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Cognition and Emotion

ISSN: 0269-9931 (Print) 1464-0600 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/pcem20

How Emotions Develop and How they Organise Development Kurt W. Fischer , Phillip R. Shaver & Peter Carnochan To cite this article: Kurt W. Fischer , Phillip R. Shaver & Peter Carnochan (1990) How Emotions Develop and How they Organise Development, Cognition and Emotion, 4:2, 81-127, DOI: 10.1080/02699939008407142 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02699939008407142

Published online: 07 Jan 2008.

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COGNITION AND EMOTION,1990,4 (2), 81-127

How Emotions Develop and How they Organise Development Downloaded by [University of California Davis] at 19:39 13 May 2016

Kurt W. Fischer Human Development, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, U.S.A.

Phillip R. Shaver Psychology Department, State University of New York, Buffalo, U.S.A.

Peter Carnochan Psychology Department, Denver University, Colorado, U.S.A. Concepts from functional theories of emotions are integrated with principles of skill development to produce a theory of emotional development. The theory provides tools for predicting both the sequences of emotional development and the ways emotions shape development. Emotions are characterised in terms of three component models: (a) the process of emotion generation from event appraisal, (b) a hierarchy of emotion categories organised around a handful of basic-emotion families, and (c) a characterisation of emotions in terms of prototypic event scripts. The basic emotions and the positive vs. negative hedonic components of emotions function as constraints or organisers that shape behaviour whenever an emotion is activated. Through these patterning effects, emotions shape both short-term behavioural organisation and long-term development. The skilldevelopment component of the theory explains how, as children grow, they construct and control increasingly complex skills-which affect many aspects of emotion, from appraisal to emotional self-control. These skills can be characterised in terms of a series of developmental tiers and levels; they are not fixed traits of the child but instead are affected by assessment conditions and emotional action tendencies. The developmental process

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Requests for reprints should be sent to Dr Kurt W. Fischer, Human Development, Lanen Hall, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass. 02138, U.S.A. The work in this article was supported by a fellowship from the Cattell fund and grants from the Spencer Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation Network on Early Childhood, the National Institute of Mental Health, and the National Science Foundation. The authon would like to thank Joseph Campos, Robert Emde, Sharon Griffin, Helen Hand, Susan Harter, Jerome Kagan. Susie Lamborn, Marc Lewis, Sandra Pipp, Judy Schwaru, Louise Silvern, and Malcolm Watson for their contributions to the arguments represented here.

@ 1990 Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Limited

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gradually moves from basic, species-specific emotions to culture-specific, subordinate-category emotions and the complexities of adult emotional experiences. The theory provides a set of conceptual and methodological tools to predict and assess emotional development. It also indicates how emotional development fits with other aspects of systematic change in the organisation of behaviour.

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INTRODUCTION Emotions develop, and as they do, they help structure and direct other aspects of development. A theory of emotional development needs to explicate both of these distinct sets of phenomena-the development of emotions and the ways that emotions shape development (Barrett & Campos, 1987; Izard & Malatesta, 1987). During the first year or SO of life, infants exhibit facial expressions and action patterns that most parents and psychologists readily categorise as instances of joy, affection, anger, sadness, and fear. Over many years, as infants develop into adults, more complex emotions develop, such as compassion, nostalgia, humiliation, resentment, and alienation. This is the first set of phenomena that needs explication-the development from a few relatively simple basic emotions to a broad array of complex and often subtle ones. At the same time, emotions shape development. When an emotion is activated, it tends to shift a person’s goals from their prior state to a new organisation determined by the emotion. For example, when a one-yearold girl becomes angry at her father’s interference with her play, she stops playing, complains, and pushes him away to stop the interference. This organising effect of emotions on behaviour begins in early infancy and continues throughout life. When children have disproportionate experience with one or more specific emotions, their development is affected in particular ways, from having a propensity for certain kinds of appraisals to continually exhibiting certain emotion-specific facial expressions or showing vastly different behavioural patterns as a function of social-emotional states. That is, emotional experiences have long-term effects on development, producing particular developmental pathways. We argue that a systematic approach to behavioural organisation called skill theory (Fischer, 1980) provides a basis for analysing emotional development. Skill theory is based in extensive research on development of many different behaviours in diverse settings, including emotion-related situations. In an earlier article (Fischer, Shaver, & Carnochan, 1988), we argued that skill theory helps to resolve antinomies between cognitive and noncognitive views of emotion elicitation and between universalist and relativist positions concerning cross-cultural comparisons of emotions. In brief, the elicitation of basic emotions, especially in early infancy, can be

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based on extremely simple appraisals (e.g. that a situation is novel, that a simple goal-directed action is unexpectedly blocked). Later in development the elicitation of more complex emotions (guilt, jealousy) involves cognitively complex appraisals, often involving culture-bound social situations and interpretations of events. These more complex emotions can differ across cultures and historical periods in ways that basic emotions probably cannot. The skill approach combines an analysis of emotions with a system for analysing the development of skills. The approach has been used to predict and test development of understanding emotions and telling stories about them, and so our exposition will focus on these emotion-related phenomena. As we will explain, having emotions and vividly acting out stones about emotions are closely linked, especially in early childhood, and developments in one are likely to signal developments in the other. We propose that the skill approach can be extended to provide useful developmental analyses of other aspects of emotion, such as expression and selfcontrol. As we describe the theory, we will point out ways that the approach makes contact with these other aspects of emotions, especially in infancy, where the bulk of the research on development of emotion expression and elicitation has been done. We realise that extensive research will be required to test this theory of emotions. A major goal of this article is to encourage and facilitate such research. In the present article we show how skill theory can be used to predict developmental sequences of emotions and the shaping effects of emotions on pathways of development. Our analysis is divided into two major parts. The first has to do with a conception of emotions, which (following many current leads) might be called functionalist or organisational (Barrett & Campos, 1987; Bretherton, Fritz, Zahn-Waxler, & Ridgeway, 1986; Frijda, 1986). The second has to do with the application of skill theory to the development of emotions so conceived. Our exposition will necessarily be abstract and synoptic, given the scope of our concerns and a restricted number of pages. We will try to elaborate sufficiently to give a sense of how the approach works and will suggest sources where further explication of methods and concepts are available. We will also illustrate how to use the theory with concrete examples involving joy and anger, as well as the nice and mean social interactions that relate to them, although we will touch upon many other emotions as well.

THE ORGANISATION OF EMOTIONS Contemporary emotion theorists and researchers agree substantially on the broad nature of emotions, and our analysis builds upon that consensus. In contrast to earlier views-that emotion is equivalent to arousal, that

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emotions are disruptive of cognition, that emotions are primarily subjective feelings-this functionalist view considers emotions as organised, meaningful, generally adaptive action systems. Although emotions often suffer a bad press, their effect is mostly positive and adaptive, steering people toward behaviours that meet important needs and motivating development toward effective action. Emotions are disorganising or disruptive only when they bring about something insistently incompatible with whatever else the emotional person is trying to accomplish. On the one hand, most investigators agree with Darwin (18724975) that emotions are discrete, innate, functional, biosocial action and expression systems (e.g., Ekman, 1984; Emde, 1980a; Frijda, 1986; Izard, 1977; Tomkins, 1962-1963). At least the primary, basic, or discrete emotions (different writers use different names for these) are evident in infancy and are cross-culturally universal (Barrett & Campos, 1987; Ekman, Friesen, & Ellsworth, 1982; Scherer, 1988). Theoretical work by Arnold (1960) and Tomkins (1962-1%3) and research by Izard, Ekman, Campos, Emde, and their coworkers have more or less driven out rival conceptions of emotion focusing on arousal (Duffy, 1962), the cognitive labelling of arousal (Schachter & Singer, 1962), and the social construction of emotions (Had,1986). On the other hand, an increasing number of investigators also acknowledge the role of cognitive processes such as judgement, appraisal, and intentions or goals in the elicitation and structuring of emotions (e.g. Lazarus, 1984; Ortony, Clore, & Collins, 1988; Roseman, 1984; Ellsworth & Smith, 1988a, 1988b). Many current theories of emotion (e.g. Ekman, 1984; Frijda, 1986; Plutchik, 1980; Scherer, 1984) and emotional development (Bretherton et al., 1986; Barrett & Campos, 1987; Leventhal & Scherer, 1987) embrace both the functionalist position and the cognitive one. Even Izard, who maintains that cognitive and emotional systems are independent, acknowledges the emergence in development of “cognitiveaffective structures or emotion-cognition complexes” (Izard & Malatesta, 1987, p. 498). Building upon compatible recent theories, we will assemble a functionalist framework for emotions that specifies how emotions organise behaviour and how they relate to cognitive processing. Based upon this framework, a theory that explains development of skill organisation can be used to analyse emotional development.

Defining Emotions Emotions strike people so personally, so compellingly, that it violates intuition to acknowledge lack of clarity in the meaning of the term emotion. But the range of referents of words like “emotion,” “joy”, and

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“anger” is wide (Averill, 1975). Emotion draws under itself experiences as diverse as the subtle enjoyment that comes from the warmth of a summer day and the wrenching agony and rage that stem from the loss of a loved one. Even within a specific emotion category such as anger, there is large variability. People speak of a man being angry when he gets into a fist fight or when he quietly fumes about the unreasonableness of his boss. Emotions are complex functional wholes including appraisals or appreciations, patterned physiological processes, action tendencies, subjective feelings, expressions, and instrumental behaviours. But as Barrett and Campos (1987) point out, none of these features is necessary for a particular instance of emotion. Emotions fit into families, within which all members share a family resemblance but no universal set of features. In the terms of cognitive theory, emotions fit the prototype model of categories, in which all category members can be related to a best instance (prototype) defining the category but few members have all characteristics of that prototype (Rosch, 1978;Fehr & Russell, 1984;Shaver, Schwartz, Kirson, & O’Connor, 1987;Wittgenstein, 1953). What is most prototypical of a particular emotion-anger, for example-is a certain kind of functional relation between person and environment. If a person or situation is perceived as illegitimately thwarting or punishing, the response is likely to be angry, retaliatory, protesting, or the like. Whether this response involves a particular facial expression (or a raised voice, or clenched fists, or a particular conception of legitimacy) is a matter of probability. What is characteristic of anger is its overall organisation and function, not any of its many other features. Similarly, other emotions have a characteristic overall organisation and function. At least three components are required to deal with the complexities of the many emotions. First, the process of emotions involves the elicitation of functionally organised action tendencies by people’s appraisals of events as advancing or hampering their goals or concerns (implicit goals) in some specific way. Secondly, categories of emotions form families organised around a few basic emotions and forming a three-layer hierarchy of superordinate (positive or negative), basic, and subordinate (differentiated and situationally specific). Thirdly, each emotion category is defined in terms of a prototypical action script delineating a sequence of events for that category. We need to elaborate these three components of emotions before we can explicate emotional development in terms of skill theory.

