10 Flashcards
The Function of Emotions
Modern theories emphasize the functional value of emotion.
According to the functional approach, emotions are useful because they help people adapt to their environment
- Take fear as an example. Most of us would rather not be afraid, but there are instances in which feeling fearful is very adaptive. Fear is adaptive because it organizes your behavior around an important goal-avoiding danger
- Similarly, other emotions are adaptive. Happiness, for example, is adaptive in contributing to stronger interpersonal relationships: When people are happy with another person, they smile, and this often causes the other person to feel happy too, strengthening their relationship
- Disgust is adaptive in keeping people away from substances that might make them ill: As we discover that the milk in a glass is sour, we experience disgust and push the glass away.
Thus, in the functional approach, most emotions developed over the course of human history to meet unique life challenges and help humans to survive.
Basic emotions
Joy, anger, surprise, interest, disgust, distress, sadness, and fear
Basic emotions are experienced by people worldwide, and each consists of three elements: a subjective feeling, a physiological change, and an overt behavior
Measuring emotions
Although babies show certain facial expressions, does that mean they are experiencing those emotions? Not necessarily. Facial expressions are only one component of emotion - the behavioral manifestation.
Emotion also involves physiological responses and subjective feelings.
- babies do not talk so we do not know about their subjective feelings
- BUT, some of the physiological responses that accompany facial expressions are the same in infants and adults. For example, when infants and adults smile - which suggests they’re happy - the left frontal cortex of the brain tends to have more electrical activity than the right frontal cortex
Research has revealed other reasons to believe that facial expressions are an accurate barometer of an infant’s emotional state:
- Infants (and adults) worldwide express basic emotions in much the same way
- For example, the universal signs of fear are eyes are open wide, eyebrows raised, and mouth relaxed but slightly open.
- The universality of emotional expression suggests that humans are biologically programmed to express basic emotions in a specific way. - By 5 to 6 months, infants’ facial expressions change predictably and meaningfully in response to events.
- When a happy mother greets her baby, the baby usually smiles in return; when a tired, distracted mother picks up her baby roughly, the baby usually frowns at her - When adults are really happy or amused, they smile differently than when they smile to greet an acquaintance or to hide hurt feelings.
- In “joyful” smiles, the muscles around the eyes contract, which lifts the cheeks.
- Similarly, infants smile both at mothers and interesting objects, but are more likely to raise their cheeks during smiling when looking at Mom
- The close parallel between the details of infants’ and adults’ smiles suggests that smiling has the same meaning, emotionally, for infants and adults.
Collectively, these findings make it reasonable to assume that facial expressions reflect an infant’s underlying emotional state.
DEVELOPMENT OF BASIC EMOTIONS
According to one influential theory (Lewis, 2000), newborns experience only 2 general emotions: pleasure and distress.
- But soon, more discrete emotions emerge, and by 8 or 9 months of age, infants are thought to experience all basic emotions.
Joy emerges at about 2 or 3 months.
- At this age, social smiles first appear: Infants smile when they see another human face.
- Sometimes social smiling is accompanied by cooing, the early form of vocalization.
- Smiling and cooing seem to be the infant’s way of expressing pleasure at seeing another person.
Sadness is also observed at about 2 or 3 months: Infants look sad, for example, when their mothers stop playing with them
Anger emerges between 4 and 6 months.
- Infants will become angry if a favorite food or toy is taken away and infants also become angry when their attempts to achieve a goal are frustrated.
- For example, if a parent restrains an infant trying to pick up a toy, the result is a very angry baby.
Fear emerges later in the first year.
- At about 6 months, infants become wary in the presence of an unfamiliar adult, a reaction known as stranger wariness.
- When a stranger approaches, a 6-month-old typically looks away and begins to fuss. The baby will cry, look frightened, and reaches with their arms outstretched in the direction of someone familiar.
How wary an infant feels around strangers depends on a number of factors.
- First, infants tend to be less fearful of strangers when the environment is familiar and more fearful when it is not.
