I am having trouble finding theoritecal perspectives to emotional development through the lifespan. Can you point me in some specific direction or are they incoporated in general development through the lifespan? P.S. They need to be more current than historical (if there was such a thing). Thankyou.

Sally Adamiak

-- Sally Adamiak (adamiak@bigpond.com), April 27, 2001

Answers

Hi Sally, with regard to emotional development through the lifespan, somewhere out there is a film, I think the title is "Everyone Rides the Carousel; it is about Erik Erikson's theory, and I think it might provide partial answer to your question. Have you considered the Freudian perspective through the frustration-aggression hypothesis applied to stages of development? And you might find this elaborated by Dollard and Miller. From radical behaviorist perspective, Bijou & Baer wrote a small book on child development. Perhaps Maslow's hierarch is worth considering in light of how this affects emotional development. A more recent book that kind of addresses your question is Emotional Intelligence by Daaniel Goleman. Look at Joesph Wolfe's ideas, if you can think of emotional development on a continuum from normal development to the pathological, and this is current or timeless as desensitization, for a more explicit understanding of this approach, a learning theory approach, you could read Guthrie's text on learning. Hope something is help in the above, David

-- david clark (doclark@yorku.ca), April 30, 2001.

Hi Sally,

Authors that have provided theoretical perspectives on emotional development throughout the lifespan are many. They include the famous emotion researcher Carol Izard. Carol has been responsible for developing infant (MAX) and adult coding schemes of emotions (FAX). More importantly, he has provided a detailed theory on how our behavior is coloured by emotions (e.g. emotions are first and thought is second) A seminal paper would be: Izard, C.E. (1993). Four systems for emotion activation. Cognitive and noncognitive processes: Psychological Review, 100, 68-90. Izard claims that the emotion system is fundamentally independent of the cognitive system in its origin and major developmental aspects. In contrast, there are approaches which, identify multidirectional causal links between emotion, cognition and particularly social development See for instance, Barrett&Campos, 1987 for early development)and the famous contemporary Dutch emotion theorists Nico Frijda for later lifespan development. Hope this information gets you started in your research endeavours.

-- Maria Legerstee (legerste@yorku.ca), May 04, 2001.

British psychometrician Paul Kline wrote a little book called *Psychology Exposed* (1988) suggesting that academic selection procedures favor the hiring of emotionally impoverished individuals, and that the resulting statistically guided research on emotional matters (on 'love' for instance) is characteristically trivial and devoid of relevance to wider human affairs. The largest loading item of one factor analytic assessment of love' (as I recall) was: "I would very much like to give a present"

So take a look at that book, cuz it just might cheer you up a bit.

I'm also encouraged that someone has suggested that some sort of 'life-span' developmental approach be taken to the above issue. Other approaches (such as the evolutionary continuity view of Darwin and even Romanes and the similarly continuous behaviorist viewpoint of J.B. Watson) have been a dismal failure.

Being forewarned however is to be forearmed. Much which claims to be life-span developmental is still very additive and continuous indeed. Hence the import of looking at ‘historical’ examples of figures like G.H. Lewes, Lev Vygotsky, and A.N. Leontiev who all tried to brake out of that mode of thought. In short, they all argued that higher animals (e.g., dogs, chimps), infants, and small children have *feelings* (i.e., individual processes which emerge during the course of their social development) and that older human beings (during their normal developmental internalization of culture) develop *emotions.*

Cheers,

Paul F. Ballantyne

-- Paul F. Ballantyne (pballan@comnet.ca), September 04, 2004.