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Chapter 6:

Socioemotional Development in Infancy

Learning Goals

Learning Goal 1: Discuss the development of emotions and personality in infancy.

A. Describe emotional development during infancy.

B. Explain temperament and its various classifications.

C. Discuss personality development during infancy.

Learning Goal 2: Describe social orientation/understanding and the development of attachment

in infancy.

Describe social orientation and understanding during infancy.

B. Explain attachment and its development.

C. Discuss individual differences in attachment.

D. Discuss how caregiving styles are linked to the quality of attachment.

E. Elucidate developmental neuroscience and attachment.

Learning Goal 3: Explain how social contexts influence the infant’s development.

A. Describe the family and its importance as a context for infant development.

B. Discuss childcare and its importance as a context for infant development.

An increasing number of fathers are staying home to care for their children (Lamb, 2010; O'Brien & Moss, 2010). Consider 17-month-old Darius. On weekdays, Darius' father, a writer, cares for him during the day while his mother works full-time as a landscape architect. Darius' father is doing a great job of caring for him. He keeps Darius nearby while he is writing and spends lots of time talking to him and playing with him. From their interactions, it is clear that they genuinely enjoy each other.

Last month, Darius began spending one day a week at a child-care center. His parents carefully selected the center after observing a number of centers and interviewing teachers and center directors. His parents placed him in the center one day a week because they wanted to help Darius get some experience with peers and to give his father some time out from his caregiving.

Darius' father looks to the future and imagines the Little League games Darius will play in and the many other activities he can enjoy with Darius. Remembering how little time his own father spent with him, he is dedicated to making sure that Darius has an involved, nurturing experience with his father.

When Darius' mother comes home in the evenings, she spends considerable time with him. Darius has a secure attachment with both his mother and his father.

Until now, we have only discussed the social situations and emotions of parents before and after the

arrival of their infants, focusing on such topics as parents' feelings of joy, anticipation, anxiety, and

stress during pregnancy; how a mother's optimism may lead to better outcomes for her fetus; and

parents' emotional and psychological adjustments during the postpartum period. In this chapter, we will

explore the infant's socioemotional development.

Question:

• What are some emotions that you think you experienced in infancy? Surprise, joy, happiness, anger, fear? These emotions run the gamut and we will discuss some of them here.

Emotions

What are some emotions? Can be positive or negative. Positive ones include enthusiasm, joy, and love. Negative ones include anxiety, anger, guilt, and sadness.

• Emotion: feeling, or affect, that occurs when a person is in a state or an interaction that is important to him or her, especially to his or her well-being. Think about when you are threatened or hurt, your emotions are likely to run even higher than usual.

• Biological and Environmental Influences: • Changes in baby’s emotional capacities with age • Development of certain brain regions plays a role in emotions (Infants only gradually

develop the ability to regulate their emotions, and this ability seems tied to the gradual maturation of frontal regions of the cerebral cortex that can exert control over other regions of the brain.)

• Emotions are the first language with which parents and infants communicate • Social relationships provide the setting for the development of a variety of emotions

• Early Emotions: • Primary Emotions: emotions that are present in humans and animals

• Appear in the first 6 months: Surprise, interest, joy, anger, sadness, fear, and disgust.

• Self-Conscious Emotions: require self-awareness that involves consciousness and a sense of “me”

• Appear between 6 months and 2 years of age: Empathy, embarrassment, pride, shame, and guilt.

• Emotional expressions are involved in infants’ first relationships • Positive interactions are described as reciprocal or synchronous

• Crying is the most important mechanism newborns have for communicating with their world • Three types of cries:

• Basic cry: consists of a cry, followed by a briefer silence, then shorter whistle that is somewhat higher in pitch than the main cry, then another brief rest before the next cry. Hunger is one of the reasons that babies do the basic cry.

• Anger cry: Variation of the basic cry where excess air is forced thru the vocal cords. Have you ever heard a baby who is upset?!? Talk about loud and definitely different

than the anger cry.

