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:
“The children [on TV] are too well behaved and are reasonable beyond their years. All the children pop in with exceptional insights. On many of the shows the children’s insights are apt to be unexpectedly philosophical. The lesson seems to be, “Listen to little children carefully and you will learn great truths.””
—G. Weinberg. originally quoted in “What Is Television’s World of the Single Parent Doing to Your Family?” TV Guide (August 1970)
“Mothers who have little sense of their own minds and voices are unable to imagine such capacities in their children. Not being fully aware of the power of words for communicating meaning, they expect their children to know what is on their minds without the benefit of words. These parents do not tell their children what they mean by “good” much less why. Nor do they ask the children to explain themselves.”
—Mary Field Belenky (20th century)
“The world men inhabit ... is rather bleak. It is a world full of doubt and confusion, where vulnerability must be hidden, not shared; where competition, not co-operation, is the order of the day; where men sacrifice the possibility of knowing their own children and sharing in their upbringing, for the sake of a job they may have chosen by chance, which may not suit them and which in many cases dominates their lives to the exclusion of much else.”
—Anna Ford (b. 1943)