Chapter 4

• Early emotions: primary emotions

  • surprise
  • interest
  • joy
  • anger
  • sadness
  • fear
  • disgust
• 3 types of crying:

  1. Basic cry
  2. Anger cry
  3. Pain cry
• Smiling:

  1. Reflexive smile: smile that does not occur in response to external stimuli and appears during the first month after birth
  2. Social smile: smile that occurs in response to an external stimulus, typically a face. Occurs as early as 2 months
• Stranger anxiety: The infant shows fear and wariness of strangers; emerges gradually at 6 months. Depends on:

  • parents' presence to eliminate activation of the HPA system
  • caregiver's behaviours
  • environment and location of the mother
  • characteristics of the stranger
• Separation distress: Infants show signs of distress when separated from their caregivers (mother). This is normal up until about 18 months.
• Chess and Thomas' Temperament classification:

  1. Easy child: generally positive mood, quickly establishes regular routines
  2. Difficult child: reacts negatively and cries frequently
  3. Slow to warm up child: low activity level, somewhat negative
• Kagan's concept of temperament:

  • Inhibition to the unfamiliar
  • children react to many aspects of unfamiliarity with initial avoidance, distress, or subdued affect beginning at 7-9 months
• Rothbart and Bates' temperament:

  • Effortful control: involves the executive attention system where an infant will inhibit their dominant response in favour of a more adaptive subdominant one
  • develops by the first year
• Goodness of fit: the match between the infant's temperament and the environmental demands the infant must cope with
• Strategies fr temperament sensitive parenting:

  1. Pay attention and respect the child's individuality
  2. Structure the child's environment
  3. Avoid applying negative labels to the child
• Development of sense of self:

  • Rouge test (15-23 months)
  • Pronouns emerge
  • Autonomy vs shame and doubt (Erikson)
  • Empathy
  • Embarrassment
• Dyadic interaction: direct (often bodily) interaction between caregiver and adult (from 2-3 months on)

  Triadic interaction: infant interactions with others revolve around objects (from 9-10 months on)
• Social referencing: tendency to look at parent when faced with ambiguous or novel situation/object; using the emotional expression of another person as a source of information
• Types of pointing:

  1. Protoimperative
  2. request for an object, conveys desire; understands others as agents of action
  3. Protodeclarative
  4. directing or sharing attention, coneys interest; understanding others as agents of contemplation
• Freud's theory of attachment:

  • infants become attached to the person or object that provides them with oral satisfaction (mother)
  • Harlow's study:
  • baby monkeys prefer to spend time with the cloth mother regardless of who fed them
  • directly refutes Freud's theory
• Bowlby's theory of attachment:

  1. Attachment system is a behavioural adaptation
  2. Internal working model of attachment
  3. expectations of the availability of attachment figures, their likelihood of providing support during times of stress, self's worthiness of support
  4. Secure based
  5. familiar caregiver is used as a point from whom to venture out to explore the environment and whom to return to
• Phases in development of attachment:

  1. Pre-attachment (birth - 6 weeks)
  2. built-in signals
  3. Attachment in the making (6 weeks to 6-8 months)
  4. responds different to caregiver than to stranger, but no separation anxiety
  5. Clear-cut attachment (6-8 months to 18mo-2 yrs)
  6. separation anxiety
  7. Formation of a reciprocal relationship(2 yrs +)
  8. understand parents coming and going, decline of separation anxiety
• Strange situation: infant experiences a series of introductions, separations, and reunions with the caregiver and an adult stranger in a preset order. Researchers hope to observe and assess the infant's motivation to be near the caregiver and the degree to which the caregiver's presence provides security
• Secure attachment (65%):

  • as long as the mother is present, child plays comfortably
  • reacts positively to stranger
  • becomes upset when mothers leave, not consoled by stranger
  • actively seek contact upon mother's return
• Avoidant attachment (20%):

  • more or less indifferent to where mother is sitting
  • no affective behaviour (secure base behaviour)
  • show little distress when the mother leaves
  • actively avoid contact with mother upon return
• Resistant attachment (10%):

  • have problems from the start in the strange situation
  • become upset when the mother leaves
  • not comforted by mother's return
  • do not readily resume playing after their mother returns
• Disorganized/disoriented attachment (5-10%):

  • behave in contradictory, unpredictable ways that seem to convey extreme fear or utter confusion
  • have no strategy for managing the stress of being separated from and then reunited with mother
  • appear dazed and disoriented; slow movements or sitting
• Influences on attachment security:

  1. quality of caregiving (sensitivity)
  2. infant characteristics not clear
  3. family circumstances (stress)
  4. parents' internal working models
  5. child care
• Individual differences in infant attachment affect:

  • dependency, self-reliance, efficacy
  • efforts at mastering a challenging task
  • emotion regulation
  • social competence
  • psychopathology
• Home observation of secure children:

  • more harmonious interactions with mother, more cooperative
  • expect the caregiver to be accessible and responsible
  • explore environment and accept brief separations without protest
• Home observation of anxious-avoidant children:

  • rejected by their mother; mother appears angry at them
  • mothers spend less time cuddling and holding children
  • these children have a strong need for security but their internal representation of their caregiver makes them expect that their request for comfort will be rejected
• Home observation of resistant children:

  • cry more at home than securely attached babies, get upset at separation
  • experience inconsistent mothering; mother ignores signs of distress
  • mothers do not make contact that is appropriate to the infant's needs
  • babies develop an internal model of attachment of the mother as being unpredictable
• Home observation of disorganized children:

  • clinically depressed mothers
  • high risk populations
  • multi-problem families
  • maltreating families