Karen Caplovitz Barrett

The development of emotion regulation and dysregulation: Guilt and empathy: Sex differences and implications for the development of depression

Adult depression is typified by prolonged episodes of sadness and inability to experience pleasure. There are different types of depression with a variety of causes as well as physical, cognitive, and affective symptoms. Physical symptoms include disturbances in activity, sleep, and eating patterns. Affective and cognitive symptoms include passivity, confusion, pessimism, helplessness, worthlessness, self-blame, and guilt. There are also different models of depression that tend to emphasize specific symptoms. The biological models, for example, focus on vegetative signs, biochemical changes, and brain-behavior pathways that are involved in depression. The cognitive and psychodynamic theories are based on reasoning, beliefs, and mood. Reformulated attribution theory (Abramson, Seligman, & Teasdale, 1978) characterizes depression as having internal, stable, and global self-attributions of responsibility for negative events. Depressed individuals feel powerless yet responsible for events that go wrong, and their guilt is exaggerated. As Freud described it, depression is a disorder characterized by dissatisfaction with the ego on moral grounds. The guilt, shame, and self-derision that commonly accompany depression are viewed in biological models as correlates or outcomes of depression. In attribution theories, these qualities of individuals are viewed as proximal antecedents of depression. Traditional and reformulated psychodynamic theories view guilt, shame, and self-derision as both distal antecedents and central elements of the disorder.

Avoiders vs. Amenders: Implications for the investigation of guilt and shame during Toddlerhood?

Abstract Recent research and theory highlights the distinctive features of shame vs. guilt, as well as the important implications of that distinction for typical and atypical behaviour regulation. Briefly, shame is characterised by withdrawal and hiding from judgemental others, and guilt by making amends–repairing and confessing. The present study was aimed at determining whether a shame-relevant and a guilt-relevant pattern of responses to a standard violation could be distinguished in toddlers. Two-year-old children participated in a play session, during which a mishap occurred that the children appeared to have caused. Based upon whether or not children avoided the experimenter (E) after the mishap, they were dichotomised into a shame-relevant group of subjects (Avoiders) who avoid E after the mishap, are slow to make reparation, and are slow to tell E about the mishap; and a guilt-relevant group (Amenders) showing the opposite pattern. All guilt-relevant behaviours were greater for Amenders than Avoid...

Self-produced Locomotion

A few years ago, Emde, Gaensbauer, and Harmon (1976) highlighted two periods of rapid developmental reorganization in infancy. These periods were characterized by dramatic changes in perceptual, cognitive, and especially emotional functions. The period from 7 to 9 months of age is one of these times of rapid reorganization. It is marked by numerous changes in sensorimotor intelligence, including the beginnings of representation, changes in object permanence, new modes of understanding spatial relationships, more complex forms of imitation, and the beginnings of concept formation. This period also appears to be characterized by a burgeoning of fear: Infants at this age react aversively to separation, strangers, heights, looming stimuli, and various unfamiliar toys and objects (Scarr & Salapatek, 1970). The inverse of fear— security—also begins to be clearly evident. The child becomes capable of using the attachment figure as a “haven of safety” and as a “secure base for exploration” (Ainsworth, 1973; Bowlby, 1969). The important changes taking place in the attachment relationship herald major changes in other social contexts as well, including peer and sibling relationships and sociability to strangers (Campos, Barrett, Lamb, Goldsmith, & Stenberg, 1983).

Botulinum toxin and the facial feedback hypothesis: Can looking better make you feel happier?

The facial feedback hypothesis suggests that muscular manipulations which result in more positive facial expressions may lead to more positive emotional states in affected individuals. In this essay, we hypothesize that the injection of botulinum toxin for upper face dynamic creases might induce positive emotional states by reducing the ability to frown and create other negative facial expressions. The use of botulinum toxin to pharmacologically alter upper face muscular expressiveness may curtail the appearance of negative emotions, most notably anger, but also fear and sadness. This occurs via the relaxation of the corrugator supercilii and the procerus, which are responsible for brow furrowing, and to a lesser extent, because of the relaxation of the frontalis. Concurrently, botulinum toxin may dampen some positive expressions like the true smile, which requires activity of the orbicularis oculi, a muscle also relaxed after toxin injections. On balance, the evidence suggests that botulinum toxin injections for upper face dynamic creases may reduce negative facial expressions more than they reduce positive facial expressions. Based on the facial feedback hypothesis, this net change in facial expression may potentially have the secondary effect of reducing the internal experience of negative emotions, thus making patients feel less angry, sad, and fearful.

