Sure, but if you’re a little kid, I predict that your spread of valences is larger than for an adult, and if anything prone to some polarization; additionally, you might not yet even think you should distinguish “things are going poorly for me” from “I am bad”. Additionally—you end up thinking about yourself in the context of the negative-valenced thing, and your self-concept takes a hit. (I predict that it’s probably equally easy in principle to make a little kid enduringly manic, but that world conditions and the greater ease of finding suffering over pleasure means you get depression more often.)
For one thing, insofar as we observe a correlation between miserable childhoods and miserable adulthoods, there’s an obvious confounder that personality (e.g. being prone to anxiety or anger) is somewhat persistent through a person’s lifetime. And there’s another obvious confounder from the fact that most people grow up with close genetic relatives like parents, so e.g. if someone has parents with anger issues, then they’re probably going to have a crappy home life as a child, and then later they’re probably going to grow up into adults with anger issues, but not necessarily because of the crappy childhood, but because they have similar genes as their parents.
And behavioral genetics shows that there’s relatively weak if any lifetime effects of childhood upbringing that remain after you account for those things, under normal circumstances. (As usual, I have a post on that.)
For another thing, plenty of people have crap childhoods but wind up as well-adjusted adults and vice-versa. And people can be severely depressed and bedridden for 6 months, and then happy and well-adjusted (or even manic) a year after that. Indeed, somebody can be severely depressed and bedridden, then take ketamine, or go 24 hours without sleep, and then they’re happy and energetic (temporarily).
So it seems wrong to say that “negative valence begets negative valence” in a persistent way, nor vice-versa.
Rather, I would say: if your thoughts are mostly negative valence right now, then there’s a probably a reason that your thoughts are mostly negative valence right now. Maybe you’re being tortured, maybe you’re in a bad mood, maybe you’re wracked by anxiety and OCD, who knows. But whatever that reason is, that very same reason may well still be present, and still be causing your thoughts to be mostly negative valence, in 5 minutes, or a week, or 20 years.
But that’s different than negative valence itself snowballing, right? I don’t see any strong mechanism by which negative valence now would beget negative valence in the future—even if we’re talking about 10 seconds into the future, forget about decades.
you might not yet even think you should distinguish “things are going poorly for me” from “I am bad”.
I disagree; I think there’s abundant evidence from everyday experience that all children from toddlers to teenagers are very capable—indeed, virtuosic—at blaming other people when bad things happen to them. :)
For one thing, insofar as we observe a correlation between miserable childhoods and miserable adulthoods, there’s an obvious confounder that personality (e.g. being prone to anxiety or anger) is somewhat persistent through a person’s lifetime. And there’s another obvious confounder from the fact that most people grow up with close genetic relatives like parents, so e.g. if someone has parents with anger issues, then they’re probably going to have a crappy home life as a child, and then later they’re probably going to grow up into adults with anger issues, but not necessarily because of the crappy childhood, but because they have similar genes as their parents.
And behavioral genetics shows that there’s relatively weak if any lifetime effects of childhood upbringing that remain after you account for those things, under normal circumstances. (As usual, I have a post on that.)
For another thing, plenty of people have crap childhoods but wind up as well-adjusted adults and vice-versa. And people can be severely depressed and bedridden for 6 months, and then happy and well-adjusted (or even manic) a year after that. Indeed, somebody can be severely depressed and bedridden, then take ketamine, or go 24 hours without sleep, and then they’re happy and energetic (temporarily).
So it seems wrong to say that “negative valence begets negative valence” in a persistent way, nor vice-versa.
Rather, I would say: if your thoughts are mostly negative valence right now, then there’s a probably a reason that your thoughts are mostly negative valence right now. Maybe you’re being tortured, maybe you’re in a bad mood, maybe you’re wracked by anxiety and OCD, who knows. But whatever that reason is, that very same reason may well still be present, and still be causing your thoughts to be mostly negative valence, in 5 minutes, or a week, or 20 years.
But that’s different than negative valence itself snowballing, right? I don’t see any strong mechanism by which negative valence now would beget negative valence in the future—even if we’re talking about 10 seconds into the future, forget about decades.
I disagree; I think there’s abundant evidence from everyday experience that all children from toddlers to teenagers are very capable—indeed, virtuosic—at blaming other people when bad things happen to them. :)