Observing the Dynamics of Socioemotional Interactions

Emotions organize behaviour. Emotions provide motivation and meaning and give rise to particular “actions” (e.g., anger motivates attack). Emotions are also regulated in order to maintain and achieve goals. As children mature, they develop the ability to regulate emotionally charged behaviour in order to satisfy both personal goals and social norms. In a dyadic social interaction, the emotions of both individuals organize their behaviour through both self and other regulation. This co-regulation can be seen in parent-child exchanges. For example, a child upset by being denied a candy bar may regulate his own emotions in order to remain upset so that his mother might relent and give him the candy bar. Despite his attempts at regulating his mother’s emotions, the mother may suppress her own feelings of guilt for denying the candy and also try to regulate the child’s emotions through distraction. Thus, both parties are experiencing emotions and attempting both intra- and interpersonal emotion regulation.

My research focuses on observing these patterns of emotional exchanges. However, one difficulty with observing emotions is that even adolescents are quite good at masking emotions and using emotions to manage relationships (Rosenblum & Lewis, 2003; Saarni, 1999). Thus, someone who appears to be calm and neutral may in fact be feeling a strong emotion but has made it difficult for an outside observer to detect. I have attempted two ways to get around this problem.

First, I have examined the relative flexibility versus rigidity of parent-child interactions. That is, instead of just look at what emotions are exchanged during an interaction, I also look at how these interactions unfold over time. Flexible behaviour is generally associated with positive emotions (Isen, 1987) and effective emotion regulation (Thompson, 1990). Rigid/inflexible behaviour may indicate that an individual or a dyad is effortfully regulating negative emotions (Hollenstein, 2005). Moreover, rigid thoughts and behaviours are components of many psychopathologies and examining interpersonal interactions in this way may lend some insight to the development of these disorders (Hollenstein, et al., 2004).

Second, I have begun to incorporate psychophysiology measures during the video recording of dyadic interactions in order to examine how levels of arousal correspond with observed emotional expressions in real time. With this method, I hope to be able to identify those who appear to be “neutral” or unemotional yet are showing a high degree of physiological arousal. I am also interested in looking at physiological correlates of flexibility.