Week 3 Chapters 4 & 5 Psychology 456
temperament *
"constitutionally based" individual differences in emotional, motor, and attentional reactivity and self-regulation"
Describe the three broad temperamental profiles that Thomas and Chess identified in their classic longitudinal research. Which profile(s) are thought to place children at risk of future adjustment difficulties, and what seems to determine whether or not children with such profiles actually experience adjustment problems?
1. Easy temperament (40 percent of the sample): Easygoing children are even-tempered, typically in a positive mood, and quite open and adaptable to new experiences. Their habits are regular and predictable. 2. Difficult temperament (10 percent of the sample): Difficult children are active, irritable, and irregular in their habits. They often react very vigorously to changes in routine and are very slow to adapt to new persons or situations. 3. Slow-to-warm-up temperament (15 percent of the sample): These children are quite inactive, somewhat moody, and can be slow to adapt to new persons and situations. But, unlike the difficult child, they typically respond to novelty in mildly, rather than intensely, negative ways. For example, they may resist cuddling by looking away rather than by kicking or screaming. temperamentally "difficult" children are more likely than other children to have problems adjusting to school activities, and they are often irritable and aggressive in their interactions with siblings and peers. Difficult infants are especially likely to remain difficult and to display behavior problems later in life if their parents are often impatient, angry, demanding, and forceful with them
Describe the behavioral phases that Bowlby observed in young children during extended hospitalizations.
1. In an initial protest phase, children tried to regain their mothers by crying, demanding her return, and resisting the attention of substitute caregivers. This phase lasted from a few hours to more than a week. 2. In a second phase of despair, children seemed to lose hope of ever being reunited with their mothers. They often became apathetic and unresponsive to toys and other people and seemed to be in a deep state of mourning. 3. Finally, many children progressed to what Bowlby called the detachment phase. They appeared to have "recovered" in that they showed renewed interest in toys and substitute caregivers; but their relationships with their mothers had changed. When the mother visited, her child was often cool and indifferent, showing little if any protest when she left once again. It almost seemed as if the children were in the process of undoing their emotional ties to their mothers. Bowlby noted that a fourth separation phase, permanent withdrawal from human relationships, may occur if a child's separation from the mother is extremely prolonged or if he loses a series of temporary attachment objects, such as nurses or babysitters, while separated from his mother.
Based on what is known from available research, describe the strategies that parents might use to make necessary separations more tolerable for infants and toddlers.
1. Provide an explanation for the separation. 2. Provide some reminder of home. 3. Choose a sensitive substitute caregiver.
Describe the 4 patterns of attachment usually characterized by observers of Ainsworth's Strange Situation procedure.
1. Secure attachment. About 60-65 percent of l-year-old American infants fall into this category. The securely attached infant actively explores while alone with the mother and may be visibly upset by separations. The infant often greets the mother warmly when she returns and, if highly distressed, will often seek physical contact with her, which helps to alleviate that distress. The child may be outgoing with strangers while the mother is present. 2. Resistant attachment. About 10 percent of 1-year-olds show this type of "insecure" attachment. These infants try to stay close to their mothers but explore very little while she is present. They become very distressed as the mother departs. But when she returns, the infants are ambivalent: They remain near her, although they seem angry at her for having left them and are likely to resist physical contact initiated by the mother. Resistant infants are quite wary of strangers, even when their mothers are present. 3. Avoidant attachment. These infants (about 20 percent of l-year-olds) also display an "insecure" attachment. They often show little distress when separated from the mother and will generally turn away from and may continue to ignore their mothers, even when she tries to gain their attention. Avoidant infants are often rather sociable with strangers but may occasionally avoid or ignore them in much the same way that they avoid or ignore their mothers. 4. Disorganized/disoriented attachment. This recently discovered attachment pattern characterizes the 5-15 percent of American infants who are most stressed by the Strange Situation and who seem to be the most insecure. It appears to be a curious combination of the resistant and the avoidant patterns that reflects confusion about whether to approach or avoid the caregiver. When reunited with their mothers, these infants may cringe and look fearful, freeze, or curl up on the floor; or they may move closer but then abruptly move away as the mother draws near.
