EMOTION

Many factors have contributed to the sudden rise of interest in the field of emotion. First of all, academic psychology lost its inhibition about speaking of internal states. This proved significant, because until psychology abandoned a vocabulary referring to consciousness, no one denied either the validity of discrete states of mind called “affective,” nor the specificity of such affective processes. With the return of consciousness to the vocabulary even of behaviorists (e.g., cognitive behaviorists), the stage was set for psychologists to notice that a whole array of mental events was not being scrutinized.

Secondly, cognitive psychologists [ 181 and social psychologists [ 191 began to emphasize the critical significance of goals and strivings for the explanation of human behavior. A corollary to such a quasi-teleological emphasis was the critical role that emotions play both as “moni- tors” of one’s progress toward a goal, and as motivators of adaptations needed to attain a goal. Rather than being conceptualized as processes which are “triggered” or “released” by environmental stimuli, emotions began to be understood as factors which energize behavior, and guide behaviors toward the goals the person is striving toward. For instance, joy occurs when an event is perceived to facilitate one’s progress toward a goal; anger, when an event blocks progress to the goal; sadness, when the goal is (at least for the moment) given up or believed to be lost; fear, when an event threatens self-preservation or one’s place in a social


hierarchy (both of which are pervasive goals both in humans and infr~uman animals). When considered in this light, emotions are far from epiphenomenal. Rather, they are behavior regulators with critical survival value, but behavior regulators whose significance was often not appreciated because psychology endeavored to explain behavior without reference to goal-orientations. Moreover, the role of cognition in generating affect changed dramatically: Psychologists began studying the difference between “cold” (i.e., nonemotional) cognitions, and “hot” (i.e., affect-laden) cognitions [20]-“hot” cognitions being those which relate either mental or environmental events to the goals of the organism and which are thus events which somehow matter to a person.

Related to the significance of emotions for goal-related behavior was the emergence of an emphasis within cognitive psychology for understanding both memory and problem solving in naturalistic and lifelike settings ]21, 22). Whether one was interested in eyewitness memory, the perception of faces, or the acquisition of language, it became clear that affect could not be ignored as an important parameter, and possible determinant, of both individual differences and normative trends. A few pioneering investigators began to explore the role of affect on cognition, and the work of two investigators, Robert Zajonc [20] and Gordon Bower [23], became especially prominent, because in back-to-back years they won the awards for Distinguished Scientific Contribution presented by the American Psychological Association.

The work by Zajonc [20, 241 was especially dramatic because it called into sharp question

the traditional view that affect follows cognition and is thus secondary to cognition. Review- ing evidence from both his own laboratory and those of others, Zajonc [20] concluded that in many cases afict precedes cugnitju~ and often helps to determine it. For instance, he cited evidence from a study of recognition thresholds done in his lab that showed individuaIs demonstrating an affective preference for particular geometric stimuli even when the individ- uals were incapable of recognizing the stimulus perceptually [24]. The study was interpreted as clear evidence that affect can be processed independently of cognition.

The work of Bower [23] demonstrated that affect orgunizes cognition, and hence is not epiphenomenal. One study by Bower was particularly dramatic. In it, Bower and his collaborators performed an investigation whereby subjects committed to memory a list of verbal items in one of four hypnotically induced affective states: anger, fear, joy, or sadness. Some time later, the subjects came back to the laboratory to demonstrate their retention of the verbal materials, again in a hypnotically induced state which was the same or different from the one during the initial training. Bower reported that subjects performed best when the verbal materials were recalled in the same emotionaf state as when initially learned (i.e., about 80% recall); that they performed worst when the materials were recalled in an emotional state apposite to that during initial learning (e.g., a list learned during sadness but tested in a joy state, or one learned during fear but tested in anger produced about 57% retention); and that they performed at intermediate levels when the emotional state was neither the same nor the opposite of the state in which initial learning took place (e.g., a list learned during sadness and tested during fear, or a list learned during anger but tested in a joyful state in both cases produced about 70% recall). Bower presented other evidence showing that affect determined the flow of associations and the type of story completions produced by college student suh- jects. In short, affective manipulations proved to be powerful determinants of the outcomes of

