R Thompson

Can attachment theory offer the basis for a new and contemporary portrayal of moral development? This chapter seeks to answer this question in several steps. First, the basic tenets of attachment theory are outlined, especially with respect to secure and insecure parent–child relationships and their implications for moral growth. Second, research on attachment relationships is summarized to assess the extent to which a secure attachment contributes to the characteristics supporting moral growth and virtuous character. Third, the empirical evidence concerning the attributes of parenting leading to a secure attachment is discussed to determine whether these attributes also promote moral development. The chapter closes with reflections on what an attachment theory of moral development might look like.

The author’s earlier work proposed that core foundations of virtuous character develop early in life based on capacities for emotion understanding, sensitivity to fairness, helping, benevolence, and moral self-awareness. This chapter extends that analysis by considering the development of individual differences in character during this period. Two developmental processes are described that become integrated over time. The first contributes to the nonreflective, automatic dispositions that influence moral character and arise from multilayered features of early experience. A bioevolutionary-developmental formulation is proposed in which early chronic stress or security shapes biological systems and implicit behavioral predispositions that shape children’s initial orientations toward others, such as anticipating threat or cooperation. The second process contributes to the rational, deliberate dispositions that consciously motivate virtuous conduct. A social-constructivist formulation is proposed that parent-child discourse in multiple social contexts provides a rational foundation for children’s intentional actions toward others and their justification.

Developmental study of virtue and moral character in early childhood can inform virtue ethics. This chapter summarizes research on young children showing that an early-developing sensitivity to others’ goals, needs, and feelings contributes to an emerging premoral sensibility that influences judgments of fairness, encourages sensitivity to human welfare, and contributes to an emergent “moral self.” Further growth in the development of conscience (an internalized moral sense) derives from warm and mutually responsive parent - child relationships that foster cooperation, concern for others, mutual respect, and other aspects of positive conduct. In particular, parent - child conversation that focuses on others’ feelings and needs contributes more to early conscience development than parental focus on rules and the consequences of breaking them. By contrast with traditional portrayals of the egocentric, self-interested young child, therefore, virtue has developmental origins in an early premoral sensibility arising from children’s rapidly developing understanding of people and is nurtured by supportive relationships of parental care.

The motives, strategies, and effectiveness of emotion regulation have been the focus of emotion regulation literature to date. However, naturalistic research finds that individuals choose not to regulate their emotions as often as they choose to regulate them. We examined how often people did not regulate their emotions, the reasons why people chose not to regulate, and contextual factors related to not regulating. Adults (N = 179; Mage = 35.34, SDage = 12.26) completed ecological momentary assessments five times daily for 14 days, reporting on their largest emotional shift over the last three hours, contextual factors regarding this shift, and emotion regulation. When participants indicated not regulating, they reported their reasons for not regulating. People reported not regulating about half the time; the most frequent reasons were that emotions were appropriate or helpful (39%) or not intense enough (31%). The likelihood of not regulating was associated with greater situational pleasantness, lower situational importance, more positive affect, and less negative affect. People were less likely to regulate when alone. This research focused on an overlooked but significant part of the emotion regulation process, choosing not to engage in emotion regulation. Findings clarify the reasons people do not regulate as well as contextual features related to their decision.

The cerebellum has been hypothesized to play a role in a variety of movement timing tasks that involve the processing of temporal information on a variety of timescales. Braitenberg, Heck & Sultan propose a new theory of cerebellar function that is able to account for movement timing on the order of a couple of hundred milliseconds. However, this theory does not account for the rôle the cerebellum plays in the acquisition and retention of adaptively timed discrete movements that are on the order of 200 to 1000 milliseconds, and therefore does not account for the entire temporal range of cerebellar dependent processing

Adolescence is a time of transition from childhood to adulthood during which significant changes occur across multiple domains, including emotional experience. This article reviews the relevant literature on adolescents’ experience of four specific dimensions of emotion: emotional frequency, intensity, instability, and clarity. In an effort to examine how emotional experiences change as individuals approach adulthood, we examine these dimensions across ages 10 to 19, and review how the emotional functioning of adolescents compares to that of adults. In addition, we explore whether and how gender and puberty explain age differences in emotional experience. Finally, we discuss how these findings could inform future research on both the typical trajectory of emotional experience and the development of psychopathology in adolescence.

