Summary: Experiencing category 1 emotion during childhood can have profound negative effects, which I discuss below.
The Details
Category 1 Emotion:
These are the emotions parents typically feel when they punish their children. People who experience these emotions become physically and mentally activated. They include:
* anger
* annoyance
* irritation
* exasperation
* rage
Category 1 emotion directed at a child is perceived as a threat and evokes fear in the child. It is processed by the amygdala, ensuring that the event will be permanently stored in the brain. Future similar situations are then perceived as threats and evoke fear. This process gradually generalizes so that any anticipated bad outcome is perceived as a threat and evokes fear. The intensity of category 1 emotion directed at the child determines the intensity of the evoked fear.
Adults initially react to perceived threats with fear, but that fear may change to anger in order to fight against the perceived threat. Because of this, I sometimes describe the adult response to perceived threats as the fear/anger response.
Children who experience significant levels of category 1 emotion during childhood tend to:
* Acquire a heightened fear response.
* Strictly follow rules, fearing punishment for breaking them.
* Both accept rules as being the proper way to behave and dislike rules because of the punishment received. See How Personality Develops – Thoughts – #2 for details on how this works.
* Fear new or different behaviors because they may not be acceptable.
As adults, these people tend to:
* Have a heightened fear response.
* Believe information that supports the possibility of a threat over information that doesn't. This makes them susceptible to misinformation and lies.
* Have a well-defined and rigid set of acceptable behaviors.
* Dislike rules and regulations set upon them by authority figures.
* Misrepresent information or lie in order to avoid perceived negative outcomes.
It doesn't take a lot of category 1 emotion to produce this in a child. That's because a region in our brains - the amygdala - is specially designed to recognize and respond to threats. It works with the hippocampus to store memories of any threats it perceives.