Week 14: Social and Emotional Development Flashcards
3 Perspectives about Social and Personality Development in Childhood
- Social context in which each child lives, especially relationships that provide security, guidance, and knowledge
- Biological maturation: development of social and emotional competencies
- Developing a representation of a child’s self and the social world around them
What is the Development of Family Relationships
- Development of relationships is a biologically natural process
- Has evolved in humans because they promote children’s motivation to stay close to those who care for them
- Occurs in nearly all infants: securely attach to parents when parents respond sensitively, insecurely attached when care is inconsistent/neglectful
“Strange Situation”
Brief separation of infant from caregiver; child is left alone to play in a room and a caregiver later comes back; reaction to caregiver’s return is dependent on level of attachment (may be welcoming, clingy, rejected, etc)
Security of Attachment
Infant’s confidence in the sensitivity and responsiveness of a caregiver (secure vs. insecure)
- Secure attachment often leads to advanced emotional understanding and early conscious development
High warmth/responsiveness with low expectations/control = (parent wise)
Permissive
Low warmth/responsiveness with low expectations/control = (parent wise)
Uninvolved
Low warmth/responsiveness with high expectations/control = (parent wise)
authoritarian
High warmth/responsiveness with high expectations/control = (parent wise)
authoritative
Children Peer Relationships
- Must socially interact with other children to manage conflict, play, etc
- Challenges: self-esteem from peer acceptance (peer rejection can often lead to later behaviour problems), bullying, peer victimization, pressure to fit in, social comparison leading to lack of worth
- Increased focus on psychological intimacy in adolescence
Children Social Understanding
- Familial and peer relationships cause children to develop expectations for specific people, understandings of how to interact with ppl, development of self-concept
- Social understanding begins by end of first year
(awareness others have perceptions, feelings, and other mental states)
Social Referencing
A person consults another person’s expressions to determine how to evaluate and respond to ambiguous and uncertain circumstances
- E.g. mom sad = baby sad even tho they don’t know why
Late preschool years developmental understanding
Child begins to understand that another’s beliefs can be mistaken rather than correct, that memories can affect feelings, and that emotions can be hidden from others
Reason: Kids are keen, sensitive observers and make connections to derive inferences about mental states
Temperament
Early emerging differences in reactivity and self-regulation which constitutes a foundation for personality development
- Biologically based, but interacts with influence of experiences from birth (e.g. level of supportive parental care)
Goodness of fit
Match between child’s temperament and characteristics of parental care that contributes to positive/negative personality development
Ex: good fit would be adventurous child w adventurous parents
Development of conscience
Cognitive, emotional, and social influences that cause young children to create and act consistently with internal standards of conduct
- Emerges from young child experiences with parents
- Involves biologically-based temperament
Effortful control
temperament quality that enables children to create and act consistently with internal standards of conduct
5-HTTLPR gene expression
Low expression on measures of conscious development when participants and previously experienced unresponsive maternal care, but strong later performance on those who grew up with responsive care measures
What does the end of preschool yrs bring personality and social wise
- development of a “moral self” - children think of themselves as ppl who want to do right thing and feel bad for doing wrong thing
- Strong interaction with gender identity: learnt from parents and society
Gender schemas:
organized beliefs and expectations about maleness and femaleness that guide children’s thinking about gender
Intrapersonal Functions
What occurs in oneself
- Minimal conscious awareness (rapid decision-making)
- Immediate action (activation and deactivation of sys that prevents chaos of competing sys operating simultaneously, subjective experiences, expressive behaviour, psychological reactions)
- Thought (memories/thought include emotion that serve neural glue to connect these facts in our minds, emotions)
- Future behaviour (striving for satisfaction, joy, pride, etc -> working to avoid negative emotions)
Interpersonal Functions
Relationships between 2+ people
- Emotions can be expressed verbally/nonverbally, they can be expressed/judged by others, influence others
- Facilitation of specific behaviours in perceivers (ex: we feel fear when we see someone is angry)
- Nature of interpersonal relationships (e.g. marriages)
- Incentives for desired social behaviour - social referencing and visual cliff study
Social/Cultural Functions
Systems of relationships between individuals and groups of individuals
- Much revolves around cities => social chaos
- Complex, individuals of multiple groups with diff roles, norms, and expectations
Culture
meaning and information afforded to the system transmitted across generations
- Effects emotions have on sociocultural functioning
- Emotions maintain social order
Cultural display rules
rules learned early in life that tell us how to manage and modify emotional expressions according to social circumstances (e.g. men don’t cry; don’t laugh during a funeral)
Attachment Theory
- Developed by John Bowlby who observed that infants would go to extraordinary lengths to prevent being separated from parents
Harlow’s research on contact comfort
Placed young monkeys in cages with 2 artificial “mothers”
(1 was a wire contraption, 1 was wire with cloth)
Proved infant-caregiver bond is rooted more deeply than for basic survival = contact comfort
Attachment Figure
Someone who functions as primary safe haven and secure base for someone (often parent in childhood or partner in adulthood)
- Associated with likelihood to survive to a reproductive age
Attachment behavioural system
Motivational system selected over course of evolution to maintain proximity between young child and his/her attachment figure
Attachment behaviour
Behaviour/signal from child that attracts attention of primary attachment figure and functions to prevent separation (ex. crying, clinging, etc)
Ainsworth strange situation
lab study that seperated parents and infants for brief period to examine individual differences in attachment behaviours
significance:
1. 1st empirical demonstration (observable data) of how attachment behaviour is organized in unfamiliar contexts
2. 1st empirical taxonomy of individual differences in infant attachment patterns/how they behave
a) secure
b) anxious-resistant
c) anxious-avoidant
3. individual diff correlate w infant-parent interactions in child’s first year (anxious=b&c stages w parents who tend to b insensitive/inconsistent/neglectful
What did Bowlby believe
Attachment influenced adulthood e.g. romantic relationships
What did Hazan and Shaver believe
emotional bond between romantic partners is partly due to same motivational system that gives risk to emotional bond between infants and caregivers
a. ppl feel safe and secure when other person is present
b. ppl turn to other person when stressed, sick, scared, etc
c. ppl use the other person as “secure base” to explore world
d. ppl speak to one another in unique language (babytalk)
Research on adulthood attachment
- Who ends up w who? (secure ppl w secure ppl, etc)
- Relationship functioning (insecure vs secure)
- Do early experiences shape adulthood?
