Emotional Development and the Emergence of Self-Development

Emotional Development and the Emergence of Self-Development

Emotional development refers to the rise of experience, expression, comprehension as well as regulation of emotions starting from birth, growth as modification in these abilities across childhood, adolescence to adulthood. Emotion development happens in line with behavioral development, neural and cognitive, and emerges within a specific cultural set-up.

According to Piaget, kids have a mental structure that forms the subsequent children learning as well as knowledge. Piaget felts that biological maturation, together with the environmental experience, makes children cognitive development to be a continuous process of arranging mental structure. Kids develop a comprehensive of the globe around them then view the differences between the prior knowledge together with what they experience around their environment. Piaget established the theory of cognitive development that concentrated on seeing the alterations within cognitive abilities and processes of children. There are different main concepts to the theory of Piaget, which are Equilibrium, Accommodation, Schema, Adaptation, Assimilation, and four stages of cognitive development.  They were designed to explain the techniques as well as processes that an infant then develops into a child then into a person who is able to reason and think using a hypothesis (Lewis, 2019).

Schema refers to a cognitive structure that arranges knowledge together with anticipation concerning the surroundings (LoBue et al., 2019). However, Piaget view that a schema comprises of both the procedure of gaining knowledge as well as grouping of the knowledge. Whenever experiences happen, the information is utilized to add, change, or modify earlier existing schemas.  For instance, a kid might have a schema concerning animal type like a dog. Cases where a child was with a small dog, and then the kid will have faith that all dogs are small with four legs. Supposing the kid comes across an enormous dog. The kid will comprehend a new idea, update from the previous existing schema to take in this new observation.

Assimilation is the process of adopting brand information in already existing schemas. In the above example, observing a dog for the first time and naming it “a dog” is an example of assimilating the animal into the dog schema of the kid. According to Piaget, all children attempt to balance between assimilation and accommodation that is attained by a technique Piaget calls equilibration.  As kids advance through the cognitive development phases, it is essential to keep a balance between using prior knowledge known as assimilation and altering conduct to account for new learning known as accommodation. Therefore, equilibration enhances to explain the way children may move from one stage of thought to the other. It is essential to note from Piaget’s theory that creating knowledge as well as intelligence, is an inherently active process.

Children move through a series of stages of cognitive development. Every phase relies on the way kids develop a comprehensive of the globe surrounding them; therefore, children try to explore and create a sense of their environment. There are four stages of cognitive development: sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational, and the formal operational stage.

The first stage is sensorimotor, which is from birth to 2 years (Arnett et al., 2020). This stage, infants are concerned on what is immediately in front of them and concentrate on what they are doing and what they can only see, and physical contact with instant surrounding (Moreno and Branco, 2018).

The preoperational stage starts from 2 through age 7. Children of these ages become more symbolically, they advance memory, and imagination, as well as their language, becomes more mature (Holodynski and Seeger, 2019).  Kids begin to acquire through fictitious play, although they struggle logic, constancy together with taking in the view from others. Between 7years to 12 years, we have another stage called concrete operational. The stage is where one starts thinking more codependent, and they begin to be aware of external events.

Nonetheless, during this phase, kids tussle with theoretical concepts and developing ridged thinking (Arnett et al., 2020). Between adolescence and adulthood, there is a final stage called Formal operational. It is the phase where one applies symbols to abstract concepts (Moreno and Branco, 2018). They similarly develop the skill of observing several solutions to problems as well as form a scientific opinion concerning the world.

Strength in the emotional competence area can assist kids and adolescents in coping efficiently in some circumstances, as well as endorsing attributes connected with positive development outcomes, such as emotional self-efficacy, supporting family and peer relationships, and pro-social behavior. Moreover, emotional competencies function as protective influences that diminish the effect of risk factors. The negative emotional experience rises during early adolescence in line with the ability of abstract thinking.  Adolescents usually experience emotional anguish in response to confusing and imagined romantic exchanges.  As the adolescent struggle with rising theoretical as well as complex social problems, they always look for stable peer groups to help in emotional management.

In Piaget’s theory, young people grow cognitively from concrete to formal operation, for them to be capable of dealing with abstract theory, ideas, and concepts. However, it usually takes time for self-confidence to build by these new abilities; therefore, they might make errors in the decision. Therefore, studying through failure as well as success is part of the bottlenecks of learning processes for the adolescent group.

References

Arnett, J., Maynard, A. E., Brownlow, C., Chapin, L., & Machin, T. (2020). Child development as a cultural approach. Pearson Australia.

Holodynski, M., & Seeger, D. (2019). Expressions assign and their significance for emotional development: developmental psychology, 55(9), 1812.

Lewis, M. (2019). The self-conscious emotions and the role of shame in psychopathology. In Handbook of Emotional Development (pp. 311-350). Springer, Cham.

LoBue, V., Pérez-Edgar, K., & Buss, K. A. (Eds.). (2019). Handbook of Emotional Development. Springer.

Moreno, M. R., & Branco, A. U. (2018). Self-development, Human Values, and the Construction of Children’s Trajectories in Educational Contexts. In The Emergence of Self in Educational Contexts (pp. 31-59). Springer, Cham.