Emotional Development in Infancy

Emotional Development

• Emotional development encompasses primary and self-conscious emotions
• Primary emotions are present in humans and other animals and appear in the first 6 months of life
• Examples of primary emotions include surprise, interest, joy, anger, sadness, fear, and disgust
• Self-conscious emotions require self-awareness, consciousness, and a sense of "me"
• Examples of self-conscious emotions include jealousy, empathy, embarrassment, pride, shame, and guilt
• Self-conscious emotions occur after 18 months when a sense of self becomes consolidated

Infancy: Cries

• Cries and smiles are among babies’ first form of emotional communication
• The different types of cries include basic cry, anger cry, and pain cry
• The basic cry has a rhythmic pattern of cry, brief silence, shorter inspiratory whistle more high pitched than the cry, and another brief rest before the next cry
• The anger cry is a variation of the basic cry, but a loud harsh noise, almost like shouting
• The pain cry is a sudden long initial loud cry followed by breath holding with no preliminary moaning and occurs in response to external stimulus

Infancy: Smiles

• Reflexive smiles occur during the first month of life, are indiscriminate, usually during sleep and do not occur in response to external stimuli
• Social smiles occur in response to people
• At 4-6 weeks, smiling takes the form of smiling to the caregiver's voice
• At 6-9 weeks, social smiles extend to faces, and infants also smile to other stimuli that please them, such as toys and mobiles
• Duchenne smiles, smiles with eye constriction, begin around 6-12 months of age
• Generally, infants become more selective with their smiles as they grow older
• By 18 months social smiles becomes more frequent than smiling toward inanimate objects
• If adults are not responding to the child, the smiling begins to decrease, indicating that they are intentionally using smiles to communicate with others
• Anticipatory smiles communicate pre-existing positive emotion by smiling at an object and then turning their smile toward an adult
• Anticipatory smiles imply that infants are sharing an emotion with someone else that's about some third thing
• Anticipatory smiles seem to predict future social behavior
• A longitudinal study found that anticipatory smiling at 9 months of age successfully predicted social expressivity and competence - the ability and inclination to engage with other people - at 30 months, almost two years later.

Emotional Development: Fear

• Fear typically first appears at about 6 months of age
• Abused and neglected infants can show fear as early as 3 months
• Researchers have found that infant fear is linked to guilt, empathy, and low aggression at 6 to 7 years of age
• By the end of the first year, infants develop stranger anxiety and separation anxiety
• Both stranger and separation anxieties begin roughly around 6-8 months and start to decline around 15 months
• Stranger anxiety is wariness displayed by infants when encountering an unfamiliar person
• Infants tend to show less anxiety with female strangers than with male strangers
• Infants react more positively to strangers who are children than to strangers who are adults, perhaps because their size is less intimidating
• Separation anxiety is the distress displayed by infants when the customary caregiver departs

Emotional Development: Adolescence

• Emotions during adolescence tend to be the most volatile during early adolescence
• Emotions during adolescence are more negative and extreme than they were in middle childhood
• Emotions during adolescence are more transient and apt to be more quickly replaced
• Emotions during adolescence have an intensity that seems out of proportion to events that elicit them
• Most adolescents have experienced significant depressive symptoms at some point
• Significant depressive symptoms are being so sad or hopeless for two weeks that they stopped doing their normal activities
• Depression is more common in girls than boys during adolescence but during childhood there are no gender differences in rates of depression
• Suicide is the 3rd most common cause of death in 15-24 year olds
• There is a higher rate for boys, although girls attempt suicide more frequently
• Teens who called a hotline because they were considering suicide mentioned the following concerns: family problems, peer relationships, self-esteem, just to talk, drugs and alcohol, abuse, sexuality, school problems, death, mental illness, spirituality, pregnancy, other, legal, eating disorder, and AIDS

Preventing Suicide

• Steps to prevent suicide include: talk to the person; talk specifically about suicidal thoughts; try to distinguish between general upset and more serious danger; be supportive; do not challenge, dare, or use verbal shock treatment; do not keep suicide talk a secret; make the environment safe; take charge of finding help; make a contract with the person; and do not be overly reassured by a sudden improvement of mood

