Introduction:
Personality is built, not born. Children acquire their emotional makeup and a wide range of beliefs through interactions with their parents*. Those are stored in schemas that continue operating throughout life. When we become adults, our schemas shape most of how we think, feel, and behave, often without us realizing it.
In this section, I’ll walk through how that happens. I start with how children acquire their emotional makeup and beliefs. Next, I show how these become stored in schemas. Finally, I’ll show that all of this fully explains the differences in intelligence, mental health, and behavior we see in adults, just as I claim in the Introduction.
* Parent on this page means a person whose face is imprinted, as explained on the Imprinted Faces page.
Emotion
Why it’s so important
Emotions influence virtually every aspect of human life, leaving no part of our experience untouched. They have a direct impact on both body and mind, affecting almost every bodily system, influencing our thinking, and determining our reactions to what happens around us. Emotions aren’t just what we feel in the moment. They are lasting forces that define who we are and how we live.
To show just how pervasive and important emotions are, here are a few examples from the countless ways they shape human life:
Body and health: Emotions affect every organ system in the body: the heart, lungs, liver, kidneys, bowel, brain, and every other system that keeps us alive.
Attention, memory, and learning: Emotions steer what we pay attention to, what sticks in our memory, and how well we concentrate. Strong emotions narrow focus and make learning more difficult.
Intelligence: Emotions affect how clearly people think and how easily they solve problems, which directly shapes intelligence.
Decision-making: Emotions influence judgment in powerful ways. Fear encourages caution, while anger or entitlement can lead to impulsive choices that affect careers, finances, and safety.
Creativity and curiosity: Joy and wonder open the door to curiosity, fueling the urge to explore, imagine, and create. Anxiety and discouragement shut that door, leaving little space for invention or playful thinking.
Addiction: Unpleasant emotions drive people to use substances in an effort to feel better.
Long-term health and resilience: Emotions influence how quickly the body recovers from illness and physical setbacks.
Relationships and social behavior: Emotions shape how people respond to one another. They influence trust, intimacy, cooperation, and conflict in everyday life.
These examples show that emotion is not a side effect of experience but a driving force behind it.
Emotion is evoked in children in two distinct ways.
I. The first way children’s emotions are evoked is through mimicry:
Mimicry Through Observation (without direct interaction):
1. When a child observes a parent behaving in a particular way without directly interacting, the child mimics both the parent’s behavior and emotion.
If a child observes a parent expressing anger toward a pet, the child learns to respond to the pet with anger.
If a parent treats a pet kindly, a child learns to act kindly toward it.
When a child observes a parent who is emotionally detached, the child mimics that state and experiences emotional detachment as well.
Mimicry Through Direct Interaction
2. Children mimic parental emotion when their interactions are positive.
When a parent smiles at a child, the child is likely to smile back.
If a parent expresses sadness while comforting a child, the child mimics that sadness.
II. The second way children’s emotions are evoked is through interactions with parents that trigger opposite emotions. To explain how this happens, I first need to distinguish between two general types of emotion.
I group emotions into two broad categories that I call Category 1 and Category 2.
1. Category 1 emotions are activating or energizing. They involve increased physiological arousal and are often expressed through outward action. Common terms that describe Category 1 emotions include anger, frustration, impatience, agitation, displeasure, resentment, irritation, annoyance, hostility, indignation, disapproval, disdain, disgust, and sternness. Category 1 emotions also include one form of pride, the tense, status-oriented version described on the More Thoughts page. Behaviors often charged with Category 1 emotion include scolding, lecturing, criticizing, punishing, and disciplining.
2. Category 2 emotions involve withdrawal, inward focus, disengagement, or emotional numbing, where attention turns inward, away from the outside world. They are essentially the opposite of Category 1 emotions. Common terms for Category 2 emotions include fearful, passive, uninvolved, indifferent, ignoring, not paying attention, unresponsive, distant, preoccupied, emotionally flat, unavailable, uninterested, aloof, and apathetic.
Category 1 and 2 emotions and parent-child interactions: When a parent is expressing Category 1 or Category 2 emotion, it is important to distinguish between times when the parent and child are interacting and times when they are not.
