Chapter 6: Emotional and Social Development in Infancy and Toddlerhood

development of basic emotions

Basic emotions—happiness, interest, surprise, fear, anger, sadness, and disgust—are universal in humans and other primates and promote survival. Gradually, an infant's emotional expressions become well-organized and specific—and therefore provide more precise information about the baby's internal state. Research has focused primarily on happiness, anger, sadness, and fear.

development of attachment

Attachment is the strong affectionate tie that humans have with special people in their lives that leads them to feel pleasure when they interact with them and to be comforted by their nearness in times of stress. Although the parent-infant bond is vitally important, the continuing quality of the parent-child relationship also influences later development. Both the psychoanalytic perspective and behaviorism regard feeding as the central context for the development of the infant-parent emotional bond, but research has shown that attachment does not depend on hunger satisfaction.

Factors That Affect Attachment Security: Parents' Internal Working Models

Parents bring to the family context their own history of attachment experiences, from which they construct internal working models that they apply to the bonds they establish with their children. Early rearing experiences do not destine individuals to become either sensitive or insensitive parents

measuring temperament

Temperament is often assessed through parent interviews and questionnaires, behavior ratings by pediatricians or teachers, and laboratory observations by researchers. Neurobiological measures are used also, to help identify biological bases of temperament, especially for children who fall at the extremes. a. Inhibited, or shy, children react negatively to and withdraw from novel stimuli. b. Uninhibited, or sociable, children display positive emotion to and approach novel stimuli.

temperament

Temperament refers to early-appearing, stable individual differences in reactivity (quickness and intensity of emotional arousal, attention, and motor activity) and self-regulation (strategies that modify reactivity). In 1956, Alexander Thomas and Stella Chess initiated an investigation that showed that temperament influences a child's likelihood of experiencing psychological problems. They later discovered that parenting practices also can modify children's temperaments considerably

Stability of Attachment

Quality of attachment is usually secure and stable for middle-SES babies who experience favorable life conditions. Securely attached babies more often maintain their attachment status than insecure babies.

Temperament and Child Rearing: The Goodness-of-Fit Model

The goodness-of-fit model describes how an effective match between child-rearing practices and a child's temperament can produce favorable outcomes. Recent evidence indicates that temperamentally difficult children function much worse than other children when exposed to inept parenting, yet benefit most from good parenting. Cultural values also affect the fit between parenting and child temperament.

Cultural Variations in Attachment

Cross-cultural evidence indicates that attachment patterns may have to be interpreted differently in different cultures. Despite cultural variations, the secure pattern is the most common attachment quality in all societies studied

fear

Fear, like anger, rises from the second half of the first year into the second year. The most frequent expression of fear is to unfamiliar adults, a response called stranger anxiety. Crosscultural research reveals that infant-rearing practices can modify stranger anxiety. The rise in fear after 6 months keeps newly mobile babies' enthusiasm for exploration in check. Once wariness develops, babies use the familiar caregiver as a secure base, or point from which to explore, venturing into the environment and then returning for emotional support.

happiness

Happiness binds parent and baby into a warm, supportive relationship that fosters the infant's developing competences. The social smile—the broad grin evoked by the parent's communication—first appears between 6 and 10 weeks. Laughter first appears around 3 to 4 months in response to active stimuli.

Understanding and Responding to the Emotions of Others

Infants' emotional expressions are closely tied to their ability to interpret emotional cues of others. Beginning at 8 to 10 months, babies engage in social referencing—actively seeking emotional information from a trusted person in an uncertain situation. Toddlers use those signals to evaluate the safety and security of their surroundings, to guide their own actions, and to gather information about others' intentions and preferences.

anger and sadness

Newborn babies respond to unpleasant experiences, such as hunger, with generalized distress. Older infants react with anger in a wider range of situations, partly because they want to control their own actions and the effects they produce. Expressions of sadness are common when infant-caregiver communication is seriously disrupted. Parental depression can interfere with effective parenting and seriously impair children's development.