• Pain cry: A sudden long, initial loud cry followed by breath holding. No preliminary moaning is present. The pain cry is stimulated by a high-intensity stimulus. My neighbor’s 2 year old had fallen off the couch and onto the floor, resulting in a loud thud and a very loud pain cry! Distinctive sounding and frightening, even to me, the neighbor.

• Two types of smiling: • Reflexive smile: Does not occur in response to external stimuli and is during first month,

during sleep. Sorry to burst your bubble, parents, but no, your baby isn’t smiling at you while she’s sleeping because she knows you are there and are happy.

• Social smile: Occurs in response to an external stimulus. Occurs as early as 4 months in response to a caregiver’s voice.

Now that is a social smile!

• Fear is one of a baby’s earliest emotions • Appears at about 6 months; peaks at about 18 months

• Stranger Anxiety: occurs when an infant shows a fear and wariness of strangers • Emerges gradually, first appearing at about 6 months of age • Intensifies at about 9 months of age, escalating past the 1st birthday

In what ways is this baby’s stranger anxiety adaptive?

• Intensity of anxiety depends on: • Individual differences • Familiarity of the setting • Who the stranger is and how the stranger behaves

• Separation Protest: crying when the caregiver leaves • Due to anxiety about being separated from their caregivers • Typically peaks at about 15 months for U.S. infants • Cultural variations, but in general happens around the same time.

• Caregivers’ actions influence the infant’s neurobiological regulation of emotions • As caregivers soothe, it reduces the level of stress hormones. This baby below is likely

self-soothing with her blanket

• Swaddling

This practice of wrapping the baby up like a mini-burrito is shown to reduce stress hormones in many

babies.

• Infant gradually learns how to minimize the intensity of emotional reactions • Self-soothing • Self-distraction • Language (2nd year)

• Context can influence emotional regulation • How should caregivers respond? When they are infants, they are usually crying for a good

reason, so it may be a little early to:

Temperament

• Temperament: an individual’s behavioral style and characteristic way of responding • Chess and Thomas’s Classification:

• Easy child (40%): Positive mood, quickly establishes routine in infancy, adapts to new experiences.

• Difficult child (10%): Reacts negatively and cries frequently, engages in irregular daily routines, and is slow to accept change.

• Slow-to-warm-up child (15%): Low activity level, somewhat negative, displays low intensity of mood.

• Unclassified (35%) • Kagan classifies children based on inhibition to the unfamiliar

• Shows stability from infancy to early childhood •Kagan (1998) found that about 20 percent of 4-month-olds are easily upset by novelty, whereas 40 percent thrive on novelty and new experiences. Approximately 30 percent of children in these extreme

groups maintained their temperamental style as they grew older. That is, the ones who were easily

upset as infants became fearful, inhibited toddlers and preschoolers. The ones who thrived on novelty

developed into outgoing, uninhibited preschoolers. Kagan proposes that the arousal of the amygdala

(inner brain structure that controls avoidance reactions) may be responsible for the individual

differences seen in temperament styles. In some children—especially the shy, inhibited ones—minimal

stimulation is necessary to excite the amygdala and its connections to the cerebral cortex. In contrast,

the same level of stimulation evokes minimal excitation in the highly social, uninhibited children.

•In addition, shy infants and preschoolers display greater right than left frontal brain activity. Sociable children show the opposite pattern. The left cortical hemisphere is specialized to respond to positive

emotion, whereas the right hemisphere is associated with negative emotion (Calkins, Fox, & Marshall,

1996). Neural activity in the amygdala is transmitted to the frontal lobes and may influence

temperament styles. There are other physiological differences between shy and sociable children:

•The heart rates of shy children are consistently higher and speed up further in response to novel events (Snidman & others, 1995).

•Cortisol, a stress hormone, tends to be higher in shy children (Gunnar & Nelson, 1994).

•Shy children show more pupil dilation and their blood pressure rises more during novel events (Kagan, 1994).