The development of nonverbal communication of emotion: a functionalist perspective

A functionalist perspective on the development of nonverbal communication of emotion is presented. This perspective is distinguished from other current conceptualizations by the following features: (a) Emphasis is placed on the functional implications of emotion-relevant movements for social regulation (communication), intrapersonal (internal) regulation, and behavior regulation. (b) Emotions are viewed as “members of families of emotions.” Emotion families are composed of emotion processes with similar functional relationships to the environment, which also differ in particular communicative features as a function of contextual demands, socialization history, and developmental abilities of the organism. (c) Facial movements are treated as only one of many forms of communication of emotion, rather than as having special status as “the” clearcut indicators of emotion. (d) Communication of emotion always is embedded in a context: There are no movements that can be considered clearcut, context-free expressions of emotion, at any period of development. (e) The role of socialization in the development of emotion and emotion communication is emphasized. (f) The multiple influences on communicative behavior, and the implications of such multicausality for clearcut communication, are acknowledged.

A Functionalist Perspective to the Development of Emotions

In this chapter, I address the three questions to which the editors have asked me to respond: (1) What is an emotion? (2) What about emotions undergoes developmental change, and, more specifically, what developmental changes occur in one or two specific emotion families? (I will examine shame and pride). (3) What are the functions of these emotions for the child? I address questions 1 and 2 in turn, and, in doing so, I will address question 3.

Applying the Emotional Availability Scales to children with disabilities

In this article, we describe issues regarding emotional availability and its application to children with disabilities. We then apply this approach to the scoring of emotional availability for caregiver-child interactions of children with disabilities, with information based on children with genetic mental retardation syndromes, children with autism, and children with hearing impairments.

The Origins of Guilt in Early Childhood

Publisher Summary This chapter concerns the origins of guilt in very young children–toddlers in the first 3 years of life. Although findings from studies are open to interpretation, they do paint a picture of the toddler as a caring individual who is learning and attending to societys rules, even in the absence of surveillance, is ready to try to repair wrongdoings he or she causes, and shows a pattern of behavior that is highly suggestive of guilt. Guilt, like all emotions, is adaptive under certain circumstances. Research has indicated that it is associated with positive characteristics, such as empathy and reparation. Moreover, it is an unusual emotion, in that even though it is considered a “negative” emotion, it is generally considered socially desirable to display under certain circumstances. However, most theorists and researchers agree that it is possible for guilt to be maladaptive as well, when it is too pervasive, intense, or stable, when it occurs under inappropriate circumstances, or when it occurs too infrequently under desirable circumstances. It is important to study guilt during its origins, before it might become deflected into a maladaptive pattern in some children and entrenched as a permanent feature of personality. Research on guilt in very young children may have important implications for the future development of those children.

Maternal Attributions of Taiwanese and American Toddlers’ Misdeeds and Accomplishments

Parental beliefs are important influences on their child-rearing practices, which, in turn, affect their children’s personal-social development. Such parental beliefs are derived from the culture in which a parent and child reside. The differences might contribute to observed differences in children’s behaviors across nationalities. In the present study, parental beliefs (attributions) regarding the reasons for their children’s and their own positive and negative behaviors are examined. Five attributional orientations were assessed: (a) external/uncontrollable (situation), (b) external/unstable (luck-fate- chance), (c) internal/unstable (emotions), (d) internal/stable (traits), and (e) maternal socialization. Participants included 21 Taiwanese and 36 American mothers of children ranging from 24 to 36 months old. Results suggested that American mothers typically attributed positive behaviors to internal/stable dispositions and blamed external/unstable factors for negative behaviors, whereas Taiwanese mothers attributed positive behaviors to external/unstable factors and negative behaviors to internal/stable and/or external/ unstable characteristics. Implications are discussed.

IBM SPSS for Intermediate Statistics: Use and Interpretation, 4th Edition

1. Introduction 2. Data Coding and Exploratory Analysis (EDA) 3. Imputation of Missing Data 4. Several Measures of Reliability 5. Exploratory Factor Analysis and Principal Components Analysis 6. Selecting and Interpreting Inferential Statistics 7. Multiple Regression 8. Mediation, Moderation, and Canonical Correlation 9. Logistic Regression and Discriminant Analysis 10. Factorial ANOVA and ANCOVA 11. Repeated-Measures and Mixed ANOVAs 12. Multivariate Analysis of Variance (MANOVA) 13. Multilevel Linear Modeling/Hierarchical Linear Modeling Appendix A. Getting Started With SPSS and Other Useful Procedures D. Quick, M. Myers Appendix B. Review of Basic Statistics J.M. Cumming, A. Weinberg Appendix C. Answers to Odd Interpretation Questions