Behaviour: uncontrolled emotions

Emotion is an entity that lies on the border of the body and the mind. Emotions are primarily experienced and expressed through the body's autonomic nervous system, leading to bodily feelings, but they are also accompanied by perceptions, thoughts and ideas to which the emotion is attached. The expression of emotion is to a considerable degree involuntary - conveyed by facial expression, by laughter and tears, by bodily posture and gestures and by the tone in which words are said. When emotions are very strong their expression can overflow into action, such as shouting or physical attack.

An individual's emotions can also have a strong effect on the emotions of others, and this too is to a large degree involuntary. Humans tend to 'resonate' and react to the emotional expressions of another. Laughter often really is 'infectious', and the sadness of another person often makes us actually feel sad ourselves. Sometimes emotional communication can lead to a reciprocal feeling - for example one may feel fear when with a person displaying anger, or disgust when with one displaying excited pleasure.

Much emotional communication, both the emitting of emotional signals and the reception of them, occurs outside the awareness of the people concerned. When someone, for some reason, does not show emotion, or shows one that does not seem to match their words or situation, or when we experience emotions which somehow seem 'out of sync' with the verbal message we are receiving from someone, we feel disconcerted and confused, sometimes without entirely realising why.

EMOTIONAL REGULATION

As we mature and gain experience of the world, we develop more capacity to use our minds to make sense of our emotional experience, to label individual emotions and to process our strong feelings before deciding on a rational course of action. Babies at birth have virtually no capacity to regulate or make sense of their emotions. They are dependent on their caretakers to 'read' their emotional expression, make sense of them and take appropriate action, for example, feeding, changing, soothing, sharing a joyful game. The capacity to make sense of and manage emotions thus develops out of interactions with the central caretakers in a child's life.

It is through emotional communication that caretaking adults help babies and children develop the capacity for emotional regulation. When a baby cries and cries and can't be soothed, his parents will commonly experience a sense of desperation. This feeling, we may surmise, is an attenuated version of that experienced by the baby. One might say the baby has communicated what he feels to the parents. The parents can then use their more advanced experience, together with the raw emotional experience, to take action to convey to the baby the message that what he feels can be managed.

Gradually, parents and other adults 'interpret' the meaning of the emotional experience to children, both through using words and through emitting emotional signs of empathy with the child's feeling and simultaneous confidence that the feeling can be managed.

To work well with children (or adults), childcarers need to be able to resonate to the emotions they communicate enough to have some empathy, but not so much that they are carried away or overwhelmed with emotion. In other words, if a childcarer feels a child's distress to the degree that they are also in tears, they are not in a good position to help the child.

Small children can evoke very strong feelings in those who work with them, but if the feelings can be 'held on to' and thought about before a response is made, they can prove to be a useful tool for understanding the child.

Inevitably, sometimes, the emotional communication can be so powerful that the adult finds herself propelled into making an emotional communication back which was not necessarily intended and which may be less than helpful. But even in these situations, catching herself after speaking or acting, and reflecting on the whole interaction, can produce an important sense of understanding about the child.

CASE STUDY: DAVID

David, aged four, has attended nursery for six months and in that time he has constantly provoked feelings of frustration and even fury in the nursery staff. Somehow, however carefully they had given time to explain what was to happen, negotiating with him where possible, David always seemed to misunderstand, to be walking in the wrong direction from the rest of the group on an outing and to be generally at odds with staff and children alike.

He appeared to be an intelligent child, with a concerned and involved mother. Sometimes one or other of the staff would find themselves getting angry with him and even having a sense that he was deliberately trying to provoke. His mother said his behaviour was not like this at home.

The head of the nursery decided to hold a staff meeting to think through the difficulty. She encouraged free discussion of how people felt. The staff first described their frustration, then their bewilderment and finally they voiced how completely helpless David made them feel because all their usual strategies to help children had failed.

Then one staff member remarked that David's mother had said that his life had been full of changes. For a variety of reasons they had moved house five times, often with little warning. David's mother had a serious illness when he was two years old and she was in hospital for two weeks. Until he was three they had lived near his much loved grandparents, but then suddenly moved 100 miles away. Then David's father got work on an oil rig which involved him being away for considerable periods.

As the nursery staff talked this over it dawned on them that David might feel bewildered and helpless, having no control over these events in his life. Maybe the feeling of bewilderment and helplessness he evoked in the staff could be considered as a way of showing them what it felt like to be him, and continued to feel like since he did not know what sudden change might happen next. Maybe also he found it safer to stir up these difficult feelings in the nursery staff than in his mother, who had once been seriously ill and whom he needed even more desperately, following the separation from his grandparents and father.

Once they had been able to put all this together, the staff found they reacted less strongly to David's behaviour. They started to talk to him about how it can feel so difficult when other people make plans for you and you are never sure what will happen next. His keyworker found a new book for the library called 'Sammy moves house' about a mouse who kept having to move when the farmer changed his plans for the fields. This became a firm favourite with David.

Gradually, as David felt understood, his behaviour become less oppositional. At the times when his old ways re-emerged, the staff understood that this was likely to be because he was anxious about a prospective change. They would then take extra time to explore this with him.

This article is based on a Nursery World 'Behaviour' series by psychologists at the Anna Freud Centre in north London, a registered charity, offering treatment, training and research into emotional development in childhood