Amy Halberstadt | |
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Born | |
Alma mater | Colgate University Johns Hopkins University |
Scientific career | |
Fields | Social and developmental psychology |
Institutions | North Carolina State University |
Amy Gene Halberstadt is an American psychologist specializing in the social development of emotion. She is currently Alumni Distinguished Undergraduate Professor of Psychology at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, North Carolina, and is an editor of the journal Social Development . [1]
She developed questionnaires on emotional expression in the family that are used internationally to address a wide variety of social developmental questions. To date she has authored or co-authored more than forty articles and book chapters and two readers for graduate and undergraduate courses in social psychology. Her research has been presented at national and international conferences including the Society for Research in Child Development, the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, the Association for Psychological Science and the International Society for Research on Emotion.
She has been awarded several research grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and National Science Foundation (NSF) and is currently working on a NSF-funded project examining children's understanding of emotion in the family.
Amy Halberstadt was born on December 28, 1954, in Brooklyn, New York. Her father was an engineer and management consultant and her mother a small businessperson. She grew up in New Hyde Park, New York, attended Colgate University for her BS in 1976 (PBK, 1975) and Johns Hopkins University as a graduate student, where she earned her PhD in 1981 working with Professor Judith Hall. From high school through her early professional life she was also a competitive fencer and fencing coach, placing sixth in women's foil at the 1985 Empire State Games in Buffalo, New York. Halberstadt and her husband Anthony Weston have two children and are active in urban agriculture in Durham, North Carolina.
Halberstadt's work on family emotional expressiveness, begun in her doctoral dissertation under the supervision of Professor Judith Hall, is now widely cited and utilized in research on socialization of emotion and nonverbal communication. She has demonstrated contrasting relationships of family expressiveness to nonverbal skills (sending and decoding of emotional expression) and shown, with various colleagues, that family expressiveness styles influence individuals' expressiveness, emotional experience, and understanding of others' emotional experiences. The Family Expressiveness Questionnaire (FEQ) and the Self-Expressiveness in the Family Questionnaire are tools used in the service of this research. [2] With Judy Hall, Halberstadt helped establish social psychology's interest in understanding the relation of hierarchy-related variables, such as personality dominance and actual or perceived social power, to nonverbal communication.
Halberstadt's key contribution to the field of social development is an integrated conceptualization of emotional communication skills, a concept she labelled Affective Social Competence (ASC). [3] ASC includes three components: sending one's own emotional messages, receiving others' emotional messages, and experiencing emotions. Within each component are four developmental skills: becoming aware of an emotion, identifying what that emotion is, working within the social context, and regulating emotion to meet short-term and long-term goals. [4]
The conceptualization is dynamic, to reflect the moment-to-moment changes inherent in social interactions. Halberstadt and colleagues also consider how individual characteristics, such as temperament and self-concept, and environmental contexts, such as culture and historical change, may alter how ASC components operate. The ASC construct has been used by researchers in clinical psychology, [5] developmental psychology, [6] [7] and family science. [8]
Recognizing that parental beliefs may influence parents' emotion socialization behaviors and child outcomes and that these beliefs might vary across cultures, Halberstadt and Professors Julie Dunsmore (Department of Psychology, Virginia Tech) and Al Bryant (School of Education, UNC-Pembroke) received funding to explore the varied beliefs about emotions that parents from African American, European American, and Lumbee American Indian cultural groups hold. One goal was to develop a questionnaire to assess parents' beliefs about children's emotion (PBACE) by using a multi-ethnic, multi-class questionnaire development process, which involved over 1000 parents. Multiple studies have utilized previous versions of the PBACE in an attempt to further understand the influence of parents' beliefs about emotions on parenting behaviors and children's outcomes, including parental emotional reactions and discussion of emotion, and children's attachment, emotion understanding, ability to cope with stress, and sense of self. [9] [10] [11] [12] [13]
Halberstadt's recent interests include the intersections of race, culture, class, and gender in the socialization of emotion, while continuing to explore the role of parental beliefs about emotion in children's emotion development. [14] [15] Currently she is collaborating with Dr. Patricia Garrett-Peters of the Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute at UNC-Chapel Hill on a project funded by NSF investigating the multi-dimensionality of emotion understanding in middle childhood, as well as links between mothers' beliefs about emotions, parenting, maternal emotion socialization practices, children's emotion understanding, and social competence at school. Other current research focuses on particular emotions, such as anger, pride, and jealousy; affective social competence in general; the social construction of gender; and a variety of cultural factors.