1. Parent experiencing Category 1 emotion: When a parent is experiencing Category 1 emotion, it is usually easy to tell whether they are interacting with the child or not. For example, if a parent is angry, it is generally clear whether the anger is directed at the child or at someone or something else.
2. Parent experiencing Category 2 emotion: Since Category 2 emotion causes a person to be unengaging, it may not always be clear whether a parent experiencing this emotion is interacting with the child or if the child is merely observing them. Whether it counts as interaction depends on the child’s expectation. If the child is seeking connection or believes they are engaged with the parent, that moment qualifies as interaction, even if the parent is unresponsive.
For example, if a child tries to show a drawing to a parent who doesn’t respond, the child is seeking interaction, so I regard this as an interaction between the parent and child, even though the parent is not participating. I describe this type of interaction as the parent directing Category 2 emotion at the child.
Eventually, the child may give up on trying to get the parent’s attention. At that point, the interaction has ended and the child is merely observing the parent. The child will then mimic the emotion they see in the parent, as described above.
Effects of category 1 and category 2 emotion directed at a child
Category 1 emotion directed at a child evokes fear in the child.
For example, if a parent scolds a child for doing something wrong, the child feels fear.
Category 2 emotion directed at a child evokes Category 1 emotion in the child.
For example, if a parent ignores a child who is showing them a new toy, the child will experience Category 1 emotion such as irritation or anger, which activates the child and directs their energy toward getting the parent’s attention.
In both cases, the child experiences a threat. Category 1 emotion directed at a child feels like a direct attack, while Category 2 emotion feels like abandonment.
How these interactions shape temperament: Baseline Emotions
Category 1 and Category 2 emotions evoked either through mimicry or during parent-child interactions become permanently active. I call these baseline emotions.
Baseline emotions are permanently active because they are stored within schemas that remain active throughout life. I explain schemas in a later section.
The intensity of baseline emotions depends on how frequent and how intense the emotional interactions were that produced them.
Baseline emotions operate mostly outside conscious awareness and are not usually recognized as emotion.
Baseline emotions determine what is often described as temperament.
Mimicry makes children temperamentally (i.e. emotionally) similar to their parents, while Category 1 or 2 emotion directed at a child makes the child temperamentally different from their parents.
Children need a certain amount of interaction with their parents. When a child does not receive enough interaction, the brain interprets the situation as if the parents are showing Category 2 emotion. The child then mimics that emotion, and over time, Category 2 emotion becomes part of their baseline emotional makeup. For this reason, when a parent dies or is absent for extended periods, Category 2 emotion becomes incorporated into the child’s baseline emotions.
Reactions in Older Children
1. Older children may respond differently than described above because their reactions combine baseline emotions formed earlier with their immediate response to a parent’s current emotion.
For example, a child who has incorporated Category 2 emotion into their baseline may react less strongly when a parent ignores them. Instead of showing the intense Category 1 reaction typical of younger children, the baseline Category 2 emotion dampens the response, resulting in reduced effort to regain attention.
Conversely, a child who has developed a strong baseline of Category 1 emotion may react more intensely when ignored. In this case, the parent’s Category 2 behavior evokes Category 1 activation, and because that activation is already part of the baseline, the response may be stronger, faster, or more explosive than expected.
Beliefs
Children acquire beliefs in several ways.
Children generally believe whatever a parent tells them.
Children acquire beliefs about both themselves and their parents according to how their parents treat them.
Positive emotion directed toward a child produces positive beliefs about the parent and themselves.
Category 1 emotion directed at a child (e.g., punishing or scolding) evokes contradictory beliefs characterized by "I did nothing wrong, I don't deserve this," and "I must have done something wrong, I'm a bad person."
Category 2 emotion directed at a child (e.g., ignoring or withdrawing) also evokes contradictory beliefs characterized by "there must be something wrong with me or you would pay attention to me," and "something must be wrong with you because you don't pay attention to me!"
Children acquire beliefs about things they experience outside of their relationship with their parents. Children constantly take in their environment and form beliefs about how it works according to their experience. For example, if they have very negative experiences at school, they might learn that teachers are mean or bad and schools are worthless. If they have a very positive experience with a person from a different race, they might learn that people of that race are generally very nice.