Ethological Theory: Perhaps I was born to relate and love
A major assumption of the ethological approach is that all species, including human beings, are born with a number of innate behavioral tendencies that have in some way contributed to the survival of the species over the course of evolution. Believe that many of these built-in behaviors are specifically designed to promote attachments between infants and their caregivers. Even the attachment relationship itself is said to have adaptive significance, serving to protect the young from predators and other natural calamities and to ensure that their needs are met.
caregiving hypothesis Verses temperament hypothesis
Ainsworth's notion that the type of attachment an infant develops with a particular caregiver depends primarily on the kind of caregiving he has received from that person. Kagan's view that the Strange Situation measures individual differences in infants' temperaments rather than the quality of their attachments.
Describe the development of negative emotions over the first year. What cognitive element is one of the strongest elicitors of negative emotion among 2 to 8-month-old infants?
Although newborns show generalized distress to hunger, pain, and a wide range of other discomforting stimuli, particular negative emotions begin to appear over the first six months of life. Red-faced anger (as opposed to general distress) is sometimes seen in the faces of 2-month-olds who receive painful inoculations or who cannot exert control over toys and other events, and these angry reactions become increasingly intense by the middle of the first year. Sadness shows a similar developmental trend, with 2- to 6-month-olds becoming sullen in some of the same situations that elicit angry displays. By age 3 to 4 months, infants expect caregivers to respond to their social overtures and violation of an infants' learned expectancies, as when a mother adopts a "still face" or is having a serious depressive episode, is often enough not only to distress an infant, but to sadden her as well. Fear forms last. An infant considers a person, object, or situation to be a distinct threat (and thus cause him to be fearful) begin to appear at 6 to 7 months of age. The caregiver's responses is one of the biggest elicitors of negative emotions. The control over the environment too, but how a caregiver responds greatly affects how the child responds.
A social critic argues that because most day care in the U.S. is far less than optimal, women should stay home to care for their infants and toddlers, if not forever, at least until they are age 3 or older. Rebut this claim, citing at least two findings to suggest that the critic's viewpoint is misleading and potentially harmful.
Apparently there is far less risk that children will display insecure attachments (or any other adverse outcome) when they receive excellent day care—even when that care begins very early. Jerome Kagan and his associates (1978), for example, found that the vast majority of infants who entered a high-quality, university sponsored day-care program at age 3½ to 5½ months not only developed secure attachments to their mothers but were just as socially, emotionally, and intellectually mature over the first two years of life as children from similar backgrounds who had been cared for at home. studies of U.S. children in day-care arrangements of varying quality reveal that early entry into high-quality care is a reasonably good predictor of favorable social, emotional, and (especially) intellectual outcomes (for example, language skills, readiness for school, and performance on standaridized tests) at age 3, 4½, and during the primary grades at school, with low-quality care being associated with much poorer outcomes. There are high quality daycares out there and they can provide care that a parent may not be able to provide. Especially if they come from a place that requires dual incomes or she desires to keep working.
When (at what ages) can children typically understand they can feel two emotions at the same times and know that they or others can experience mixed (positive and negative) emotions in the same situation.
At ages 5-7 children can understand that they can feel two emotions at once and between 6-10 children begin to acknowledge that they or people they know can have positive and negative feelings (mixed emotions)
Describe the two patterns of caregiving that are thought to foster avoidant attachments and compare each to the caregiving styles thought to promote resistant attachments and secure attachment.
Aviodant-impatient and unresponsive, reject babies, or provide too much attention Resistant- parents inconsistent with moods, Resistant infants make vigorous attempts to gain emotional support where as avoidant infants have learned to do without support
Psychoanalytic Theory: I love you because you feed me
Because it is usually mothers who "pleasure" oral infants by feeding them, it seemed logical to Freud that the mother would become the baby's primary object of security and affection, particularly if she were relaxed and generous in her feeding practices. Erik Erikson also believed that a mother's feeding practices will influence the strength or security of her infant's attachment. However, he claimed that a mother's overall responsiveness to all her child's needs is more important than feeding itself.
Cognitive Development Theory: To love you I must know you will be there
Before an attachment can occur, the infant must be able to discriminate familiar companions from strangers. She must also recognize that familiar companions have a "permanence" about them (object permanence), for it would be difficult indeed to form a stable relationship with a person who ceases to exist whenever she passes from view. So perhaps it is no accident that attachments first emerge at age 7-9 months—precisely the time when infants are entering Piaget's fourth sensorimotor substage, the point at which they first begin to search for and find objects that they've seen someone hide from them. They found that 9-month-olds who scored high (substage 4 or above) in object permanence only protested when separated from their mothers, whereas age-mates who scored lower (substage 3 or below) did not reliably protest separations from anyone. So it seemed that only the cognitively advanced 9-month-olds had formed a primary attachment (to their mothers)—a finding which implies that the timing of this important emotional milestone does depend in part on the infant's level of object permanence.
