Science|ORDER FOUND IN DEVELOPMENT OF EMOTIONS
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By Daniel Goleman
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June 19, 1984
,
Section C, Page
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BABIES, as everyone knows, have intense feelings from the moment of birth. But their early feelings are few, limited to the most primitive such as distress and disgust. Only with the passage of time does the full emotional panoply blossom.
And it grows, one or two feelings at a time, in a lawful, orderly fashion - a progression which scientists are tracking with greater precision than was possible before. For instance, the capacity for joy has been found to precede that for sadness by many months. And years after the development of those two come the capacities for envy and for social confidence.
Among the main practical benefits of this research, the psy chologists say, should be a more realistic standard of emotional growth. Such a standard could act as an antidote to the tendency of some adults - parents and teachers foremost among them - to judge children's emotional reactions by adult standards rather than by a yardstick gauged to their actual stages of maturation. Thus, since humility typically is not part of a child's emotional repertoire until around the age of 5, the seemingly outrageous bragging of a 4-year-old can be seen as, in all likelihood, the most normal of expressions.
The sense of orderly emotional development in human beings has been noted in the impressions of behavioral scientists in the past. And of course psychoanalytic theory discusses aspects of this development in detail. Now it is being observed by another group of researchers, the developmental psychologists, through rigorous scientific experimentation.
Dr. T. Berry Brazelton, a Harvard University researcher and popular author on child development, expressed pleasure in the current direction of investigation.
''It's about time we started looking at emotions more carefully,'' he said. ''Everything we know about a child shows that healthy emotional development is the key to other kinds of growth.''
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