memory and cognitive studies. A considerable amount of work in ethology stressed the significance of conceptualizing

emotional expressions as prewired and unlearned behavior regulators. Ethologists proposed that emotional expressions (whether from the face or the voice), far from being arbitrary and meaningless, had messages with clear significance to conspecifics. For instance, the smile of the human infant began to be conceptualized as signifying to another person, “Keep up what you are doing. I like it.” The cry signifies “Change what is happening to me. I don’t like it.” An anger expression means, “Be careful, I may attack.” In short, emotional expressions were important because of the action consequences which they signify to others.


The unlearned basis of these messages was confirmed in a number of studies using mon-

keys reared in social isolation, and hence incapable of learning through social interaction the “meaning” of various emotional signals like stares or threat gestures. In one study Sackett [25] demonstrated the aversive qualities of such threat gestures. In another, Kenney, Mason, and Hill [26] demonstrated unlearned reactions both to threat gestures and to friendly ones. Most recently, Mendelsohn, Haith, and Goldman-Rakic [27] reported that socially isolated monkeys reacted aversively to pictures of a staring monkey.

These dramatic findings from ethology revolutionized our understanding of emotion: They suggested that emotions were important not simply because they are internal feeling states, but because they communicate information to others about actions which others must adapt to. In addition, their biological adaptive significance was underscored by their now-documented unlearned bases. And finally, they showed that emotions were distinctly not epiphe-

nomenal. At the same time as the ethological studies were being performed, a series of theoretical

papers and empirical reports dealing with the universality of facial expressions across widely differing societies began to appear. This work was fostered by the pioneering thinking of Sylvan Ton-&ins’ two volume work Afsect, Imagery, and Consciousness [28, 291, in which Tomkins argued for the existence of prewired neurological “affect programs” in the brain, and the direct activation by these programs of distinct patterns of facial expressions in the person experiencing an emotional state. The cross-cultural studies by Izard [30] and Ekman, Sorenson and Friesen [3 1, 321 confirmed Tomkins’ predictions, insofar as members of numerous cultures seemed both to encode facial expression patterns specific to emotional states, and to decode the facial expression patterns of others with a high degree of accuracy.

The work of Ekman and his collaborators and of Izard was particularly influential for two other reasons, They not only accounted for the errors of inference made by previous and highly influential critics of facial expression measurement [30, 33, 341, but they also devised a number of careful methods of scoring facial movements in order to avoid many of the prior errors of measurement encountered by researchers [35-381.

The cross-cultural work has now been confirmed to a very large extent by studies of facial expressions of very young human infants, infants so young that rudimentary retention abili- ties and opportunities for social learning are not likely to account for the sometimes exquisite facial expression emotion patterning observed. One study [39] documented facial expression patterning to happiness, surprise, and occasionally to fear stimuli. Two other studies from the same laboratory documented particularly clear facial expression patterns of anger in infants at 4 and 7 months of age, and to some extent, even at 1 month [40, 411. Other studies from Izard’s laboratory [42] are similarly documenting the existence of facial patterns of disgust, anger, surprise, and other emotions as well, and research on facial expressions of newborns appears to be demonstrating clear differentiation of sadness, happiness, and surprise [43]. It is thus clear that emotional expressions show measurement specificity.

III. EMOTIONS AS BEHAVIOR REGULATORS IN INFANCY: THE STUDY OF SOCIAL REFERENCING

The advances made in the quantification of the patterning of emotional expressions has now resulted in the initiation of studies with human infants on the consequences of one person’s emotional expressions for the behavior of others in the environment, particularly the child. However, how does one proceed to investigate the social regulatory effects of emotions, and what are the advantages of beginning such a study of social regulatory effects from a developmental perspective? Following a tradition initiated by Cooley’s concept of the “Look- ing Glass Self” [44] and George Herbert Mead’s theory of the emerging social self [45], we


have initiated a series of studies on a process called “social referencing” [46-501 to investigate in a general way the manner in which the emotional expressions of the mother can play a significant role in the emotional development of the child.

