Dan & Clarie Learning Pack 2 Flashcards
When does stranger fear develop?
- Emerges at 6 months, increasing throughout infancy
- Remains dominant in toddlerhood
- It is a normal behaviour
What is the evolutionary. perspective on the development of stranger fear?
- Thought to offer balance to infants’ natural inquisitive nature for approach and exploration
- Contributes to healthy attachment systems (Ainsworth, 1973)
What is the strange situation?
Mary Ainsworth
- Designed to assess the quality of attachment between the infant and primary caregiver
- Various stages of the infant being left with both mother and stranger, stranger alone, mother alone, completely alone
- Can also tell us about stranger fear
What happens in the strange situation with stranger anxiety: Secure attachment
Avoidant of stranger when alone, but friendly when the mother is present
What happens in the strange situation with stranger anxiety: Resistant attachment
The infant avoids the stranger –> shows fear of the stranger
What happens in the strange situation with stranger anxiety: Avoidant attachment
The infant is okay with the stranger and plays normally when the stranger is present
Relationship between behavioural inhibition and stranger fear
- Temperament research shows stranger fear to be a clear and reliable marker for heightened behavioural inhibition
- Behavioural inhibition is a risk factor for the development of anxiety (Kagan, 2000; Kagan et al., 1987)
How do children self-regulate stranger fear?
- The ability to self regulate is one of the best early indicators of future socioemotional competence and health
- Includes the ability to regulate fear-related action
- Generally assumed that children expand and use their repertoire of executive processes to regulate prepotent responses
What is self-regulation?
- A fundamental and dynamic process to engage executive processes to reduce prepotent responses - Executive processes refers to emotional/cognitive control
- Prepotent responses refers to automatic emotional reactions
Do prepotent responses decay overtime, or do executive processes develop and become more effective?
Morales et al. (2017)
- Found that there is a critical period between 2-5 years of age where children become faster at reducing their prepotent responses, and more effective at employing their executive processes
Examples of psychological abuse
- Spurning - ridiculing or humiliating
- Terrorising - threatening violence against child or child’s loved one
- Isolating - restricting social interactions
- Corruption/exploitation - involving in illegal activities
- Denying emotional responses - providing no praise
Psychological abuse is difficult for clinicians to detect and assess
What are the conflicting motivational systems for children who experience abuse
Children who grow up with abuse often face conflict between two inborn and powerful dispositions
- The tendency to ask for soothing and help (regulated by the attachment system)
- The impulse to protect themselves through fight-flight responses (regulated by the survival defence system)
- Fright without solution (Main and Hesse, 1990)
What is the polyvagal theory?
Porges (2007)
- Dorsal nucleus of the vagal nerve is activated for both
1. Impending danger when fight/flight is impossible
and
- Attachment system is activated, but help might not come
- Dorsal nucleus activation can lead to symptoms associated with the development of dissociation:
1. collapsed body posture
2. Loose muscular tone
3. Low heart beat
4. Numbing
5. Deep feeling of helplessness
HPA axis functioning in children
- Higher morning cortisol levels in sexually abused girls aged 6-15, within 6 months of trauma
- Elevated salivary cortisol in 6 to 12 year old children raised in orphanages for > 8 months, compared to children 6 and a half years post-adoption
What is theory of mind?
- Our ability to interpret others’ behaviour in terms of mental states (e.g. thoughts, intentions, desires, beliefs)
Relationship between childhood trauma and theory of mind
Children with severe traumatic brain injury show poor executive functions and theory of mind
What is risk?
- Stressors that have proven or presumed effects on increasing the likelihood of maladjustment
What is resiliience?
- The experience of positive outcomes despite experiencing significant risk
Children must experience:
- Exposure to threat or severe adversity
- Achievement of positive adaptation
What is the cumulative risk theory?
- The sum of risks (regardless of context) leads to dysfunction
- Overwhelms adaptive capacities of the child
Protective/Vulnerability factors: Personal characteristics
- Older evidence suggests young boys are at greater risk of maladaptive responding to family issues than young girls
- New evidence suggests that modern fathers are more involved post separation/divorce
- Positive constellation of characteristics appears to counteract risk effects:
1. Easy temperament
2. Social responsiveness
3. Humour
Protective/Vulnerability factors: Family characteristics
- Secure parent-child attachment
- Authoritative parenting with appropriate amounts of structure and discipline
- Family-level resources such as cohesion, positive interactions and support
Protective/Vulnerability factors: External support systems
- Reciprocal, positive friendships
- High-quality child care is a protective factor for children living in low-income areas
- Supportive teachers
- Community extra-curricular actiivities
What are Masten and Powell’s (2003) intervention designs for bolstering resilience?
- Risk-focused programs
- Attempt to reduce the level of risk - Asset-focused programs
- Increase the quality/quantity of assets in children’s lives - Process-orientated programs
- Attempt to improve the most important adaptational systems for children such as key relationships, intellectual functioning, and self-regulation systems
What is the study of ageing called?
Gerontology
What are the 3 major factors that interact to form our own personal experiences throughout life?
- Biological - physiology, genetics
- Psychological - cognition, emotion, personality
- Social - cultural, interpersonal relationships
What are the 4 principles of ageing?
- Continuity - early experiences influence later life
- Survivor - self-selection through healthy behaviour
- Individuality - variation within (intra) and between (inter) age groups
- Health vs. pathology - ‘normal’ and pathological ageing involve fundamentally different processes
What is primary ageing
- Gradual and inevitable
- Biological
- Starts in early adulthood
- Genetic/pre-programmed coding
- Intrinsic
- Progressive deterioration in physical structure and biological function
- Independent of disease and environment
- Skin wrinkling
- Hair loss/greying
- Cardiovascular changes