Processes Generating Emotions In common with many authors, we suggest that the action tendencies of emotions arise when people appraise their goals or concerns as being advanced or hampered in some specific way (Barrett & Campos, 1987;

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defivera, 1986; Frijda, 1986; Leventhal & Scherer, 1987; Ortony et al., 1988; Roseman, 1984; Scherer, 1984). The appraisals usually occur automatically, without elaborate conscious evaluation. They are part of what Frijda (1986) calls “situational meaning structure”, much of which is implicit or unconscious at any given moment. The theoretical sequence of events involved in the generation of an emotion is outlined in Fig. 1. Emotions siart with the detection of a notable change-something different or unexpected that acts as a signal to continue processing the input for its personal significance (Scherer, 1984). The continued processing involves appraising the event in relation to concerns and coping potential. The term concerns refers both to the individual’s current goals and wishes and to his or her implicit goals (Frijda, 1986). The notable change is appraised to determine whether it promotes or interferes with these concerns. Positive emotions arise from events that facilitate goal attainment, negative emotions from events that interfere (Roseman, 1984). Also appraised is the person’s coping potential (Scherer, 1984), which influences which particular positive or negative emotion will occur. The emotion arises from the person’s appraisal of how he or she can cope with or change the event. Joy appears when according to the appraisal the event is desirable or is going unexpectedly well and no special effort is required. Anger occurs when according to the appraisal the event threatens an important goal and the person feels that he or she has the wherewithal (or at least the justification; Roseman, 1984) to remove that threat or obstacle. When, according to the appraisal, the negative event is complete and cannot be removed or reversed, the person experiences sadness. When an event is appraised as dangerous and control is uncertain, the emotion is fear. Following each specific appraisal, the person begins to experience and exhibit the action tendency specific to that emotion-an organised approach to dealing with his or her relation to the appraised event (Frijda, 1986; Frijda, Kuipers, & ter Schure, 1989). That is, for each emotion, a distinct pattern of actions and bodily events is evoked. For joy, the action tendency includes feeling good, opening one’s perceptual and associative pathways (Isen, 1984), and allowing or encouraging the event to continue. For anger, it includes focusing attention on the bamer or injustice, preparing the body for action, and attempting to resist or overcome the event. The emotional action tendency exhibits what Frijda (1986) calls control precedence, top priority in the control of behaviour. While driving to the supermarket (a goal-directed action), a person may suddenly become frightened or angry about traffic and temporarily direct coping efforts toward that problem, forgetting about shopping. The action tendency also

t

Appraisalof the Change in Relationto: 1. Concerns 2. Coping Potential ~

Emotion-specific Action Tendencies and Concomitant Physiological Changes

FIG. 1. Model of the emotion process.

Note: The heavy lines indicatethe locus of action tendenciesfor specific emotions.

Notable Change

b

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Action, Expression, consdous self-categorlsing

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prepares the body physiologically to take the indicated actions. The person displays changes in tension, posture, blood pressure, and heart rate, as well as specific facial and vocal expressions. Of course, these parts of the action tendency contribute to particular subjective feelings associated with particular emotions. As complex as this action tendency may be, it usually occurs automatically, permeating behaviour and experience (as suggested by the heavy lines in Fig. 1). People also monitor their own emotional reactions and try to control them (Kopp, 1988; Lazarus, 1984; Saarni, 1984). We propose that these self-control efforts occur through the self-monitoring of action tendencies, which involves an additional loop through the basic appraisal process, as shown in Fig. 1. Some previous investigators have suggested that selfcontrol efforts require a separate component in the process (Frijda, 1986; Shaver et al., 1987; Leventhal & Scherer, 1987)-something akin to a Freudian ego-but they seem to us to require only a reapplication of the basic appraisal process in which emotional action tendencies themselves become the events appraised. In this way, people can have an emotion about an emotion. Suppose that the initial pass through the appraisal process produces anger. The person perceives his or her own emerging anger as a notable change that is itself appraised in relation to goals and concerns. If this second appraisal produces a fear of the consequences of anger, such as counter-attack, then the fear affects the anger action tendencies. Fear involves fleeing or freezing, which inhibits the anger. There is a fear of anger or a conflict between fear and anger. (This is how we propose to deal with psychodynamic concepts such as repression and defence; see Fischer & Pipp, 1984a.) Development produces reorganisation of all the components of the emotion process in Fig. 1. In early infancy, for example, the distinction between action tendencies and action itself is not present: The frustrated infant produces angry actions (Campos et al., 1983; Lewis, in press). Later, children gradually come to be able to note their own emotional action tendencies and thus monitor their emotions. In a similar way, there are developments in the kinds of changes that are noticed, the perceived coping potential, self-monitoring,emotion labelling, and rules for emotion expression. The approach we develop in the second half of this paper provides tools for investigating the development of the various emotion components. Because a thorough analysis of all these developments would require many pages, we will focus primarily on the patterns of appraisal and the plans of action evidenced when children tell stories about emotional events, a phenomenon that has been studied from a skill-theory perspective. But the theory is designed to deal also with the development of emotion elicitation, expression, and regulation.

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An Emotion Hierarchy Besides a model of emotion processes, we also need a developmentally significant model of emotion categories. Emotion researchers have been divided between at least two opposing camps. One group emphasises the common biological bases of a limited set of so-called basic or discrete emotions, such as anger, fear, sadness, joy, and love, which appear to be universal in human beings (Ekman, 1973; Emde, 1980a; Izard, 1977; for love, see Bretherton & Waters, 1985; Epstein, 1984; Sroufe, 1979). Another group dwells on the more complex, socially constructed emotions, such as loneliness and resentment in English-language culture, amae in Japanese culture (Morsbach & Tyler, 1986), or sungkan in Javanese culture (Geertz, 1974)-which show great cultural diversity (HarrC, 1986). We propose that emotion categories are organised into emotion families in something like the way illustrated in Fig. 2, which relates the emotion categories from the two opposing camps. The hierarchy contains three different levels or layers of categories. (We will henceforth refer to them as layers, to distinguish them from the developmental levels discussed later in the article.) At the top of the hierarchy is the superordinate layer, a division into positive and negative that arises from the appraisal of events in relation to concerns, as shown in Fig. 1. In the middle of the vertical dimensions of the hierarchy is the basic layer, “basic” being used in the sense explained by Rosch (1978). Basic emotion categories are those that are shared most generally across cultures, including anger, sadness, fear, joy, and love. Each of the basic Categories defines a family of categories at the subordinate layer. The subordinate categories are more complex, socially constructed emotions, such as adoration, resentment, loneliness, and jealousy. Later we will use this hierarchy as a guide to probable developmental pathways for emotions from basic categories to subordinate ones. The hierarchy is built on research by Shaver et al. (1987) concerning American adults’ use of emotion terms, and is generally consistent with findings for European adults (Scherer, 1988). Recent research using Shaver et al.3 methodology for inferring a hierarchy indicates that similar hierarchies obtain in Italy and China (Agnoli, Kirson, Wu, & Shaver, 1989). The superordinate and basic emotion categories are largely the same, while some of the subordinate emotions making up each basic family (bottom layer of Fig. 2) are different for each culture. Also, the Chinese use an additional basic-emotion family-shame. Our use of the hierarchy as a clue to developmental pathways can endure future debates about the exact form of the hierarchy in different cultures. In fact, cultural variations suggest interesting possibilities for developmental research. The categories in the middle layer of the hierarchy are basic in several

Contentment

Hostility

Anger

Jealousy

Grief

I

Loneliness

Sadmu

FIG. 2. A simplified version of the emotion hierarchy reported by Shaver et al. (1987). Only a few of the subordinate category emotions are included here.

Infatuation

Positivep

EMOTIONS

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senses. They overlap closely with the emotions that have been identified as universal across human cultures, as shown both by infant facial and vocal expressions and by adult categories. They include most of the first emotion terms learned by American and British children and presumably children in other societies as well (Bretherton et al., 1986; Dunn, Bretherton, & Mum, 1987). And they help explain the family groupings of specific emotions in the subordinate layer of the hierarchy. Because of the many indications of the pervasiveness of these basic categories, we propose that they represent not merely ways that people put emotion words together but core species-specific emotional organisations that operate from early infancy and shape both behaviour and development throughout life. That is, the action tendencies underlying the basic emotions are species-specifichuman characteristics shared by all people. In the literature on species-specific learning, such shared shaping effects are often referred to as constraints or biases (Gelman & Carey, in press; Gould & Marler, 1987), but because of the negative connotations of those words, we prefer to speak of shaping or organising influences (see also Barrett & Campos, 1987; Emde, 1980a; Sroufe, 1979). Emotions are thus one of a broad class of species-specific constraints or organisers, which reduce the range of potentially available behaviours. The categories at the superordinate layer-positive and negative-are clearly at a different level of organisation, but they are also basic in an important sense: As suggested by their place in the emotion process model, they arise early in the process, from appraisal of a notable change in terms of the person’s concerns. In Rosch’s (1978) theory, superordinate categories are supposedly less accessible and pervasive than basic ones, but developmental evidence sometimes contradicts that claim (Mandler & Bauer, 1988). With emotions, children develop words for positive and negative as early as words for basic emotions. Examples include nice, good, like, bud, meun, and don’t like (Bretherton et a]., 1986; Fischer et al., 1984). Across cultures, division into positive and negative has proven to be one of the most fundamental human categorisations (Davitz, 1969; Emde, 1980b; Osgood, Suci, & Tannenbaum, 1957; Russell & Ridgeway, 1983). Subordinate emotions are less pervasive, however. Many of them show wide variations across cultures, and children’s knowledge of them develops late (Bretherton et al., 1986; Dunn et a]., 1987). Categories like bliss, contentment, annoyance, resentment, depression, hostility, and jealousy involve culturally specific information about social interpretations, including factors such as motivation and social status. In some cases, such as annoyance, they specify a specific subcategory of a basic emotion like anger. In many cases, they involve complexities far beyond the basic emotions. Resentment implies a particular type of social relationship,

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where the offended party is angry but for some reason feels unable to retaliate. Jealousy involves not only a type of social relationship but also a combination of basic emotions, including anger, love, and fear (Sharpsteen, in press). The meanings of subordinate emotion categories are therefore more complex than those for basic and superordinate emotions, and they depend on specific experience in social contexts.

