Key Terms

• Hypothalamus: stimulates the release of cortisol, elevates blood pressure, and prompts the ANS to prepare the actor or the emergency

• Temperament: differences in the overall quality of a baby's mood, energy level, behavioral tempo, and alertness

• Amygdala: small almond shaped region implicated in the experience of fear and anxiety

• Routine: pre-established pattern of action which is unfolded during a performance and can be presented/played through on other occasions

• Personal front: consists of cues that signify the actor's position in the performance and their status/identity in the group (eg: clothing, age, posture, speech patterns, facial expressions)

• Hippocampus: seahorse shaped region involved in the formation of memories

• Extraversion: seeking social rewards and enjoying social rewards

• Improvisation: when actors personalize their performance by making it fit their own unique nature and lived experience

• Performance of emotion: how the infant expresses and regulates the feelings that well up inside

• Behavioral Approach System (BAS): motivates the individual to approach potentially rewarding (social) situations and to experience the positive emotion associated with the pursuit and attainment of rewards

• Fear: results of immediate threats to the environment. Stimulates dopamine activity

• Human social behavior: series of performances through which actors play roles and enact scripts to manage the impressions of other characters in the social scene

• Facial scripts: the 1st type of scripts

• Stranger anxiety: fear/wariness in the presence of strangers

• Separation anxiety: fear/anger/sadness in response to prolonged separation from primary caregivers

• Secure attachment: when the infant sees the caregiver as a safe haven during periods of emotional distress and as a secure base from which to explore the world when emotions feel more positive

• Attachment relationship: infants develop a relationship of love and security with their primary caregivers

• Working model of attachment: infant’s emotional history of attachment that sets forth expectations about how experiences of love/trust can transpire in the future. It can be updated and changed over time

• Positive emotionality: basic temperament tendency to feel positive affect like joy/excitement/pleasure and to act in a way that suggests a positive emotional engagement with the social world

• Negative emotionality: people who experience fearfulness, inhibition, irritability, and frustration

• Neuroticism: high levels of fear, anxiety, sadness, frustration, guilt, shame, and hostility (negative emotionality)

• Fight-flight-freeze system (FFFS): when confronted with a threat people can either attack the source of the threat, flee to escape, or freeze. Linked with fear

• Behavioral inhibition system (BIS): alerts the actor to potential threats associated with uncertainty and conflict in the environment. Linked with anxiety

• Art of personality development: the expression and refinement of a uniquely personal and recognizable style of emotional performance

• Social smiles: 2 months old babies display these, indicating to social actors present that they are experiencing joy/happiness

• Dopamine: neurotransmitter that concerns reward seeking/wanting and is released as a result of eating food, having sex, and ingesting drugs such as cocaine

• Opioid system: releases neuropeptides when the organism achieves rewards, producing feelings of joy/pleasure [liking]

• Revised NEO Personality Inventory (NEO-PI-R): self-report measure that breaks down E into six related subtraits: excitement seeking, activity, assertiveness, gregariousness, positive emotions, and warmth

• Negative emotionality: divided into 2 regions (emotional feafulness/behavioral inhibition and irritability/strong responses to frustration)

• Neurotic cascade: high neurotic people are more reactive to signs of threat/negative emotion, are exposed to more negative events, view objectively neutral/positive events in negative light, precipitate mood spillover (negative feelings in now area of life spills in others), have the sting of familiar problems (a day’s negative events bring back old psychological issues)

• Anxiety: long-term response to a stimuli that suggests uncertainty and potential risk of danger and is a learned response

Researchers - Theories

• Erving Goffman: believed that human social behaviors are a series of performances through which actors play roles and enact scripts in order to manage the impressions of other characters in the social scene

• William James: difference between “I” and “me” emerges at 2 years old

Experiments

• Researchers found that newborns express the emotions of general distress, general contentment, interest, and disgust and that between 2-7 months, babies show signs of joy, surprise, anger, sadness, and fear

• Across cultures, people can recognize in infants facial expressions of fear, sadness, joy, interest, anger, and disgust

• When mothers stare at their babies with an expressionless face, babies react with anger or sadness

• Babies of depressed mothers eventually stop trying to engage with their mothers

• At 3 months old, babies’ social smiles are brighter and stronger in response to real human beings compared animated objects such as puppets

• Human infants begin to recognize themselves in mirrors and through recording devices around 18 months

• 3-year-old Jennifer failed to recognize herself in a video of her showed 3 minutes later, failing to realize that the actor continues to be “me” over time. Only at age 3-4 that they consolidate a clear sense of self as a continuous social actor

• 4 month-old infants who smile and show positive emotion in response to pleasant pictures/sounds are more likely to show positive approach behavior in response to novel situations later in life

• Infants who experience more anger in response to frustration tend to be seen as more outgoing and sociable in grade school because anger plays a major role in reward-seeking