Bowlby's Ethological Theory of Attachment

Recognizes the infant's emotional tie to the caregiver as an evolved response that promotes survival, is the most widely accepted view. John Bowlby first applied this view to the human infant-caregiver bond. a. Built-in infant behaviors help keep the parent nearby to protect the baby from danger. b. The attachment bond is best understood in an evolutionary context in which survival of the species is of utmost importance. According to Bowlby, attachment begins as a set of innate signals that the baby uses to summon the parent, and then goes through four phases as it develops into a true affectionate bond. a. Preattachment phase (birth to 6 weeks): Built-in signals help bring newborn babies into close contact with other humans, who comfort them. b. "Attachment-in-the-making" phase (6 weeks to 6-8 months): Babies respond differently to a familiar caregiver than to a stranger and begin to develop a sense of trust. c. "Clear-cut" attachment phase (6-8 months to 18 months-2 years): Babies display separation anxiety, becoming upset when the trusted caregiver leaves. d. Formation of a reciprocal relationship (18 months to 2 years and on): Separation protest declines. Out of their early experiences, children develop an internal working model—a set of expectations about the availability of attachment figures and their likelihood of providing support during times of stress—that serves as a guide for all future close relationships.

Self-control

Self-awareness also contributes to effortful control, evident in toddlers' strengthening capacity to inhibit impulses, manage negative emotion, and behave in socially acceptable ways. As these capacities emerge between 12 and 18 months, toddlers first become capable of compliance, showing clear awareness of caregivers' wishes and expectations and obeying simple requests and commands. Researchers often study self-control by giving children tasks that require delay of gratification—waiting for an appropriate time and place to engage in a tempting act. Young children's capacity to delay gratification is influenced by both biologically based temperament and quality of caregiving.

Emergence of Self-Conscious Emotions

Self-conscious emotions—guilt, shame, embarrassment, envy, and pride—appear in the middle of the second year, as 18- to 24-month-olds become firmly aware of the self as a separate, unique individual. Besides self-awareness, self-conscious emotions require an additional ingredient: adult instruction in when to feel proud, ashamed, or guilty.

Factors That Affect Attachment Security: Family Circumstances

Stressful life changes in families may undermine attachment by interfering with parental sensitivity and can also affect babies' sense of security directly, by altering the emotional climate of the family or by disrupting familiar daily routines. Social support fosters attachment security by reducing parental stress and improving the quality of parent- child communication.

Attachment and Later Development

The inner feelings of affection and security resulting from a healthy attachment relationship in infancy support all aspects of psychological development. Yet in some longitudinal studies, though secure infants generally fared better than insecure infants, they didn't always. Evidence indicates that continuity of caregiving determines whether attachment security is linked to later development.

Stability of Temperament

The overall stability of temperament is low in infancy and toddlerhood and only moderate from the preschool years on. Although temperament is modified by experience, children's temperaments rarely change from one extreme to the other.

Structure of Temperament

Thomas and Chess's model identified nine dimensions of temperament, which tend to cluster together, yielding three types of children (although some children show unique blends of characteristics). a. The easy child quickly establishes regular routines in infancy, is generally cheerful, and adapts easily to new experiences. b. The difficult child is irregular in daily routines, is slow to accept new experiences, and tends to react negatively and intensely. c. The slow-to-warm-up child is inactive, shows mild, low-key reactions to environmental stimuli, is negative in mood, and adjusts slowly to new experiences. The difficult pattern places children at high risk for adjustment problems. An influential model of temperament today, Mary Rothbart's, combines related traits proposed by Thomas and Chess and other researchers, yielding a list of just six dimensions. According to Rothbart, individuals differ not only in reactivity on each dimension but also in effortful control— the capacity to voluntarily suppress a dominant response in order to plan and execute a more adaptive response. Beginning in early childhood, effortful control predicts favorable development and adjustment in cultures as diverse as China and the United States.