Prototypic Action Scripts for Emotions According to Rosch’s (1978) theory, each family of categories can be defined by a prototype. We propose that the prototype for each basic emotion is a script of behavioural and social events for the best or most typical case of the emotion, the essence of the category. These action scripts are similar to those described by Nelson (1985) for activities like going to bed or having a birthday party and by Schank and Abelson (1977) for eating at a restaurant. As with prototypes in general, adults agree on the categories for prototypic emotion episodes but disagree on episodes with only some of the features of the prototypic script. Shaver et al. (1987) derived a set of prototypic scripts for the basic-category emotions in Fig. 2 by analysing American adults’ accounts of emotion episodes (See also Averill, 1982; de Rivera, 1981; Scherer, 1988). Although these scripts are thus derived from accounts of emotion episodes (that is, cognitive representations), we use them here as guides to the real actions and events in emotion prototypes. Indeed, they relate closely to the events and actions found in research on infants’ and children’s emotions, as we will show. In line with other researchers’ usage, the term “script” refers to both the generic representation of an event and the plan that is used to enact the event. In other words, a restaurant script can be used both: (1) to understand a scene in a movie in which two characters enter a restaurant, sit down, eat a meal, and then pay the bill; and (2) to carry out the actions of entering a restaurant, following a hostess to a table, and so forth. Similarly, an anger script can play a role not only in understanding or perceiving anger events but also in becoming angry, expressing anger, and controlling it. The script structure of the prototype for each emotion specifies typical antecedents and responses, including behavioural, expressive, experiential, and cognitive components. For the negative basic emotions, there are also typical self-control or coping strategies (see Kopp, 1988). Such coping strategies are omitted in the scripts for positive emotions because adults typically left them out of their emotion accounts in the research of Shaver et al. (1987). Of course, subtle or less frequent attempts to control positive emotions are not precluded by this omission. Tables 1 and 2 show idealised versions of the empirically derived action

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TABLE 1 Adult Script for Anger (Based on Empirical Research)

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Antecedents: Illegitimate Interruption, Violation, or H a m Something or someone violates the person’s wishes or expectations, obstructs or interferes with the person’s freedom of movement or goal-attainment, hurts or insults the person, ignores or demeans the person’s status. This interference or harm is perceived as illegitimate, as something that should not happen and should not be allowed to happen. Responses: Vigorous Protest, A ftack, Retaliation The person becomes energised, and mentally and behaviourally organised, to protest or fight or retaliate, thereby restoring justice, freedom of movement or passage, proper recognition, etc. The person looks and sounds angry (e.g. face red, brows furled, voice raised) and moves in an emphatic, threatening, or exaggerated way. The person is preoccupied with the anger-inducing situation and repeatedly insists that he or she is right, deserves better treatment, etc. Self- Control Procedures: Suppression and Redejinition The person may try to suppress or hide the anger or redefine or remove the situation so that anger is no longer called for. Note: Idealised version of results reported by Shaver et al. (1987).

scripts for anger and joy (also called happiness). In anger, for example, the person sees some event as interrupting or violating her goals or threatening harm in a manner that is unfair to her. She responds by becoming energised for aggression, focusing on the situation that is causing the anger, and looking and moving angrily. She may also attempt to control the emotion, hiding or suppressing it or redefining what happened so that anger is no longer called for. TABLE 2 Adult Script for Joy (Based on Empirical Research) Antecedents: Desirable Outcome, Achievement, Affection, Esteem The person receives or attains something wished or strived for; receives esteem, praise, or affection (is accepted, liked, loved); has surprisingly good fortune or receives a benefit that exceeds expectations. Responses: Smiling, Laughing, Communicating Good Feelings, Positive Outlook The person smiles, laughs, is warm and sociable, communicates and shares the good news and good feelings, is optimistic and less vulnerable to worry, feels and acts energised or excited, jumps up and down, hugs others, is kind and generous toward others. Self-Control Procedures: Not a Salient Issue (Although suppression of joy in the interest of decorum or avoidance of envy is possible, such self-control efforts are not prototypical.) Note: Idealised version of results reported by Shaver et al. (1987).

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We assume that the action scripts represented by these texts develop from the species-specific action tendencies of infants’ basic emotions via long-term experience with their shaping effects in oneself and in others, as well as socialisation experiences when the emotions are expressed. Key parts of the action tendencies are outlined under Responses in the tables. These prototypic scripts emphasise the biosocial nature of emotions (Campos et al., 1983; de Rivera, 1986; Emde, 1980a), although they do not deal exhaustively with all social aspects of emotions. The scripts explicitly include other people in the prototypes because in our research most subjects included people in their stories about emotions, even though a person can obviously experience anger or joy in the absence of other people. A major component of emotions is social communication and regulation. Because of the close ties between emotional appraisals, subjective feelings, action tendencies, expressions, and behaviours, emotions communicate to other people one’s needs, wishes, intentions, understandings, and likely behaviours. This communication generally promotes both need satisfaction and social co-ordination. Every culture imposes display rules for emotions, suggesting that emotions are an important target of social control (Hochschild, 1983). Also, in different cultures, historical periods, and age groups, people exhibit different emotions and talk differently about emotions ( H a d , 1986; Heider, in press; Lutz, 1988).

Emotions as Organisers that Shape Development According to theory, then, emotions arise when people detect a notable change in their situation and appraise both the significance of that change for their concerns and the potential they have for coping with it. The particular appraisal mobilises an emotion (action tendency) that organises a wide range of behaviours into a specific pattern or script. The patterned action tendencies (and their associated appraisals) fall within a set of basic emotion families, including love, joy, anger, fear, and sadness. They also generally divide into positive and negative (notable change appraised as good or bad for the person). This general organisation of emotions is present in rudimentary form at an early age, but all its components develop, becoming more complex and differentiated as well as more regulated. Besides themselves developing, emotions also shape development, with different emotional experiences producing dkrincr developmental parhways, both between and within individuals. Many scholars have argued that emotions have such an organising effect on development (Case, Hayward, Lewis, & Hurst, 1988; Demos, 1988; Emde, 1980a; Fox & Davidson, 1984; Izard & Malatesta, 1987; Leventhal & Scherer, 1987; Sullivan, 1953;Tomkins, 1962-1963), and the skill approach provides a framework for analysing and predicting those effects.

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The diverse developmental pathways are produced by the action tendencies for the basic emotions as well as those for positive and negative reactions, all of which are present early in infancy. Because of their control precedence, emotions organise behaviour in particular patterns whenever they are activated. Different emotional experiences thus lead to different behavioural organisations, with recurrent emotional experiences of a particular kind evoking similar organisations each time and thus shaping development along a specificpathway. These shaping effects are evident in phenomena as diverse as facial expressions, attachment patterns, and personality disorders. Dominance of an Emotion. One of the most straightforward shaping effects of emotions involves the dominance of an emotion in an individual. When people experience one emotion repeatedly, it can shape their development, moulding the architecture of both their face and their personality. Malatesta (1988) has demonstrated, for example, that some adults have a dominant emotion: It shows in their facial expressions when they try voluntarily to express other emotions, and it shows in their personality characteristics. Many personality constructs are closely related to specific emotions (depression to sadness, trait anxiety to fear, security to happiness, and so forth), and Malatesta’s evidence suggests links between characteristic expressive patterns and personality assessments. What shows on the face is a valid hint concerning a long and biased history of emotional experience and expression that can be tapped more deeply by measures of character or personality. (Of course, some of the continuity may be due to temperament, which does not greatly alter our present conclusions about it.) Emotion Patterns in Attachment Relationships. Because of the social nature of emotions, their shaping effects on development are particularly evident in social relationships. Research on infant-caregiver attachment provides clear evidence of how emotions affect developmental pathways involving relationships (e.g. Ainsworth, Blehar, Waters, & Wall, 1978; Bowlby, 1980;Bretherton & Waters, 1985;Sroufe, 1979). Different infants develop different types of emotion-based attachment relationships with a caregiver, and these variations seem to have substantial effects on later relationships and personality. Each type involves a distinctive configuration of emotions about emotions-joy, anger, fear, or some other emotion experienced with love-which shapes the attachment relationship. Ainsworth and her colleagues describe three major patterns of attachment in one-year-old infants, labelled secure, anxious/ambivalent , and avoidant. The secure children, whose mothers were observed over a period of months to be generally sensitive and responsive to the infants’ needs, were frequently in a positive emotional state and tended comfortably to

