Emotional Development

• What Are Emotions?

  • emotions play important roles in communication with others and behavioral organization

• Biological, Cognitive, and Environmental Influences

  • Biological

    • parts of the brain that develop early in life play a role in emotions

    • infants gradually develop the ability to regulate emotions (cerebral cortex)

  • Cognitive

    • children who can distract themselves from a stressful encounter

      • lower level of negative affect

      • less anxiety over time

  • emotional development and coping skills are influenced by whether caregivers have maltreated / neglected children and whether children’s caregivers are depressed or not

  • toddlers are distressed when their parents fight

• Early Emotions

  • self-conscious emotions require self-awareness that involves consciousness and a sense of “me”

  • parents and babies copy each other’s emotions

    • babies pick up on mother’s stress

    • sensitive, responsive parents help their infants grow emotionally

    • reciprocal / synchronous interactions

• Emotional Expression and Social Relationships

  • fear: one of the child’s earliest emotions

    • stranger anxiety: infant shows a fear and wariness of strangers

    • separation protest: crying when caregiver leaves

Temperament

• temperament: individual differences in behavioral styles, emotions, and characteristic ways of responding

• reactivity: variations in the speed and intensity with which an individual responds to situations with positive or negative emotions

• self-regulation: variations in extent / effectiveness of an individual’s ability to control their emotions

• Describing and Classifying Temperament

  • Chess and Thomas

    • easy child: positive mood, regular routine, easy to adopt

    • difficult child: reacts negatively, cries, irregular routine, slow to change

    • slow to warm up child: low activity level, negative, low intensity of mood

  • Kagan

    • inhibition to unfamiliar: avoidance, distress, subdued effect

    • inhibition shows stability in infancy to early childhood

  • Rothbart and Bates

    • effortful control / self-regulation

    • extraversion / surgency. uninhibited children

    • negative affectivity: easily distressed

• Biological Foundations and Experience

  • Biological

    • inhibited temperament is associated with high and stable heart rate, high level of cortisol, high activity in frontal lobe

    • contemporary view: temperament is a biologically based but evolving aspect of behavior

  • Gender, Culture, and Temperament

    • parents react differently to an infant’s temperament based on gender

    • fathers’ internalizing problems (anxiety and depression, etc) were linked to a higher level of negative affectivity in their 6 mth olds

    • maternal negativity and child problem behavior were most strongly linked for children who were low in effortful control and living in chaotic homes

• Goodness of Fit and Parenting

  • goodness of fit: match between a child’s temperament and the environmental demands the child must cope with

  • lack of fit can produce adjustment problems

  • differential susceptibility model

  • biological sensitivity to context model

  • certain characteristics, like different temperaments, that render children more vulnerable to difficulty in adverse contexts also make them more susceptible to optimal growth in very supportive conditions

Personality Development

• Trust

  • Erik Erikson: trust v mistrust stage of development in first year of life

  • infants learn trust when they are cared for in a consistent, warm manner

  • if the infant is not well fed and kept warm on a consistent basis, a sense of mistrust is likely to develop

• The Developing Sense of Self

  • mirror technique

  • signs of self-recognition begin to appear among some infants 15-18 months old

  • late in the second year and early in the third year, toddlers show a self-awareness of “me”

  • infants begin developing an understanding of others as early as 13 months

• Independence

  • Erik Erikson: important issue in second year of life

  • second stage of development: autonomy v shame and doubt

    • autonomy builds as infant’s mental and motor abilities develop

  • It is important for parents to recognize the motivation of toddlers to do what they are capable of doing at their own pace. Then they can learn to control their muscles and their impulses themselves. But when caregivers are impatient and do for toddlers what they are capable of doing themselves, shame and doubt develop. Every parent has rushed a child from time to time. It is only when parents consistently overprotect toddlers or criticize accidents (wetting, soiling, spilling, or breaking, for example) that children develop an excessive sense of shame and doubt about their ability to control themselves and their world.

Social Orientation / Understanding and Attachment

Social Orientation / Understanding

• social orientation

  • young infants stare intently at faces and are attuned to the sounds of human voices, especially the voices of their caregivers

  • later, they become adept at interpreting the meaning of facial expressions and voices

  • face-to-face play begins to characterize caregiver-infant interactions when the infant is 2-3 months old

    • focused social interaction

    • vocalizations, touch, and gestures

    • illustrates a mothers’ motivation to create a positive emotional state in their infants

  • by 2-3 months infants respond in dif ways to ppl and objects

    • show more positive emotion to ppl than to inanimate objects

    • most infants expect ppl to react positively when the infants initiate a behavior

  • interaction w peers increases considerably in the last half of the second year

  • between 18 and 24 months of age, children increase their imitative and reciprocal play

    • imitating nonverbal actions like jumping and running

• locomotion

  • newly developed, self-produced locomotion skills (ability to crawl, walk, and run) allow the infant to independently initiate social interchanges on a more frequent basis

