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Emotional Development in Babies
At birth, a baby may be described as a bundle of reflexes, but as development proceeds, specific emotions are expressed in forms that are recognizable to others.
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Newborns (Emotional Development in Babies)
- Crying
- Facial expressions of disgust in response to to sour taste
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After 1st Month (Emotional Development in Babies)
Social Smiles
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After 2nd Month (Emotional Development in Babies)
Smiles occur with gentle stroking
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After 3rd Month (Emotional Development in Babies)
- Smile frequently in interaction with caregiver
- Smile
in response to same events as older children and adults
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Lewis, Alessandri, & Sullivan 1990 (Infants Mastering Skills)
- Showed that smiling occurs when infants master skills
- Babies placed in an infant seat with string attatched to their arms
- Condition 1 had to pull string to turn on music for a short period
- Condition 2 had music play for a short time independent of string pulling
- Condition 1 infants of 2,4,6, and 8 months soon learned to start the music by pulling string and showed higher levels of interest and smiling than Condition 2 babies
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Hiatt, Campos, & Emde 1979 (Fruststraion and Playfulness)
- Tested the relation of emotional expressions to specific elicitors by presenting 10-12 month-old babies with 6 eliciting conditions
- Found:
- Happy smiling occurs in response to playful games like peek-a-boo
- Anger in response to frustration
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Scarr & Salapatek 1970 (Developmental Changes in Elicitation of Emotion)
- Babies from 2 month-2 years old were exposed to strangers , a visual cliff, a jack-in-a-box, a moving toy dog, loud noises, and someone wearing a mask
- As children age, they show more fearful avoidance of visual cliff, and more fear of strangers and masks
- For fear of loud/sudden movements and unfamiliar toys, fear began at about 7 month, peaked at the end of the 1st year, then declined
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Developmental Changes in Elicitation of Emotion
Preschoolers --> Fear of imaginary themes such as monsters and ghosts
Early grade school --> Fears surrounding bodily injury and physical danger
Adolescence --> Primary cause of fear is related to social concerns; increased negative emotion
Grade 10 and up --> positivity increases; sexual love first comes to be important
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Imitations
- Show within the first few hours of life
- May have effect on infants' perceptions
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Habituation
Allow infants to make discriminations between some emotional expressions
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Harlow (1959) Monkey Experiment
- Removed baby monkeys from mothers, and offered them a choice between a surrogate mother made of terrycloth, the other of wire
- In the first group a terrycloth mother provided no food, while a wire mother did
- In the second group, a terrycloth mother provided food; the wire mother did not
- Young monkeys clung to the terrycloth mother whether or not it provided them with food, and that the young monkeys chose the wire surrogate only when it provided food.
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Cohn & Tronick (1983)
- Examined what happened when mothers showed no emotions to their babies
- Babies videotaped when mothers cycled 3-minute intevals of "flat affect" with acting normally
- Flat affect --> infants made more protests, more wary expressions, briefer positive expressions
- Adult emotions do function to regulate interaction
- Mutual Regulation Model
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Social Referencing Skills
Skills using information from caregivers to alter their own actions
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Sorce et al. 1985 (Social Referencing Skills)
- Exposed 1 year olds to visual cliff
- 74% crossed cliff when mothers showed a happy facial expression
- None crossed when mothers showed a fearful facial expression
- Facial expressions alone can powerfully affect whether a child will cross the visual cliff
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Differentiation Between Self and Others (Development Empathy and Compassion)
- 6 months --> show much clearer interest in others' emotions
- 12-24 months -->children respond to anothers distressby comforting, bringing a parent, offering an object
- 3 years --> ways they offer comfort are moreappropriate to the needs of other people
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Empathy and Compassion
- Empathy is essential to prosocial behavior, kindness, caring, and justice
- Compassion has been thought of as the very foundation of society
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Emotions in Play and Games
- Play enables practice of social skills
- Symbolic (pretend) play depends on the imagination, and also involves trying out roles, and the use of objects as props
- A game is a model of some aspect of the social world, and we enter into it in order to take part in a particular kind of interaction
- Games may be artificial but interpresonal engagement is real
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Behavioral vs. Mentalistic Ideas of Emotion
- It has been argued that children under 4 are not capable of understanding the cause of others' emotions, so their ideas of emotions are more behavioral than mentalistic
- Some evidence that 2-3 year old children may have mentalistic conceptions of emotions
- By 3-4 years old, children give plausable reasonsfor experiencing emotions in which they make reference to the goal states (desires) of other people
- By 4 years children become good at explaining people's actions in terms of these people's own mental statee, including desires and emotions
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