• Some of the same brain processes involved with the experience of positive emotion are also implicated in human sociality

• Extraverts respond with greater intensity of positive emotion when presented scenarios that detail pursuit of rewards

• When asked to imagine how much positive emotion students would feel in response to hypothetical scenarios, high E students have higher ratings on positive emotion for pleasant interpersonal situations, even if it doesn’t involve the pursuit of social rewards

• Inhibited children show higher levels of morning cortisol in the blood which is also true for inhibited monkeys compared with sociable monkeys

• High N is a strong factor for mental illnesses/psychiatric disorders

• High N predicts bad interpersonal experiences + negative outcomes in life

• High N is associated with high divorce rates, poor health, increased risk for illnesses (heart disease), and poor quality of life

• Neurotic individuals experience more stress, are more reactive to stress, and are bad at coping with stress

• 4-month-old infants who react to novel visual/auditory stimulation with strong negative responses show high levels of negative emotionality and their FFFS are more readily strongly activated in daily life

• People with high N may suffer from an overactive BIS

• Neuroticism is correlated with amygdala and hippocampus activity in response to negative stimuli

• The intense and prolonged sadness accompanying depression may result from deficits in positive emotionality

• The performance of negative emotion across the human lifespan is a product of both nature and nurture

Examples

• Actors in the play “A Streetcar Named Desire”: conveyed human emotion in vivid and convincing fashion

• McAdams calls the personal front the rudiments of personality

• There is no developmental period in human life when the individual is not a social actor

• Children with autism and related disorders may find it difficult to express and decode facial cues in the social arena

• We don’t remember the first 2 years of our lives because early socioemotional development occurs without any conscious awareness

• Extraversion’s prime function is to attract and hold the attention of other social actors

• George W. Bush: highly extravert, was named the “family clown”, rapidly approaches social reward, alcohol abuse, became sober to save his marriage

• George W. Bush: had low level of O, powerful life goal to defend his beloved father, and a redemptive life story

• George W. Bush scored 5th in most extraverted president

• Someone who scores low on positive emotionality doesn’t necessarily experience more negative emotions, just less positive emotions

• The BIS is activated in challenging everyday situations that involve interpersonal relationships and social conduct

Tables/Figures

Figure 2.1

Table 2.1 - Extraversion

Positive

• High extraversion: social interactions, popularity, sexual behavior, social competence, social goals, intimacy, happiness, positive emotional balance, rewards/incentives, good at speeded tasks, multitasking, sales/marketing/people-oriented jobs, economic goals, less depression/anxiety, fewer personality disorders

Negative

• Disregard negative feedback, anger, poor accuracy,in speeded tasks, alcohol consumption, conduct disorder

Summary

• Art of personality development involves the expression and constant refinement of personal emotional performance

• Human beings, as eusocial species, are social actors that develop the basic dispositions of their relative personalities via social performances. One’s expression and regulation of emotions are observed and interpreted by others.

• The ability to express emotion holds substantial adaptive value and begins to develop at a young age.

• Babies are perceived to be social actors whereby caregivers observe and decode their behaviors. Babies respond to dynamic, face-to-face interactions by sharing emotional states and engaging in elaborate non-verbal exchanges.

• Interactions with caregivers influence attachment style within their first year of life and by the second year, they have internalized a working model of attachment, which gives them expectations about emotional life in the future.

• This socioemotional development is critical and occurs without any conscious awareness.

• Emotions were summarized to come in two broad categories; negative (unpleasant) and positive (pleasant) emotions.

• Positive emotionality (commonly referred to as extraversion in the temperament literature) is the basic temperament tendency to feel positive affect such as joy, excitement and pleasure and to act in such a way as to suggest a positive emotional engagement with the social world, which can influence the propensity to seek out social interactions.

• The Behavioral Approach System (BAS) was introduced to explain the neural connection between feeling good and being social and works in tandem with the opioid system. Scoring toward the high end of extraversion tends to bring more advantages than disadvantages. However, this is not to say that scoring toward the introversion pole will bring more disadvantages.

• Negative emotionality (referred to as neuroticism in the temperament literature) and McAdams normalizes its experience by explaining that human nature mandates that we will invariably experience negative emotions as it serves as a sort of alarm signal that something is not right.

• Personality comes into play in the observed fact that some of us experience negative emotions with more frequency and intensity, and under a wider range of social conditions, than do others. Those on the high end of negative emotionality are described as generally more fearful, inhibited, irritable, and prone to frustration, compared to those on the low end.

• Neuroticism is a strong risk factor for mental illness.

• It is important to note that negative emotionality is not the opposite of positive emotionality. It is, simply, conceptually different. Further, it is believed that those high in neuroticism tend to experience and convey relatively high levels of fear and anxiety.

• Neuroscience research presents two systems that implicate the amygdala and may produce these negative emotions and contribute to the development of N over the human life course: fight–flight– freeze system and behavioral inhibition system.