- Many parents know this firsthand from traveling with their infants: Enter a friend’s house for the first time and the baby clings tightly to its mother.
- Second, the amount of anxiety depends on the stranger’s behavior.
- A stranger should talk with other adults and, in a while, perhaps offer the baby a toy. Handled this way, many infants will soon be curious about the stranger instead of afraid.
Wariness of strangers is adaptive because it emerges at the same time that children begin to master creeping and crawling
- babies are inquisitive and want to use their new locomotor skills to explore their worlds.
- Being wary of strangers provides a natural restraint against the tendency to wander away from familiar caregivers.
- However, as youngsters learn to interpret facial expressions and recognize when a person is friendly, their wariness of strangers declines.
EMERGENCE OF COMPLEX EMOTIONS.
People feel complex emotions such as pride, guilt, and embarrassment.
Sometimes known as the self-conscious emotions, they involve feelings of success when one’s standards or expectations are met and feelings of failure when they aren’t.
Most scientists (e.g., Lewis, 2000; Mascolo, Fischer, & Li, 2003) believe that complex emotions don’t surface until 18 to 24 months of age, because they depend on the child having some understanding of the self, which typically occurs between 15 and 18 months.
Children feel guilty or embarrassed, for example, when they’ve done something they know they shouldn’t have done
Similarly, children feel pride when they accomplish a challenging task for the first time.
Children’s growing understanding of themselves allows them to experience complex emotions like pride and guilt (Lewis, 2000).
Basic vs complex emotions
Basic
- Experienced by people worldwide and include a subjective feeling, a physiological response, and an overt behavior
- emerges at birth to 9 months
- Joy, anger, fear
Complex (self conscious)
- Responses to meeting or failing to meet expectations or standards
- emerges at 18 to 24 months
- Pride, guilt, embarrassment
LATER DEVELOPMENTS
As children grow, their emotions continues to expand.
For example, think about regret and relief, emotions that adults experience when they compare their actions with alternatives.
- by 7 years of age children experience feelings of regret, but they’re less likely to experience feelings of relief (Guttentag & Ferrell, 2004).
Older children experience basic and complex emotions in response to different situations or events.
- In the case of complex emotions, cognitive growth means that elementary-school children experience shame and guilt in situations where they would not have when they were younger
- For example, unlike preschool children, many school-age children would be ashamed if they neglected to defend a classmate who had been wrongly accused of a theft.
Fear is another emotion that can be elicited in different ways, depending on a child’s age.
- Many preschool children are afraid of the dark and of imaginary creatures. These fears typically diminish during the elementary-school years as children grow cognitively and better understand the difference between appearance and reality.
- Replacing these fears are concerns about school, health, and personal harm. Such worries are common and not cause for concern in most children. In some youngsters, however, they become so extreme they overwhelm the child. For example, a 7-year-old’s worries about school would not be unusual unless her concern grew to the point that she refused to go to school.
- An overwhelming fear of going to school and active resistance to attending school constitutes school phobia. Children may develop school phobia because they are overanxious generally and school is full of situations that can cause anxiety, such as reading aloud, taking tests, or learning new activities with competitive classmates. School-phobic children can be helped with systematic desensitization, a technique that associates deep relaxation with progressively more anxiety-provoking situations
CULTURAL DIFFERENCES IN EMOTIONAL EXPRESSION
Children worldwide express many of the same basic and complex emotions.
- However, cultures differ in the extent to which emotional expression is encouraged
In many Asian countries, outward displays of emotion are discouraged in favor of emotional restraint.
- Consistent with these differences, in one study (Camras et al., 1998), European American 11-month-olds cried and smiled more often than Chinese ll-month-olds.
- In another study (Zahn-Waxler et al., 1996), U.S. preschoolers were more likely than Japanese preschoolers to express anger in interpersonal conflicts.
Cultures also differ in the events that trigger emotions, particularly complex emotions.
- Situations that evoke pride in one culture may evoke embarrassment or shame in another.
