engleski

The role of positive emotions in play and exploration

The role of emotions is to direct an organism towards a certain set of behaviours and/or to allocate the necessary metabolic support for emotion specific actions. Emotions call to mind urges to act in particular way, but positive emotions usually don’t follow this model of so- called “action-tendencies”. Instead, positive emotions induce changes, first of all, in cognitive activity, and changes in physical activity can follow. Fredrickson (2001) proposes the broad-and-built theory which describes how positive emotions function. According to this theory, positive emotions broaden persons’ momentary thought–action repertoires, in other words, they widen the amount of the thoughts and actions that come to person’s mind. This serves to build enduring personal resources, ranging from physical and intellectual ones to social and psychological. In this paper, focus is put on role of emotions in play and explorative behaviour. Although play and exploration are often put in the same category, there are distinct emotional systems in charge of them. Play usually occurs when organism is in a safe environment and relatively happy state, while exploration occurs when organism experiences change in environment and is connected with more neutral state and feeling of anticipation. When organism is in positive emotional state, amount of the thoughts and actions that come to person’s mind is widened, so they are more ready to exercise new behaviours which in the end leads to new skills. Exploration occurs when organism is in mildly negative or neutral state, so then organism behaves more stereotyped and is less possible that it will exercise novel behaviours.

broaden-and-build-theory of positive emotions; rough and tumble play; exploration

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