Early childhood

• Social Smiling


  Newborn infants gaze and smile at their parents; smile that occurs in response to external stimulus (2 months)
• Reflexive Smile


  A smile that does not occur in response to external stimuli and appear during the first month after birth
• Anticipatory Smiling


  Infants smile at an object then gaze at an adult while continuing to smile
• Self-Conscious emotions


  Arise only after children have developed self-awareness
• Altruistic Behavior


  Acting out of concern with no expectation of reward
• Mirror Neurons


  Underlie empathy and altruism
• Temperament


  An early-appearing, biologically based tendency to respond to the environment in predictable ways
• Types of Temperament


  • Easy Children
  • Difficult Children
  • Slow-to-Warm-Up Children
• Strong links between infant temperament and childhood personality at age of 7
• Goodness of Fit


  The match between a child's temperament and the environmental demands and constraints the child must deal with
• Goodness of Fit occurs between ages of 2 and 4
• Intuitive Thought


  Begin to use primitive reasoning and want to know the answers to all sorts of questions
• Intuitive Thought occurs approx. 4-7 yrs of age
• Children also begin to able to understand the symbols that describe physical spaces
• Piaget believed that children cannot yet reason logically about causality
• Transduction


  They mentally link two events, especially events close in time, whether or not here is logically a causal relationship
• Identities


  The concept that people and many things are basically the same even if they change in outward form, size, or appearance
• Animism


  Tendency to attribute life to objects that are not alive
• Centration


  The tendency to focus on one aspect of a situation and neglect others
• Children cannot Decenter (think about several aspects of a situation at one time)
• Irreversibility


  Failure to understand that an action can go in two or more directions
• Egocentrism


  Young children center so much on their own point of view that they cannot take in another's
• Conservation


  The fact that two things are equal remain so if their appearance is altered, as long as nothing is added or taken away
• Theory of Mind


  The awareness of the broad range of human mental states - beliefs, intents, desires, dreams, and so forth - and the understanding that others have their own
• Theory of Mind allows us to understand and predict the behavior of others and makes the social world understandable
• 1. 5 yr old children are more proficient with language than younger children
• Fast Mapping


  Allows a child to pick up approximate meaning of a new word after hearing it only once or twice in conversation
• Nouns are easier to fast map than verbs
• Syntax


  A concept and involves the rules for putting together sentences in a particular language
• Pragmatics


  Practical knowledge of how to use language to communicate
• Social Speech


  Speech intended to be understood by a listener
• Private Speech


  Talking aloud to oneself with no intent to communicate with others (Egocentric Speech)
• Private Speech is immature (Piaget) and a learning process (Vygotsky)
• Emergent Literacy


  Development of fundamental skills that eventually lead to being able to read
• Social interaction promotes emergent literacy
• Self-Concept


  Our total picture of our abilities and traits
• Children's self-definition typically change between ages 5 and 7
• At about 7, children will be able to describe themselves in terms of generalized traits
• Self-Esteem


  Self-evaluative part of the self-concept, the judgement children make about their overall worth
• Children's self-esteem tends to be unidimensional (either good or bad)