- For example, American elementary- school children often show pride at personal achievement, such as getting the highest grade on a test or, being chosen student of the month.
- In contrast, Asian elementary-school children are embarrassed by a public display of individual achievement but show great pride when their entire class is honored for an achievement
Expression of anger also varies around the world.
- Imagine that one child has just completed a detailed drawing when a classmate spills a drink, ruining the drawing. Most American children would respond with anger.
- In contrast, children growing up in east Asian countries that practice Buddhism (e.g., Mongolia, Thailand, Nepal) rarely respond with anger because this goes against the Buddhist tenet to extend loving kindness to all people, even those whose actions hurt others.
- Instead, they would probably remain quiet and experience shame that they had left the drawing in a vulnerable position (Cole, Tamang, & Shrestha, 2006).
Recognizing and Using Others’ Emotions
When can infants first identify emotions in others?
- Perhaps as early as 4 months and definitely by 6 months, infants begin to distinguish facial expressions associated with different emotions.
- They can distinguish a happy, smiling face from a sad, frowning face
Fearful, happy, and neutral faces elicit different patterns of electrical activity in the infant’s brain (Leppanen et al., 2007), which also shows the ability to differentiate facial expressions of emotion.
And infants notice if an angry-looking face produces a happy-sounding voice
Of course, infants might be able to distinguish an angry face from a happy one but not know the emotional significance of the two faces. How can we tell whether infants understand the emotions expressed in a face?
- The best evidence is that infants often match their own emotions to other people’s emotions.
- When happy mothers smile and talk in a pleasant voice, infants express happiness themselves. If mothers are angry or sad, infants become distressed, too
Also like adults, infants use others’ emotions to direct their behavior.
- Infants in an unfamiliar or ambiguous environment often look at their mother or father, as if searching for cues to help them interpret the situation, a phenomenon known as social referencing.
- If a parent looks afraid when shown a novel object, 12-month- olds are less likely to play with the toy than if a parent looks happy
- Furthermore, an infant can use parents’ facial expressions or their vocal expressions alone to decide whether they want to explore an unfamiliar object
- And infants’ use of parents’ cues is precise. If two unfamiliar toys are shown to a parent, who expresses disgust at one toy but not the other, 12-month-olds will avoid the toy that elicited the disgust but not the other toy
- And by 14 months, infants remember this information: They avoid a toy that elicited disgust an hour earlier
- By 18 months, they’re even more sophisticated: When one adult demonstrates an unfamiliar toy and a second adult comments, in an angry tone, “That’s really annoying! That’s so irritating!” 18-month-olds play less with the toy, compared to when the second adult makes neutral remarks in a mild manner.
- These youngsters apparently decided that it wasn’t such a good idea to play with the toy if it might upset the second adult again.
- Thus, social referencing shows that infants are remarkably skilled in using their parents’ emotions to help them direct their own behavior.
Although infants and toddlers are remarkably adept at recognizing others’ emotions, their skills are far from mature.
- Adults are much more skilled than infants-and school-aged children, for that matter-in recognizing the subtle signals of an emotion (Thomas et aI., 2007), and adults are better able to tell when others are “faking”
emotions; they can distinguish the face of a person who’s really happy from the face of a person who’s faking happiness
Thus, facial expressions of emotion are recognized with steadily greater skill throughout childhood and into adolescence.
UNDERSTANDING EMOTIONS
As their cognitive skills grow, children begin to understand why people feel as they do.
- By kindergarten, children know that undesirable or unpleasant events often make a person feel angry or sad (Levine, 1995).
- Children even know that they more often feel sad when they think about the undesirable event itself but feel angry when they think about the person who caused the undesirable event
- Kindergarten children also understand that remembering past sad events can make a person unhappy again (Lagattuta, Wellman, & Flavell, 1997) and that people worry when faced with the possibility that an unpleasant event may recur
During the elementary-school years, children begin to comprehend that people sometimes experience “mixed feelings.”
- They understand that some situations may lead people, for example, to feel happy and sad at the same time (Larsen, To, & Fire- man, 2007).
