Читать книгу Developmental Psychopathology - Группа авторов - Страница 74

It is generally agreed that there are a number of universal basic emotions expressed in similar ways across all cultures, including joy, fear, anger, surprise, sadness, and disgust. Moreover, these basic emotions are expressed beginning in early infancy. Indeed, infants have the ability to communicate their emotions through smiling, crying, and the use of facial expressions, and these basic expressions are remarkably similar all over the world. Given that infants are fully dependent on their caregivers for survival, crying is believed to be an evolutionarily adaptive way of communicating their needs.

Sometime during the toddler and preschool years, children start to experience new emotions, called self‐conscious emotions, which include embarrassment, pride, shame, guilt, and envy (Reddy, 2005). Self‐conscious emotions depend on children’s newly acquired abilities to recognize and think about themselves in relation to other people and the goals they desire (Lewis, 2007). Unlike basic emotions, which occur in response to events that elicit them, self‐conscious emotions involve a complex combination of cognition and emotion. As their sense of self evolves, their self‐conscious emotions become deeper and more complex.