Social referencing concerns the tendency of a person of any age to seek out the emotional information from a significant other person in the environment, and to use that information to make sense of an event that is otherwise ambiguous or beyond the person’s own intrinsic appraisal capabilities [4X]. The important implications of the social referencing concept for our purposes is that the behavior of the referencing individual is predicted to differ as a

function of the emotional information provided by others in the environment.

One study documents particularly well the pervasive role of emotional signals as behavior regulators in a social referencing context. In this study, an apparatus called the “visual clifl” was used. This apparatus is well known for its use in studies of both depth perception and development of fear of heights in humans and animals [51]. The cliff is a large (8 ft. x 6 ft.) safety glass-covered table divided into two halves, a “shallow” and a “deep” side. On the shallow side, a patterned surface is placed underneath the glass so that there is no apparent dropoff. On the deep side, the same surface is placed at a preselected distance under the glass to appear as if there is a “cliff’ there. The glass, of course, prevents the child from actually falling, in the event that he or she wanders onto the “deep” side. The experimental procedure involves placing the mother across the deep side of the cliff to determine whether the infant can be induced to cross to her.

The advantage of the visual cliff for studies of social referencing stems from the ability the investigators have in controlling for the distance of the apparent dropoff: At certain distances, e.g., 48 inches, no infant will cross the deep side at 12 months of age. At other distances, e.g., 3 inches, all infants will cross the deep side. However, at about a 12-inch dropoff, most infants are uncertain as to how they behave on the deep side, and tend to look to the mother for information on what to do. We thus chose a 12-inch apparent depth to assess whether the facial expression the mother poses to the child will influence the tendency of the lZmonth-old to cross or not to cross the deep side.

Elsewhere, we had conceptualized social referencing as a two-person communication about a third event. Accordingly, we wanted to set up a test that would require the infant to look down at the IZinch dropoff, look up to the mother in one unbroken sweep, and to have the mother look down at the deep side and then at the child, so that her facial expression would communicate something to the child about the deep side. In order to accomplish this, the mothers first were instructed prior to the study on how to pose the facial expression which they were to show to their infants. Some mothers were instructed to pose a fear face; others, an anger face; others, a joy face; and still others, an interest face. Still another group of mothers was instructed to pose sadness. Our expectations were that the posing of either anger or fearful facial expressions would lead infants to avoid crossing the deep side, if the two- person communication about the third event would lead the infant to understand that the mother was afraid or angry about the infant’s crossing the depth. On the other hand, we expected that the posing of the joy and interest faces would lead infants to cross to the mother, since the message there would be that all is safe. The sadness manipulation was performed because we wanted to see what the infant would do when presented with an emotional expression that we deemed contextually inappropriate to the visual cliff, i.e., we expected the baby to be puzzled to see someone sad about something like an uncertain dropoff.

The specific procedure used in the study was quite simple. The infant was placed at the extreme end of the shallow side of the cliff table while the mother and an attractive toy on the


deep side of the cliff induced the child (nonverbally) to venture onto the center of the cliff table. The child typically moved readily to the center of the table, noticed the dropoff, and

then looked immediately to the mother. At that point, the mother was instructed to pose the appropriate facial expression while looking alternately at the infant and the deep side. We then scored the infant’s reactions.

Findings. Our results were dramatic: Of the 17 infants presented with the fear face, none crossed the deep side of the cliff, and of the 19 infants presented with the anger face, only two crossed. By contrast, 75% of the infants in either the joy or the interest condition crossed the deep side to reach the mother. In short, these year-old babies could be induced to cross or not to cross the deep side of the cliff simply by manipulating the mothers’ facial expressions.