- The increased ability to see multiple, differing emotions coincides with the freedom from centered thinking that characterizes the concrete operational stage
Display rules - UNDERSTANDING EMOTIONS
As children develop, they also begin to learn display rules, culturally specific standards for appropriate expressions of emotion in a particular setting or with a particular person or persons.
- Adults know, for example, that expressing sadness is appropriate at funerals but expressing joy is not.
- Similarly, expressing sadness is appropriate with relatives and close friends but less so with strangers.
Preschool children’s understanding of display rules is shown by the fact that they control their anger more when provoked by peers they like than when provoked by peers they don’t like
- Also, school-age children and adolescents are more willing to express anger than sadness and, more willing to express both anger and sadness to parents than to peers
What experiences contribute to children’s understanding of emotions? - understanding emotions
What experiences contribute to children’s understanding of emotions?
Parents and children frequently talk about past emotions and why people felt as they did; this is particularly true for negative emotions such as fear and anger (Lagattuta & Wellman, 2002).
- Not surprisingly, children learn about emotions by hearing parents talk about feelings, explaining how they differ and the situations that elicit them (Brown & Dunn, 1996; Cervantes & Callanan, 1998).
Also, a positive, rewarding relationship with parents and siblings is related to children’s understanding of emotions
- The nature of this connection is still a mystery.
- One possibility is that within positive parent-child and sibling relationships, people express a fuller range of emotions (and do so more
often) and are more willing to talk about why they feel as they do, providing children more opportunities to learn about emotions.
Children’s growing understanding of emotions in others contributes in turn to a growing ability to help others.
- They are more likely to recognize the emotions that signal a person’s need.
- Better understanding of emotions in others also contributes to children’s growing ability to play easily with peers because they can see the impact of their behavior on others.
Recognizing emotions in others is an important prerequisite for successful, satisfying interactions.
Regulating emotions - infants
People often regulate emotions; for example, we routinely try to suppress fear (because we know there’s no real need to be afraid of the dark), anger (because we don’t want to let a friend know just how upset we are), and joy (because we don’t want to seem like we’re gloating over our good fortune).
Regulating emotions skillfully depends on cognitive processes
- Attention is an important part of emotion regulation: We can control emotions such as fear by diverting attention to other less emotional stimuli, thoughts, or feelings
- And we can use strategies to reappraise the meaning of an event (or offeelings or thoughts), so that it provokes less emotion
Even infants can regulate their emotions and school-age children have mastered several techniques for regulating emotion
- successful regulation develops gradually through childhood and adolescence and that at any age some children will be more skilled than others are at regulating emotions
Emotion regulation clearly begins in infancy. By 4 to 6 months, infants use simple strategies to regulate their emotions
- When something frightens or confuses an infant - for example, a stranger or a mother who suddenly stops responding - he or she often looks away (just as older children and even adults often turn away or close their eyes to block out disturbing stimuli).
- Frightened infants also move closer to a parent, another effective way of helping to control their fear (Parritz, 1996).
By 24 months, a distressed toddler’s face typically expresses sadness instead of fear or anger; apparently by this age toddlers have learned that a sad facial expression is the best way to get a mother’s attention and support
Not all children regulate their emotions well, and those who don’t tend to have problems interacting with peers and have adjustment problems
- When children can’t control their anger, worry, or sadness, they often have difficulty resolving the conflicts that inevitably surface in peer relationships
- Ineffective regulation of emotions leads to more frequent conflicts with peers, and, consequently, less satisfying peer relationships and less adaptive adjustment to school
Regulating emotions - Older children and adolescents
Older children and adolescents encounter a wider range of emotional situations, so it’s fortunate they develop a number of related new ways to regulate emotion
- Children begin to regulate their own emotions and rely less on others to do this for them.
- A fearful child no longer runs to a parent but instead devises her own methods for dealing with fear.
- For example, she might reassure herself by saying, “I know the thunderstorm won’t last long and I’m safe inside the house” - Children more often rely on mental strategies to regulate emotions.