Describe the development of happiness over the first year. What cognitive element is one of the strongest elicitors of surprise and joy among 2 to 8-month-old infants?
By the end of the second month, babies begin to display social smiles that are most often seen in interactions with caregivers who are likely to be delighted at a baby's positive reaction to them and to smile back and continue whatever they are doing that the baby enjoys. By age 3 months, babies are more likely to smile at real people than at other interesting and animated puppets that beckon to them. between 3 and 6 months of age, babies increasingly display raised-check and open-mouth (that is BIG) smiles while gazing or interacting pleasantly with a smiling caregiver, a sign that some interpret as indicating that young infants are beginning to share positive affect with a companion. By age 6 or 7 months, infants begin to reserve their biggest smiles for familiar companions and may often seem wary rather than happy to encounter a person they don't know.
Describe how developmental researchers study/measure infant emotions.
Carroll Izard and his colleagues at the University of Delaware have studied infants' emotional expressions by videotaping babies' responses to such events as grasping an ice cube, having a toy taken away, or seeing their mothers return after a separation. So they used facial expressions.
Describe the long term correlates of social deprivation in infancy. Can children recover from it?
Children who suffer social depravity have great difficulty forming secure attachment, score lower on IQ tests, were socially immature, were remarkably dependent on adults, had poor language skills, and were prone to behavioral problems as well as aggression. Fortunately, socially deprived (or otherwise maltreated) infants and toddlers can overcome many of their initial handicaps if placed in homes where they receive lots of attention from sensitive, responsive caregivers. Recovery seems to go especially well when children have not been abused and are placed by age 6 months with highly educated and relatively affluent adoptive or foster parents who themselves have positive (that is, secure) working models of attachment relationships. On the other hand, the lingering deficiencies and reactive attachment disorders that some early abuse victims and many late adoptees display suggest that the first six months of life may be a sensitive period for developments that would help infants to establish secure affectional ties and other capacities that these ties may foster. Can they make complete recoveries? We don't really know yet.
How does the culture in which a child is raised affect his/her emotional self-regulation and later display of emotion? Illustrate by describing culturally specified rules that differ between collectivist and individualistic peoples.
Depending upon what culture you are raised in is what emotions are socially acceptable to express. American parents love to stimulate their babies until they reach peaks of delight. By contrast, caregivers among the Gusii and the Aka tribes of central Africa rarely take part in face-to-face play with their babies, seeking instead to keep young infants as calm and contented as possible. So American babies learn that intense displays of emotion are okay as long as they are positive, whereas Gusii and Aka babies learn to restrain both positive and negative emotions.
Compare the evolutionary interpretation with the cognitive-developmental interpretation of stranger and separation anxiety.
Evolutionary theorists claim that many situations that infants face qualify as natural clues to danger—situations that have been so frequently associated with danger throughout human evolutionary history that a fear or avoidance response has become biologically programmed. infants may be programmed to fear, once they can readily discriminate familiar objects and events from unfamiliar ones, are strange faces. The evolutionary viewpoint also explains an interesting cross-cultural variation in separation anxiety. Infants from many nonindustrialzed societies, who sleep with their mothers and are nearly always in close contact with them, begin to protest separations about two to three months earlier than Western infants do. Cognitive-developmental theorists view stranger anxiety and separation anxiety as natural outgrowths of an infant's perceptual and cognitive development. Jerome Kagan suggests that 6- to 10-month-olds have finally developed stable schemes for (1) the faces of familiar companions and (2) these companions' probable whereabouts at home (if they are not present). Suddenly a strange face that is discrepant with the infants' schemes for caregivers appears and upsets children because they can't explain who this is or what has become of familiar caregivers.
How might cultural variations in child rearing affect attachment behaviors?
For example, parents in northern Germany deliberately encourage their infants to be independent and tend to discourage close, clingy contact, perhaps explaining why more German than American babies show reunion behaviors characteristic of the avoidant attachment pattern. Furthermore, intense separation and stranger anxieties, which characterize resistant attachments, are much more common in cultures such as Japan, where parents rarely leave their infants with substitute caregivers and Israel, where communally reared kibbutz children sleep in "infant houses" managed by substitute caregivers without having their parents available to them at night.
