CHAPTER 8 SOCIOEMOTIONAL DEVELOPMENT IN INFANCY

EMOTIONAL AND PEROSONALITY DEVELOPMENT

Emotional Development Defining emotion – Feeling or affect that can involve physiological arousal, conscious experience, and behavioral expression. Affect in parent-child relationships – Emotions are the first language between parents and infant; infants react to their parents’ facial expressions and tone of voice; initial aspects of infant attachment to parents are based on interchanges; a mother’s facial expression influences whether an infant will explore an unfamiliar environment. Developmental timetable of emotions – The Maximally Discriminative Facial Movement Coding System (MAX) (Carroll Izard) codes infants’ facial expressions related to emotion. MAX tells us that interest, distress, and disgust are present at birth and the following reactions appear at later junctions:continued…

Social smile appears at four to six weeks. Sadness appears at about three to four months. Fear appears at about five to seven months. Shyness appears at about six to eight months. Contempt and guilt appear at around two years of age. Crying – is the most important mechanism newborns have fro communicating. There are at least three types: Basic cry – rhythmic pattern – cry followed by silence Anger cry – variation of the basic cry with more excess air forced through vocal chords Pain cry – sudden loud crying without preliminary noises followed by an extended period of breath suspension

Fear – There are two related fears for infants: Stranger anxiety – Infant shows a fear and wariness of strangers, usually second half of first year. By age nine months, it becomes more intense. Separation anxiety – Fear and distress of being left by the caregiver, who will protect them from harm. Social referencing – The infant reading emotional cues from others to assist in how to act in a given situation. Emotional regulation – Managing arousal to adapt and reach a goal.

Adaptive Functions Control of arousal – Safeguards against uncomfortably high levels of excitement or distress. Establishment and maintenance of social relationships – Infants learn to manage their emotions by distracting themselves. Provision of state this is conducive for learning – Learning occurs best when individuals are not overly aroused. Contextual functions – Infants are affected by fatigue, hunger, and time of day and eventually learn to adapt to different contexts that require emotional regulation. Coping strategies – Infants learn how to regulate through coping strategies such as sucking on a thumb.

Temperament – an individual’s behavior style and ways of emotionally responding to stimuli. Defining and classifying temperament – There may be dimensions of temperament: Chess and Thomas’ Temperament Styles Easy child – positive mood, quickly establishes regular routines in infancy, and adapts easily to new experience Difficult child – negatively reacts and cries frequently, irregular daily routines, and is slow to accept new experiences Slow-to-warm-up child – low activity level, somewhat negative, low adaptability, and low intensity of mood Shy and inhibited children – inhibited children tent to react to unfamiliarity with initial avoidance, distress, or subdued affect.

New Classifications Positive affect and approach – the extent to which a child is sociable and outgoing. Negative affectivity – child is easily distressed, closely related to introversion Effortful control (self-regulation) – high on effortful control means the infant is capable of managing arousal, while low control has the opposite outcome. Heredity and environment – An infant is born with some static characteristics that are impacted by the environment. Goodness of fit – A match between the child’s temperament and the environmental demands with which the child must cope. Parenting and child’s temperament – Nature as well as nurture influence the child’s development; children differ from each other from very early in life; and these differences have important implications for parent-child interactions.

Personality development – individual characteristics of the child Trust – Erikson’s first stage of psychosocial development – trust vs. mistrust – if the infant is not well fed and kept warm on a consistent basis, a sense of mistrust develops. The developing sense of self and independence – sense of self is a strong motivating force The self – By 18 months the infant can recognize his or her reflection in a mirror. Independence – Erikson’s second stage of psychosocial development – autonomy vs. shame and doubt – as the child explores through climbing, opening, closing, etc., overprotective or critical parenting can cause the child to develop an excessive sense of shame and doubt.

ATTACHMENT What Is Attachment? – Restricted to a relationship between particular social figures and a particular phenomenon – a close emotional bonding between infant and caregiver. Work with monkeys indicates that not food, but proximity and comfort are key integers of secure attachment.

Individual Differences – The work of the late Mary Ainsworth. Secure attachment – Infants use the caregiver as a secure base from which to explore the environment; Ainsworth believed it forms an important foundation for psychological development in later life. Strange situation – An observational measure of infant attachment that requires the infant to move through a series of introductions, separations, and reunions with caregiver. The following resulting definitions emanate from these observations: Insecure avoidant babies – Show insecurity by avoiding the caregiver; often display distress by crying when she leaves the room. Insecure resistant babies – Cling to caregiver then resist by fighting; don’t explore the playroom. Disorganized babies – Disoriented, strong patterns of avoidance and resistance; child leans away.

Care-giving Styles and Attachment Classification – Securely attached babies have caregivers who are sensitive to their signals and are consistently available to respond to their infants’ needs. Attachment, Temperament, and the Wider Social World – Some developmentalists believe that too much emphasis is placed on the importance of the attachment bond; researchers have found cultural variations in attachment (i.e., German and Japanese babies often show different patterns of attachment from American babies).

SOCIAL CONTEXTS The Family The transition to parenthood – When people become parents through pregnancy, adoption, or step-parenting, they face disequilibrium and must adapt. During the early years of the child’s life, parents must juggle their roles as parents and self-actualizing adults. Reciprocal socialization – Children and parents socialize each other; in infancy, mutual gaze or eye contact play and important role in early social interaction. Scaffolding is parental behavior that supports children’s efforts through positive reciprocal frameworks. The Family as a system – Divisions of labor among family members define particular subunits and attachments define others. Each family member is a participant in several subsystems. Mothers and fathers as caregivers – The main responsibility usually falls on the mother. Mothers do more family work than fathers, but observations of fathers with their infants suggest that fathers have the ability to act sensitively and responsively with their infants.

Day Care – Approximately 2 million children are in formal, licensed day care, and more than 5 million attend kindergarten, with untold millions in informal, unlicensed babysitting situations. A great deal of research has been completed on this topic.