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explore novel environments from the secure base of the mother. The anxious/ambivalent infants, whose mothers were less predictable and less reliably available, seemed especially prone to fear and angry protests and were preoccupied with their mother’s whereabouts during a laboratory observation period. The avoidant infants, whose mothers seemed uncomfortable with physical contact and systematically redirected the infants’ bids for contact, seemed to have partially suppressed what Bowlby (1980) calls their “attachment behavioral sytem”. That is, in emotion-theory terms, they had learned by the end of the first year of life to regulate their fear and their desire for attachment by detaching to some extent, using the mother for protection but not expecting much affection. These attachment patterns seem to show substantial stability in development beyond infancy, even into adulthood (Main, Kaplan, & Cassidy, 1985; Main, in press), although they can be changed by major alterations in the emotional climate of the family. In several recent studies, Hazan and Shaver have found the same three attachment organisations among adult romantic partners (Brennan, Hazan, & Shaver, 1989; Hazan & Shaver, 1987; Shaver, Hazan, & Bradshaw, 1988). As with infants, emotions other than love are linked to the relationship and help shape it. Secure adults find it relatively easy to trust partners, are less often anxious, and are less afraid of various kinds of threats to the relationship. Anxious/ambivalent adults (often called “enmeshed”) are the most afraid of abandonment by partners, the most jealous, the most prone to angry denunciations. Avoidant adults are the least willing to get involved in intimate relationships, the most likely to have casual sexual affairs, and the most likely to say they have trouble understanding their feelings about relationships. These three kinds of adults recall their parents in terms very similar to those used by Ainsworth to describe the mothers of the corresponding three kinds of infants. In describing the emotional make-up for each of these attachment styles, Hazan and Shaver focus on emotion appraisals and self-control procedures. Secure children and adults express emotions relatively freely and are quick to be soothed when an attachment figure responds to their negative emotions. Anxious/ambivalent children and adults seem to have learned that protest is sometimes effective in attracting the attention and support of attachment figures. Avoidant children and adults seem to have learned to deny, suppress, or “deactivate” (Bowlby, 1980) certain emotions whose expression has not led, early in life, to satisfactory parental responses. Although the attachment styles are usually linked with individuals, because people often have a dominant style, it is important to note that the distinct developmental pathways for each style may co-exist in a single person. Many people seem to show different styles in different relation-

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ships. A person may, for example, show a secure style in most close relationships but an anxioudambivalent one in some.

Emotional Splitting and the Effects of Abuse. Any strong, recumng emotional experience can shape development, producing a distinct developmental pathway. One such distinct pathway is multiple personality, which seems to be produced by the emotional experience of child abuse (Fischer & Pipp, 1984a). In nearly all cases of multiple personality, the person experienced extreme physical and/or sexual abuse as a child (Kluft 1985). During childhood the child’s parents or other important caregivers sometimes showed affection toward the child and took care of him or her. But at other times they abused the child, producing strong, mostly negative emotions, which shaped the child’s development. To deal with the divergent emotional situations, the child split the self into distinct personalities (Bliss, 1980; Fagan & McMahon, 1984). The different personalities seem to be organised around distinct dominant emotions (Bower, 1981), often connected with the abuse. In adults, one or more of the personalities are typically built directly upon the earlier abuse situation(s) but with the roles reversed so that the person is in control rather than subject to abuse. For example, a woman who was sexually abused as a child may have one personality that is flirtatious and promiscuous. A man subjected to physical abuse as a child may have one personality that is violent and abusive. Research on numerous cases shows similar patterns, with the personalities typically differing in their dominant emotions. Other forms of dissociative disorders, such as hysteria and borderline personality, also seem to be produced by child abuse and to involve emotions organising personality (Kluft, 1985; see also Cicchetti, in press). In borderline personality, the dominant emotional organisation is a split between positive and negative (Kernberg, 1976). The person divides people into good ones, who are on his or her side, and bad ones who are against him or her and not to be trusted. In the extreme, the person will even treat an individual such as a therapist as two different people, one good and one bad. For example, after a vacation during which the therapist and patient do not meet, the patient may insist that the bad therapist who went away is not the same person as the good therapist who saw the patient before the vacation. Emotional splitting is not limited to multiple or borderline personalities. Although the extreme emotions induced by child abuse produce extreme effects, splitting by emotional valence is a basic property of human mental life (Osgood et al., 1957; Sullivan, 1953). This phenomenon is reflected in the superordinate division between positive and negative for the emotion categories (Fig. 2). Normal children organise much of their

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experience into distinct development pathways for positive and negative. We have investigated the development of splitting from early childhood in a series of studies of nice and mean social interactions. In presenting the developmental component of our theory, we will focus on these studies of splitting to illustrate how to analyse the ways emotions shape development.

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DEVELOPMENT OF EMOTIONAL SKILLS Cognition involves organisations of behaviour over which people exercise some control, and emotion involves action tendencies that shape the organisation of behaviour, shifting the way people control their actions, thoughts, and feelings. A general theory of the organisation of behaviour should take account of both types of organising influences. In most cases, cognition and emotion are not really separable processes; there are no separate compartments in the mind for cognition and emotion but only ongoing behaviour that includes both cognition and emotion intertwined. In development, what changes is the organisation of behaviour, independent of whether that behaviour fits under the rubric of cognition or emotion. More specifically, behaviour is organised in terms of hierarchically structured skills, and what develops is children’s ability to construct and control those skills (Fischer, 1980). The action tendencies produced by emotions are an important influence on the organisation and development of the skills. At the same time, the changing control structures produce development in the various components of the emotion process (Fig. 1). In this way emotions shape skill control structures and are also shaped by them. The concept of skill as it is used in everyday English has several characteristics that are useful for analysing emotional development. First, it indicates that the person is controlling something about his or her own behaviour, and the behaviour does not have to be either “cognitive” or “emotional”. A person can be skilled not only at doing long division or writing effective prose, but also at expressing love, controlling fear, or helping others to experience their (suppressed) anger. Secondly, it implicates both person and environment, in contrast to concepts such as competence or intelligence in theories like those of Piaget (1983), Chomsky (1965), Gardner (1983), and Case (1985). In English usage, a skill is an ability to carry out a set of actions in a particular context. A person has a skill for building wooden furniture, a skill for driving a car with a standard shift, or a skill for pretending about emotions with preschoo1,children. Even a switch to a different kind of building material, a different car, or children of a different age changes the skill. A skill is a characteristic of aperson-in-a-context. A change in either the person or the context changes the skill (Fogel & Thelen, 1987).

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Starting with this concept of skill,our theory provides a framework with specific constructs and methods for predicting and explaining developmental sequences in children’s skills. A skill is defined as the child’s ability to control variations in his or her own actions and mental processes in a particular context. Skill theory specifies both general properties of skills that characterise the broad sweep of development and local properties that specify how individual skills are directly tied to particular contexts. The child develops a skill in a particular task domain and must then work to generalise that skill to other task domains (Fischer & Farrar, 1987). Development does not automatically produce broadly applicable competencies but instead involves the gradual and laborious construction and generalisation of skilIs. Predicting emotional development therefore necessitates beginning with a specific domain for analysing skills and performing a specific analysis of what children must control in that domain. The constructs and methods of skill theory provide guidelines for how to do that skill analysis and how to use it to predict development. We will outline a few skill analyses below for the development of emotion-related scripts. More extensive guides to skill analysis and methods are available elsewhere (Fischer, 1980; Fischer, Pipp, & Bullock, 1984; Rose & Fischer, 1989). Unlike most developmental theories, skill theory relates development to variations in context, experience, and organismic state. Both development and these other variations are characterised in terms of detailed developmental scales, which are derived from a hierarchy of skill levels and a set of rules for transforming skills into more complex forms within a level. Behaviour moves up and down these scales not only with development but also in response to other mechanisms of variation (Fischer & Farrar, 1987). One set of mechanisms of variation involve the effects of emotions. Virtually all components of emotional behaviour-the various appraisals, antecedents, responses, and self-control procedures-change with development. With careful skill analyses, the theory should be useful for predicting development of most of these components, individually or in combination, for specific contexts. Our exposition here will emphasise the scripts for anger and joy and the related scripts about social interactions that evoke anger and joy (mean and nice interactions, respectively). Besides outlining how the scripts for these basic emotions develop, we will suggest how development spawns new subordinate-category emotions that are variants and combinations of the original set of basic emotions. Barrett and Campos (1987), Izard and Malatesta (1987), and Leventhal and Scherer (1987) have pointed the general direction for some of these ideas. What we have added is the apparatus of skill theory for analysing and predicting emotional development, an apparatus that has been tested in extensive research on many different kinds of skills at diverse ages.

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Skill theory portrays developmental sequences at three different degrees

of detail, each tested in extensive empirical research. Successive tiers of

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skills characterise the broad sweep of emotional development. Developmental levels within each tier capture the middle range of change. The detailed micro-development of skills is described by transformation rules for skill acquisition. Our description will focus on tiers and levels.

