Expressions as signs and their significance for emotional development.

Abstract

For research on emotional development, defining emotions as psychological systems of appraisals, expressions, body reactions, and subjective feelings in all phases of ontogenesis raises tricky methodological issues. How can we measure single emotions when appraisals and feelings cannot be assessed from outside, when expressions do not seem to be tied unequivocally to single emotions, and feelings are sometimes decoupled from perceivable expressions? Furthermore, how does a restricted set of neonate emotions differentiate into a culturally modified set of adult emotions? This article presents an innovative answer to these issues by applying Vygotsky’s culture-historical approach on the psychological significance of social signs to the analysis of emotion, expression, and their development. The core assumption is that humans learn to use emotional expressions as communicative signs that appeal to another person to regulate their interaction through emotions and as psychological signs that appeal to the self to regulate the self’s actions through emotions. This twofold function assigns a significant mediating role to expression for not only culture-historical and ontogenetic differentiation but also a growing awareness, self-regulation, and mental processing of emotions. The article describes three stages of emotional development supported by empirical evidence on how a biologically given set of neonate emotions are transformed into a culturally modified set of conscious, sign-mediated emotions that enables a decoupling of expression and feeling.

The Relationship between Emotion Regulation and Emotion Knowledge in Preschoolers: A Longitudinal Study

“…From other perspectives, emotional expressions are taken to be (non-linguistic) signs that facilitate communication and regulation of behaviour before the first words appear [ 56 , 57 ]. Before and during language acquisition, emotion and facial/body expression are the first signs.…”

Mothers' interoceptive knowledge predicts children's emotion regulation and social skills in middle childhood

“…Interoceptive knowledge may also support other skills not measured in this study, such as parents' ability to mentalize about their children's internal states or parental modeling of effective emotion regulation and social skills, as suggested by literature connecting interoception with empathy, emotion regulation, and prosociality (Durlik, Brown, & Tsakiris, ; Ernst et al, ; Ferri, Ardizzi, Ambrosecchia, & Gallese, ). Future work should examine how interoceptive knowledge may facilitate parental inferences about children's internal states, such as work on affect mirroring and attunement, social biofeedback theory, and mind‐mindedness (Gergely & Watson, ; Holodynski & Seeger, ; Meins, Fernyhough, Johnson, & Lidstone, ).…”

“…One goal of emotion socialization is for children to develop more precise labels for and understanding of their own and others' internal, first‐person states—yet internal states and sensations, be it feeling sad, tired, or thirsty, cannot be directly experienced by outside observers. This limited access to others' internal states poses not only a developmental puzzle for children to solve (e.g., developing theory of mind, learning to accurately predict what others are thinking and feeling), but also can pose a barrier for parents, especially in early development when a child is pre‐verbal or when the child can speak but does not yet have a full vocabulary to articulate their needs, thoughts, and experiences (Gebauer, ; Gergely & Watson, ; Holodynski & Seeger, ). Interoceptive knowledge may help parents overcome this barrier, providing a broader repertoire of possible sensations and experiences so that parents can better mentalize and talk to children about the internal, first‐person experience of emotions and other states.…”

I Feel Less Blue When I Read With You: The Effect of Reading Aloud With a Child on Adult Readers’ Affect

“…The emotional connection that shared reading can build between children and adults can be affected by the emotions one experiences in adulthood. Once an individual reaches adulthood, there may be a shift in how they experience their emotions (Holodynski and Seeger, 2019). Experiences promote feelings that fluctuate between positive and negative, and these are considered in totality when taking our own "well-being" into account.…”