Chapter 6 – Emotional and Social Development in Infancy and Toddlerhood

Psychosocial Stages During Infancy and Toddlerhood

• Erikson’s Stage
  • Basic trust vs. mistrust (first year)
    • Responsiveness
    • Sympathetic, loving balance of care
  • Autonomy vs. shame and doubt (second year)
    • Suitable guidance and reasonable choices
    • Reasonable expectations for impulse control

First Appearance of
Basic Emotions

• Happiness
  • Smile: from birth
  • Social smile: 6–10 weeks
  • Laugh: 3–4 months
• Anger and sadness
  • General distress: from birth
  • Anger: 4–6 months
  • Sadness: response to disrupted caregiver–infant communication
• Fear
  • First fears: second half of first year
  • Stranger anxiety: most frequent expression of fear

Responding to Emotions of Others

• Matching feeling tone of caregiver
• Sensitivity to structure and timing of face-to-face interactions: 3–4 months
• Social referencing: 8–10 months

Social Referencing

• Reliance on a trusted person’s emotional reactions to appraise an uncertain situation
• Used by caregivers to teach children how to react to everyday events

Self-Conscious Emotions

• Appear between ages 1½ and 3 years:
  • Shame
  • Embarrassment
  • Guilt
  • Pride
  • Envy
• Require
  • awareness of self as separate and unique
  • adult instruction in when to feel emotions

Emotional Self-Regulation

• Adjusting one’s own state of emotional intensity
• Requires effortful control
• Improves over first year, with brain development
• Caregivers
  • contribute to child’s self-regulation style
  • teach socially approved ways of expressing feelings

Thomas and Chess: Structure of Temperament

• Easy: 40%
• Difficult: 10%
• Slow-to-warm-up: 15%
• Unclassified: 35%

Rothbart: Structure of Temperament

• Reactivity: quickness and intensity of
  • emotional arousal
  • attention
  • motor activity
• Self-regulation: strategies that modify reactivity

Biological Basis of Inhibited Temperament

• Neurobiological correlates of shyness and sociability:
  • heart rate
  • saliva concentration of cortisol
  • pupil dilation, blood pressure, skin surface temperature
  • Persistence of temperamental style is influenced by child-rearing practices

Stability of Temperament

• Stability is
  • low in infancy and toddlerhood
  • moderate from preschool years on
• Temperament develops with age, becoming more stable after age 3 years

Heredity and Environment in Temperament

• Genetic influences
  • Responsible for about half of individual differences
  • Vary with trait and age of individuals studied
• Environmental influences
  • Nutrition
  • Quality of caregiving
  • Cultural variations
  • Gender stereotyping

Goodness-of-Fit

• Interaction between temperament and child-rearing style
• Effective child rearing: good fit with child’s temperament
• Role of cultural context

Bowlby’s Ethological Theory of Attachment

• Preattachment
•  Attachment-in-the-making phase
• Clear-cut attachment phase
  • separation anxiety
• Reciprocal relationship with caregiver

Measuring Attachment Security

• Secure: 60%
• Avoidant: 15%
• Resistant: 10%
• Disorganized/
  disoriented: 15%

Factors That Affect Attachment Security

• Early availability of consistent caregiver
• Quality of caregiving: parental sensitivity
• Infant characteristics
• Parents’ internal working models

Multiple Attachments

• Fathers
• Siblings
• Grandparents
• Professional caregivers

Role of Paternal Warmth

• Often expressed through play
• Promoted by
  • time spent in physical proximity to babies
  • intimacy and cooperation between parents

Siblings and Attachment

• Majority of children have siblings
• Arrival of new baby can be stressful for older siblings
• Siblings typically develop rich emotional relationship
• Certain temperamental traits (high emotional reactivity) increase likelihood of sibling conflict

Attachment and Later Development

• Secure attachment is related to later cognitive, emotional, social competence
• Continuity of caregiving promotes favorable development

Self-Development

• Self-awareness
  • From birth
  • Aided by capacity for intermodal perception
• Self-recognition
  • Emerges end of second year
  • Promoted by acting on environment and noting effects
• Empathy
  • Ability to “feel with” another person
  • Aided by self-awareness

Categorical Self

• Classifying self and others into social categories on basis of
  • age
  • physical characteristics
  • goodness vs. badness
• Used to organize behavior, including gender-typed behavior

Self-Control

• Effortful control is the capacity to
  • inhibit impulses
  • manage negative emotions
  • behave in socially acceptable ways
• Depends on
  • awareness of self as separate, autonomous being
  • confidence in directing own actions
  • memory for caregiver’s directives

Compliance

• Emerges between 12 and 18 months
• Awareness of caregivers’ wishes and expectations
• Ability to obey simple requests and commands
• Leads to first consciencelike verbalizations
• Delay of gratification: between ages 1½ and 3 years

Helping Toddlers Develop Compliance and Self-Control

• Respond with sensitivity and support.
• Give advance notice of change in activities.
• Offer many prompts and reminders.
• Reinforce self-controlled behavior.
• Encourage sustained attention.
• Support language development.
• Increase rules gradually.