Thomas and Chess
IBQ and CBQ; goodness of fit
How is a working mother's attitude about working and child care related to her child's social and emotional well-being?
If she is happy with her job and her role as mother the child's social and emotional well-being with thrive. She will be more sensitive to the child's needs.
A mother returns after a separation and is reunited with her 1-year-old as part of the "Strange Situation." How does the infant respond to this reunion if he is securely attached? resistant? avoidant? disorganized/disoriented?
If the child is securely attached he greets his mother warmly, if highly distressed he will seek physical contact with her. If the child is resistant, they become very uspet when the mother leaves and resists physical contact. If avoidant, they show little distress if the mother leaves and turns away from her and igors her if she tries to gain her attention. If Didorganized/disoriented, they cringe and look fearful, freeze or curl up on the floor or move away when she comes near.
Discuss cross-cultural differences in the implications of childhood and adolescent shyness.
In the united states shyness is a social disadvantage. Those who are shy are shunned and looked down upon regardless of the person's maturity. In Asian cultures being shy is preferred and seen as far more mature then their peers. The quiet reserved nature is the pinnacle of what a person should be and are far more accepted than their assertive peers.
Outline the development of identification/interpretation of others' emotion and social referencing during the first year of life and those that occur between 18 months to 8 years.
Infants are prepared to react to certain vocal signals at birth or shortly thereafter. 3 month olds can discriminate between happy and sad faces, especially those of their mother. By 4 months of age, infants can discriminate changes in a stranger's naturalistic displays of emotion (a happy person becoming sad, for example), and by age 7 months, they not only discriminate others' simple emotions on the basis of only one kind of sensory input (vocal cues or facial expressions, for example), but show different patterns of brain wave activity (ERPs) to photos posing different emotions. Infants' ability to interpret particular emotional expressions does become more obvious between ages 7 and 10 months. 12-month-old infants even social referenced from a televised segment, avoiding and reacting negatively themselves to presentation of an object that had elicited a fearful reaction from an adult on TV. 18 month olds can become angry by viewing another person tearing apart a toy. Before age 3, children are notoriously bad at identifying and labeling the emotional expressions posed by people in pictures or on puppets' faces. This may simply reflect the fact that 2- to 3-year-olds have not acquired (or cannot retrieve) the words to label various emotions, because even 18-month-olds can draw some appropriate behavioral inferences from others' emotional expressions. Between ages 3 and 5, children become better and better at correctly identifying and labeling the simple emotions on people's (or puppets') faces. Three-year-olds are likely to correctly label happy expressions but will often use the label "happy" to describe other positive emotions such as surprise. Between ages 3 and 4 children begin to rely on the labels "sad" (or "mad") to characterize negative emotions, with "scared" (the label used for fear) becoming more common and applied more appropriately by 4- and 5-year-olds. Yet even 5-year-olds rarely used the labels "surprised" or "disgusted" to characterize emotions—these emotions, and the more complex ones such as pride, shame, and guilt are not correctly labeled until the early to middle grade-school years. 5-year-olds could tell from expressive movements which of the dancers was the sad, fearful, or happy one, and 8-year-olds were as skilled as adults, correctly identifying all four emotions implied by the dancers' expressive movements. 4- and 5-year-olds know that a persons' current feelings (particularly negative emotions such as sadness) may stem from reflections on past events. 5 and 7, children understand that they can feel two compatible emotions at the same time. between the ages of 6 and 10, children begin to acknowledge that they or people they know can have positive and negative (that is, mixed) feelings about the same situation
Learning Theory: Rewardingness leads to love
Infants will become attached to persons who feed them and gratify their needs. Feeding was thought to be particularly important for two reasons: First, it should elicit positive responses from a contented infant (smiles, coos) that are likely to increase a caregiver's affection for the baby. Second, feeding is often an occasion when mothers can provide an infant with many comforts—food, warmth, tender touches, soft reassuring vocalizations, changes in scenery, and even a dry diaper (if necessary)—all in one sitting. Over time, then, an infant should come to associate his mother with pleasant or pleasurable sensations, so that the mother herself becomes a valuable commodity. Once the mother (or any other caregiver) has attained this status as a secondary reinforcer, the infant is attached—he or she will now do whatever is necessary (smile, cry, coo, babble, or follow) in order to attract the caregiver's attention or to remain near this valuable and rewarding individual. Harlow and Zimmerman's classic study implies that contact comfort is a more powerful contributor to attachment in monkeys than feeding or the reduction of hunger.
