Review emotion as an instinctive function.

Review emotion as an instinctive function

Whether the production and understanding of emotions are innate in infants or gained through life was argued by lots of theorist. This time, one will appraise the evidences which based on the nature views. One’s view about the production and understanding of emotions is that infants were born with primary emotion knowledge. However, they would learn more precisely the association of facial expressions and emotion, the tone and emotion, motion and emotion, etc of both themselves and other people through their life.

First of all, Darwin (1877)’s proposed that some emotional displays are instinctive in children and animals. One of the evidence is the early display of facial expressions. A study by Ganchrow, Steiner and Daher (1983) showed that at the very first feed, newborns would produce distinct facial expressions to sweet and bitter liquid (slight smile or mouth corners down, pursed lips). It was suspected that whether the sense of taste of newborn is sufficient for them to make the judgement and reflect on the emotions hence. It is also possible that smiling is the only facial expression that newborns associate with the taste of sweet. But do they feel happy when they were smiling? The association of smiling and pleasure might be learned through the social learning afterward. In this case, emotion could not be an instinctive function. Other evidence is the universal of facial expressions. A study about children and adults of fore from New Guinea (Ekman et al, 1969) suggested this evidence. Nevertheless, Harris raised a question that if the fore children’s responses to the western adults’ facial expressions a copy of the expressions or a reflection of their feeling. Meltzoff and Moore (1983) found that infants could imitate facial expressions from birth. This could explain why babies could react to caregivers’ facial expression. It was only an imitation but not a reflection of emotion. For the evidences about, they were all based on the facial expression. It was doubted that could the facial expressions represent babies’ emotions. In the other words, the question of can the facial expressions reflect the infants’ emotion should be further examined.

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On the other hand, Darwin (1877) suggested another view: infants instinctively know the meaning of facial expressions and produce appropriate emotional reactions to them. Studies provided proofs for it. It was proposed that 6-week-old infants would imitate behaviours (Meltzoff and Moore, 1983). It showed that infants were able to recognize the facial expressions. Furthermore, another study presented that 10-week-old infants could react appropriately to their mothers’ facial expressions and tone of voice depicting happiness, sadness and anger. It attempted to prove that the abilities of interpret and produce emotions were innate to babies. However, there were a few critical views for the above evidences. Firstly, the studies were about 6-week-old infants or over. Babies might have leant to recognize, understand and react to adults’ emotion through social life before they were set in the exam. If the understanding and producing of emotion were innate, it was wondering why infants did not present these abilities once they were born. In addition, the understanding for the facial expressions newborns have imitated from adults would be vital for interpreting their emotion. Study showed that the infants were attempting to repair an “interactive error” and to modify their parents’ behaviour. This could explain that why babies could react to their mothers’ facial expressions. They were assimilating new information into their initial scheme and accommodating to new rules of exchanging emotional information. Piaget (1929) supported the function of assimilation and accommodation.

Another evidence was about babies’ reactions to inoculations. A study (Izard et al, 1987) claimed that adults observed infants’ expressions of distress to inoculation. It proved that the babies were born with ability to produce emotion. However, it was also showed that babies who over 7 months old display anger to inoculation. This change illustrated that the initial emotional ability was not sufficient for communicating. Therefore, infants learned more complex expressions for present their desires. Furthermore, it was doubt that the observation of adults cannot reflect newborns’ real emotion because adults’ perspectives were mature social members’ perspectives which were completely different from newborn’s perception.

The gender difference about temperament could be other evidence for interpreting infants’ instinctive emotion ability. Matias & Cohn (1993) proposed that girls show more positive emotion during the fist six months of infancy. The Temperament differences were attributed to the gender differences which were innate. The emotion expressions that were effected by the temperament were assumed to be innate. But it was proposed that one approach to learn sex-role identification was to mould the behaviour of adults, especially parents and teachers (Bandura, 1969; Mischel, 1970). According to this social learning theory, the difference in temperament for different gender was not nature.

The autism could be a strong proof for emotion as an instinctive ability. Kanner (1943) concluded his report with the claim that an innate emotional difficulty, rather than any particular feature of the family environment, caused autism. It indicated that emotion could be an innate function. Although it was claimed the emotional experience of autistic children would be impoverished, the cases of autism were rare in the whole population. The rule could not be applied to infants’ emotion ability in general.

All in all, there were various explanations about the understanding and production of emotion were abilities that born with babies. However, evidences demonstrated that the initial knowledge of emotion was not enough for infants to communicate. Most of information about how to dominate emotion was learned through social life afterward.

Reference:

Darwin C. 1877: A biographical sketch of an infant. Mind, 2, 285-94.

Ganchrow, J. R., Steiner, J. E., and Dacher, M. 1983: Neonatal facial expressions in response to different qualities and intensities of gustatory stimuli. Infant Behavior and Development, 6, 473-84.

Ekman, P., Sorenson, E. R., and Friesen, W. V. (1969). Pan-cultural elements in facial displays of emotions. Science. 164, 86-8.

Meltzoff, A. and Moore, M. 1983: Newborn infants imitate adult facial gestures. Child Development, 54, 702-9.

Piaget, J. 1929: The Child’s Conception of the World. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

Izard, C. E., Hembree, E. A., and Huebner, R. R. 1987: Infants’ emotion expressions to acute pain. Developmental Psychology, 23, 105-13.

Bandura, A. 1969: Social learning theory of identificatory processes. In D. A. Goslin (ed.) , Handbook of Socialization Theory and Research. Chicago: Rand McNally.

Mischel, W. 1970: Sex-typing and socialization. In P. H. Mussen (ed.), Carmichael’s Manual of Child Psychology, vol. 2, Third edition. New York: Wiley.

Kanner, L. 1943: Autistic disturbances of affective content. Nervous Child, 2, 217-50.

Matias & Cohn (1993)