What are the implications of temperamental variations for parenting? Although answers to this question necessarily are speculative, these conclusions regarding the best parenting strategies to use in relation to children's temperament were reached by temperament experts Ann Sanson and Mary Rothbart (1995):

 Attention to and respect for individuality. Good parenting involves sensitivity to the child's individual characteristics. A goal might be accomplished in one way with one child and in another way with another child, depending on the child's temperament.

 Structuring the child's environment. Crowded, noisy environments can pose greater problems for some children (such as a “difficult child”) than others (such as an “easy child”). We might also expect that a fearful, withdrawing child would benefit from slower entry into new contexts.

 The “difficult child” and packaged parenting programs. Programs for parents often focus on dealing with children who have “difficult” temperaments. In some cases, “difficult child” refers to Thomas and Chess' description of a child who reacts negatively, cries frequently, engages in irregular daily routines, and is slow to accept change. In others, the concept might be used to describe a child who is irritable, displays anger frequently, does not follow directions well, or some other negative characteristic. Acknowledging that some children are harder than others to parent is often helpful, and advice on how to handle particular difficult characteristics can be useful. However, whether a particular characteristic is difficult depends on its fit with the environment. To label a child “difficult” has the danger of becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. If a child is identified as “difficult,” people may treat the child in a way that actually elicits “difficult” behavior.

Too often, we pigeonhole children into categories without examining the context (Bates, 2012a, b; Rothbart, 2011). Nonetheless, caregivers need to take children's temperament into account. Research does not yet allow for many highly specific recommendations, but, in general, caregivers should (1) be sensitive to the individual characteristics of the child, (2) be flexible in responding to these characteristics, and (3) avoid applying negative labels to the child.

• Biological Influences: • Physiological characteristics have been linked with different temperaments: • Heredity has a moderate influence on temperament differences • Contemporary view: temperament is a biologically based but evolving aspect of behavior

• Gender and Cultural Influences: • Parents may react differently to an infant’s temperament depending on gender: Mothers

are more responsive to the crying of irritable girls than the cries of irritable boys.

• Different cultures value different temperaments: Child’s environment can encourage or discourage the persistence of temperament characteristics.

• Goodness of Fit: the match between a child’s temperament and the environmental demands the child must cope with: If Jason is an active toddler who is made to sit still for long periods of time, and Bob is a slow to warm up toddler who is abruptly pushed into new situations on a regular basis, there is a lack of fit that might produce adjustment problems.

Could there be a connection between temperament and crime?!:

Elaine Cassel and Douglas A. Bernstein study crime as a developmental event. They have written about

the connection between temperament and attachment and the development of criminal behavior

(2006). They cite the following as support for the role of temperament and attachment in the

development of later criminal behavior:

 Infants whose temperaments facilitate the development of secure attachment tend to become children who are socially and emotionally competent, cooperative, enthusiastic, good at problem-solving, compliant and controlled, popular and playful.

 On the other hand, infants whose temperaments engender fussiness, overactivity, and a tendency not to respond to parents’ attempts to comfort them are more likely to become children who conflict with, and are rejected by, their peers, thus leading to low self-esteem, truancy, and eventually delinquency.

 Inherited temperamental patterns that are associated with insecure attachment, and which are not altered by counteracting parental influences, appear to at least increase the probability of child behaviors that set off the chain of negative reactions and further misbehavior that often leads to aggressiveness, violence, and crime.

 Connectedness to parents (defined as feelings of warmth, love, and caring from parents) is a significant factor in protecting adolescents from engaging in substance use and violence according to conclusions based on surveys and interviews with 100,000 7

th -12

th graders.

The good news is that parents can be taught how to respond to their infants in order to make secure

attachment more likely. Programs which provide such mentoring for mothers living in disadvantaged

environments have been effective in preventing crime among potentially high risk children.

Personality Development

• Three central characteristics: • Trust: Erikson believed the 1st year is characterized by trust vs. mistrust: •Infants learn to trust when they are cared for in a consistent, warm manner. If they are e not well fed and kept warm on a consistent basis, then a sense of mistrust is likely to develop.