What of the sadness condition? Interestingly, when the mothers posed a sad expression in that condition, the infants vacillated between crossing and not crossing. Their referencing of the mother was much more frequent than in either of the other two negative affect poses, and the infants’ tendency to venture forward, then backward, at the center of the table was also much more frequent than in the other negative conditions. Thus, the infant’s behavior was a function, in part, of the contextual appropriateness of the mother’s emotional message.

Another finding from this study confirmed the importance of context for the behavioral regulation seen in a social referencing setting. We tested a separate group of infants using a visual cliff condition in which there essentially were two shallow sides. In this condition, we instructed the mothers to pose a fear face, as in the 12-inch dropoff condition that resulted in no baby crossing the deep side. However, in this setting, very few babies (only 4 out of 24) even referenced the mother at all, and those four continued to cross the cliff table to reach their objective, which in some cases was the toy lure, and in others was the mother. In short, the behavioral regulation produced by the facial expression took place only in those situations where the facial expressions were both appropriate to interpreting or “appraising” what the infant was to do, and seemed to be the outcome of an emotional “search” process produced by the infant-the social referencing itself [47].

Social Referencing Phenomenon in First Year Infancy

A second study from our laboratory demonstrated not only the replicability of the social referencing phenomenon in another context of uncertainty, but also showed that the phenomenon is evident as early as 8.5 months of age.

We know from prior studies that when infants in the second half year of life are ap- proached by a stranger, they tend to look to the mother then to the stranger alternately [52, 531. This process has been considered to be one of facial comparison, the outcome of which is to elicit a “discrepancy” reaction, from which fear is expectable if discrepancy is noted. However, we argued elsewhere [48] that such an interpretation of looking back and forth between mother and stranger seemed unlikely as a comparison process because it continued well past the age when infants would be expected to have a well-established memory of the mother’s facial features. We thought that the checking back and forth might rather reflect a social referencing process, with the infant attempting to determine how the mother is reacting affectively to the stranger’s entry

To test this notion, we compared the behaviors of 32 infants in a standard laboratory stranger approach task [54]. Half the infants were assigned to a condition in which the mother greeeted the stranger with a single cheery “Hello” and a broad smile. The second half were assigned to a condition in which the mother greeted the stranger with a stern “Hello” and a distinct frown which continued throughout the stranger approach.

154 Joseph J. Cameos

Findings. We have several dependent variables, but we will present here only the data for the infant’s heart rate responses to the stranger, and the infant’s smiling in response to the stranger. As with the visual cliff study, our findings here were equally clear: When the stranger was greeted by a joyful signal, the infant’s heart rate slowed down indicating nonfearful attentiveness, and the stranger received several smiles from the infant. On the other hand, when the stranger was greeted by the stern voice and frown, the infant’s heart rate acceler- ated, indicative of fearful or distressed attention [54], and the infant smiled little or none at all to the stranger. Another recent study carried out by Saul Feinman and Michael Lewis at the Educational Testing Service [50] has obtained similar findings despite the use of a somewhat different methodology. Thus, social referencing operates both with social and nonsocial stimuli, and is observable at remarkably early ages.

Other Studies in Social Referencing

Other recent studies on social referencing have demonstrated that social referencing is sometimes directed at other persons than the caregiver [55], and that the emotional communication from familiarized adults can be very powerful [56]. Still other work demonstrates that vocal information about emotional states can clearly regulate the behavior of infants in the second half year of life [57]. And some studies have shown that social referencing is more likely, and the influence of emotional communication more powerful, the more uncertain a setting event is [58]. There is thus a steadily growing body of literature demonstrating the great significance of emotional information from others in regulating the behavior of infants.

