Self-conscious emotion and stress reactivity

Rutgers, The State University Of New Jersey-Rbhs-Robert Wood, Piscataway NJ

Investigators

Abstract

By the end of the third year of life, children have begun to express the self-conscious evaluative emotions including pride, shame, embarrassment, and guilt. From the onset, children show large individual differences in their self-conscious emotions. The major aim of this project is to examine the role of cortisol response to stress and environmental factors involving maternal behavior and family risk on children's self-conscious evaluative emotions. Of particular interest are the self-conscious emotions of shame and embarrassment that reflect the outcome of children's negative evaluation of their own behavior. It is expected that high reactivity to stress and/or difficulty in coping with stress will be related to greater expression of negative evaluation emotions. Environmental factors are also known to affect children's self-conscious emotions as well as their ability to cope with stress. For example, quality of maternal caregiving is associated with altered patterns of pride and shame in children. Sensitive maternal caregiving plays a crucial role in fostering or promoting children's adaptive reactions to stress. Moreover, family context has an effect on both the mother and the child. Socioeconomic disadvantage, parental life stress, daily hassles, inadequate social support, and marital discord likely will lead to a deterioration in maternal caregiving as well as to altered patterns of positive and negative self-conscious emotions and less optimal reactions to stress in children. An early proneness for negative self-evaluation is related to increased risk for later internalizing problems. In older children, past work has found a high cortisol response to stress to be associated with internalizing problems. Thus, it is of interest to determine whether both a high cortisol response and negative evaluation emotions are already related to internalizing behavior at the point in development when the self-conscious evaluative emotions have just emerged. In examining this possibility, the effects of maternal and family factors on child internalizing need to be considered. The broader implications of this project bear on child mental health and social policy issues. Results will serve to identify resilience or vulnerability factors that lead to more-or-less optimal patterns of emotional functioning. Identifying these factors should prove helpful in designing successful intervention strategies targeted for at-risk populations at early ages to forestall or minimize negative outcomes. Understanding the relations between these factors is critical for developing better screening and targeting of children and families for public health education, outreach, and intervention.