Temperament and Emotional Regulation

• Temperament includes individual differences in behavioral styles, and emotional responding
• Important aspects of temperament are how quickly emotion is shown, how strong it is, how long it lasts, and how soon it fades away
• Temperament is believed to be biological, with differences seen at birth
• Chess and Thomas' classifications are the easy child, difficult child, and slow-to-warm-up child
• An easy child has a positive mood, quickly establishes regular routines, and adapts easily to new experiences
• Children with an easy temperament at 3-5 are more well-adjusted as young adults than difficult children
• A difficult child reacts negatively and cries frequently, has irregular daily routines, and is slow to accept change
• Difficult temperament in childhood is linked to a lower likelihood of attending college for boys and marital conflict in girls
• A slow-to-warm-up child has a low activity level, is somewhat negative, and has a low intensity of mood
• 40% are easy children, 10% are difficult children, 15% are slow-to-warm-up
• These classifications tend to be consistent throughout the lifespan
• Temperament tends to be quite stable throughout the course of one's lifespan
• The more extreme the temperament (“very easy” vs. “mild easy”) the more stable the behavioral tendencies are throughout the lifespan
• For the extremes, it still tends to become less extreme with age
• Children with an easy temperament at 3-5 are more well-adjusted as young adults than difficult children
• Difficult temperament in childhood is linked to a lower likelihood of attending college for boys and marital conflict in girls
• Behavioral Inhibition is a type of temperament characterized by shy and timid behavior
• Inhibition at 3 is linked to shyness at age 7
• Behavioral Inhibition tends to be very stable throughout the lifespan if the inhibition is extremely high or extremely low; otherwise it is moderately stable
• Inhibition during childhood is linked to less assertiveness, less social support, and a longer amount of time obtaining a steady job
• In other countries, shyness is not linked to negative outcomes
• In China, shyness is valued and linked to being more popular among peers
• In Sweden, shyness is not correlated with strained careers
• Goodness of fit can be thought of as the match between a child's temperament and the environmental demands the child must cope with and as temperament friendly child-rearing
• Goodness of fit is particularly important when a child has intense reactions to the environment
• A good match particularly helps children with strong temperamental tendencies
• It is important because what may appear to be a behavioral problem may actually be a mismatch between the parent's temperament (or environment) and their child's
• Difficult children need predictable schedules and environments that give them plenty of time to gradually adapt to changes
• Parents may perceive the child's reactions as misbehaving or being spoiled, while the child's distress is genuine resulting in ineffective parenting strategies
• Difficult babies have more behavioral problems than easy babies in Kindergarten, generally
• Difficult babies have less behavioral problems than easy babies in Kindergarten, if they received high quality parenting
• The overall goal is that parents should make adaptations towards accepting their child's temperament without letting the temperament itself create the family atmosphere
• This would involve beginning by avoiding (not eliminating) situations that are likely to elicit strong reactions from the child
• This would involve gradually and gently exposing the child to new less threatening social situations but also helping them through Emotion Coaching (to be discussed)
• This would involve gradually (very gradually) work your way up to situations that the child will perceive as more threatening, and engage in Emotion Coaching