Developmental Tiers: The Broad Sweep of Development The components of the emotion process are present in rudimentary form in early infancy. Primitive species-specificaction tendencies for the basic and superordinate emotions shape development from the start. Gradually, these action tendencies lead the child to construct complex action scripts that include key components of the emotional action tendencies. Progress through a long series of developmental levels, taking many years, is necessary for children to move from the primitive action tendencies of early infancy to the emotion scripts that adults understand and use. Skills at the later levels are built upon the more primitive skills from the earlier levels, which do not disappear but become components of the later skills. In broad sweep, the levels are grouped mto four developmental tiers, which are associated approximately with particular age periods. Each tier is characterised by a different type of skill unit-reflexes, sensorimotor actions, representations, and abstractions, respectively, as shown in Table 3. Skills at each tier are control structures for variations in the respective unit, which subsumes and organises skills from the prior tier, as well as earlier tiers. Five-month-olds, for example, control variations in sensorimotor actions, which include and organise variations in reflex components. Three-year-olds control variations in representations, which include and organise variations in sensorimotor-action components, which in turn include and organise variations in reflex components. The skill units are those structures that control a cluster of behaviours including actions, perceptions, feelings, and thoughts. Researchers sometimes use the terms “representation” and “abstraction” to refer to internal, “merely” cognitive processes, which they contrast with action or emotion. It is our contention that such a view distorts the reality of behaviour and development. Just like a script, a representational or abstract skill refers not only to what people understand but to what they do and feel. A representational skill, for example, develops from and controls sensorimotor actions, which include movements, perceptions, and feelings. When a five-year-old girl falls down and hurts herself, the pain, tears, cries for help, attempts to fix injuries, and associated behaviours are controlled through her representational skills. Those representations subsume not

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only talking about injury, pain, and sadness but also feeling and acting upon injury, pain, and sadness. There is no sharp division of representation from action and feeling. For specialised purposes, researchers can sometimes separate them, but in the development of real people they go together. During the first tier, which develops mostly in the first four months of life, babies gradually form the basic components of sensorimotor action, which include movement, perception, and feeling. The reflex skills of this tier begin with innate species-specific action components, conventionally called reflexes (Izard & Malatesta, 1987; Piaget, 1936/1952). These are not the involuntary, automatic responses that are also called reflexes, such as the eyeblink and knee jerk. Instead, they are early, primitive, voluntary responses that the infant gradually establishes control over and combines in more complex skills, as described by Fischer and Hogan (1989). Examples are closing the hand around an object that touches the palm or focusing the eyes on an object that is in front of the face. Such early reflex skills are severely limited in scope and adaptability, as evidenced by the effects of posture. In the tonic neck reflex, for example, the positions of the infant’s torso and arms fall into what looks like a fencing posture, which limits looking to one side of the visual field. Similarly, emotion reflex skills such as anger and joy produce emotional behaviours in partial form, limited in scope and adaptability. By one month, for example, most but not all components of the anger facial expression are present, and the so-called “infant social smile” has begun to occur by two months (Campos et al., 1983; Emde, Gaensbauer, & Harmon, 1976; Izard & Malatesta, 1987). During these first few months, the infant gradually differentiates and coordinates many of the components of emotional reactions. For the basic emotion of anger, for example, babies are developing not only facial expressions of anger but also hitting, clenching, staring, looking away, vocalising protest, and becoming tense. These components are not fully co-ordinated into an anger action script until the start of the next tier, at about four months. In the second tier, the infant controls sensorimotor actions built from co-ordinating and differentiating reflexes. As a result of this developmental process, infants between four months and two years control broad, flexible actions that operate relatively independently of many of the limits of early infancy, such as postural constraints. For instance, with looking, babies can skilfully turn their heads from side to side and visually follow a ball that is moving irregularly in front of them, all the while adjusting eye movements, head movements, and posture to keep the ball in view. They are not prevented from looking by particular postures or by minor changes in movements of the ball. For basic emotions, we hypothesise, infants of about four months exhibit

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18-20 yrs

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’Plain capital letters designate reflex sets; bold capital letters designate sensorimotor sets; italic capital letters designate representational sets, and script capital letters designate abstract sets. Multiple subscripts designate differentiated components of a set; whenever there is a horizontal arFow, two or more subsets exist by definition, even when they are not expressly shown. Long straight lines and arrows designate a relation between sets or systems. Brackets designate a single skill. See Fischer (1980) for elaboration. bReflex structures continue at higher levels, as do sensorimotor and representational structures, but the formulas become so complex that they have been omitted. For example, to fill in the sensorimotor structures in the representational tier, simply replace each representational set with the sensorimotor formula for level S4. ‘These ages are the modal periods for emergence of optimal levels based on research with middle-class American and European children. They may differ across cultures or social groups. Also, the first three levels, Rfl, 2, and 3. should still be considered tentative; data are not yet sufficient to test them.

Abstract mappings

Representational systems Systems of representational systems, which iire single abstract sets

A2

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RP3

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FISCHER, SHAVER, CARNOCHAN TABLE 4 Hypothesised Sensorimotor Script for Infant Anger

Antecedents: Interfcrcnce with Goal-Directed Activity, Discomfo f l

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Something or someone obstructs or interferes with the infant's freedom of movement or goalattainment, or causes discomfort to the infant. Responses: Vigorour Protest, Resistance The infant becomes energised and behaviourally organised to protest or resist the obstruction or pain. The infant looks and sounds angry (e.g. face red, brows furled, voice raised and strident) and may twist, turn away, resist the interference, or hit. The infant focuses on the anger-inducing situation and refuses to be easily calmed or distracted while the interference or pain persists.

Self-Control Procedures: Inhibition

By the end of the first year, the infant may try to inhibit his or her anger.

simple sensorimotor action patterns or scripts like those for anger and joy presented in Tables 4 and 5 . This early development of sensorimotor scripts demonstrates the shaping power of basic emotions. Indeed, for every tier after the first (reflex), an outline of each basic-emotion script develops early, taking the form of a complex cluster of components in a sensorimotor, representational, or abstract skill. According to the emotion-shaping hypothesis, this precocity arises because the emotion action tendencies organise the scripts for the child, allowing him or her to control a cluster of components without having to construct them all de novo.

In the sensorimotor anger script, an infant appraises something as obstructing or interfering with a goal or hurting her. She responds with a cluster of species-specific anger behaviours, including facial expressions, protest, resistance, and intensified goal-directed behaviours. Evidence indicates that most of this cluster, including all the expressive components, are co-ordinated by four months of age (Campos et al., 1983; Lewis, in press; Stenberg, Emde, & Campos, 1983). Similarly, in the joy script smiling and laughing become a co-ordinated part of positive social interaction by four months of age. For example, on seeing a favourite person, such as an older brother, a baby girl will show a full-blown joy responsebecoming excited, smiling, laughing, and reacting positively to play overtures from him. In this way, the cluster of joyful or angry behaviours fills out most of the action script by approximately four months of age. Note, however, that elaborations of the script that require co-ordinating one action cluster with another develop later in the first or second year, as the infant moves to higher levels within the sensorimotor 'tier.

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TABLE 5 Hypothesised Sensorimotor Script for Infant Joy

Antecedents: Desirable Event or Outcome The infant receives or attains something wished or strived for, receives affection or praise.

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Responses: Smiling, Communicating Good Feelings, Positive Mood The infant smiles, laughs, is warm and sociable, communicates good feelings, acts energised and excited, jumps up and down, hugs others. Self-Control Procedures: Not a Salient Issue

Development of representational skills at the third tier begins when sensorimotor actions are co-ordinated to form simple representations based in actions, which emerge at about two years of age. For example, children represent themselves, their mothers, or a doll as carrying out an action, such as grasping, walking, or being angry or happy (Pipp, Fischer, & Jennings, 1987). These first skills in this tier demonstrate how representations include and organise variations in sensorimotor actions: In pretending that a doll is angry, two-year-olds co-ordinate a system for acting angry (making an angry facial expression, hitting, yelling, or similar actions) with a system for manipulating the doll. The result is a control structure for making the doll act angry, a representational skill that organises the child’s actions, perceptions, and feelings into an action script for anger. Most of the evidence concerning the development of emotions in the preschool years involves pretend play or spontaneous language, which are both good indexes of the child’s everyday emotional life. Young children readily become engrossed in play and show a wide range of spontaneous emotions, including laughs, frowns, yelling, hitting, and even crying. Their play typically concerns important themes and emotions from their everyday lives, often to the point that the listener quickly learns about family issues and conflicts (e.g. Watson & Getz, in press). Indeed, young children’s emotional involvement in pretend play makes it the method of choice for psychotherapists working with them (Harter, 1982). The evidence from spontaneous language mostly deals with actions (as well as language) in real-life situations at home. Some studies have analysed actual behaviours at home, and others have examined maternal reports of children’s language and behaviour (Bretherton et al., 1986). The findings of language and pretend play converge on the same conclusions about young children’s emotions. Representational skills organising the basic emotions and the positivehegative dimension emerge near the beginning of this tier, as predicted by the emotion-shaping hypothesis. In spontaneous language in real-life situations at home, two-year-olds

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commonly talk about the basic emotions, using words like happy, love, angry, mad, sad, afraid, and scared, as well as words relating to the positivelnegative superordinate dimension, such as nice, bad, like, and don’t like (Bretherton et al., 1986; Dunn, Bretherton, & Munn, 1987; but see also Bloom & Beckwith, 1989). In pretend play, two-year-olds make dolls or other figures laugh, kiss, hit, cry, run away, and so forth, and often they also state the relevant emotion, as in “Baby mad”. Both sources of evidence show the clusters of actions that capture the essence of the prototypic scripts for basic and superordinate emotions. Examples of 28-months-olds’ utterances for anger and joy show the antecedent and response components of the respective scripts: “Grandma mad. I write on wall”. “I give a hug. Baby be happy” (Bretherton et al., 1986). As we will elaborate later, these scripts become much more complex and specific as the child co-ordinates and differentiates representations at higher levels (Fischer & Elmendorf, 1986; Griffin, in press; Harter, 1986). For instance, one child of six or seven years, talking with a friend about some fights, said, “Sometimes when I hit you and then I want to comfort you, you push me away because you’re still angry” (Bretherton e t al., 1986). The scripts children use for basic emotions are still a long way from the adult scripts in Tables 1 and 2. Representational skills deal with concrete events occumng with specific people or objects, not the generalised social categories used in the adult scripts. Between two and nine years of age, children build skills combining representations in more and more complex ways, but continuing to deal with concrete events, closely tied to immediate experience, as in the statement of the child about fights with a friend. By 10 to 12 years, this development leads to the emergence of abstract skills and the beginning of the fourth tier. As with representational skills, abstract skills are not internal, “merely” cognitive processes. They are control structures that include and organise representational skills, which in turn include and organise sensorimotor actions, and so forth. The abstract control structures allow adolescents and adults to organise their behaviour in terms of concepts such as personality characteristics, social influences, and moral principles. In the adult script for anger, categories such as illegitimacy, insult, and retaliation enter as real components in people’s anger. Children do not behave in terms of these abstract categories (although adults can use the categories to interpret children’s behaviour), but adults truly act in terms of the categories. An adult can become angry because something is illegitimate or insulting rather than because it produces direct harm. For example, a worker may become angry when a coworker is promoted illegimately (not according to standard rules and procedures) but not when a different coworker is promoted legimately, even though in both cases the worker herself is

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passed over for promotion. It is with such abstract control structures that people develop full action scripts for complex, socially constructed emotions such as umae in Japanese culture or resentment in American culture. According to the emotion-shaping hypothesis, 10- to 12-year-old children will develop their first action scripts founded on abstract skills for the basic emotions. These scripts will consist of a cluster of components involving personality and social concepts like’those in Tables 1 and 2 and fitting the prototypic script. They will be evident not only in children’s categories but also in their perceptions and actions. Although we know of no research directly assessing the development of such scripts for the basic emotions, there have been assessments of interactions related to abstract categories such as kindness and responsibility that are relevant to socially constructed emotions. Kindness is related to positive emotions like joy because it concerns making other people happy (Lamborn, Fischer, & Pipp, 1990), and responsibility is related to the emotion of guilt because people are responsible for righting wrongs of which they are guilty (Fischer, Hand, & Russell, 1984). Before approximately 10 years, children understand kindness in terms of concrete instances, such as sharing lunch with someone who has none or fixing a person’s broken watch. With the development of abstract skills at 10 to 12 years, these concrete instances are co-ordinated into a control structure centered on an abstract concept of kindness, such as caring for people by helping them when they are in need. Research on interpersonal understanding indicates that children begin at this age to perceive and discuss deeply hidden emotions, such as repressed anger that people are not aware of in themselves (Fischer & Pipp, 1984a; Selman, 1980).

