Impact of Emotions on Child Cognitive Processing

Impact of Emotions on Child Cognitive Processing Using research findings, critically discuss the impact emotions can have on children’s cognitive processing, social behaviour, and physical health. There are different impact emotions have on children’s cognitive processing, their social behaviour and how it affects children’s physical health. The critical discussion of this topic essay, will be centred on the events relating to children in grief for the passing of a parent, maltreated children, and also how parenting style can affect the emotional characteristics that are displayed by the children and from this angle relating it with two great influence on children cognitive psychologist. It is essential to recognise the factual significance of emotions before getting into the other impacts, emotions are part of everyday distinction, it is a complex feelings that range between happiness and sadness, which are also the feelings that follows most aspects of other emotional feelings (Barnes, 1995). But why must children’s emotion have any impact on their life’s and others? Why must it affect individual cognitive processing? Does it always have to affect positively or negatively on the self and others and are the emotions expressed acceptable? Piaget coined the stages of cognitive development on how children’s knowledge of the world grows and improves with age. According to Piaget, schema are in different categories of both sensory and physical activities, as children mature in age the developmental schema enables them to categorize and compare different items, this process improves over time, the outline has its strengths and limitations, it serves to devise how we remember. Through this process children can therefore change their thoughts into emotional feelings to their primary care provider. The scheme also enables sorting of items in the memory and through this process, we are then able to make decisions and hold natural processes on different environmental characteristics, although the schemata have its advantages but it is also determined by the quantity of information it can hold. It is obvious that Piaget considered environmental factors that sometimes changes how we recollect, in sight of this he came up with the adaptation-organization, which is the method that schema changes through when something happened in a child’s life. The stage of adaptation organisation is sensitive to ambiguity because he further complicated this stage by saying that children are not influenced by any external factors, but cognitive development is totally innate. Although Piaget’s theory had a great influence on modern developmental psychology, but to some extent it underestimated the full potential of children and what they are capable of doing. (Bee Boyd, 2010). Some emotions that are expressed strongly can be satisfactory depending on the circumstances for example, when a child loses a parent, the notions of loss naturally will cause an impingement on the child mental state, it sometimes have an impingement on their physical health and possibly affect how they socialize with other youngsters, but if this emotion are repressed it could manifest in different shapes, granting to the child bereavement case study conducted out by Worden (1996). There was a 6 years old girl who began to experience nightmares and high level of anxiety when her mother was diagnosed with cancer and even after the death of her mother the symptoms persisted, but her 3 years old brother and 13 years old sister did not experience such anxiety both before and after the death of their mother. In that respect are different views on when children gain the cognitive functions of grieve, according to Wolfenstein children develop the content to mourn or grieve from adolescence , while Bowlby suggested that children as young as 6months acquire the feelings as an adult. (Barnes, 1995). The case study shows individual differences in how the cognition reacts to different emotional issues and also support Bowlby’s suggestion that children as young as 6months acquire the feelings to grieve the same manner as an adult. (Parrott, 2001). Vygotsky’s theory is different from Piaget’s, Vygotsky refers to the cognitive process from social interaction aspect, according to him children learn from adult and other people that has a direct contact with them and through the relationship formed with other people they learn to experience how to socialize with other people. Through the guidance that children received from their parents they develop different skills and their zone of proximal development increases from the support and care received from their parents in order to acquire emotional stability, this is one major role out of many others, therefore the loss of that particular figure in a child’s developmental stage due to the sudden change of death will have its consequences on the child’s response in their cognitive development. Some strength of this theory is formed in the cognitive behavioural processes of a childs emotions and they are displayed through attention, retention, reproduction and motivation, he sees children talking to themselves has a way of learning to regulate both their emotions and behaviour and also it is a way of children developing problem solving skills. It is somehow hard to criticize this theory because it was not completed before Vygotsky died. (Bee Boyd, 2010). Male and female emotions operate with a different internal model, children mostly find it difficult to hide their emotions, for instance, when they are angry, they look miserable and through their facial expressions parent or the child’s caregiver can easily know that something is wrong and it is feasibly possible to describe what form of emotions that are displayed. But why can’t we always mask our emotions without other peoples awareness? Research findings has shown that the construction of emotions is universally and culturally similar, it is hard to separate emotions and cognition because the two processing influence each other, making it hard to isolate events of pure emotion and pure knowledge. Emotions alert individuals to be mindful of some very significant characteristics of the environment and provide directions for cognitive processing with the display of behaviour in certain ways that is conformed to the nature. (Lemerise Arsenio, 2000) On that point are some emotions related to shame and guilty conscience due to maltreatment from the health care provider, this feeling comes up due to distress to personal transgression. Guilty feelings in children