Jeannette M. Haviland

Beyond Depression: Gender Differences in Normal Adolescents' Emotional Experiences.

Adolescents (N=262) in the fifth, seventh, ninth, and eleventh grades reported the frequency, intensity, and duration of their experiences of 12 emotions and the situations during which they occurred. The first three scales of emotion combined to produce the emotion saliency score. Girls reported higher saliences of surprise, sad, self-hostility, shame, shy, and guilt. Boys reported higher saliency of contempt. Factor analysis of the salient emotions retained the same three factors for both genders: positive emotion, inner-passive, and outer-hostile negative emotions. The loadings for surprise, sad, and anger on each factor suggested within factor gender differences. Most salient emotions were experienced with peers; however, boys experienced both surprise and sadness more often when alone than did girls. There were gender differences in most emotion categories on the events associated with salient emotions. Boys found activities and achievement, and girls found affiliation, to be emotionally salient. These data suggest that gender differences in emotion are pervasive rather than confined to depressive emotion and include differences in the organizational properties of emotion.

Affect-Cognition Relationships in Adolescent Diaries: The Case of Anne Frank

The adolescent diary of Anne Frank was examined for evidence of changes in emotional expression (measured by density of categories of emotion), in cognitive level, and in the relation between the two.

Hearts and Faces: A Study in the Measurement of Emotion

Like many areas of psychological inquiry, the study of emotion and emotional development is cyclical. Relatively stagnant since the 1930s, there is currently a resurgence of interest and research in this area. As is often the case, this new research has rekindled old controversies and issues relevant to the study of emotion, in general, as well as raising many new issues pertinent to the study of emotional development. As one examines emotional responses from a developmental perspective, the traditional problems of definition and measurement take on new importance.

Signals, Symbols, and Socialization

As Tomkins (1962) observed, the human adult, and especially the male of the species, rarely displays intense emotional feelings publicly. When we think about the intense volatility of young children’s feelings and displays and compare it with adult behavior we are naturally struck by the contrast. The motivations to control affective display are powerful and varied. In adults, Tomkins (1962) suggested, the facial display of affect is brought under strict social control in order to prevent affect contagion and escalation and in order to prohibit others from achieving control through knowledge of one’s otherwise private feelings. According to the work of Saarni (1979, 1981, 1982), the motivations of children are equally commanding and involve defense of self-esteem, avoidance of punishment and disapproval for revealing unregulated negative expressive behavior, concern over hurting other people’s feelings, and gaining advantage in interpersonal situations. Gradually, of course, chil-dren acquire the skills that are necessary for the regulation of emotion, and they adopt culturally specific conventions of expression. What is not so readily understood, however, is how children learn to regulate their expressive behavior and their underlying feelings. In this chapter, we take on the task of framing a working model of affect socialization in an attempt to answer this question. We start with certain premises about the nature of emotion as a motivational system and about the nature of emotional expression.

Intermodal perception of emotional expressions by children with autism

Twenty-six children and adolescents with autism and six normally developing peers participated in an intermodal preference study examining their perception of emotional expressions. Children were presented pairs of videotaped facial expressions accompanied by a single soundtrack affectively matching one of the two facial expressions. Overall, the children with autism looked less at these emotional expressions than did the normally developing children. Both groups of children looked preferentially to fearful facial expressions, irrespective of the accompanying vocal expression. The sound manipulation influenced the childrens looking time to the sad and happy facial expressions. These patterns of looking were correlated with chronological age and PPVT scores for the children with autism.

A critique of Plomin and Foch's "A Twin Study of Objectively Assessed Personality in Childhood".

Plomin and Fochs (1980) study of objectively assessed personality in childhood is critiqued on five points: (a) conceptual validity of the measures, (b) stability of the measures for the population age range, (c) comparability of populations, (d) accuracy of literature review, and (e) appropriate interpretation of broad heritability data. The Plomin and Foch study contains major errors; it is theoretically and methodologically flawed. Their report is especially significant because it is representative of problems critical to the study of the genetic correlates of personality.

Further considerations for behavior-genetic analysis of humans.

In this reply to Plomin and Foch (1985) we maintain that the five specific points we criticized in their behavior-genetic analysis of personality are still important (Haviland, McGuire, & Rothbaum, 1983). In addition, we briefly describe three relevant issues in experimental behavior-genetic studies as they apply to correlational behavior-genetic studies of human personality.