Emotion and Motivation
One thing from reading that surprised me was the curious connection between two statements. It’s been said that some emotions are recognized and expressed in the same way by all the humans in the world despite their differences in culture, customs, upbringing and other aspects of life. But at the same time it was stated that emotions and their expression varies among the cultures.
That led me to a question: if our cultures and social standards are so diverse and different from each other, what is the psychological mechanism of recognizing the emotion expressed by the representative of another community? Our social standards of expressing the emotions and ways of doing it are different but somehow anger is still recognized as anger no matter who is expressing it. Probably, there is some evolutional benefit if this feature is present in every human being. This would make social interactions much more fast and efficient especially in situations, when there is no time or possibility to use actual words. An angry face expression is instantly recognized because it is a potential danger to our health or a threat of exclusion from group which used to be a more feared thing than anything else. And the friendly face makes our interaction easier in terms of finding friends that promise the potential benefits in future.
Development
As to my own development, I believe that the principal of reciprocal determinism is a concept with great explanative potential. This principle works perfectly in explanation of my memories about my actions as a child. For instance, it described precisely how I used to change my tactics of getting what I wanted depending on the difference in feedback received from mother and father. In this way, I don’t consider the “caregiving hypothesis” to be a productive one.
First of all, it completely ignores the role of fathers which is weird as I believe it is not just a coincidence that in most cases both parents live together with their children. I also disagree with Piaget’s concept of mental development stages. My personal opinion is that mental abilities Piaget was talking about do not develop in conjunction with each other.
In my opinion, these abilities are separate skills that can be developed independently of others. Of course, there is some measure of connection, but it does not necessarily mean that a child should develop his or her mental skills as some sort time determined set. This theory seems to neglect the very fact of developmental diversity of all the living things and children in particular. While having some preset programs of development, we are exposed to the environment which actually decides what programs are to be continued and what must be terminated as they have nothing to do with the current …
