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Understanding Emotions

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center of attention, suggesting that they are embarrassed (Lewis, 1995). Toddlers also express behaviors that suggest shame and guilt. A 2-year-old may react to accidentally breaking a toy by hiding the toy and avoiding the caregiver (shame) or attempting to repair the toy (guilt) (Barrett, Zahn-Waxler, & Cole, 1993). CHECK YOUR UNDERSTANDING 7.4 1. How might researchers determine which negative emotion(s) underlie an infant’s cry? 2. When do babies begin to show self-conscious emotions? Give an example. Understanding Emotions Understandingemotions is critical to social relationships. Emotionunderstanding refers to understanding people’s emotional reactions to specific situations, evaluating the circumstances that led to the emotional response, and inferring what people want and might do in specific emotional situations (Camras & Halberstadt, 2017). These are not easy to do. It takes many years of social inter- actions and cognitive development for children to understand how others feel, and even then, they often make errors. Infants are so new to the world that their understanding of emotions pales compared to that of children and adults. Still, infants display the precursors of emotion understanding in their abilities to (1) discriminate among different emotions and different intensities of emotions; (2) connect emotional expres- sions to meaning, such as recognizing that a smile signals joy and a frown sig- nals sadness; and (3) seek and use emotional information to guide their actions. Discriminating Emotions LEARNING OBJECTIVE 7.5 Define emotion discrimination and discuss how it is demonstrated by infants. Emotion discrimination is the ability to distinguish among emotional expres- sions (Camras & Shuster, 2013). Remarkably, even newborns display rudimen- tary capacities to discriminate among emotions. They open their eyes more ✓ Tamis-LeMonda Child Development: Context, Culture, and Cascades 1E Sinauer Associates/OUP Morales Studio T 1e_07.08 06-30-21 FIGURE 7.8 Infants may be biased to attend to potentially threatening stimuli, without being afraid. Developmental psychologist Vanessa LoBue and colleagues tested whether infants show evidence of fear to threatening stimuli, or instead are just biased to detecting such stimuli. They assessed infants’ propensity to look at snakes relative to other animals such as elephants or rhinoceroses while also monitor- ing their physiological responses. They found that snakes elicit infant attention, but infants do not necessarily display “fear” based on measures of heart rate and other physiological indices. (After J. S. DeLoache and V. LoBue. 2009. Dev Sci 12: 201–207.) PROPERTY OF OXFORD emotion understanding Infants’ ability to discriminate among emo- tions; connect emotional expres- sions to meaning; and seek and use emotional information to guide their actions self-conscious emotions Emotions that involve a sense of self-awareness and are based on others’ perceptions, such as embarrassment, pride, guilt, and shame

emotion discrimination The abil- ity to distinguish among emotional expressions such as sad and angry speech or faces UNIVERSITY PRESS