Emotional Development in Infants

Emotional Development in Infants

• Infants' emotions emerge and develop over the first two years of life.
• Smiling and Laughing:
  • Social smile (6 weeks): Appears when viewing human faces.
  • Laughter (3-4 months): Often occurs with curiosity.
• Anger:
  • First expressions of anger appear around 6 months.
  • A healthy response to frustration.
• Sadness:
  • Indicates withdrawal and is accompanied by increased cortisol production.
  • Usually occurs in response to stressful experiences.
• Fear:
  • Emerges around 9 months.
  • Response to unfamiliar people, things, or situations.
  • Stranger wariness: Infants no longer smile at any friendly face or show signs of fear or anxiety when they encounter a stranger who moves too close.
• Separation anxiety:
  • Infants show signs of distress when separated from a caregiver (tears, dismay, anger).
  • If the anxiety continues after age 3 it might suggest a possible emotional disorder.
• Toddlers' Emotions:
  • Anger and fear become less common and focused over time.
  • Crying and laughing become more focused and louder as they progress.
  • New emotional expressions emerge (pride, shame, embarrassment, guilt)
  • These are influenced by family interactions and cultural values.
• Self-awareness:
  • Infants develop a sense of self as separate from others in the first 4-5 months.
  • This develops in the first 4 months as they start to identify themselves as separate from their mothers.
  • By 15-18 months, children have a sense of self as an object.
• Mirror recognition: The ability to recognize one's own reflection, can be a sign of self-awareness.
  • Infants under 12 months don't react to a mark put on their face as if they knew the mark was there.
  • 15-24-month-olds are able to touch their own noses.
• Emotional Development Table: A table details the emergence of different emotions at specific ages e.g., crying, contentment, social smile, and full responsive smile around 3 months. Anger, fear of strangers and separating from care givers are noted to appear between 4 and 14 months. self-awareness and other related emotional responses are included in the table.

Brain Maturation and Emotions

• Synesthesia:
  • Sensory stimulation triggers unrelated sensory experiences in infants' brains.
  • This is because in infants, the boundaries between sensory parts of the cortex are less distinct.
  • Infants associate textures with sights, sounds with smells, etc.
• Synesthesia of emotions:
  • Infant’s cry can be triggered by multiple factors (pain, fear, tiredness, excitement).
  • Infants' emotions are not easy to predict as the brain’s activation is complex.

Theories of Infant Psychosocial Development

• Freud's Psychoanalytic Theory: Focuses on oral and anal stages.
  • Oral stage (first year): The mouth is the primary source of satisfaction.
  • Anal stage (second year): Pleasure comes from bowel movements and controlling them.
  • Potential conflicts: Oral fixation may occur if a mother does not meet the infant’s oral needs adequately. Anal personality may result in difficulties, including cleanliness issues in future.
• Erikson's Theory: Focuses on trust and autonomy.
  • Trust vs. mistrust (infancy): Infants develop trust if their basic needs (e.g. food, comfort) are met.
  • Autonomy vs. shame and doubt (toddler years): Toddlers develop independence and self-rule.
• Behaviorism: Parents mold infants' emotions and personality through reinforcement and punishment.
  • Social learning: Children learn by observing others' behavior.
• Cognitive Theory:
  • Working models: Sets of assumptions used to organize perceptions and experiences.
  • The child's interpretation is vital in how they understand early experiences.
• Ethnotheory: Cultural values and practices that often go unnoticed to the people in that culture.
  • Examples: Reincarnation, and child-rearing practices.
• Systems Theory:
  • Epigenetic approach: Development as influenced by many characteristics (multidirectional, multi-contextual, multicultural, multidisciplinary, and plastic).
• Temperament:
  • Inborn differences in emotions, activity, and self-regulation.
  • New York Longitudinal Study (NYLS): Categorized infants into different temperaments (easy, difficult, slow to warm up, and hard to classify) in the 1960s.
  • Temperament is influenced by genetics and child rearing practices.
• The Big Five:
  • Personality traits (openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, neuroticism) that remain relatively stable over time.
• Longitudinal study:
  • Researchers tracked temperament in infants from 4-months old to later ages.
  • Less than half changed their responses as they grew older. This suggested that some types of temperament may not always change.
• Parenting practices: Proximal (close), and distal (distance) parenting styles affect the development of children. Good parenting practices have direct impact.

Other Relevant Topics

• Social Referencing: Seeking information about how to react by observing someone else’s social response to a new or ambiguous object.
• Fathers’ Roles: Fathers often spend less time than mothers with infants, but their involvement can be helpful.
• Comparing Mothers and Fathers: Research shows infants can establish secure relationships with either parent.
• Infant Daycare: Family-based and center-based daycare care. High-quality daycare should include adequate caregiver-to-infant ratios and well-trained caregivers that emphasize appropriate interactions with their groups of children.
• Measuring Attachment: Strange situation (a lab procedure) used to measures attachment types.
• Attachment: A lasting emotional bond between two people, that begins in early infancy and has a lasting impact on an infant's future relationships.
• Types of Attachment: Secure, insecure-avoidant, insecure-resistant (ambivalent), and disorganized attachments.

This quiz explores the emotional development of infants during their first two years of life. Topics include the emergence of emotions like smiling, anger, sadness, fear, and separation anxiety. Test your understanding of these critical emotional milestones.