“With increase in age,” Salovey writes, “children become better able to regulate their emotions and to control the natural action tendency associated with a particular emotion.” By the time children are ready for kindergarten, they can usually articulate and talk about their feelings, have a larger repertoire of feelings — such as shame, guilt, jealousy, and hope — and manage fairly complex social situations such as classroom interactions. In many cases, they can refrain from emotional outbursts. At this point, their prefrontal cortex, where the executive function of the brain occurs, has linked with emotional limbic regions and the amygdala.
At this stage, children are on their way to producing an ability to manage emotions in order to achieve intended goals. The frontal lobe is the “emotional manager,” due to its apparent role in controlling emotion and overriding impulses. Emotion is such a complex process it needs a symphony conductor, and Sroufe says that the cortex “tunes” the limbic structures and amygdala while simultaneously feeding information back to the hypothalamus, where memories are assigned to specific categories.
The final component of emotion is the ability to recognize emotions in others. The frontal cortext continues to develop through childhood and on into early adulthood. Yet in adolescents and teenagers, the prefrontal region is still undeveloped.
Recent research shows that teens and adults actually use different regions of the brain in responding to certain tasks. In a study conducted at McLean Hospital, just outside of Boston, psychologist Deborah Yurgelun-Todd and colleagues showed pictures of people wearing fearful expressions to teenagers between the ages of 11 and 17 while the teens’ brains were scanned using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Yurgelun-Todd found that the teens’ frontal lobes were less active and their amygdalae were more active. The results suggested that the frontal lobe was not fully complete and functioning in teenagers, and that they are not yet able to correctly read emotional states or understand the consequences of their behavior.
Neuroscientist B. J. Casey has hypothesized that teenage brains fall into a neurological gap. Overrun by the rush of hormones, they act without a sense of consequences, and yet these hormones do nothing to speed up their cognitive and emotional development. Instead, cognitive control slowly matures through childhood, adolescence and into early adulthood. The capacity to reflect on future behavior, feel empathy for others and realize that actions can have consequences all require mastery of the skills of emotional thinking.
When any of these stages are interrupted by trauma, emotional development can lag behind — or even be permanently damaged — and basic brain functioning can suffer. In such cases, executive function may not proceed as easily or may not be as well regulated. Areas such as attention and decision-making may be impaired.
Though biological temperament plays a factor, it is now believed that environmental circumstances often take precedent. A child may have the gene for shyness, but, with encouragement, he or she can learn not to be frightened of others. They do not have to feel trapped by their emotional timidity.
Through brain imaging, scientists have demonstrated that the area right behind the eyes, in the prefrontal cortex, is quite specialized in functions of attachment; this area has been labeled the mirror-neuron system. Mirror neurons allow human brains to read the intentions and feelings of others through nonverbal cues. It has been suggested that this system is the neurological basis for empathy, although empathy is a stage that does not develop until later.
According to psychology professor John Gottman’s research in “Raising an Emotionally Intelligent Child” (co-authored with Joan Declaire and Daniel Goleman), there are five elements of behavior that parents can demonstrate to help their children become more emotionally intelligent:
- Be aware of a child’s emotions
- Recognize emotional expression as an opportunity for intimacy and teaching
- Listen empathetically and validate a child’s feelings
- Label emotions in words a child can understand
- Help a child come up with an appropriate way to solve a problem, or deal with an upsetting issue, or situation, and set clear limits
The brain’s remarkable adaptability at birth, together with a child’s emotional connection to a caregiver, sets up a lifelong pattern for thinking, feeling, and behaving. However, we now understand that the human brain remains flexible and capable of growth throughout life. This means we can always make changes and increase not only our emotional intelligence but our cognitive understanding, as well.
This article was originally published in the Fall 2011 issue of Brain World Magazine.