DISCUSSION

What is the clinical significance of this research? We will discuss three particularly salient implications. First of all, this research documents the critical importance of the emotional availability of the mother and other significant adults in the child’s environment [59]. These adults become significant agents of “emotional socialization” in part by providing the infant with their own emotional reactions to events which are of uncertain significance to the child. When a child loses the possibility of accessing such emotional information, distress results

[531. Another important implication concerns a new significance which can be given to the so-

called “double bind.” The double bind usually refers, of course, to a contradiction between the affective tones of the nonverbal and verbal channels of a message. However, nonverbal emotional messages can be conveyed in multiple, somewhat independent channels. What are the psychological consequences for the infant who is faced with affective messages that are conveyed in one way in the face, but in another way in the voice? Does the child pay greater attention to one channel than another? Is primacy given to the communication of a negative message, regardless of channel? To a positive message regardless of channel? Are there clinical consequences for a child whose parents show contradictory affective messages? These questions are currently the topic of active study in several laboratories, e.g., that of Bugental at Santa Barbara, as well as our own.

Thirdly, how do emotional messages come to have long lasting significance for a child? Do certain emotions, such as anger, produce persistent aversive responses more significantly than do other emotions? Does the child who needs to refer socially very often become the type of adult who is subject to conformity and other forms of peer pressure? Does the child whose mother and father show clear and consistent positive emotional reactions to events the child is uncertain about acquire a more confident and more curious attitude toward the world?

A new perspective on emotions

SUMMARY

155

This brief overview of both the recent history of the study of emotions in developmental

psychology, and of the research on social referencing should suffice to demonstrate the new perspective on human emotions which psychologists are adopting at present. It is a perspective which assumes, in contrast to previous research, the role of emotions as independent variables, rather than as secondary outcomes of other processes deemed more central. This approach is showing the pervasive influence of emotions on numerous other psychological processes, including memory, perception, and social interaction. It revives the interest in emotions implicit in the work of theorists such as Spitz [60), Mahler et al. [59] and Bowlby [61]. It is similar in many ways to the ethological view about emotional expressions, but differs from it in stressing the great significance of emotions as organizers of internal psychological processes such as memory, perception, and thought. The new methodologies for the measurement and elicitation of emotional states in others, and the new theorizing which has accompanied the advances in emotional measurement, indeed, promise to make the 1980s the decade in which emotions returned to their central place in academic psychology.

REFERENCES

1. BANDURA, A. Social Learning Theory. Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ (1977). 2. SKINNER, B. F. Verbal Behavior. Appleton-Century-Crofts, New York (1957). 3. KAGAN, J. On emotion and its development: A working paper. In: The Development of Affect, M. Lewis and L.

Rosenblum (Eds.). Plenum, New York (1978). 4. RYLE, G. The Concept of Mind. Barnes & Noble, New York (1950). 5. SKINNER, B. F. Science and Human Behavior. Free Press, Glencoe, IL (1953). 6. BOWLBY, J. Attachment and Loss (Vol. 1) Attachment. Basic Books, New York, p.117 (1969). 7. LANGER, S. Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling. Johns Hopkins Press, Baltimore, MD (1967). 8. KAGAN, J. Change and Conrinuity in Infancy. Wiley, New York (1971). 9. STERN, D. 7’he First Relationship: Infant and Mother. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA (1977).

10. BRAZELTON, T. B., TRONICK, E., ADAMSON, L., ALS, H. and WISE, S. Early mother-infant reciprocity. In: Purent-Infant Interaction, M. Hoffer (Ed.). Excerpta Medica, Amsterdam (1975).

11. AINSWORTH, M. D. S., BLEHAR, M., WATERS, E., and WALL, S. Patterns of Attachment. Erlbaum, Hills- dale, NJ (1978).

12. DECARIE, T. 7’he Infant’s Reactions to Strangers. International Universities Press, New York (1974). 13. LACEY, J. Somatic response patterning and stress: Some revisions of activation theory. In: Psychological Stress:

Issues in Research, M. Appley and R. Trumbull (Eds.). Appleton-Century-Crofts, New York (1967). 14. JAMES, W. Principles of Psychology. H. Holt and Co., New York (1890). 15. LANDIS, C. The interpretation of facial expression of emotion. Journal of Genera/ Psychology 2:59-72 (1929). 16. SHERMAN, M. The differentiation of emotional responses in infants: I. Judgments of emotional responses from

motion picture views and from actual observation. Journal of Comparative Psychology 1~265-284 (1927). 17. SHERMAN, M. The differentiation of emotional responses in infants: II. The ability of observers to judge the

emotional characteristics of the crying of infants and of the voice of the adult. Journal of Comparative Psychology 7:335-35 1 (1927).