Measuring the Security of Attachment

Using the Strange Situation—a laboratory procedure for assessing the quality of attachment between ages 1 and 2—researchers have identified a secure attachment pattern and three patterns of insecurity. a. Secure attachment: These infants use the parent as a secure base; they may be distressed by separation from the parent, but, when the parent returns, they actively seek contact and their crying is reduced immediately. b. Avoidant attachment: These infants usually are not distressed by the parent's departure; they respond to the stranger in much the same way as to the parent and are unresponsive to the parent during reunion. c. Resistant attachment: These infants remain close to the parent before departure, are usually distressed when the parent leaves, and display angry, resistive behavior during reunion. d. Disorganized/disoriented attachment: At reunion, these infants respond in a confused, contradictory way. This pattern reflects the greatest insecurity. The Attachment Q-Sort, a method of measuring attachment in children between 1 and 4 years, depends on home observation. Despite its shortcomings, it may better reflect the parent-infant relationship in everyday life than the Strange Situation.

Genetic and Environmental Influences

About half of individual differences in temperament and personality can be attributed to differences in genetic makeup. Genetic influences vary with the temperamental trait and with the age of individuals studied. Environment is also powerful, especially in cases of persistent nutritional or emotional deprivation. Heredity and environment often jointly contribute to temperament because a child's approach to the world affects the experiences to which she is exposed. Ethnic and Gender Differences a. Variations among infants may have genetic roots, but they are supported by cultural beliefs and practices. b. Although gender differences in temperament are evident early and suggest a genetic foundation, parents promote differences through the toys they provide and through more positive reactions when the child exhibits traits consistent with gender stereotypes. Children's Unique Experiences a. Parents' tendency to emphasize each child's unique qualities affects their child-rearing practices. b. Siblings have distinct experiences with teachers, peers, and others in their community that affect personality development.

Erikson's Psychosocial Theory

Although the psychoanalytic perspective is no longer in the mainstream of human development research, a lasting contribution has been its ability to capture the essence of personality during each period of development. Erik Erikson's psychosocial theory accepted and elaborated on the basic outlines of Freud's theory. Basic Trust versus Mistrust 1. Expanding and enriching Freud's view of the importance of the parent-infant relationship during feeding, Erikson identified the psychological conflict of the first year as basic trust versus mistrust. 2. Erikson believed that a healthy outcome during infancy depended on the quality of caregiving. When the balance of care is sympathetic and loving, the baby will develop basic trust, expecting the world to be good and gratifying. Autonomy versus Shame and Doubt 1. Unlike Freud, Erikson viewed toilet training as only one of many influential experiences of toddlerhood. 2. In Erikson's view, the conflict of toddlerhood is autonomy versus shame and doubt, which is resolved favorably when parents provide young children with suitable guidance and reasonable choices and are neither over- nor undercontrolling.

Factors That Affect Attachment Security: Infant Characteristics

Because attachment is the result of a relationship that builds between two partners, infant characteristics should affect how easily it is established. Babies whose temperament is emotionally reactive and difficult are more likely to develop later insecure attachments, but insecurity is more likely when these babies also have highly anxious mothers, leading to a "disharmonious relationship." Research focusing on disorganized/disoriented attachment has uncovered gene-environment interactions. The heritability of attachment is virtually nil; siblings with different temperaments tend to establish similar attachment patterns with their parents. Many different child attributes can lead to secure attachment as long as caregivers sensitively adjust their behavior to fit the baby's needs.