could be affiliated with some specific behaviour this mostly is a shape of negative evaluation of emotional experience that are acquired from guilt, the individual will not realize that the problem is from themselves instead attention is primarily centred on what has taken place or what did not take place, it is severely important to look at the state of mind of a caregiver because it will deliver a substantial impact on the psychological evolution of the small fry. (Bee Boyd, 2010) The cognitive function of a child’s brain that deals with grieve is the Ego, it is the unconscious part that focus on the realness of the effect of a loss of a child’s parent. Kids as young as five years are vulnerable because they cannot fully understand the permanency of death, this is ascribable to the fact that their knowledge is not fully evolve in order to link up with the notions of loss (this statement contradicted what Bowlby suggested that children as young as six months can have the same impressions of heartache as an adult). (Worden, 1996) There are individual differences with the ability to understand other people’s emotion, the social development children and their social competence also have an impingement on their emotional knowledge of others. Children empathize with other people in different ways, it involves the consideration of their emotions and relating their feelings with other people’s emotional state, some children have very poor understanding of other people’s emotion, and perhaps the parental style of the caregiver might be accounted for the children’s lack of ability to understand other people’s emotion. (Bee Boyd, 2010). It is important for parents to create a positive impact in their children’s life, according to Samuelson (2012). The positive parental behaviours that are exhibited by the parents would be linked to the children’s attention and working memory and their inhibitory control this therefore means that the parental regulation of emotion would predict children’s executive functioning and there would be a better relationship and sympathy of other people’s emotion after controlling their own emotions. This construct is similar to Bandura’s theory with the Bobo doll experiment the main idea was to show how an aggressive behaviour can be modelled well by children, thus emotional behaviours that are exhibited by the parent of a child will be moulded by the small fry because of such children that is the normal style of behaviour, due to the children’s exposure to that type of emotions. So also some negative expressions of emotion that are exhibited by the parent can be disconcerting to the children, it frequently happens when children have been exposed to both positive and negative emotions in the same shape, this can thus prevent the child’s competency and developing problem solving skills. (Samuelson, Krueger, Wilson, 2012). It has been generally accepted that what determines social and emotional troubles in children are from some sort of temperament disturbance, according to Rutter and Caesar (1991). There are other underlying issues that contribute to behavioural difficulties, some of this behaviour are from language disorder, while others develop from different parenting style. It is important to point out that there is a general assumption that the beginning of problems in children are from their social and emotional development. Although parental attitudes and the distinctive preference for boys and girls emotions that are socially acceptable are deemed through the way children are responded to by their parents, which also would have a strong influence on their emotional behaviour, for example, if boys are taught to be tough and strong and encouraged that aggressive behaviours are masculine type of behaviour they will surely display more of such character and hide their emotions due to learned behav iour, while girls are taught to be gentle and calm so therefore girls are more flexible with how often they get emotional. Children learn through modelling they therefore will imitate the same learned behaviour displayed at home. (Ding Littleton, 2005) The research carried out by Berg-Nielsen et.al (2003). Revealed that there was a low parental involvement for boys in comparison to girls due to this lack of contact given to boys and lack of positive emotions displayed by their fathers when they are angry, by encouraging them to show their emotions and improve their self-awareness in order to enable them to be able to self-regulate their emotions. The reaction from the parent is otherwise due to the expectations from boys are different from girls thus there are riskier for boys to develop emotional behavioural disturbances. However, there are limitations to this research because it does not cut across different cultures. Nevertheless the environment that a child grows up will also have an impact on their emotional behaviour through the way they socially interact with others, for example parent that have a medical history of stress are always angry and depressed. This surely will affect the child’s growth in the appropriate wa y, there is a tendency for the child to develop an emotional imbalance, irritable temperament or mental health problems and possibly unable to regulate own behaviour, due to the type of attachment given to the child by the parents. (Ding Littleton, 2005). In conclusion, there are different theoretical approaches to emotion from the cognitive aspect of the social and behavioural aspect, there are some emotional display of behaviour that can be seen as acceptable, and for example when a child is grieving the loss of a parent. Across different cultures, children display similar emotions that suggests that a child’s cognitive processing have an impact on their emotions which are then exhibited in their behaviour, research findings have also shown that the environmental influences also have an effect on children, developmental stages, but the strongest influences are the type of parenting style, the type of attachment children received during childhood will determine how they deal with and regulate their emotions. And lastly children’s emotions also cause an impact on their health, for instance, if a child is constantly afraid it can lead to acute anxiety problems which mostly therefore becomes a mental health illness. References Barnes, P. (1995). Personal, Social and Emotional Development of children. Oxford: Blackwell. Bee, H., Boyd, D. (2010). The Developing Child (12th ed.). Boston: Pearson Education. Berg-Nielsen, T. S., Vika, A., Dahl, A. A. (2003). 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