Developmental Levels: Growing Complexity of Emotions within Each Tier The tiers charactense the broad sweep of development of emotional skills. Within each tier, development proceeds through a series of four developmental levels, beginning with the simplest form of skill for that tier and building to more and more complex forms. At any specific age, children’s skills are limited by an upper bound on the complexity of skills they can produce and control. That limit, called the child’s optimal level, is determined by assessing the child’s skills under conditions that support the best possible performance. The ages for levels in Table 3 indicate when American and European middle-class children have shown emergence of each optimal level according to empirical research. Skill Analysis and Methods for Predicting a Sequence. The 13 developmental levels in Table 3 have been used successfully to predict develop-

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mental sequences in several dozen empirical studies of various kinds of skills, including emotion skills. According to our theory, they can similarly be used to predict developmental sequences for any component of emotions. What is required is (a) specification of task(s) and assessment mntext(s), (b) a skill analysis of what children must control for each task in the context, and (c) relation of the skill analysis to the skill structures of tiers and levels to predict the sequence. To illustrate this procedure, we will describe a developmental sequence of emotionally organised social interactions that we predicted and tested in several studies: The development of mean and nice social interactions in a pretend play situation with dolls (Fischer & Pipp, 1984a; Hand & Fischer, 1989; Rotenberg, 1988). We chose play because of the ease with which children became emotionally involved and displayed a wide range of emotional behaviours. The dolls were named after the child and friends or siblings chosen by the child. We chose the categories mean and nice because they are prominent categories for children and are closely tied to emotions such as anger and joy in social interaction. They also embody the superordinate emotional split between positive and negative. To assess understanding of nice and mean interactions, we used several different assessment conditions and tasks (a design feature that is crucial for capturing the normal vanation in skill level children demonstrate in real-life behaviour). In the high-support conditions designed to pull for children’s optimal levels, an experimenter presented the child with a story similar to the examples in the right-hand column of Table 6, using realistic cardboard dolls that were easy to manipulate and that stood easily on their own. The child was then asked to act out a.similar story. At least one such story was used to assess each level. The stones were generally designed to capture the children’s prototypes for nice and mean interactions. In several spontaneous conditions, children were asked to make up their own stones about nice and mean interactions. In all conditions children performed stories instead of just telling them. Many stories, especially early in the sequence in Table 6, could be performed with little or no verbal explanation. Children were videotaped so that both their behaviours and their verbal explanations could be coded. Across several studies, more than 200 children and adolescents between 2 and 20 years of age were assessed. The predicted developmental sequence in Tabk 6 was tested in each individual person through a scalogram procedure. Statistical tests strongly supported the sequence, with nearly all children fitting predictions. According to the skill analysis, each task required the control of one or more distinct social-emotional categories in the dolls’ behaviour, with a category comprising a cluster of related actions focusing on meadangry behaviour or nicehappy behaviour. In terms of the emotion process model

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TABLE 6 A Developmental Sequence of Skills for Mean and Nice Social Interactions

Level

Step

Skill

1

Active agent: A penon performs at least one behaviour fitting a socialinteraction category of mean or nice. Behavioural category: A penon performs at least two behavioun fitting a category of mean or nice.

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Rpl: Single Representational Skills

2

3

Rp2: Representational Mappings

Shifring behavioural categories: One penon performs at least two behaviours fitting the category nice, as in Step 2, and then a second person performs at least two behaviours fitting the category mean

4a ’

Combination of opposite categories in a single person: One person performs concurrent behaviours fitting two categories, such as nice and mean.

4b’

One-dimensional social influence: The mean behaviours of one person produce reciprocal mean behaviours in a second person. The same contingency can occur for nice behavioun. One-dimensionalsocial influence with three people behaving in similar ways: Same as Step 4b, but with three people interacting reciprocally in a mean way (or a nice way). Shifring one-dimensionalsocial influence: The nice behaviours of one person produce reciprocal nice behaviours in a second penon. Then, in a separate story, the mean

5

6

Ekamples in Play

Child makes one doll hit another doll (mean) or give another doll candy (nice).

Child makes one doll act mean to another doll, hitting it and saying, “I don’t like you”. The second doll can be passive. Child makes one doll act nice toa second doll, giving it candy and saying, “Let’s play”. A third doll enters and acts mean to the second doll, hitting it and taking its ball. In both cases, the second doll can be passive. Child makes one doll act both nice and mean to a second doll. saying “Let’s be friends”, giving the second doll candy, and then hitting it and saying, “Since we’re friends, you should give me your ball!” The second doll can be passive throughout. Child makes one doll say mean things and hit another doll, who responds by hitting and expressing dislike for the fint one. The second one’s behaviour is clearly produced by the first one’s behaviour. With three dolls, child makes one tease the others, while a second one hits the others. The third doll rejects both of the fint two because they are mean. With three dolls, child makes one act friendly to a second one, who responds nicely. Then, a third doll hits the second one, who responds meanly.

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Rp2:

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Mappings (cont.)

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Rp4/AI: Single Abstract Skills

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behaviours of a third penon produce reciprocal mean khaviom in the second person. (Or a reciprocal mean interaction am occur first. and then a reciprocal nice interaction.) Onc-dimcnswnal social inpuence with three peopk behaving in opposite wys: The nice behavioun of one person and the mean behaviours of a second person produce reciprocal nice and mean behaviours in a third penon. Two-ditnenswd social influence: Two poopk interact in ways fitting opposite categories. such as that the first one acts both nice and mean and the second one responds with reciprocal behavioun in the same categories.

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Two-dimensionalsocial influence wirh threepeople: Same as Step 8 but with thpe people interacting reciprocally according to opposite categories.

10

Single abstract control strucrure integrating opposite social behaviours: Two interactions involving opposite behavioun (as in Step 8) co-ordinated in terms of an abstract control structure, such as that intentions matter more than actions.

With three dolls, child makes

one act friendly to others, while a second one hits others. The third doll responds nicely to the brst doll and meanly to the second. Child makes one doll initiate friendship with a second doll but in a mean way. The second OM, confused about the dmepancy, declines the friendship because of the meanness. The first then aplogises and makes another friendly gesture, which the second one responds to accordingly. With three dolls, child makes one doll act friendly to a second one. while a third initiates play in a mean way. The second one acts friendly to the first one and rejects the third. pointing out the third's meanness. The third then apologises for being mean, while the first does something new that is mean. The second accepts the third one's apology and rejects the first one. pointing out the change in behaviour. With three characters, child makes one act friendly to a second, while a third initiates play in a mean way. The second character responds to each accordingly, but then learns that the nice one had mean intentions while the mean one had nice intentions.

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TABLE 6 (cont)

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10 (cont.)

A2: Abstract Mappings

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Shifring abstract control structures, each integrating opposite social behaviours: First, two interactions involving opposite behaviours are co-ordinated in terms of one control structure, such as intention (as in Step 10). Then two interactions involving opposite behaviours are explained in terms of a different abstraction, such as responsibility: What matters is whether people take responsibility for the harm they do.

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Control structure relating two abstractions that integrate opposite social behaviours: Two interactions involving opposite behavioun are coordinated in terms of a control structure relating two abstractions, such as intention and responsibility: People who have a deceitful intention can be forgiven if they take responsibility in a way that undoes the deceit.

The second character then changes his or her behaviour to each t o match their intentions and explains that he or she cares more about people's intentions than their actions. First, child performs a story like Step 10. Then child shifts to a different story, as follows: With three characters, child makes two of them act mean to a third. The first one takes responsibility for her behaviour by admitting blame and accepting the consequences of her action. The second one takes no such responsibility. The third one forgives the one who took responsibility and refuses to forgive the one who did not, because. she says, she cares about whether people take responsibility for the harm they do. With three characters, child makes two of them act nice on the surface to a third, both with the intention of deceiving her into doing their homework. When the deceit is discovered by the third one, the first one takes responsibility for her deceit by admitting her intention and re-establishing her honesty. But the second one does not show such responsibility. The third character forgives the first one, but not the second, because she cares about whether people take responsibility for their deceitful intention and undo the deceit.

Note: Portions of this table are adapted with permission from Fischer & Pipp (1984a). 'Steps 4a and 4b develop at approximately the same time.