- For example, a child might reduce his disappointment at not receiving a much-expected gift by telling himself that he didn’t really want the gift in the first place. - Children more accurately match the strategies for regulating emotion with the particular setting.
- For example, when faced with emotional situations that are unavoidable, such as going to the dentist to have a cavity filled, children adjust to the situation (for instance, by thinking of the positive consequences of treating the tooth) instead of trying to avoid the situation.
Temperament
Temperament refers to biologically based differences in infants’ and children’s emotional reactivity and emotional self-regulation.
- However, scientists disagree on the number and nature of the dimensions that make up temperament.
Some infants respond warmly to strangers and others are very shy.
- Such behavioral styles, which are fairly stable across situations and are biologically based, make up an infant’s temperament.
For example, all babies become upset occasionally and cry.
- However, some recover quickly and others are very hard to console.
- These differences in emotion and style of behavior are evident in the first few weeks after birth and are important throughout life.
Alexander Thomas and Stella Chess (Thomas, Chess, & Birch, 1968; Thomas & Chess, 1977) pioneered the study of temperament with the New York Longitudinal Study, in which they traced the lives of 141 individuals from infancy through adulthood.
- Thomas and Chess gathered their initial data by interviewing the babies’ parents and asking individuals unfamiliar with the children to observe them at home.
- Based on these interviews and observations, Thomas and Chess suggested that infants’ behavior varied along nine temperamental dimensions.
One dimension was activity, which referred to an infant’s typical level of motor activity.
- A second was persistence, which referred to the amount of time that an infant devoted to an activity, particularly when obstacles were present.
Using these and other dimensions, Thomas and Chess identified three patterns of temperament.
- Most common were “easy” babies, who were usually happy and cheerful, tended to adjust well to new situations, and had regular routines for eating, sleeping, and toileting.
- A second, less common group were “difficult” babies, who tended to be unhappy, were irregular in their eating and sleeping, and often responded intensely to unfamiliar situations.
- Another less common group were “slow- to-warm-up” babies. Like difficult babies, slow-to-warm-up babies were often unhappy; but unlike difficult babies, slow-to-warm-up babies were not upset by unfamiliar situations.
The New York Longitudinal Study launched research on infant temperament, but today’s researchers no longer emphasize creating different categories of infants, such as “easy” or “slow to warm up.”
- Instead, researchers want to determine the different dimensions that underlie temperament.
A Theory of the Structure of Temperament in Infancy
Mary K. Rothbart (2004; Rothbart & Hwang, 2005) has devised a theory of temperament that includes three different dimensions:
- Surgency / extraversion refers to the extent to which a child is generally happy, active, vocal, and regularly seeks interesting stimulation.
- Negative affect refers to the extent to which a child is angry, fearful, frustrated, shy, and not easily soothed.
- Effortful control refers to the extent to which a child can focus attention, is not readily distracted, and can inhibit responses.
Rothbart claims that these dimensions of temperament are evident in infancy, continue into childhood, and are related to dimensions of personality that are found in adolescence and adulthood.
- However, the dimensions are not independent: Specifically, infants who are high on effortful control tend to be high on surgency/extraversion and low on negative affect. In other words, babies who can control their attention and inhibit responses tend to be happy and active but not angry or fearful.
Hypothesis: If temperament is biologically based and includes the three dimensions of Rothbart’s theory, then those dimensions of temperament should be observed in children around the world. That is, cross-cultural studies of temperament should consistently reveal the dimensions of surgency/extraversion, negative affect, and effortful control.
Conclusion: As predicted, the structure of temperament was the same in two cultures. This supports Rothbart’s claim that the dimensions of her theory of temperament are biologically rooted and, consequently, should be evident regardless of the specific environment or culture in which a child develops.
Application: An important theme of temperament research-one that began with Thomas and Chess (1977) and has been picked up by other temperament researchers-is that children’s development proceeds best when there is a good fit between their temperament and the environment in which they grow up. That is, because temperament is rooted in biological factors, parents should accept their baby’s unique temperamental characteristics and adjust their parenting accordingly.
