Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [248]
Most research on the development of the emotions has been focused on the first two years of life, and for good reason. According to Michael Lewis and his colleagues at the Institute for the Study of Child Development, University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, the primary emotions (joy, fear, anger, sadness, disgust, and surprise) appear during the first half year, the secondary or “derived” emotions (embarrassment, empathy, and perhaps envy) in the second half of the second year, and other secondary emotions (pride, shame, and guilt) soon after. Studies of infants’ videotaped facial expressions by Carroll Izard and his colleagues and students at the University of Delaware have yielded related findings.73
Until a generation ago, developmentalists had no theory of the development of emotions; now they have several. These differ on various issues, the most important being whether the development of the emotions is due chiefly to the maturation of specific neural circuits or to social learning of emotional behaviors and their displays. In both views the emotions are said to assume specific form through learning, but one holds that the major determinant is maturation, and the other, cognitive capacity and training. Consider a piece of the evidence for each side:
First, the maturational view:
A team of researchers at the National Institute of Mental Health set out to pinpoint the earliest appearance of altruism or care giving in children by observing children in play groups and at home. Altruism is a form of behavior based on the emotion of empathy; the team expected to see the first signs of empathy at about age six, as predicted by psychoanalytic theory, but they could see that younger children—as young as three—seemed distressed when another child was in pain or unhappy. Going back still farther, they looked for empathy in toddlers by having mothers simulate pain or a choking cough at home in the presence of their child. Some years ago, Dr. Carolyn Zahn-Waxler, a member of the team, told the author of this book what the team, to its own surprise, found: “Even a one-year-old might look distressed when his mother cried, and in children only a few months older, we’d see unmistakable expressions of concern for the other person.” These reactions are almost universal and show up in predictable forms at relatively predictable stages and ages. “That suggests to me,” she concluded, “that whatever part experience plays, the organism is hard-wired with a tendency to respond empathetically.”*74 In very recent years she has been proven quite right: Brain scans—a subject we’ll come to later—provide abundant evidence that particular brain circuits respond in similar ways to the circuits of others in emotional states, and that this empathy-generating neural architecture develops very early in the infant brain and hence is very likely hard-wired.
Second, the cognitive-developmental view:
A curious bit of methodology, first used with children several decades ago, consists of unobtrusively dabbing rouge on a child’s nose and then putting him or her in front of a mirror. Until they are about twenty months old, most children either do nothing or try to touch the rouge spot in the mirror; at twenty months and older, most of them touch the spot of rouge on their noses. This is taken as evidence of the emergence of a sense of self; children realize that the image in the mirror is of them.75 Michael Lewis and a group of colleagues used the mirror-rouge technique to find out when and why the emotion of embarrassment first appears. Most children who touch the rouged spot, they reported, also looked embarrassed (the criteria: an embarrassed smile, a turning away of the head, and a nervous touching of the body), but most non-touchers did not. The team’s conclusion:
The ability to consider one’s self—what has been called self-awareness or referential self—is one of the last features of self to emerge, occurring in the last half of the second year of life… [and] is the cognitive capacity that allows for all self-conscious