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in Fig. 1, the levels developed toward more complex appraisals and action tendencies and usually more socially adaptive forms of anger. For the first level assessed, the child had to make the doll carry out actions fitting a category of either mean or nice. The later levels entailed relating various instances of mean and nice categories to each other in interactions among dolls. The complete sequence included multiple steps for each level, as shown in Table 6. These steps were predicted via both levels and microdevelopmental transformation rules (which will be explained later). The general analysis of the main step at each level will be presented in the exposition of the levels. A detailed description of the skill analysis for the entire sequence is available on request from the authors. Four Levels of Representational Skills. Development proceeds through four levels of control structures within each tier. Table 3 presents the formulas defining the structures for all levels. The explication of the levels will concentrate especially on the representational tier and provide briefer descriptions of levels in the other tiers. Development of control structures moves from single representational skills to mappings of two or more representational skills, then to systems co-ordinating several mappings, and finally to systems co-ordinating several systems. This last level produces a new type of control structure, an abstract skill, which begins the next tier. For every tier, a similar series of levels occurs, as shown in Table 3. In single representations, which first develop between 18 and 24 months, children initially make a doll carry out a single action tied to an emotion, 0, such as a mean or angry action of hitting someone, or a nice action of hugging someone or sharing food (Step 1in Table 6). Within a few months of the emergence of these simple emotion skills, children cluster two or more actions into a behavioural category for mean or nice, OM or ON, respectively (Step 2). (Subscripts identify the specific category-Mean or Nice.) For example, in a category for mean, they make a doll hit another doll, take away its toy, and say, “I don’t like you!” It is at this level that children also produce simple prototypic clusters of actions fitting the simplest scripts for the basic emotions, as in “Grandma mad. I write on wall” or “I give a hug. Baby be happy”. In the terms of Table 6, these scripts comprise behavioural categories for anger, OA, and joy, O,, which are closely related to the scripts for mean and nice. Notice that a single categorykript can include the actions of two people. At higher levels these people’s actions will be differentiated into separate roles, with a richer definition of the properties of each role (Pipp et al., 1987). In mappings, which emerge at approximately four years of age, children co-ordinate two behavioural categories into a role relation. At Step 4b, one

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person is mean to another, who is mean in return because of the first one’s meanness, [OM- PM]. The causal connection is crucial in that it indicates the relation between the two people’s behaviours, marked by the horizontal line in the skill formula. At a much earlier age, children can make all people be mean to each other, but without any reciprocity or other specified relation between the people’s behaviours. Mappings thus produce a more sophisticated appraisal of the significance of mean behaviour and a more differentiated response. In terms of the script for anger, children divide it into two concrete roles, where one person becomes angry because of something another one did, [OM-PA](Fabes, Eisenberg, McCormick, & Wilson, 1988; Trabasso, Stein, & Johnson, 1981). Both people act in the script in relation to each other, showing multiple relevant behaviours fitting their roles. Children also control other simple mappings concerning emotions, such as that a person’s concrete intention relates to his actions. The emotional appraisal is affected by this mapping. For example, if someone is trying to be helpful and accidentally hurts another, then he is not truly mean and his behaviour does not warrant anger (Fischer & Elmendorf, 1986). In another type of mapping, one person’s behaviour simultaneously fits two opposing categories, such as nice and mean, [ON-O M ] (Step 4a). or happy and sad, [OH-OsJ (Fischer & Pipp, 1984a; Hand, 1982). In the same way, any behaviour that requires the co-ordination of several emotion categories in a simple relation can develop at this level, so long as its development is supported by the child’s environment. With the development of systems at approximately six years, children can co-ordinate several mappings in a single skill. These systems produce complex social-emotional scripts for interactions among concrete people and events, with dramatic growth in the complexity of emotion appraisals and responses in the scripts. At Step 8 in Table 6, children integrate mean and nice behaviours in two people interacting reciprocally, [OM.N c-JpM.N]. One person may say he would like to be friends with the second, while at the same time he hits the second one on the arm. The second responds with a mean behaviour (rejection of the friendship bid) and a simultaneous nice one (statement that he would like to be friends if the other person would act nice). In general, as children extend and consolidate skills at this level, they come to recognise many of the complexities of emotions in social interactions, such as that people often experience simultaneous conflicting emotions (Donaldson & Westerman, 1986; Fischer & Pipp, 1984a; Harter & Buddin, 1987; Wiggers & van Lieshout, 1985) and that they can control their own emotional reactions not only by changing the emotion-arousing situation but also by changing their own interpretation of the situation (Band & Weisz, 1988). At the fourth level, which emerges at 10 to 12 years, two or more such

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concrete systems are co-ordinated to form a single abstract skill, producing a new control structure concerning the general nature of events, people, or objects. The control structure for Step 10 grows from a comparison of two social interactions, both concerning simultaneous mean and nice actions:

The comparison focuses on the intention behind the actions-intentions matter more than actions-which is simultaneously a co-ordination of the two concrete interactions and a single abstraction, [ al].Within this control structure, it is better to have a nice intention even though the accompanying action was mean than to have a nice action hiding a mean intention. Research shows that similar emotion-related abstract skills involving kindness and responsibility develop at about this age (Fischer & Lamborn, 1989).

LeveLF in Other Tiers. With single abstract skills the person has entered a new tier, with a new type of control structure. One result is a new type of emotion script, an adult-like script made up of general personality and social concepts rather than concrete behavioural categories. This script develops through four levels for the co-ordination of abstract skills, as shown in Table 3. In the sequence for mean and nice, Step 12 shows an example of the co-ordination of two categories in a mapping to specify the form of guilt, [ ?tl- VR]: A person’s deceitful intention implies that he or she must take responsibility for the consequences of his or her deceit in such a way as to undo it. Later levels bring even more sophisticated skills, such as a system specifymg how different types of intention imply different types of responsibility (Fischer, Hand, & Russell, 1984). Here is where late adolescents and young adults build complex emotion scripts like those in Tables 1 and 2. In the anger script in Table 1, concepts such as illegitimate interruption, retaliation, restoration of justice, and redefinition of the situation all require high-level skills. Developing and coordinating such concepts to form this sort of script occurs at later levels within the abstract tier, when the scripts for the most sophisticated subordinate emotions also develop. These advanced scripts are complex differentiations of the first scripts based on abstract skills, which are hypothesised to emerge at about 10 to 12 years. The two tiers of infancy include a similar series of developmental levels (Table 3). which are supported by empirical research (Fischer & Hogan, 1989). Space precludes extensive treatment of these developmental patterns, but a few examples will illustrate how the levels explain early development.

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The first few months of life are often vaguely portrayed as a time when the infant cannot do very much, but is somehow moving toward getting his/ her actions together. The levels of the reflex tier go beyond these vague descriptions to provide a model of development in the first four months. The first co-ordinations of reflexes into mappings appear at about one and a half to two months of age, when infants begin to look at their mothers’ eyes when they hear her voice (Haith, Bergman, & Moore, 1977) or smile to the sight of her face (Kaye & Fogel, 1980; Legerstee, Pomerleau, Malcuit, & Feider, 1987). By two and a half to three months, babies can control reflex systems, co-ordinating a number of behaviours. For example, in what is often called a greeting response, infants listen to their mother’s voice, look at her face, smile at her, and coo to her (Papousek & Papousek, 1979). Development in the sensorimotor tier moves through four additional levels. The single actions appearing at about four months of age comprise what might be called sensorimotor categories, clusters of behaviours fitting categories such as looking at a moving ball, being angry at having one’s arm held still, being joyful at seeing one’s older brother, or being distressed at one’s mother abruptly breaking off a positive social interaction (Case et al., 1988, Study 2; Campos et al., 1983). At about eight months, a wide array of sensorimotor mappings develop, in which infants co-ordinate a few sensorimotor actions in a single mapping. For anger, infants show advances in the ways they can resist-trying to push away the hand of someone interfering with their actions or to grab back a cookie that has been taken away (Campos et al., 1983). They show a spurt in distress at being separated from their mother, as if they are trying to make her come back (Emde et al., 1976). They also begin to consistently use thumbsucking to quiet themselves, which was much more haphazard at earlier ages (Fogel & Thelen, 1987). And they use emotional information from their caregivers’ facial and vocal expressions to evaluate novel people or objects-a phenomenon called social referencing (Campos et aI., 1983). With the emergence of sensorimotor systems at about 12 to 13 months, infants show further major advances such as pretending to be sad, mad, or happy (Kuaynski, Zahn-Waxler, & Radke-Yarrow, 1987; Watson & Fixher, 1977), beginning to use words for basic and superordinate emotions, and we hypothesise, using emotional information and expression to do sensorimotor negotiation with the mother. Finally, at about two years, children construct single representational skills by co-ordinating sensorimotor systems into higher-order systems. Subordinate Emotions. Our focus has been primarily on basic and superordinate emotions. The development of subordinate emotions requires both higher developmental levels and more specific social experiences than the development of basic or superordinate emotions, as we have argued elsewhere (Fischer et al., 1988). Indeed, subordinate emotions are

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predicted to develop at later levels in every tier because they require more complex scripts. They always entail the addition of something to basic emotion scripts: a specific intensity (as in bliss and contentment, annoyance and fury); an emotion about an emotion or a combination of emotions (jealousy, resentment); a particular set of expectations, life situations, or social roles (loneliness, worry, jealousy); or a set of cultural definitions (amae in Japan, Morsbach & Tyler, 1986;or sungkan in Java, Geertz, 1974). Some emotions that belong at the subordinate layer according to our research (Fig. 2) have been proposed as basic emotions by other researchers-for example, shame, guilt, contempt , and/or pride (Izard, 1977;Izard & Malatesta, 1987;Scheff, in press). These categories do seem to develop during infancy, like the basic emotions. But according to both our analysis and the research evidence, they develop late in infancy, at the higher sensorimotor levels (Case et al., 1988,Study 1; Kagan, 1987;Lewis, in press; Stipek, 1983), and they are elaborated during the preschool years (Griffin, 1988;Zahn-Waxler, Kochanska, Krupnick, & McKnew, 1990).