•This task is not completely resolved in the first year of life

• Development of a sense of self • Occurs at approximately 18 months: Rouge test is one way to determine visual self

recognition. Dot of rouge on nose, then count how many times infant touches nose. When put in mirror, and increased touching takes place, then this indicates that they realize that is themselves in the mirror. Try it out!

• Independence through separation and individuation • Erikson: autonomy vs. shame and doubt (2nd stage). In this stage, the child is

attempting to learn to be more independent. Parents should let the child safely explore the environment (what kinds of things did you get to do?), or else they may experience a sense of shame and doubt.

Social Orientation

• Face-to-face play begins to characterize interactions at 2 to 3 months of age • Infants begin to respond more positively to people than objects

• Still-face paradigm: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=apzXGEbZht0

I am so fascinated by this video, wasn’t it incredible!? So quickly, you could see the child’s

emotional reaction to the mother change to the point that it impacted the baby himself in major

ways. I always think of parents who have depression and other disorders where they may have a

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=apzXGEbZht0

very flat mood or affect and wonder if it could impact the child’s emotional reactions. Seems like it

definitely would!

• Frequency of face-to-face play decreases after 7 months of age (they are more mobile after this age)

• Peer interactions increase considerably between 18 to 24 months of age • Increased locomotion skills allow infants to explore and expand their social world. Baby-proof that

house!

• Perceiving people as engaging in intentional and goal-directed behavior occurs toward the end of the 1

st year

• Joint attention and gaze following (child looks where dad looks and follows his gaze) • Social Referencing: “reading” emotional cues in others to determine how to act in a particular

situation

• Emerges by the end of the 1st year; improves during the 2nd year. We see social referencing a lot with kids encountering stranger anxiety. They look to dad to see his reaction. If he is relaxed, the kid is more likely to follow.

Attachment

• Attachment: a close emotional bond between two people. To whom are you attached? How about when you were a child?

• Theories of Attachment: • Freud: infants become attached to the person that provides oral satisfaction (usually mom) • Harlow: contact comfort preferred over food:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vbEdNJ-e-Yc

Reared for 6 months by surrogate mom. Regardless of which mom fed them, the monkeys spent

far more time with cloth mom. Even if the wire mom provided nourishment, they still clung to the

cloth monkey especially in times of distress.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vbEdNJ-e-Yc

• Erikson: trust arises from physical comfort and sensitive care • Bowlby: newborns are biologically equipped to elicit attachment behavior from caregivers Newborn is biologically equipped to elicit attachment behavior (cries, clings, coos, smiles, walks,

follows mom). Immediate result is to keep caregiver nearby and therefore increase chances of

survival.

• Strange Situation is an observational measure of infant attachment: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QTsewNrHUHU

• Attachment Classifications: • Securely attached: explores environment while using caregiver as a secure base; displays

mild discomfort when caregiver leaves

• Insecure avoidant: avoids caregiver; shows no distress/crying when caregiver leaves • Insecure resistant: clings to caregiver and protests loudly and actively if caregiver leaves • Insecure disorganized: disorientation; extreme fearfulness may be shown even with

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QTsewNrHUHU

caregiver

• Ainsworth’s research is criticized for being culturally biased. The Japanese norm of group cohesion and collectivism may trump the development of other styles of interacting with the parent.

•Attachment is not just an important part of infant and early childhood development. Our attachment relationship with our primary caregivers impacts later childhood and adolescent development in several

domains. Can an insecurely attached child develop later attachments well? Sure, it just takes more effort

and insight.

• Interpreting Differences in Attachment: • Attachment is an important foundation for later psychological development • Early attachment can foreshadow later social behavior • Early secure attachment is not the only path to success because children are resilient and

adaptive

• Later experiences also play an important role • Genetics and temperament play a role in attachment differences • Attachment varies among different cultures of the world

Social Contexts

• Which aspects of parenting lead to a sense of trust? • What roles do physical comfort, consistency, lack of fearful situations, and feeding play? • What is the role of parental attentiveness? • Should the caregiver respond immediately to the infant's cries? • Do you think that trust is developed more easily by later-born children, because their parents are

more confident?

