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Emotional Development Throughout the lifespan Blog Entry

Week 9 Assignment: Create a Blog Entry

Activity Description

For this task, imagine that you have been asked to contribute comments for a blog that discusses research on emotional regulation throughout the lifespan. This includes developmental changes during childhood as well as how emotional regulation changes in adults over age 60. The intended audience for this blog is a general population of adults who may not necessarily have a psychology background or be familiar with terms such as “emotional regulation” and “inhibitory control.” Although you should not provide formal “dictionary” definitions for these terms, you should clearly explain these terms throughout your blog.

Length: 450-500 words

Your blog entry should demonstrate thoughtful consideration of the ideas and concepts presented in the course by providing new thoughts and insights relating directly to this topic. Your response should reflect scholarly writing and current APA standards.

Learning Outcomes

1.0   Assess the concepts and theoretical framework of emotion, motivation, and cognition.

2.0   Interpret the critical research findings related to emotion, motivation and cognition.

4.0   Evaluate the development of emotional, motivational and cognitive skills throughout the lifespan.

6.0   Synthesize concepts of emotions, motivation and cognition using a variety of communication tools.

Week: 9

Emotional Development Throughout the lifespan

Introduction: 

As you learned during Week 7, emotional intelligence consists of many factors related to the regulation of emotions within ourselves, along with the perception and interpretation of emotions in other people. Emotional regulation is crucial to success in social situations and research has found that children, who are better able to regulate their emotions, also are more successful in school and in social settings with their peers.

The ability to regulate emotions is a developmental process that appears to develop at a young age. Hudson and Jacques (2014) discuss several factors important for the development of emotional regulation and one of these is inhibitory control. You may remember from Week 4 that inhibitory control is considered an executive function and the development of which may be linked to continued brain development in children, particularly the development of the prefrontal cortex. As you may recall from your other classes, the frontal lobes are the last areas of the brain to develop in children with some research suggesting that this development continues throughout adolescence. Interestingly, we see that the frontal lobes are one of the first areas of the brain to show age-related decline in older adults (over 60 years of age).

Although frontal lobe declines tend to be negatively related to deficits in executive function, Isaacowitz and Blanchard-Fields (2012) provide evidence that emotional regulation actually increases in adults over the age of 60. These researchers suggest that this may be due to the changes in motivational strategies in older adults.

Your assignment this week is to write a newsletter article that summarizes the research on emotional regulation. This should include development during childhood as well as how emotional regulation changes in adults over the age of 60.

Be sure to review this week’s resources carefully. You are expected to apply the information from these resources when you prepare your assignments.