Describe the long term outcomes of secure and insecure attachments. Is attachment history destiny?
Is attachment destiny? No. Secure attachment with one person can offset an insecure attachment with the mother. Secure can become insecure as life events change
Describe a concern about early day care raised by the NICHD study? How robust are those findings?
It was once feared that regular separations from working parents and placement into day care might prevent infants from establishing secure attachments or undermine the quality of attachments that were already secure. However, there is little evidence that either a mother's employment outside the home or alternative caregiving will have harmful effects unless children face the dual risks of insensitive care at home and poor day care.
Amae
Japanese term that refers to an infant's feeling of total dependance on his or her mother and presumption of the mother's love and indulgence.
Describe Jerome Kagan's research findings related to behavioral inhibition. Which groups of children displayed long-term stability?
Jerome Kagan and his associates found while conducting longitudinal studies of a temperamental attribute they call behavioral inhibition: the tendency to withdraw from unfamiliar people or situations. Children were tested at 4 months then again at 12 months. Children at 4 months who were classified as "inhibited" showed quick fussy and heightened motor activity to novel objects like bright colors. toddlers classified as inhibited were rather shy and sometimes even fearful when they encountered unfamiliar people, toys, or settings, whereas most uninhibited children responded quite adaptively to these events. When tested at 4 ½ 5 ½ years they were shown to be socially and less sociable with peers. Both the highly inhibited and highly uninhibited were the ones with the most stability.
List and describe Rothbart & Bates six dimensions of temperament.
Mary Rothbart and John Bates (1998) define as "constitutionally based"individual differences in emotional, motor, and attentional reactivity and self-regulation": 1. Fearful distress (fearfulness) — wariness, distress, and withdrawal in new situations or in response to novel stimuli. 2. Irritable distress — fussiness, crying, and showing distress when desires are frustrated (sometimes called frustration/anger). 3. Positive affect — frequency of smiling, laughing, willingness to approach others and to cooperate with them (called sociability by some researchers). 4. Activity level — amount of gross motor activity (for example, kicking, crawling). 5. Attention span/persistence — length of time child orients to and focuses on objects or events of interest. 6. Rhythmicity — regularity/predictability of bodily functions such as eating, sleeping, and bowel functioning.
Describe how shared environmental influences and nonshared environmental influences may be related to temperamental attributes.
Negatively toned temperamental attributes are shaped more by nonshared environmental influences—those aspects of environment that siblings do not share and that conspire to make them temperamentally dissimilar. Some research implies that the home environments that siblings share most clearly influence positively toned temperamental attributes such as smiling/positive affect; yet shared environment contributes very little to negatively tonedattributes such as irritability and fearful distress because siblings living together often do not resemble each other on these aspects of temperament.
What are some cognitive strategies that parents use to help children learn to regulate their emotions?
Parents link emotions, goals and desires together. They can demonstrate an understanding of what the child is feeling, explaining why something is the way it is and explaining an outcome. Desire language. Some use a highly elaborative style in which they frequently ask their children open-ended questions about the emotions of storybook characters or provide ample background information and pose open-ended questions when conversing with their children about past events that have evoked noteworthy emotions. Other parents are far less elaborative in their emotional dialogues; they are more inclined to simply read stories without commenting on characters' emotions and are likely to ask simple yes-no questions about their children's emotional experiences (for example, "You were scared at the zoo, weren't you?") rather that openended questions that require a child to provide a more detailed analysis and interpretation of his or her feelings. Does discourse style matter? Yes, indeed! Three- to 5-year-olds whose mothers use a more elaborative style are much better able to recognize and discriminate others' facial expressions of emotion and are better at predicting how a puppet will react emotionally to particular events (for example, going to a movie, being approached by a big, but friendly dog) compared to age-mates whose mothers have been less elaborative when discussing emotions.
Describe the characteristics of high-quality infant and toddler day care.
Physical setting: clean, well lighted, ventilated, outdoor play areas are spacious. Good caregiver / child ratio caregivers are qualified. licensing...ect ect.
Describe the phases infants pass through as they become attached to their caregivers.