18. NORMAN, D. Twelve issues for cognitive science. Cognitive Science 4: l-32 (1980). 19. ROSEMAN I. Cognitive aspects of emotion and emotional behavior. Paper presented at the meeting of the

American Psychological Association, New York, September 1979. 20. ZAJONC, R. Feeling and thinking: Preferences need no inferences. American Psychologist 35: 15 1-175 (1980). 21. BRONFENBRENNER, U. Developmental research, public policy, and the ecology of childhood. Child Develop-

ment 45: l-5 (1974). 22. NEISSER, U. Cognition and Reality. W. H. Freeman, San Francisco (1976). 23. BOWER, G. Mood and memory. American Psychologisr 36: 1288148 (198 1). 24. KUNST-WILSON, W. and ZAJONC, R. Affective discrimination of stimuli that cannot be recognized. Science

207:557-558 (1980). 25. SACKEIT, G. P. Monkeys reared in isolation with pictures as visual input: Evidence for an innate releasing

mechanism. Science 154: 1468- 1472 (1966). 26. KENNEY, M., MASON, W. and HILL, S. Effects of age, objects, and visual experience on affective responses

of rhesus monkeys to strangers. Developmental Psychology 15: 176- 184 ( 1979). 27. MENDELSON, M., HAITH, C. and GOLDMAN-RADIC, P. Face scanning and responsiveness to social cues

in infant rhesus monkeys. Developmental Psychology 18:222-228 (1982). 28. TOMKINS, S. Affect, Imagery Consciousness (Vol. 1) The Positive Aficfs. Springer-Verlag, New York (1962).


29. 30. 31.

32.

33.

34. 35.

36.

37.

38.

39.

40.

41.

42.

43.

44. 45.

46.

47.

48.

49. 50.

51.

52.

53.

54.

55.

56.

57.

58.

59.

60. 61.

TOMKINS, S. Affect, Imagery, Consciousness (Vol. 2) The Negative Affects. Springer-Verlag. New York (1963). IZARD, C. E. The Face of Emotion. Appleton-Century-Crofts, New York (1971). EKMAN, P., SORENSEN, E. and FRIESEN, W. Pan-cultural elements in the facial expression of emotion. Science 164:86-88 (1969). EKMAN, P. Cross cultural studies of facial expression. In: Darwin and Facial Expression: A Century of Research in Review, P. Ekman (Ed.). Academic Press, New York (1973). EKMAN, P., FRIESEN, W., and ELLSWORTH, P. Emotion in the Human Face: Guidelines for Research and an Integration of Findings. Pergamon, New York (1972). IZARD, C. E. Human Emorions. Plenum Press, New York (1977). EKMAN. P. and FRIESEN. W. Unmasking the Face: A Guide to Recognizing Emotions from Facial Clues. Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ (1975). -