The Strange Situation procedure was developed by Ainsworth two decades agoas a means of assessing the security of infant-parent attachment. Users of the procedureclaim that it provides a way of determining whether the infant has developed species-appropriate adaptive behavior as a result of rearing in an evolutionary appropriate context, characterized by a sensitively responsive parent. Only when the parent behaves in the sensitive, species-appropriate fashion is the baby said to behave in the adaptive or secure fashion. Furthermore, when infants are observed repeatedly in the Strange Situation,the pattern of behavior is said to be highly similar, and this pattern is said to predict the infants' future behavior in a diverse array of contexts. After an exhaustive review of the literature, it is shown that these popular claims are empirically unsupported in their strong form, and that the interpretations in terms of biological adaptationare misguided. There is little reliable evidence about the specific dimensions of parental behavior that affect Strange Situation behavior, although there does appear to be some relationship between these constructs. Temporal stability in security of attachment ishigh only when there is stability in family and caretaking circumstances. Likewise, patterns of Strange Situation behavior only have substantial predictive validity in similarly stable families. Implications for future research and theorizing — particularly as they relate to the use of evolutionary biology in psychological theory — are discussed.

Studies of the conceptual abilities of nonhuman primates demonstrate the substantial range of these abilities as well as their limitations. Such abilities range from categorization on the basis of shared physical attributes, associative relations and functions to abstract concepts as reflected in analogical reasoning about relations between relations. The pattern of results from these studies point to a fundamental distinction between monkeys and apes in both their implicit and explicit conceptual capacities. Monkeys, but not apes, might be best regarded as “paleo‐logicans” in the sense that they form common class concepts of identity on the basis of identical predicates (i.e., shared features). The discrimination of presumably more abstract relations commonly involves relatively simple procedural strategies mediated by associative processes likely shared by all mammals. There is no evidence that monkeys can perceive, let alone judge, relations‐between‐relations. This analogical conceptual capacity is found only in chimpanzees and humans. Interestingly, the “analogical ape,” like the child, can make its analogical knowledge explicit only if it is first provided with a symbol system by which propositional representations can be encoded and manipulated.

ABSTRACTRumination and worry are two perseverative, negatively valenced thought processes that characterise depressive and anxiety disorders. Despite significant research interest, little is known about the everyday precipitants and consequences of rumination and worry. Using an experience sampling methodology, we examined and compared rumination and worry with respect to their relations to daily events and affective experience. Participants diagnosed with Major Depressive Disorder, Generalized Anxiety Disorder, co-occurring MDD–GAD, or no diagnosis carried an electronic device for one week and reported on rumination, worry, significant events, positive affect, and negative affect. Across the clinical groups, occurrences of everyday events predicted subsequent increases in rumination, but not worry. Further, higher momentary levels of rumination, but not worry, predicted subsequent decreases in PA and increases in NA. Thus, in these clinical groups, rumination was more susceptible to...

Systems theory holds that emotional responses derive from the continuous, mutual interaction between multiple neurobiological and behavioral systems associated with emotion as they are contextually embedded. Developmental systems theory portrays these systems as becoming progressively integrated as they mature. From this perspective, regulatory processes are incorporated into emotion throughout the course of emotional development. This article examines the implications of developmental systems theory in understanding the association between emotion and emotion regulation, enlisting the functionalist orientation of contemporary emotions theory, a broad portrayal of emotion regulatory influences, and attention to the role of context in the management of emotion

Can you think of a meme that made you laugh or a political post that made you angry? These examples illustrate how social media use (SMU) impacts how people feel. Similarly, how people feel when they initiate SMU may impact the emotional effects of SMU. Someone feeling happy may feel more positively during SMU, whereas someone feeling sad may feel more negatively. Using an experimental design, we examined whether following SMU, those in a happy mood would experience increases in positive affect (PA) and those in a sad mood would experience increases in negative affect (NA). A large sample of college students (N = 703) were randomly assigned to a happy, sad, or neutral mood induction before SMU. PA and NA were assessed at baseline, post-mood induction, and after SMU. Contrary to hypotheses, after SMU, people in happy moods experienced decreases in PA, and those in sad moods experienced decreases in NA, reflecting SMU having a dampening effect on emotions. PA and NA were significantly lower after SMU compared to baseline and did not vary by condition. How young adults feel when they log onto SMU matters in understanding how SMU impacts PA and NA, but on average, emotional experiences are dampened.

Over the past century, mental health disorders have become an area of concern for maintaining a “productive” population, as attention has shifted to endemics that slowly diminish the capacity to live a long and productive life and the care of society depends upon disciplinary technologies that aim to educate and manage people about health and self-care. People deemed as a burden on the state, such as the mentally ill, are commonly objects of governmentality. In this study of the U.S. National Institute for Mental Health media campaign, we explore the intersection between institutional discourse, narratives of personal experience, and media forms. This research contributes to the burgeoning field of Digital Discourse Studies to provide improved tools for sociolinguistic and discourse-analytic research in new media contexts by combining governmentality theory, multimodality studies, and CDA methodologies that serve new media environments. Through this case study we illustrate how institutions operationalize virtual visual synthetic personalization to reproduce institutional discourses in the service of governing, and we extend upon governmentality, introducing technologies of sociality as a disciplinary technology brought on by the affordances of social media.