Schaffer and Emerson found that infants pass through the following phases as they develop close ties with their caregivers: 1. The asocial phase (0-6 weeks). Very young infants are somewhat "asocial" in that many kinds of social or nonsocial stimuli will produce a favorable reaction, and few produce any kind of protest. By the end of this period, infants are beginning to show a preference for such social stimuli as a smiling face. 2. The phase of indiscriminate attachments (6 weeks to 6-7 months). Now infants clearly enjoy human company but tend to be somewhat indiscriminate: They smile more at people than at such other life like objects as talking puppets and are likely to fuss whenever any adult puts them down. Although 3- to 6-month-olds reserve their biggest grins for familiar companions and are more quickly soothed by a regular caregiver, they seem to enjoy the attention they receive from just about anyone (including strangers). 3. The specific attachment phase (about age 7-9 months). Between 7 and 9 months of age, infants begin to protest only when separated from one particular individual, usually the mother. Now able to crawl, infants may try to follow along behind mother to stay close and will often greet her warmly when she returns. They also become somewhat wary of strangers. According to Schaffer and Emerson, these babies have established their first genuine attachments. 4. The phase of multiple attachments. Within weeks after forming their initial attachments, about half the infants in Schaffer and Emerson's study were becoming attached to other people (fathers, siblings, grandparents, or perhaps even a regular babysitter). By 18 months of age, very few infants were attached to only one person, and some were attached to five or more.
List the secondary (complex) emotions. Why are they known as self-conscious emotions? When do they emerge?
Secondary emotions are emotions that require self-awareness in order for them to be expressed. They are called self-conscious emotions for this reason. These are such emotions as embarrassment, shame, pride and envy. When "sense of self" is obtained around age 18 months. Self-awareness is necessary for embarrassment whereas the self-evaluating emotions such as pride, shame and envy require also an understanding of social rules.
What kind of caregiving is related to an infant's developing a positive working model of others. What factors are related to the quality of an infant's working model of herself?
Sensitive, responsive caregiving should lead the child to conclude that people are dependable (positive working model of others), whereas insensitive, neglectful, or abusive caregiving may lead to insecurity and a lack of trust (negative working model of others).
Use the information in Topic Comments to expand Shaffer's description of emotional attachments on page 135.
Shaffer defines attachment as "the strong affectional ties we feel for the special people in our lives". It is also a system of behaviors with an individual that organizes our feelings about the person we are attached to. Out attachment to someone creates a set of behaviors either signaling (crying, babbling, cooing) and approaching behaviors (clinging following and reaching). The attachment is focused on specific individuals who illicit the attachment behavior, involve psychical proximity seeking and produce separation distress.
What impact, according to research, does early care by caregivers other than a child's own parents have on attachment?
That the parental attachment may be more secure when they use high-quality care. studies of U.S. children in day-care arrangements of varying quality reveal that early entry into high-quality care is a reasonably good predictor of favorable social, emotional, and (especially) intellectual outcomes (for example, language skills, readiness for school, and performance on standaridized tests) at age 3, 4½, and during the primary grades at school, with low-quality care being associated with much poorer outcomes. Mothers tend to be much happier and more sensitive as caregivers when their employment statuses are consistent with their desire to be either employed or a fulltime homemaker
What emotions are considered to be primary emotions? Construct a timeline for the emergence of the primary emotions.
The primary emotions present at birth are: disgust, distress, interest, and contentment. Between 2 and 7 months the other primary emotions begin to show: anger, joy, surprise and fear. one of the strongest elicitors of surprise and joy among 2- to 8-month-olds is their discovery that they can exert some. And disconfirmation of these learned expectancies (as when someone or something prevents them from exerting control) is likely to anger many 2- to 4- month-olds and may sadden the 4- to 6- month-olds as well life. Red-faced anger (as opposed to general distress) is sometimes seen in the faces of 2-month-olds who receive painful inoculations or who cannot exert control over toys and other events, and these angry reactions become increasingly intense by the middle of the first year Fear is one of the last primary emotions to emerge
Goodness-of-fit model
Thomas and Chess's notion that development is likely to be optimized when parents' child-rearing practices are sensitively adapted to the child's temperamental characteristics.
Describe stranger behaviors that reduce the likelihood of upsetting a wary infant? What stranger behaviors might increase negative infant reactions.
Trying not to look strange, being sensitive and unobtrusive, keeping familiar companions available. Dressing weird or separating the child from the adult, not having a warm environment.
Describe two particular fears that most infants display between 7 and 8 months of age.
