Homework Week 4

Prior to reading these articles I had a different idea of how we develop our emotions as we grow up.  I thought that we always felt all of our emotions but did not fully understand those emotions or how to respond to them until we were a little older.  This week, reading these articles helped me to better understand how this actually works.  The paper that I feel explained it well was the article written by Lewis et al.  I appreciated the figure it contained.  It explains that we develop primary emotions (joy, fear, anger, sadness, disgust and surprise) and then as our cognitive capacity develops over time we develop our self conscious emotions.  This figure helped me to visualize how things change over time.   Prior to reading these articles, I never thought about the correlation between cognitive capacity and ability to express emotion.  I read about how experiments were affected by children’s vocabulary as well as their self-referential behavior.  I felt that the articles explained all of this well.  It makes sense that emotions that require self consciousness would not be developed until our self referential capabilities develop.  I also have not spent much time thinking about what helps children develop these skills.  The article by Dunn et al. did a good job explaining how our interactions with our families can influence our ability to express and understand emotions.  This connection is very logical it is just not something I would have thought of.  I did not feel that the Tomkins article had a strong connection to the development of emotions in children.  I did find it was interesting as it talked about how our emotions act as amplifiers for our emotions but like I said, I did not see a lot of connection to this topic.  Overall, I thought these articles were extremely informative on a topic that was completely new to me.  It was intriguing and I am looking forward to our class discussion on the topic.