• What aspects of being the firstborn counterbalance the advantages of having experienced parents?

• The Family: • Family is a constellation of subsystems

• Each subsystem has a reciprocal influence on the other

• Adjustment of parents during infant’s first years • Infant care competes with parents’ other interests • Marital satisfaction and relationship dynamics may change

• Reciprocal socialization: two-way interaction process whereby parents socialize children and children socialize parents

• Parent–infant synchrony: temporal coordination of social behavior

• Scaffolding: parental behavior that supports children’s efforts through turn-taking sequences

Managing and Guiding Infants' Behavior

One study assessed results of discipline and corrective methods that parents had used by the time

infants were 12 and 24 months old (Vittrup, Holden, & Buck, 2006). As indicated in Figure 6.10, the main

method parents used by the time infants were 12 months old was diverting the infants' attention,

followed by reasoning, ignoring, and negotiating. Also note in Figure 6.10 that more than one-third of

parents had yelled at their infant, about one-fifth had slapped the infant's hands or threatened the

infant, and approximately one-sixth had spanked the infant before his or her first birthday.

As infants move into the second year of life and become more mobile and capable of exploring a wider range of environments, parental management of the toddler's behavior often triggers even more corrective feedback and discipline (Holden, Vittrup, & Rosen, 2011). As indicated in Figure 6.10, in the study just described, yelling increased from 36 percent at 1 year of age to 81 percent at 2 years of age, slapping the infant's hands increased from 21 percent at 1 year to 31 percent at age 2, and spanking increased from 14 percent at 1 year to 45 percent at age 2 (Vittrup, Holden, & Buck, 2006).

A special concern is that such corrective discipline tactics not become abusive. Too often what starts out as mild to moderately intense discipline on the part of parents can move into highly intense anger. In Chapter 8, you will read more extensively about the use of punishment with children and child abuse.

Social Contexts

• Maternal and Paternal Caregiving • An increasing number of U.S. fathers stay home full-time with their children • Fathers can be as competent as mothers in caregiving. Anyone want to be a full time dad

here?

• Maternal interactions typically center on child-care activities (feeding, changing diapers, bathing)

• Paternal interactions tend to be play-centered • Fathers tend to be more involved when:

• They work fewer hours (and mothers work more) • They are younger • The mothers report greater marital intimacy • The children are boys

• Child Care • More children are in child care now than ever before • Parental-leave policies vary across cultures

• The U.S. grants the shortest period of parental leave and is one of the few countries that offers only unpaid leave.

• Type of child care varies • Child care centers, private homes, etc.

• Low-SES children are more likely to experience poor-quality child care. My mom was middle-class, a kindergarten teacher. She put me in some pretty poor quality child care when I was 4, inadvertently. She had me in a daycare that was about 15 kids to one adult. The babysitter made us call her “Grandma Sybil” (weird!). She would make us go into the orchard to pick fruit during our “recess”, and once even made us urinate into a fried chicken bucket in the garage when the housekeeper was cleaning the bathroom! Needless to say, when I told my mother about this, she pulled me out of there right away. This was back in the early 80’s. Now, many parents are more empowered to try to report these kinds of behaviors from childcare agents.

• National Institute of Child Health Study: • By 4 months, ¾ of infants were in some type of child care • Socioeconomic factors linked to amount and type of care

• Quality of child care: • Group size, child–adult ratio, physical environment, caregiver characteristics • High-quality care resulted in better language and cognitive skills, more cooperation

and positive peer interactions, and fewer behavior problems

• Quantity of child care: • Extensive amounts of time in child care led to fewer positive interactions with mother,

more behavior problems, and higher rates of illness

• Influence of parenting was not weakened by extensive care

Some good websites to visit:

Attachment

http://www.psychology.sunysb.edu/attachment/

Cultural Differences in the Mirror Self-Recognition Test

http://www.wix.com/tanyamac/Tanya-Broesch

Infant, Child & Adult Temperament

http://www.temperament.com/

Infant Studies Lab (Joseph Campos)