Self-awareness

Beginnings of Self-Awareness: a. Newborns' capacity for intermodal perception allows babies to differentiate their own body from surrounding bodies and objects. b. Over the first few months, infants distinguish their own visual image from other stimuli, but their self-awareness is limited. Self-Recognition: a. During the second year, toddlers become consciously aware of the self's physical features. b. Around age 2, self-recognition—identification of the self as a physically unique being—is well under way. c. Nevertheless, toddlers make scale errors, attempting to do things that their body size makes impossible. d. Cultural variations exist in early self-development. Self-Awareness and Early Emotional and Social Development: a. Self-awareness quickly becomes a central part of children's emotional and social lives. b. Older toddlers who have experienced sensitive caregiving draw on their advancing cognitive, language, and social skills to express first signs of empathy—the ability to understand another's emotional state and feel with that person, or respond emotionally in a similar way.

Categorizing the Self

Between 18 and 30 months, children develop a categorical self: They begin to classify themselves and others on the basis of age, sex, and physical characteristics. Toddlers use their limited understanding of these social categories to organize their own behavior.

Multiple Attachments

Bowlby believed that infants are predisposed to direct their attachment behaviors to a single special person; however, his theory allowed for multiple attachments. Fathers a. Fathers' sensitive caregiving and interactional synchrony with infants predict attachment security. b. Mothers and fathers play differently, with mothers more often providing toys, gently playing games like pata-cake and peekaboo, and fathers engaging in highly stimulating physical play. This style of play can help babies regulate emotion in intensely arousing situations. c. A recent U.S. national survey indicated that U.S. fathers under age 29 devote about 85 percent as much time to children as mothers do, nearly double the hours young fathers reported three decades ago. Siblings a. Eighty percent of North American and European children grow up with at least one sibling. b. Security of attachment typically declines when a new baby is born, especially for children over age 2, but older siblings also show affection and concern for the new baby. c. Certain temperamental traits—such as high emotional reactivity or activity level—increase the chances of sibling conflict. d. Siblings offer a rich social context in which young children learn and practice a wide range of skills.

Beginnings of Emotional Self-Regulation

Emotional self-regulation refers to the strategies we use to adjust our emotional state to a comfortable level of intensity so we can accomplish our goals. Emotional self-regulation requires voluntary, effortful management of emotions. The capacity for effortful control improves gradually, as a result of development of the prefrontal cortex and the assistance of caregivers. Infants whose parents "read" and respond contingently and sympathetically to their emotional cues tend to be less fussy and fearful, to express more pleasurable emotion, to be more interested in exploration, and to be easier to soothe. Caregivers provide lessons in socially approved ways of expressing feelings. Toward the end of the second year, toddlers rapidly develop a vocabulary for talking about feelings, but they are not yet good at using language to manage emotions. Temper tantrums tend to occur when an adult rejects their demands.

Factors That Affect Attachment Security: Quality of Caregiving

Research findings indicate that sensitive caregiving—responding promptly, consistently, and appropriately to infants and holding them tenderly and carefully—is moderately related to attachment security across cultures and SES groups. Interactional synchrony—in which the caregiver responds to infant signals in a well-timed, rhythmic, appropriate fashion, and both partners match emotional states, especially the positive ones—separates the experiences of secure from insecure babies. Cultural differences suggest that although attachment security depends on attentive caregiving, it is not necessarily associated with moment-by-moment contingent interaction. Avoidant infants tend to receive overstimulating, intrusive care, while resistant infants often experience inconsistent care.

Factors That Affect Attachment Security: Early Availability of a Consistent Caregiver

Researchers have studied institutionalized babies who do not have the opportunity to establish a close tie to a caregiver. (1) Adopted children from a British institution with a good caregiver-child ratio but a high staff turnover developed deep ties with their adoptive parents, but were more likely to display attachment difficulties. (2) Children who spent their first year or more in deprived Eastern European orphanages—though able to bond with their adoptive parents—showed elevated rates of attachment insecurity. (3) Neurophysiological evidence suggests that, as early as 7 months, institutionalized children experience a disruption in the formation of neural structures involved in "reading" emotions. Overall, the evidence indicates that fully normal emotional development depends on establishing a close tie with a caregiver early in life.