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, cognitive, social, emotional, and educational development 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. Members of peer groups are likely to influence each others' 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 other person. 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.
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.
Affective science is the scientific study of emotion or affect. This includes the study of emotion elicitation, emotional experience and the recognition of emotions in others. Of particular relevance are the nature of feeling, mood, emotionally-driven behaviour, decision-making, attention and self-regulation, as well as the underlying physiology and neuroscience of the emotions.
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.
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.
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.
Emotions are biocultural phenomena, meaning they are shaped by both evolution and culture. They are "internal phenomena that can, but do not always, make themselves observable through expression and behavior". While emotions themselves are universal, they are always influenced by culture. How they are experienced, expressed, perceived, and regulated varies according to cultural norms and values. Culture is a necessary framework to understand global variation in emotion.
Display rules are a social group or culture's informal norms that distinguish how one should express oneself. They function as a way to maintain the social order of a given culture, creating an expected standard of behaviour to guide people in their interactions. Display rules can help to decrease situational ambiguity, help individuals to be accepted by their social groups, and can help groups to increase their group efficacy. They can be described as culturally prescribed rules that people learn early on in their lives by interactions and socializations with other people. Members of a social group learn these cultural standards at a young age which determine when one would express certain emotions, where and to what extent.
The self-regulation of emotion or emotion regulation is the ability to respond to the ongoing demands of experience with the range of emotions in a manner that is socially tolerable and sufficiently flexible to permit spontaneous reactions as well as the ability to delay spontaneous reactions as needed. It can also be defined as extrinsic and intrinsic processes responsible for monitoring, evaluating, and modifying emotional reactions. The self-regulation of emotion belongs to the broader set of emotion regulation processes, which includes both the regulation of one's own feelings and the regulation of other people's feelings.
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. The theory states that morality develops across the lifespan in a variety of ways. Morality is influenced by an individual's experiences, behavior, and when they are 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.
Expressive suppression is defined as the intentional reduction of the facial expression of an emotion. It is a component of emotion regulation.
Disinhibited Social Engagement Disorder (DSED), or Disinhibited Attachment Disorder, is an attachment disorder in which a child has little to no fear of unfamiliar adults and may actively approach them. It can significantly impair young children's abilities to relate with adults and peers, according to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, as well as put them in dangerous and potentially unsafe conditions. Common examples of this include sitting on a person's lap of which they do not know or leaving with a stranger.
The study of the relationship between gender and emotional expression is the study of the differences between men and women in behavior that expresses emotions. These differences in emotional expression 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.
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.