Emotional Competence

• Emotional competence involves: awareness of one's emotional states; detecting others' emotions; using vocabulary of emotion in socially and culturally appropriate ways; having empathic and sympathetic sensitivity to others' experiences; adaptively coping with negative emotions; awareness that emotional expression plays a role in relationships; and viewing oneself overall as feeling the way one wants to feel
• Emotional competence is linked to effective management of resilience, and more positive relationships
• At 2-3 months, most infants expect people to react positively when the infants initiate a behavior, such as a smile or a vocalization
• The still-face paradigm is where the caregiver alternates between engaging in face-to-face interaction with the infant and remaining still and unresponsive
• A meta-analysis revealed that infants' higher positive affect and lower negative affect as displayed during the still-face paradigm were linked to secure attachment at one year of age
• Maternal sensitivity towards the infant predicts higher positive affect and lower negative affect
• At 4 months infants are able to decode facial expressions
• Social Referencing is the intentional search for information about others' feelings to help make sense of uncertain circumstances and events
• Theory of mind is understanding that people have mental states such as desires, beliefs, and intentions and that these mental states guide their behaviors
• Researchers have used the false belief task to assess children's development of a theory of mind
• In this task, 3 year olds state the child will look for the object in the wrong place, 4 year olds answer correctly, and 5 year olds think the question is even ridiculous to ask
• Emotional regulation is effectively managing arousal (a state of alertness or activation) to adapt to circumstances
• Regulation in infancy gradually shifts from external sources to self-initiated, internal sources
• In early childhood, the person begins to understand that people may react differently to the same event and begin to reflect upon their own emotions
• In early childhood, the person will show a growing awareness that they need to manage their emotions to meet social standards
• In middle childhood, control of emotions grow and ability to hide emotions increases
• In middle childhood, better understanding of emotions aids in emotional highs and lows
• In middle childhood, children begin using cognitive strategies, such as distracting themselves from thinking about the event
• Adolescence involves a unique developmental change of changing the way they think about things they have encountered that makes them feel less bothered
• This also involves suppressing emotions during certain situations
• Emotion-dismissing parents deny, ignore, distract, or change the child's emotions, which is linked with poor emotional regulation
• Emotion-coaching parents monitor child's emotions, view negative emotions as a teaching opportunity, assist children in labeling emotions, and coach on how to effectively deal with emotions
• Emotion coaching is linked with better emotional regulation
• Emotion coaching parents interact with children in a less rejecting manner, use more praise, and are more nurturing than emotion-dismissing parents

Attachment

• Attachment is the positive emotional bond that develops between a child and a particular, special individual
• When children experience attachment to a given person, they feel pleasure when they are with them and feel comforted by their presence at times of distress
• Harlow's experiment studied infant rhesus monkeys separated from mother after birth
• The surrogate mothers were one wire with milk, one warm cloth
• Monkeys spent more time with cloth mother, especially when scared
• Harlow concluded that attachment is based on contact comfort but not nourishment
• Contact comfort is positive emotions afforded by touch
• In the Strange Situation, secure attachment is (~60%) and the child is upset when mom leaves, but greets her with joy
• Insecure avoidant children comprised (15%-20%) of children and were indifferent when mom leaves, with little to no reaction when she returns
• Insecure resistant children comprised (15%-20%) of children and were upset when mom leaves, resistant to show warmth when she returns
• Disorganized attachment comprised (5%-10%) of children and was where the children were upset when mom leaves, showing contradictory responses upon return
• Children who are securely attached as infants receive better grades, have a higher level of emotional regulation and less difficulty in identifying emotions, are more popular and have higher quality friendships, have higher life satisfaction, and have more successful romantic relationships in adulthood
• Multiple studies found a sensitive period for children in attachment-deprived orphanages where those who were adopted before one year of age were significantly more likely to form a secure attachment to their new caregivers
• Research is lacking on attachment to mother or father separately
• Insecure attachment to both parents is worse than being insecurely attached to one and securely attached to the other
• Securely attached babies have caregivers who are sensitive to their signals and consistently available to respond to their infants' needs
• Avoidant or Anxious babies tend to be unavailable or rejecting and do not respond to baby's signals with little physical contact with them
• Disorganized babies often (but not all) neglect or physically abuse them
• Approximately 15% of children 5 years or younger attend more than one child-care arrangement
• An increase in the number of child-care arrangements is linked to an increase in behavioral problems and a decrease in prosocial behavior
• Secure Attachment Style is a Positive View of the self and others with a healthy balance of attachment and independence, who find it easy to get close to others, and are less likely to have one night stands
• Avoidant Attachment Style is Positive view of the self, negative view of others, are dismissive of intimacy and very self-reliant
• Anxious Attachment Style is Negative view of the self, positive view of others,who demand closeness, less trusting, worry about abandonment and are jealous and possessive along with needing love to feel worthy as a person.
• Disorganized Attachment Style is a Negative view of the self and others, needs relationships but fears intimacy and has no clear strategy on meeting attachment needs