Parenting or child rearing promotes and supports the physical, emotional, social, spiritual and intellectual development of a child from infancy to adulthood. Parenting refers to the intricacies of raising a child and not exclusively for a biological relationship.
In sociology, a peer group is both a social group and a primary group of people who have similar interests (homophily), age, background, or social status. The members of this group are likely to influence the person's beliefs and behaviour.
Baby sign language is the use of manual signing allowing infants and toddlers to communicate emotions, desires, and objects prior to spoken language development. With guidance and encouragement signing develops from a natural stage in infant development known as gesture. These gestures are taught in conjunction with speech to hearing children, and are not the same as a sign language. Some common benefits that have been found through the use of baby sign programs include an increased parent-child bond and communication, decreased frustration, and improved self-esteem for both the parent and child. Researchers have found that baby sign neither benefits nor harms the language development of infants. Promotional products and ease of information access have increased the attention that baby sign receives, making it pertinent that caregivers become educated before making the decision to use baby sign.
A sibling is a relative that shares at least one parent with the subject. A male sibling is a brother and a female sibling is a sister. A person with no siblings is an only child.
Sympathy is the perception of, understanding of, and reaction to the distress or need of another life form. According to David Hume, this sympathetic concern is driven by a switch in viewpoint from a personal perspective to the perspective of another group or individual who is in need. Hume explained that this is the case because "the minds of all men are similar in their feelings and operations" and that "the motion of one communicates itself to the rest" so that as "affections readily pass from one person to another… they beget correspondent movements." Along with Hume, two other men, Adam Smith and Arthur Schopenhauer, worked to better define sympathy. Hume was mostly known for epistemology, Smith was known for his economic theory, and Schopenhauer for the philosophy of the will. An American professor, Brene Brown, views sympathy as a way to stay out of touch with ones emotions. They attempt to make sense out of the situation and see it from the person receiving the sympathy's perception.
Social behavior is behavior among two or more organisms within the same species, and encompasses any behavior in which one member affects the other. This is due to an interaction among those members. Social behavior can be seen as similar to an exchange of goods, with the expectation that when you give, you will receive the same. This behavior can be affected by both the qualities of the individual and the environmental (situational) factors. Therefore, social behavior arises as a result of an interaction between the two—the organism and its environment. This means that, in regards to humans, social behavior can be determined by both the individual characteristics of the person, and the situation they are in.
A parenting style is a pattern of behaviors, attitudes, and approaches that a parent uses when interacting with and raising their child. The study of parenting styles is based on the idea that parents differ in their patterns of parenting and that these patterns can have a significant impact on their children's development and well-being. Parenting styles are distinct from specific parenting practices, since they represent broader patterns of practices and attitudes that create an emotional climate for the child. Parenting styles also encompass the ways in which parents respond to and make demands on their children.
Child development involves the biological, psychological and emotional changes that occur in human beings between birth and the conclusion of adolescence. Childhood is divided into 3 stages of life which include early childhood, middle childhood, and late childhood (preadolescence). Early childhood typically ranges from infancy to the age of 6 years old. During this period, development is significant, as many of life's milestones happen during this time period such as first words, learning to crawl, and learning to walk. There is speculation that middle childhood/preadolescence or ages 6–12 are the most crucial years of a child's life. Adolescence is the stage of life that typically starts around the major onset of puberty, with markers such as menarche and spermarche, typically occurring at 12–13 years of age. It has been defined as ages 10 to 19 by the World Health Organization. In the course of development, the individual human progresses from dependency to increasing autonomy. It is a continuous process with a predictable sequence, yet has a unique course for every child. It does not progress at the same rate and each stage is affected by the preceding developmental experiences. Because genetic factors and events during prenatal life may strongly influence developmental changes, genetics and prenatal development usually form a part of the study of child development. Related terms include developmental psychology, referring to development throughout the lifespan, and pediatrics, the branch of medicine relating to the care of children.