- parent-child interactions represent a two-way street in which interactions are most successful when both parties - child and parent - adjust to the needs of the other.
Hereditary and Environmental Contributions to Temperament
Most theories agree that temperament reflects both heredity and experience (Caspi, Roberts, & Shiner, 2005).
The influence of heredity is shown in twin studies: Identical twins are more alike in most aspects of temperament than fraternal twins.
For example, Goldsmith, Buss, and Lemery (1997) found that the correlation for identical twins’ activity level was .72, but the correlation for fraternal twins was only .38.
However, the impact of heredity also depends on the temperamental dimension and the child’s age.
- For example, negative affect is more influenced by heredity than the other dimensions; and temperament in childhood is more influenced by heredity than is temperament in infancy
The environment also contributes to children’s temperament.
- Positive emotionality-laughing often, being generally happy, and often expressing pleasure- seems to reflect environmental influences (Goldsmith et al., 1997).
- And infants are less emotional when parents are responsive
- Conversely, infants more often develop intense, difficult temperaments when mothers are abrupt in dealing with them and lack confidence
Heredity and environment both contribute to children’s temperament.
- In fact, one view is that
temperament may make some children particularly susceptible to environmental influences - either beneficial or harmful
- For example, in one
study (Kochanska, Aksan, & Joy, 2007), emotionally fearful children
were more likely to cheat in a game when their parents’ discipline emphasized asserting power (e.g., “Do this now and don’t argue!”). Yet these children were the least likely to cheat when parents were nurturing and supportive.
- In other words, temperamentally fearful preschoolers can become dishonest or scrupulously honest, depending on their parents’ disciplinary style.
DRD4 gene on chromosome 11
- This gene is linked to brain systems that regulate attention, motivation, and re-ward, and one allele for this gene is associated with novelty-seeking in adults
- In one study (Bakermans-Kranenburg et aI., 2008), preschool children with this allele were more likely (than children without the allele) to be overactive, aggressive, and oppositional with others.
- However, when mothers participated in an intervention program designed to improve discipline by making parents more sensitive to their children’s needs, preschoolers with this allele were less likely to be overactive, aggressive, and oppositional.
- Thus, children with this particularly variant of the DRD4 gene are particularly susceptible to quality of parenting, be it sensitive or insensitive.
DRD4 is NOT a temperament gene, but it is linked to behaviors that make up temperament (e.g., novelty seeking, fearlessness).
- Consequently, these findings, along with work on fearful preschoolers (Kochanska et aI., 2007), shows that temperamental features may make some children particularly sensitive to environmental influences.
Stability of Temperament
Do babies keep the same temperament as they grow up?
The first answers to these questions came from the Fels longitudinal project, a study of many aspects of physical and psychological development from infancy.
- Although not a study of temperament per se, Jerome Kagan and his collaborators (Kagan, 1989; Kagan & Moss, 1962) found that fearful preschoolers in the Fels project tended to be inhibited as older children and adolescents.
Temperament is moderately stable throughout infancy, childhood, and adolescence (Wachs & Bates, 2001).
- For example, newborns who cry under moderate stress tend, as 5-month-olds, to cry when they are placed in stressful situations
- In addition, when inhibited toddlers are adults, they respond more strongly to unfamiliar stimuli.
- when adults who had been inhibited as toddlers viewed novel faces, they had significantly more activity in the amygdala, a brain region that regulates perception of fearful stimuli. Thus, the same individuals who avoided strangers as 2-year-olds had, as adults, the strongest response to novel faces.
The finding of modest stability in temperament means that Sam, an inhibited l-year-old, is more likely to be shy as a 12-year-old than Dave, an outgoing l-year-old.
- However, it’s not a “sure thing” that Sam will still be shy as a 12-year-old. Instead, think of temperament as a predisposition.