Transformation Rules: Microdevelopment of Emotions. The multiple steps per level for mean and nice interactions shown in Table 6 involve the finest grain of developmental change. The steps are predicted by means of a small set of transformation rules specifying how skills can be co-ordinated and differentiated within a level. The rules can be used to predict any number of steps per level, with the exact number varying as a function of context, domain, person, measurement sensitivity, and other factors. They thus provide a means for predicting detailed developmental sequences for various aspects of emotions, as with the scripts for nice and mean interaction. A full explication of the transformations is provided in Fischer (1980). Emotional Splitting in the Mean/Nice Sequence The research on mean and nice interactions not only demonstrates the levels and steps of emotional development but also illustrates how emotional splitting develops. The fundamental human proclivity to split positive and negative experiences is evident in both the meadnice sequence and the errors or distortions children make when they simplify meadnice tasks. In many different ways, children split people and interactions into positive and negative. The meadnice sequence (Table 6) starts off with children automatically splitting mean and nice. At the early steps, each person acts either mean or nice, not both at the same time. Gradually, children become able to respond to some things in the real world as simultaneously positive and

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negative, but even then they show a strong tendency to split in other situations. The first progress toward overcoming the splitting comes with Step 4a, where one person is mean and nice simultaneously. When faced with an interaction between two people, however, children return to splitting, as in Step 4b, where two people act mean to each other, or they both act nice. The consideration of two people instead of one thus leads to the disappearance of positivehegative integration. In preschool children’s play and talk, such emotional splitting seems to be much more common than the positivehegative integration of Step 4a (Donaldson & Westerman, 1986; Fischer & Pipp, 1984a; Hand, 1982; Hams, 1985; Harter & Buddin, 1987). Gradually, at higher steps, children extend the integration of mean and nice behaviours. First, at Step 7 one person shows simultaneous mean and nice behaviours while the other people remain split-one mean and the other nice. Then at Steps 8 and beyond, two or three people show simultaneous mean and nice behaviours reciprocally with each other. Even at the highest steps, however, the shaping effects of positive and negative remain evident. The action scripts at Steps 10 to 12 emphasise whether the person’s behaviour is essentially good (based on a positive intention) or essentially bad (based on a negative intention). The pervasiveness of positivehegative splitting is also evident when children are faced with a story too hard for them. In our research, children routinely simplify stones integrating mean and nice behaviours by dividing them into two separate stones, one about being mean and one about being nice (Hand, 1982). With the story at Step 8, which concerns two people acting simultaneously mean and nice to each other, five- to seven-year-olds commonly simplified the story by splitting it along emotional grounds into two separate stones. First, they told a story about a mean reciprocal interaction (like Step 4b), and then they shifted to a second story about a nice reciprocal interaction (a different version of Step 4b). In some cases, the children even indicated that the two interactions were separated in time, despite their simultaneity in the original modelled story. The powerful organising effects of emotions lead to many such instances of splitting (Fischer & Pipp, 1984a; Harter & Buddin, 1987). We hypothesise that this kind of emotion-based simplification will be evident in the errors or distortions made by people of all ages when they are faced with tasks that are too difficult for them or when they are experiencing strong emotions. In a state of anger, for example, social understanding is likely to be dominated by the anger action tendency. As a result, an angry person will have difficulty seeing the anger-inducing person as both positive and negative. Instead, anger will bias the person’s interpretation toward elaboration of the negative-the other person’s offensiveness and interference with one’s goals.

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Natural Variations in Developmental Level and their Implications for Research Contrary to common assumptions about development, people do not perform at a single developmental level but instead show variations in level (Biggs & Collis, 1982; Fischer, 1980; Flavell, 1982; Fogel & Thelen, 1987)-what Piaget (1941) called decalage. These variations occur with changes in task, domain, or emotional state and also from moment to moment within a single context, as shown with research using scales Like the one for mean and nice. Skill theory incorporates these variations into its explanations of development and thus differs sharply from the theories of Piaget and most neo-Piagetians. People’s skill or competence is not fixed at a particular step on a developmental scale but varies systematically across a wide range. This principle applies to emotional as well as cognitive development. Researchers must deal with these variations or they will misrepresent emotional development. For three types of variations, there has been sufficient research to provide guidelines for future investigation: task effects, optimal level, and functional level. Detailed explications are available in several articles (Fischer & Farrar, 1987; Fischer & Hogan, 1989; Fischer & Pipp, 1984b). First, the particular tusk helps to organize the person’s skill. When the task is changed, the skill is changed. Predicting emotional development requires first specifying a task and analysing how that task is done. Starting with this specification and analysis, a researcher can use the concepts and methods of skill theory to predict both sequences of development and patterns of variation. Developmental order is greatest when task is held constant, or as nearly constant as possible. In the meadnice sequence, all tasks in the scale used the same set of materials, the same basic procedures, and similar story content. When tasks vary, children must generalise their skills across those tasks; as a result there is much less developmental order and much more variability. Research on emotional development must therefore deal with task effects, or it is doomed to failure. Across tasks, the variability in children’s skills is limited by their optimal level, the upper bound on the complexity of skills that was discussed earlier. The optimal level sets an upper limit on how high in any developmental sequence a child’s performance can go. Even under the best testing conditions, performance does not go beyond the optimal level. For example, instruction in how to perform a task is ineffective for tasks beyond the optimal level (Fischer & Pipp, 1984b; Moshman & Franks, 1986; O’Brien & Overton, 1982; Rotenberg, 1988). Conditions that help to optimise performance include practice, familiarity of materials, clear definition of task demands, and provision of cues that prime recall of key task compo-

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nents. The modelling procedure in the meadnice studies (having an experimenter demonstrate a story), when combined with practice, exemplifies an optimal level condition. Conditions that assess optimal level tend to produce especially powerful developmental patterns because they minimise level variations from other sources. Consequently, when the research goal is documentation of developmental sequences, it is wise to use optimal or near-optimal assessment conditions. In non-optimal contexts, such as those used in most developmental studies, the level that people show drops sharply. This lower level of performance is called the individual’s functional level for that context. In the meadnice studies, for instance, seven-year-olds typically showed an optimal level of Step 8 in Table 6. But when they made up their own stones without the support of a model or memory prompt, their performance plummeted on the average to Step 4b (Hand & Fischer, 1989; Rotenberg, 1988). This gap was robust: Conditions that might be expected to reduce it, such as practice and instruction, had no such effect. Also, the gap appears to become even larger as children grow older. Most studies of emotional development appear to have assessed functional rather than optimal level and thus to have underestimated children’s emotional and cognitive maturity. By hypothesis, emotions also contribute to variations in developmental level. If the action tendency of an emotion organises behaviour in a certain way, then it should produce higher developmental levels for tasks where that organisation fits and lower levels where that organisation interferes. Anger, for instance, facilitates resistance and attack and may produce higher developmental levels on tasks that demand those behaviours. At the same time it interferes with co-operation and sharing and may produce lower levels on tasks requiring those behaviours. In this way, specific emotions such as anger may have potent effects on developmental level.

CONCLUSION: THE COMPLEXITIES OF ADULT EMOTION SCRIPTS Most of our argument thus far has focused on the basic and superordinate emotions in infancy and childhood. This focus is important €or understanding how emotions develop and how they shape development, but it should not be taken to mean that emotions are simple phenomena. There are simple principles underlying them, we believe, but emotions and emotional experiences can be remarkably complex, especially in adults. Much of the literature on emotions concentrates on the complexities of adult emotions (de Rivera, 1986; Harrt, 1986; Roseman, 1984; Scherer, 1988). It is hoped that the explanation of emotion scripts at the highest developmental levels has provided some sense of how that complexity and subtlety develop.

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Subordinate-category emotions (the bottom layer in Fig. 2) can become complex and subtle, showing wide differences across cultures and individuals (Fischer et al., 1988),but the categories named by a culture provide only part of the picture. The emotion lexicon runs out of words for the most complex emotional experiences. Adults with high-level abstract skills and extensive sociaYemotiona1 experience can become immersed in idiosyncratic emotion scripts that can be captured only by detailed explanation-or poetry. These explanations include multiple emotions about emotions and subtle refinements of the appraisal process. Emotions during adulthood become increasingly extended over time, drawing together in the appraisal process events from long in the past and speculations about the future. Also, adults can sustain their emotional reactions through systems relating numerous components in a single skill: They can keep the emotion alive through an internal rumination. Ahab, in Moby Dick,sustained his rage at the whale throughout months and years of searching. Consider a 30-year-old man working for the same business for several years. His job has been important to him and has helped to shape his professional identity as a mental health worker. Like most people, he has a long history of both rewards and disappointments in his job. He has enjoyed his work and received praise and promotion for his success. He respects his employer and feels gratitude for the positive effects his job has had on his career. One disappointment has been that he has felt slighted in the assignment of office space. In his mind, this issue has become representative of the organisation’s esteem for the individual worker. Yet he has suppressed any complaints about his office assignment, because the organisation is not wealthy and no one has a luxurious office, not even the boss. Also, there are no clear rules for determining seniority or rank so as to decide simply who merits which office. Because of his overall satisfaction with his job he has tried to ignore this problem. When the organisation moved to another building, where offices had to be re-assigned, his old feelings of being undervalued and mistreated were reactivated. He found himself feeling resentment toward the boss and the organisation and envy toward workers with better offices. At times he told himself that his feelings were not justified. At other times, he felt that he could not leave the issue unresolved because his negative emotions were interfering with his relationships with his colleagues and the organisation. In this situation, it is hard to isolate a unitary emotion experience that can be given a single name from the emotion lexicon. Within the experience are elements of all five of the basic-emotion families in Fig. 2. The use of subordinate emotion categories does not reduce the number of emotions. Included are elements of resentment, gratitude, envy, guilt, rage, and wariness, among others. These different components of the complete

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emotion experience are sometimes felt in tandem and sometimes in succession. At any one moment a given piece of the mixture may be ascendantthe individual focuses on the rage, or the resentment, or the gratitude. But always the countervailing feelings are there, complicating any simple emotional description. The developmental pathway to this complex state of mind is a 30-year journey through innumerable steps moving from sensorimotor emotions in early infancy to emotion scripts for concrete events and people in childhood and eventually to scripts based on general personality and social categories in adulthood. Like all skills, emotions thus move from the simplicitly of immaturity to a complexity in adulthood' that can be understood only through developmental explication. Manuscript received 18 April 1989 Revised manuscript received 9 January 1990

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