(Note that beliefs about oneself develop only from interactions with parents).
Schemas
Schemas are mental organizations of information acquired during childhood.
Children are constantly learning from their experiences. From each experience, their brain remembers details about what happened, who was involved, what emotions were felt, and how the situation ended. As new experiences occur, the brain stores additional information alongside the old, gradually building organized structures that connect memories from related experiences. These organized structures are called schemas.
Schemas determine how children interpret their experiences. When a new situation arises, the brain automatically compares it with existing schemas and uses those stored memories to interpret what is happening and decide how to respond. This process happens instantly and usually without conscious awareness. Over time, schemas give each person a characteristic way of understanding and reacting to the world.
The information stored in schemas generalizes: beliefs and patterns formed in one kind of relationship or situation can extend to others that share similar features. For example, beliefs a child forms about their parents’ traits or behavior may later influence how they perceive and respond to teachers, supervisors, or other perceived authority figures.
Because schemas grow by adding new experiences rather than erasing old ones, they often end up containing information that does not fully agree. Each experience is stored even if it conflicts with earlier information. For example, a schema may store “people will help me if I ask” and “no one really helps when it matters.” In any given situation, the parts that most closely match what is happening become active and guide perception, emotion, and behavior.
When a child interacts with a parent, the emotional response and the meaning of the interaction are encoded together into a schema. In adulthood, when that schema is active, it automatically evokes the same kind of emotion that formed with it. Since schemas remain active throughout life, constantly interpreting experience and shaping perception, they continually trigger the emotional patterns they were built with. The steady output of these ever active schemas is what I call baseline emotion. Baseline emotions exist because schemas never stop running and therefore never stop producing their associated emotions.
Adult life
A person's schemas determine most of what they think, feel, and do. When an adult faces a situation, the brain retrieves similar experiences stored during childhood and interprets the current situation through that lens.
The rational or cognitive parts of the brain consistently defend the beliefs stored in a person’s schemas. When current facts would lead to a conclusion that conflicts with those earlier beliefs, the mind adjusts. It may ignore or downplay some facts and combine and interpret the remaining ones in a way that produces justifications, explanations, and arguments consistent with those underlying beliefs. This same process also makes people especially receptive to ideas that fit their existing beliefs, even when those ideas are highly improbable or lack clear evidence.
As a result, all adult beliefs are consistent with beliefs acquired during childhood.
Schemas developed during childhood never change once a person becomes an adult, except through the process I describe in another part of this website.
It is commonly believed that schemas can change in adulthood, such as through therapy or personal growth. I propose that what looks like change is actually the activation of different parts of schemas that already exist. When a person’s schemas include a wide range of emotions and beliefs, there is more room to activate different parts, and this is experienced as change. People whose childhoods left them with a narrower set of emotional and belief patterns have fewer alternatives available, so the change they experience tends to be more limited.
Putting it all together
Let's look at some of my main claims and see how childhood experience explains them.
Intelligence: Baseline emotions directly affects the brain’s ability to focus, absorb, process, and retain information, effects large enough to account for most differences in intelligence.
Psychiatric disorders: Psychiatric disorders, defined by persistent groups of emotional, physical, and mental symptoms, can be fully accounted for by baseline emotions and beliefs acquired during childhood.
Psychiatric disorders are defined by groups of symptoms that last a specified length of time.
Psychiatric symptoms are:
Emotional, such as feeling depressed or anxious,
Physical, such as low energy or sleep problems, or
Mental, such as the thought that people “hate me.”
Baseline emotions can cause both the emotional and physical symptoms of psychiatric disorders.
Beliefs acquired during childhood can cause the mental aspects of psychiatric disorders.
Thus, all of the symptoms of psychiatric disorders can be caused by baseline emotions or beliefs acquired during childhood.
Medical problems: The direct effect of emotion on the body can produce medical problems. It can also play a major role in how the body responds to and recovers from illness.
Summary
Childhood is the blueprint for everything that follows. Emotions and beliefs acquired early in life shape how we think, feel, and respond as adults. Virtually every important human trait rests on the emotional and cognitive foundations built in those early years.