” ” _I

EKMAN, P. and FRIESEN, W. Facial Actron Coding System. Consulting Psychologists Press, Palo Alto, CA (1978). IZARD, C. E. 7’he Maximally Discriminative Facial Movement Coding System (MAX). Instructional Resources Center, University of Delaware, Newark, Delaware (1979). IZARD, C. and DOUGHERTY, L. Two complementary systems for measuring facial expression in infants and children. In: Measuring Emotions in Znfunts and Children, C. E. Izard (Ed.). Cambridge University Press, New York (1982). HIA’IT, S., CAMPOS, J. and EMDE, R. N. Facial patterning and infant emotional expression: Happiness, surprise, and fear. Child Development 50: 1020-1035 (1979). STENBERG, C., CAMPOS, J., and EMDE, R. The facial expression of anger in seven-month-old infants. Child Development 54:178-184 (1983). STENBERG, C. and CAMPOS, J. The development of the expression of anger in human infants. In: The Socialization of A&r, M. L. Lewis and C. Saarni (Eds.). Plenum Press, New York (1983). IZARD, C. E., HEMBREE, E., DOUGHERTY, L. and COSS, C. Changes in two- to nineteen-month-old infants’ facial expressions following acute pain. Developmental Psychology 19:418-426 (1983). FIELD, T. M., WOODSON, R., GREENBERG, R. and COHEN, D. Discrimination and imitation of facial expressions by neonates. Science 218: 179- 181 (1982). COOLEY, C. H. Human Nature and the Social Order. Scribners, New York (1912). MEAD, G. Mind Self and Sociefy: From the Standpoint of a Social Behaviorist. University of Chicago Press, Chicago. (1934). KLINNERT, M. Facial Expressions and Social Referencing. Unpublished doctoral dissertation prospectus, Psy- chology Department, University of Denver, Denver, CO (1978). KLINNERT, M., CAMPOS, J. J., SORCE, J., EMDE, R. N. and SVEJDA, M. Emotions as behavior regulators: Social referencing in infancy. In: Emotions in Early Development (Vol. 2) The Emotions, R. Plutchik and H. Kellerman (Eds.). Academic Press, New York (1983). CAMPOS, J. J. and STENBERG, C. Perception, appraisal, and emotion: The onset of social referencing. In: Infant Social Cognition: Empirical and Theoretical Considerations, M. E. Lamb and L. R. Sherrod (Eds.). Erl- baum, Hillsdale, NJ (1981). FEINMAN, S. Social referencing in infancy. Merrill-Palmer Quarterly 28:445-470 (1982). FEINMAN, S. and LEWIS, M. Social referencing and second order effects in ten-month-old infants. Develop- mental Psychology 54:878-887 (1983). BERTENTHAL, B. I., CAMPOS, J. J. and BARRETT, K. C. Self-produced locomotion: An organizer of emotional, cognitive and social development in infancy. In: Conrinuities and Disconrinuities in Development, R. Emde and R. Harmon (Eds.). Plenum Press, New York (1983). SCHAFFER, H. R. Cognitive structure and early social behavior. In: The Origins of Human Social Relatrons, H. R. Schaffer (Ed.). Academic Press, New York (1971). SORCE, J., EMDE, R. and FRANK, M. Maternal referencing in normal and Down’s syndrome: A longitudinal analysis. In: The Developmenf of Attachment and AfJiliative Systems, R. N. Emde and R. J. Harmon (Eds.). Plenum, New York (1982). CAMPOS, J. J., EMDE, R. N., GAENSBAUER, T. and HENDERSON, C. Cardiac and behavioral interrela- tionships in the reactions of infants to strangers. Developmental Psychologv 11:589-601 (1975). ZARBATANY, L. and LAMB, M. E. Social referencing as a function of information source: Mothers versus strangers. Paper read at the meetings of the Society for Research in Child Development, Detroit, April 1983. KLINNERT, M., EMDE, R. and BUTTERFIELD, P. Emotional communication from familiarized adults influences infants’ behavior. Paper read at the meetings of the Society for Research in Child Development, Detroit, April 1983. SVEJDA, M. J. and CAMPOS, J. J. Mother’s vocal expression of emotion as a behavior regulator. Developmenful Psychology (In press). GUNNAR, M. R. and STONE, C. The effects of maternal positive affect on one-year-olds’ reactions to toys. Paper presented at the meetings of the Society for Research in Child Development, Detroit, April 1983. MAHLER, M., PINE, F. and BERGMAN, A. The Psychological Birth of the Human Infant Basic Books, New York (1975). SPITZ, R. The First Year of Life. International Universities Press, New York (1965). BOWLBY, J. Attachment and Lass, (Vol. 2) Separafion. Basic Books, New York (1973).

a new perspective on emotions’10/campos.pdfa new perspective on emotions joseph j. campos...

Documents