Children's identification of embarrassment and disgust in everyday situations: Emotional understanding and the role of social context.

Format:

Book

Thesis/Dissertation

Author/Creator:

Rosen, Aynn Barbara.

Contributor:

Sabini, John, advisor.

Rozin, Paul, 1936- advisor.

University of Pennsylvania.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Clinical psychology.

Developmental psychology.

Social psychology.

0451.

0620.

0622.

Penn dissertations--Psychology.

Psychology--Penn dissertations.

Local Subjects:

Penn dissertations--Psychology.

Psychology--Penn dissertations.

0451.

0620.

0622.

Physical Description:

74 pages

Contained In:

Dissertation Abstracts International 53-07B.

System Details:

Mode of access: World Wide Web.

text file

Summary:

Embarrassment and disgust are presented as examples of complex social emotions and the interaction of affect and cognition in the emergence of emotional understanding. Children's use of adult criteria for labeling embarrassment and disgust in situations, and their recognition of the specific social conditions and subjective correlates of the emotions were investigated through development. Subjects ages 4, 6, 8, 10 and 20 years were asked to make judgements about scenarios depicting prototypic situational components of embarrassment and/or disgust (or neither) in either an audience-present or audience-absent story version. Findings indicated that children identified disgust by age 4, and embarrassment by age 6 in ways similar to adults. With subjects' increasing age, "audience presence" became increasingly necessary, but not sufficient in the attribution of embarrassment in situations depicting embarrassing or disgusting events. Attributions of disgust were not affected by audience condition. Additionally, with increasing age, children increasingly linked subjective and behavioral correlates of the emotional experiences, including social isolation and minimizing public exposure with embarrassment, and nausea with disgust. Overall findings supported a strong relation between public displays of disgust and the subjective experience of embarrassment, and a potential link between embarrassment and disgust as a compound emotional response, already present at age 4 years, and increasingly differentiated with development.

Notes:

Thesis (Ph.D. in Psychology) -- Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, University of Pennsylvania, 1992.

Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 53-07, Section: B, page: 3810.

Supervisors: Paul Rozin; John Sabini.

Local Notes:

School code: 0175.

Access Restriction:

Restricted for use by site license.