- Some infants are naturally pre-disposed to be sociable, emotional, or active; others CAN act in these ways, too, but only if the behaviors are nurtured by parents and others.
In many respects, temperament resembles personality, so it’s not surprising that many child-development researchers have speculated about potential connections between the two.
- In fact, personality in adulthood includes many of the same dimensions observed for temperament in infancy and childhood
- For example, extroversion is a dimension of personality that refers to a person’s warmth, gregariousness, and activity level. Extroverted individuals tend to be affectionate, prefer the company of others, and like being active; introverted people tend to be more reserved, enjoy solitude, and prefer a more sedate pace (Costa & McCrae, 2001).
Extroversion looks like a blend of the temperamental dimensions of positive affect and activity level; and longitudinal studies find that inhibited children are more likely as adults to be introverted than extroverted (Caspi et aI., 2005).
- However, research of this sort also reveals many instances in which temperament is poorly related to personality in adulthood (Wachs & Bates, 2001).
- This may seem surprising, but remember that temperament changes as children develop, depending on their experiences.
- An inhibited child who finds herself in a school group with children with similar interests may “open up” and become much more outgoing over time; her early inhibited temperament is not related to her later outgoing personality.
- Thus, we should not expect children’s temperament to be consistently related to their personality as adults.
Temperament and Other Aspects of Development
One of the goals of Thomas and Chess’s New York Longitudinal Study was to discover temperamental features of infants that would predict later psychological adjustment.
In fact, Thomas and Chess discovered that about two-thirds of the preschoolers with difficult temperaments had developed behavioral problems by the time they entered school.
- In contrast, fewer than one-fifth of the children with easy temperaments had behavioral problems
Other scientists have followed the lead of the New York Longitudinal Study in looking for links between temperament and outcomes ofdevelopment, and they’ve found that temperament is an important influence on development. Temperament is linked to school success, good peer relations, compliance with parents’ requests, and to depression. Consider these examples:
- Persistent children are likely to succeed in school, whereas active and distractible children are less likely to succeed (Martin, Ole- jnik, & Gaddis, 1994).
- Shy, inhibited children often have difficulty interacting with their peers and often do not cope effectively with problems (Eisenberg et ai., 1998
- Anxious, fearful children are more likely to comply with a parent’s rules and requests, even when the parent is not present (Kochanska et aI., 2007).
- Children who are frequently angry or fearful are more prone to depression (Lengua,2006).
- Children who are capable of greater effortful control, as 3- and 4-year-olds, have higher scores on measures of working memory (Wolfe & Bell, 2007) and, as school- age children, are less likely to be diagnosed with ADHD (Martel & Nigg, 2006).
- temperament is also related to children’s tendency to help people in distress.
- A young child’s temperament helps determine whether that child will help.
- When mothers and experimenters feigned injury, both shy and outgoing children noticed and were disturbed by their distress.
- Outgoing children typically translated this concern into action, helping both mothers and experimenters.
- In contrast, shy youngsters helped mothers but could not overcome their reticence to help an unfamiliar adult who did not specifically ask for help.
- Even though shy children see that a person is suffering, their apprehensiveness in unfamiliar social settings often prevents them from helping.
Temperament rarely is the sole determining factor. Instead, the influence of temperament often depends on the environment in which children develop
Let’s consider the link between temperament and behavior problems.
- Infants and toddlers who temperamentally resist control-those who are difficult to manage, who are often unresponsive, and who are sometimes impulsive- tend to be prone to behavior problems, particularly aggression, when they are older.
- However, more careful analysis shows that resistant temperament leads to behavior problems primarily when mothers do not exert much control over their children.
- Among mothers who do exert control-those who prohibit, warn, and scold their children when necessary-resistant temperament is not linked to behavior problems
Similarly, young adolescents are more likely to drink, smoke, and use drugs when they experience many life stressors and their parents themselves smoke and drink.