Two types of fears emerge, stranger anxiety (a wary or fretful reaction that infants and toddlers often display when approached by an unfamiliar person) and separation anxiety (a wary or fretful reaction that infants and toddlers often display when separated from persons to whom they are attached).
Attachment
a close emotional relationship between two persons, characterized by mutual affection and a desire to maintain proximity.
shame Verses evaluative embarrassment
a downward gaze with a slumped posture, often accompanied by statements such as "I'm no good at this" should they fail at a seemingly easy task. characterized by nervous smiles, self-touching, and gaze aversion, when they fail to complete a task in the allotted time or to otherwise match a standard. Evaluative embarrassment stems from a negative evaluation of one's performance and is much more stressful than the "simple" embarrassment of being the object of others' attention. preschoolers who experience evaluative embarrassment do not slump, turn their eyes downward, and turn down the corners of their mouth as children do when they feel ashamed; in fact, the 4-year-olds who failed to master a challenge in this study typically displayed either evaluative embarrassment or shame, but not both, thus suggesting that these are different emotions.
Emotion
a motivational construct that is characterized by changes in affect (or feelings), physiological responses, cognitions, and overt behavior.
Strange Situation
a series of eight separations and reunion episodes to which infants are exposed in order to determine the quality of their attachments.
behavioral inhibition
a temperamental attribute reflecting the fearful distress children display and their tendency to withdraw from unfamiliar people and situations.
discrete emotions theory Verses functionalist perspective
a theory of emotions specifying that specific emotions are biologically programmed, accompanied by distinct sets of bodily and facial cues, and discriminable from early in life a theory specifying the major purpose of an emotion is to establish, maintain, or change one's relationship with the environment to accomplish a goal; emotions are not viewed as discrete early in life but as entities that emerge with age.
stranger anxiety
a wary or fretful reaction that infants and toddlers often display when approached by an unfamiliar person.
separation anxiety
a wary or fretful reaction that infants and toddlers often display when separated from persons to whom they are attached.
emotional competence verses social competence verses Personal adjustment
abilities to display predominantly positive (rather than negative) emotions, correctly identify others' emotions and respond appropriately to them, and adjust one's own emotions to appropriate levels of intensity in order to achieve one's goals. the ability to achieve personal goals in social interactions while maintaining positive relationships with others. acclimation by someone to occupational and residential conditions within their community and family, particularly with regard to cultural interactions with those with whom regular personal contact is required. 2. the extent to which an individual is capable of dealing with life's demands.
preadapted characteristic-
an innate attribute that is a product of evolution and serves some function that increases the chances of survival for the individual and the species.
Imprinting
an innate or instinctual form of learning in which the young of certain species will follow and become attached to moving objects (usually their mothers).
Jerome Kagan
behavioral inhibition
Mary Ainsworth
caregiving hypothesis & strange situation paradigm
Distinguish between the "caregiving hypothesis" and the "temperament hypothesis" as related to attachment security.
caregiving hypothesis-Ainsworth's notion that the type of attachment an infant develops with a particular caregiver depends primarily on the kind of caregiving he has received from that person. temperament hypothesis -Kagan's view that the Strange Situation measures individual differences in infants' temperaments rather than the quality of their attachments. Caregiver hypothesis is about who the child depends on for care while temperament hypothesis is about how the child's temperament will affect the quality of the attachment.
Mary Main
causes of disorganized/disoriented attachments
Describe parental influence on children's display of pride, guilt and shame.
children generally showed some signs of pride over their successes and shame over their failures. Yet the amounts of pride and shame they displayed largely depended on their mothers' reactions to these outcomes. Mothers who accentuated the negative by being especially critical of failures tended to have children who displayed high levels of shame after a failure and little pride after successes. Clear rule-breaking and other moral transgressions have the potential to make children feel guilty, shameful, or both. But how parents react to transgressions may determine whether children feel guilty or shameful.
internal working models
cognitive representations of self, others, and relationships that infants construct from their interactions with caregivers.
emotional display rules
culturally defined rules specifying which emotions should or should not be expressed under which circumstances.
What attachment pattern is most often related to maternal depression and/or child abuse/neglect.
disorganized/disoriented
Harry Harlow
effects of social deprivation on rhesus monkeys
Is there an advantage to having high effortful control? Why?
effortful control appears to be a most important temperamental attribute—one that has already been linked to children's emerging emotional and academic competencies, as well as their risk of displaying a variety of problem behaviors, and that may prove in the years ahead to have implications for many other aspects of social behavior and personality development. The greater the effortful control, the better the child is at regulating emotion and not developing externalizing problems.