In psychology, mentalization is the ability to understand the mental state – of oneself or others – that underlies overt behaviour. Mentalization can be seen as a form of imaginative mental activity that lets us perceive and interpret human behaviour in terms of intentional mental states. It is sometimes described as "understanding misunderstanding." Another term that David Wallin has used for mentalization is "Thinking about thinking". Mentalization can occur either automatically or consciously. Mentalization ability, or mentalizing, is weakened by intense emotion.
Meta-emotion is "an organized and structured set of emotions and cognitions about the emotions, both one's own emotions and the emotions of others". This broad definition of meta-emotion sparked psychologists' interest in the topic, particularly regarding parental meta-emotion philosophy.
According to some theories, emotions are universal phenomena, albeit affected by culture. Emotions are "internal phenomena that can, but do not always, make themselves observable through expression and behavior". While some emotions are universal and are experienced in similar ways as a reaction to similar events across all cultures, other emotions show considerable cultural differences in their antecedent events, the way they are experienced, the reactions they provoke and the way they are perceived by the surrounding society. According to other theories, termed social constructionist, emotions are more deeply culturally influenced. The components of emotions are universal, but the patterns are social constructions. Some also theorize that culture is affected by emotions of the people.
Display rules are a social group or culture's informal norms that distinguish how one should express themselves. They can be described as culturally prescribed rules that people learn early on in their lives by interactions and socializations with other people. They learn these cultural standards at a young age which determine when one would express certain emotions, where and to what extent.
Social competence consists of social, emotional, cognitive, and behavioral skills needed for successful social adaptation. Social competence also reflects having the ability to take another's perspective concerning a situation, learn from past experiences, and apply that learning to the changes in social interactions.
Moral development focuses on the emergence, change, and understanding of morality from infancy through adulthood. Morality develops across a life span in a variety of ways and is influenced by an individual's experiences and behavior when faced with moral issues through different periods of physical and cognitive development. Morality concerns an individual's reforming sense of what is right and wrong; it is for this reason that young children have different moral judgment and character than that of a grown adult. Morality in itself is often a synonym for "rightness" or "goodness." It also refers to a specific code of conduct that is derived from one's culture, religion, or personal philosophy that guides one's actions, behaviors, and thoughts.
Gender roles are culturally influenced stereotypes which create expectations for appropriate behavior for males and females. An understanding of these roles is evident in children as young as age four. Children between 3 and 6 months can form distinctions between male and female faces. By ten months, infants can associate certain objects with females and males, like a hammer with males or scarf with females. Gender roles are influenced by the media, family, environment, and society. In addition to biological maturation, children develop within a set of gender-specific social and behavioral norms embedded in family structure, natural play patterns, close friendships, and the teeming social jungle of school life. The gender roles encountered in childhood play a large part in shaping an individual's self-concept and influence the way an individual forms relationships later on in life.
The relationship between gender and emotional expression describes the differences in behavior and actions to express emotions between men and women. These differences may be primarily due to cultural expectations of femininity and masculinity.
Social emotional development represents a specific domain of child development. It is a gradual, integrative process through which children acquire the capacity to understand, experience, express, and manage emotions and to develop meaningful relationships with others. As such, social emotional development encompasses a large range of skills and constructs, including, but not limited to: self-awareness, joint attention, play, theory of mind, self-esteem, emotion regulation, friendships, and identity development.
Nancy Eisenberg is a psychologist and professor at Arizona State University. She was the President of the Western Psychological Association in 2014-2015 and the Division 7 president of the American Psychological Association in 2010-2012. Her research focuses on areas of emotional and social development of children. She is also in charge of a research lab at Arizona State University where undergraduate researchers help in longitudinal studies of social and emotional development in children and young adolescents.
Mia A. Smith-Bynum a clinical psychologist who specializes in family science and is known for her research on mental health, parenting, family interactions, communication, and racial-ethnic socialization in ethnic minority families. Smith-Bynum is associate professor of Family Science in the School of Public Health at the University of Maryland-College Park, where she is also affiliated with the Maryland Population Research Center. She is Chair of the Black Caucus of the Society for Research in Child Development.
Carolyn Ingrid Saarni was a developmental psychologist known for groundbreaking research on children's development of emotional competence and emotional self-regulation, and the role of parental influence in emotional socialization. She was a professor in the Department of Counseling at Sonoma State University from 1980 to 2013.