  • development of these gross motor skills results from factors such as the development of the nervous system, the goal

  • the infant is motivated to reach, and environmental support for the skill the infant’s and toddler’s push for independence is paced by the development of locomotion skills

• intention, goal-directed behavior, and meaningful interactions with others

  • joining attention: when the caregiver and infant focus on the same object or event. occurs at 7-8 months and intensifies at 10-11 months

  • gaze-following

• social referencing: reading emotional cues in others to help determine how to act in a particular situation

Attachment and Its Development

• attachment: close emotional bond between two people

• Freud: infants become attached to the person or object that provides oral satisfaction

• Harlow: contact comfort is important in attachment

• Bowlby: both infants and their primary caregivers are biologically predisposed to form attachments

  • newborn is biologically equipped to elicit attachment behavior

  • immediate result is to keep primary caregiver nearby

  • long-term effect is to increase the infant’s chance of survival

  • infants develop an internal working model of attachment (a simple mental model of the caregiver, their relationship, and the self as deserving of nurturant care)

    • influences the infant’s and later, the child’s subsequent responses to other people

    • plays a pivotal role in the discovery of links between attachments and emotional understanding, conscience development, and self-concept

• attachment develops in phases

• birth - 2 months: infants instinctively direct their attachment to human figures

• 2 - 7 months: attachment becomes focused on one figure (primary caregiver) as the baby leans to distinguish between people

• 7 - 24 months: specific attachments develop. with increased locomotor skills, babies actively seek contact with regular caregivers

• 24 months +: children become aware of others’ feelings, goals, and plans and begin to take these into account in forming their own actions

Individual Differences in Attachment

• Ainsworth and the Strange Situation

  • securely attached babies use the caregiver as a secure base from which to explore the environment

  • insecure avoidant babies show insecurity by avoiding the caregiver

  • insecure resistant babies often cling to the caregiver, then resist the caregiver

  • insecure disorganized babies appear disoriented and disorganized

  • secure attachment in the first year of life provides an important foundation for psychological development later in life

  • developmental cascade model: connections across domains over time that influences developmental pathways and outcomes

Caregiving Styles and Attachment

• securely attached babies have caregivers who are sensitive to their signals and are consistently available to respond to their infant’s needs

• caregivers of avoidant babies tend to be unavailable or rejecting

  • don’t respond to their babies’ signals

  • have little physical contact w them

  • when they do interact, they may behave in an angry and irritable way

• caregivers of resistant babies are inconsistent

  • sometimes they respond to their babies’ needs and sometimes they don’t

  • tend to not be very affectionate

  • show little synchrony when interacting with them

• caregivers of disorganized babies often neglect or physically abuse them (or are depressed)

Developmental Social Neuroscience and Attachment

• prefrontal cortex, subcortical regions of amygdala, and hypothalamus likely have an important role in maternal attachment behavior

• oxytocin is released during breast feeding and by contact in warmth

Social Contexts The Family

• Reciprocal Socialization

  • children socialize parents just as parents socialize children

  • reciprocal interchanges and mutual influence processes are transactional

  • scaffolding: parents time interactions in such a way that the infant experiences turn taking with the parents

    • in using scaffolding, caregivers provide a positive, reciprocal framework in which they and their children interact

    • when adults used explicit scaffolding (encouragement and praise) their 13- and 14- month old infants were twice as likely to engage in helping behavior

  • epigenetic view emphasizes that development is the result of an ongoing, bidirectional interchange between heredity and the environment

    • harsh, hostile parenting is associated with negative outcomes for children, such as benign defiant and oppositional

• Managing and Guiding Infants’ Behavior

  • being proactive and childproofing the environment

  • engaging in corrective methods when infants engage in undesirable behaviors

• Maternal and Parental Caregiving

  • fathers have the ability to act as sensitively and responsively as mothers with their infants

  • infants who showed a higher level or externalizing, disruptive problems at 1 year of age has fathers who displayed a low level of engagement with them as early as the third month of life

  • children whose father’s behavior was more withdrawn and depressed at 3 moths had a lower level of cognitive development at 24 months of age

  • children whose fathers were more engaged and sensitive, as well as less controlling, at 24 months of age showed a higher level of cognitive development at that age

  • if fathers have mental health problems, they may not interact as effectively with their infants

Child Care

• most countries provide parental benefits only to women who have been employed for a minimum time prior to childbirth

• Variations in Child Care

  • infants and toddlers are more likely to be found in family child care in informal care settings

  • older children are more likely to be in child care centers and preschool and early education programs

  • child-care quality makes a difference

  • children and more likely to experience poor childcare if they come from families with few resources

  • extensive child care was harmful to low-income children only when the care was of low quality

  • high-quality child care involves providing children with

    • a safe environment

    • access to age-appropriate toys

    • participation in age-appropriate activities

    • low caregiver-to-child ratio that allows caregivers to spend considerable time with children on an individual basis