List the 4 components of emotion and make-up your own example illustrating these 4 components in action.
emotions have several components including: 1. feelings (generally positive or negative in character) 2. physiological correlates, including changes in heart rate, galvanic skin response (that is sweat gland activity), brain wave activity, and so forth. 3. cognitions that elicit or accompany feelings and physiological changes, and 4. goals, or the desire to take such actions as escaping noxious stimuli, approaching pleasant ones, influencing the behavior of others, communicating needs, or desires, and so on. When we feel an emotion (fear, excitement, love), we have a physiological reaction like an increased heart rate. Our brain analyzes the emotion and decides if what we are felling is ok, it will push for the response in our body, like an increase in heart rate, to go with what we feel. The goals are what we feel we need to do about the emotion. If we feel fear, our brain perceives something as threatening so it will increase our heart rate; in turn our goal will be to get away from what is making us feel that.
synchronized routines
generally harmonious interactions between two persons in which participants adjust their behavior in response to the partner's actions and emotions.
reactive attachment disorder
inability to form secure attachment bonds with other people; characterizes many victims of early social deprivation and/or abuse.
Carroll Izard
infant emotional expression
John Bowlby
integrative theory of infant/caregiver attachments
Grazyna Kochanska
interactional synchrony
Ed Tronick
internal working models
Describe Bowlby's ideas about the development of "internal working models." How do the internal working models of caregivers affect their caregiving?
internal working models—that is, cognitive representations of themselves and other people—that are used to interpret events and form expectations about the character of human relationships. Sensitive, responsive caregiving should lead the child to conclude that people are dependable (positive working model of others), whereas insensitive, neglectful, or abusive caregiving may lead to insecurity and a lack of trust (negative working model of others). Children who had specific types models had those models reflected into their future relationships. infants who construct positive working models of themselves and their caregivers are the ones who should (1) form secure primary attachments, (2) have the self-confidence to approach and to master new challenges, and (3) be inclined to establish secure, mutual-trust relationships with friends and spouses later in life. By contrast, a positive model of self-coupled with a negative model of others (as might result when infants can successfully attract the attention of an insensitive, overly intrusive caregiver) is thought to predispose the infant to form avoidant attachments and to "dismiss" the importance of close emotional bonds. A negative model of self and a positive model of others (as might result when infants sometimes can but often cannot attract the attention and care they need) should be associated with resistant attachments and a "preoccupation" with establishing secure emotional ties. Finally, a negative working model of both the self and others is thought to underlie disorganized/disoriented attachments and an emerging "fear" of being hurt (either physically or emotionally) in intimate relationships
Michael Lewis
self-conscious emotions
natural clues to danger
situations that have been so frequently associated with danger throughout human evolutionary history that a fear or avoidance response has become biologically programmed.
Contrast synchronous infant/parent interaction during parent/infant play with asynchronous infant/parent interaction during parent/infant play?
synchronized routines generally harmonious interactions between two persons in which participants adjust their behavior in response to the partner's actions and emotions. Parents who are involved witn synchronized play with their infant attends carefully to the baby's state, provides playful stimulation when the child is alert and attentive, and avoids pushing things when an overexcited or tired infant. Asynchronous play between the parent/child is where the parent may try to keep the child interacting beyond the child's limit or when the child is not ready to. which messages go unheeded and interactive errors persist—one that is undoubtedly much less pleasant for both the mother and her baby than the highly affectionate, synchronous interplay described earlier.
Mary Rothbart
temperament profiles
effortful control
temperamental attribute that reflects one's ability to focus and/or shift attention as called for by the situation and to suppress dominant or inappropriate responses in favor of those more appropriate for the situation.
learned helplessness
the failure to learn how to respond appropriately in a situation because of previous exposures to uncontrollable events in the same or similar situations.
maternal deprivation hypothesis verses social stimulation hypothesis
the notion that socially deprived infants develop abnormally because they have failed to establish attachments to a primary caregiver. the notion that socially deprived infants develop abnormally because they have had little contact with companions who respond contingently to their social overtures.
emotional self-regulation
the process of adjusting one's emotions to appropriate levels of intensity in order to accomplish one's goals.
social referencing
the use of others' emotional expressions to gain information or infer the meaning of otherwise ambiguous situations.
secure base
use of a caregiver as a base from which to explore the environment and to which to return for emotional support.