- But this is less true for young adolescents with temperaments marked by positive affect (Wills et ai., 2001). That is, young adolescents who are temperamentally cheerful apparently are less affected by life stressors and consequently are less likely to drink, smoke, or use drugs
The Growth of Attachment
Today’s parents are encouraged to shower their babies with hugs and kisses; the more affection young children receive, the better! This advice may seem obvious, but actually it’s a relatively recent recommendation after the wars
Soon after, studies of monkeys that were reared in isolation confirmed this idea.
- Although the monkeys received excellent physical care, they stayed huddled in a corner of their cages, clutching themselves, and rocking constantly; when placed with other monkeys, they avoided them as much as they could (Harlow & Harlow, 1965).
- Clearly, in the absence of regular social interactions with caring adults, normal development is thrown way off course.
According to evolutionary psychology, many human behaviors represent successful adaptation to the environment.
- That is, over human history, some behaviors have made it more likely that people will reproduce and pass on their genes to following generations.
- For example, we take it for granted that most people enjoy being with other people. But evolutionary psychologists argue that our “social nature” is a product of evolution: For early humans, being in a group offered protection from predators and made it easier to locate food.
- Thus, early humans who were social were more likely than their asocial peers to live long enough to reproduce, passing on their social orientation to their offspring (Gaulin & McBurney, 2001).
- Over many, many generations, “being social” had such a survival advantage that nearly all people are socially oriented
Applied to child development, evolutionary psychology highlights the adaptive value of children’s behavior at different points in development (Bjorklund & Pelle- grini, 2000).
- For example, think about the time and energy that parents invest in child rearing.
- Without such effort, infants and young children would die before they were sexually mature, which means that a parent’s genes could not be passed along to grandchildren (Geary, 2002).
- Here, too, parenting just seems “natural” but really represents an adaptation to the problem of guaranteeing that one’s helpless offspring can survive until they’re sexually mature.
Bowlby described four phases in the growth of attachment
According to Bowlby, children who form an attachment to an adult-that is, an enduring social-emotional relationship-are more likely to survive. This person is usually the mother but need not be
Bowlby described four phases in the growth of attachment:
- Preattachment (birth to 6-8 weeks).
- During prenatal development and soon after birth, infants rapidly learn to recognize their mothers by smell and sound, which sets the stage for forging an attachment relationship (Hofer, 2006).
- What’s more, evolution
has endowed infants with many behaviors that elicit caregiving
from an adult.
- When babies cry, smile, or gaze intently at a parent’s face, parents usually smile back or hold the baby.
- The infant’s behaviors and the responses they evoke in adults create an interactive system that is the first step in the formation of attachment relationships. - Attachment in the making (6-8 weeks to 6-8 months).
- During these months, babies begin to behave differently in the presence of familiar caregivers and unfamiliar adults.
- Babies now smile and laugh more often with the primary care- giver.
- And when babies are upset, they’re more easily consoled by the primary caregiver.
- Babies are gradually identifying the primary caregiver as the person they can depend on when they’re anxious or distressed. - True attachment (6-8 months to 18 months).
- By approximately 7 or 8 months, most infants have singled out the attachment figure-usually the mother-as a special individual.
- The attachment figure is now the infant’s stable social- emotional base.
- For example, a 7-month-old will explore a novel environment but periodically look toward his mother, as if seeking reassurance that all is well.
- The behavior suggests the infant trusts his mother and indicates the attachment relationship has been established.
- In addition, this behavior reflects important cognitive growth: It means that the infant has a mental representation of the mother, an understanding that she will be there to meet the infant’s needs (Lewis et aI., 1997).
- And infants are distressed when they’re separated from the attachment figure because they’ve lost their secure base. - Reciprocal relationships (18 months on).
- Infants’ growing cognitive and language skills and their accumulated experience with their primary caregiver make infants better able to act as true partners in the attachment relationship.
- They often take the initiative in interactions and negotiate with parents (“Please read me another story!”).
- They begin to understand parents’ feelings and goals and sometimes use this knowledge to guide their own behavior (e.g., social referencing).
- And they cope with separation more effectively because they can anticipate that parents will return.
