Children
Psychologist Elaine Hatfield theorizes emotional contagions as a two-step process: Step 1: We imitate people, if someone smiles at you, you smile back. Step 2: Changes in mood through faking it. If you smile you feel happy, if you frown you feel bad. Mimicry seems to be one foundation of emotional movement between people. Hour old infants will mimic a person's facial expressions such as smiling.
Martin E.P.Seligman, Ph.D., uses synchrony games to build children's learning that "your actions matter and can control outcomes". When a baby bangs on a table the adult bangs on the table, replicating the action. This is one way emotional learning can be validated by an adult.
Read more about this topic: Emotional Contagion
Famous quotes containing the word children:
“A year at the breast is quite enough; children who are suckled longer are said to grow stupid, and I am all for popular sayings.”
—Honoré De Balzac (1799–1850)
“Part of the responsibility of being a parent is to arrange situations in children’s lives so they are able to meet crises with a reasonable chance of coping successfully with them.... Parents who believe children are unharmed by crises and will simply bounce back in time seriously misunderstand children.”
—Donald C. Medeiros (20th century)
“Men, wives, and children stare, cry out, and run,
As it were doomsday.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)