Child Development Theories and Examples

Research On Emotions

One of the reasons for the lack of research on emotional reorganizations and Freudian processes has been that it has proved to be difficult to determine how to investigate them. Research with seriously disturbed children is particularly difficult to do, and the induction of strong emotions in children for research purposes is unethical. As a result, scholars interested in pursuing these important questions have often had to approach them indirectly—studying, for example, the development of children's conceptions of defense mechanisms in other people (Chandler et al., 1978).
A straightforward solution to this dilemma may be available. Many issues in children's everyday lives naturally evoke emotions of various degrees and types. Such issues seem to provide natural avenues for studying the organization of behavior in a way that brings together cognition and emotion.
One set of candidates includes virtually any topic involving the self—identification, identity, self-control, attributions about one's successes and failures. Kernberg (1976) has suggested that one of the primary dimensions around which the psyche is organized is whether events are perceived as threatening to the self or as supportive of the self, and much social-psycho-logical research with adults generally supports this hypothesis (Greenwald, 1980). The development of self in children and its relation to the organization of behavior is a promising avenue for studying cognition-emotion relations.
Another set of issues of special relevance to school-age children is family relations, including the emotional climate in the family. The Oedipus conflict is merely the most discussed of a wide-ranging set of family phenomena that are emotion laden.
Consider, for example, divorce. The proportion of children growing up in divorced families has risen sharply, and some projections place it at 40-50 percent in coming years. The experience of divorce is clearly emotional for many children, and systematic relations seem to exist between emotional problems in adulthood (such as loneliness and depression) and the ages of individuals when their parents were divorced (Shaver and Rubenstein, 1980). In addition, young children seem to seriously misunderstand the causes of their parents' divorce, often blaming themselves for the breakup (Longfellow, 1979; Wallerstein and Kelly, 1980). Research on how children understand and deal with divorce would seem a natural avenue for studying the development of emotion and cognition. How children understand what happened and how they conceive of the relationships in their family will probably relate in interesting ways to how they feel about themselves and their parents.
Children's reactions to illness provide another promising topic for the study of emotion-cognition relations. Virtually all children experience illnesses several times during the school years, and a substantial number of children suffer from chronic illnesses (Shonkoff, in this volume). Research on how children understand what happens during an illness and how they cope with it promises to illuminate cognition-emotion relations in development. Indeed, it would be surprising if mechanisms of defense and other emotional organizations could not be investigated in connection with divorce and illness.
A note about emotional development is in order. In our analysis we have focused on promising areas for study of how emotion relates to cognitive development. In doing so we have not differentiated the many components of emotions, including triggering, expression, suppression, interpretation, and communication. Clearly, a full analysis of emotional development will require study of these components (Campos et al., 1983).