Lesson 6: First Three Years (Psychosocial Devt)

• Personality


  Consistent blend of emotions, temperament, thought, and behavior that makes each person unique
• Personality Development


  Intertwined with social relationships; this combination is called psychosocial development
• Infants' and Toddlers' Psychosocial Development (0-3 months)

  • Open to stimulation; begin to show interest and curiosity, and they smile readily at people
• Infants' and Toddlers' Psychosocial Development (3-6 months)

  • Can anticipate what is about to happen and experience disappointment when it does not by becoming angry or acting warily; they smile, coo, and laugh often
• Infants' and Toddlers' Psychosocial Development (6-9 months)

  • Play social games and try to get responses from people they talk, touch, and cajole other babies to get them to respond and express more differentiated emotions
• Infants' and Toddlers' Psychosocial Development (9-12 months)

  • Intensely preoccupied with their principal caregiver, may become afraid of strangers, and act subdued in new situations; by 1 year, they communicate emotions more clearly, showing moods and ambivalence
• Infants' and Toddlers' Psychosocial Development (12-18 months)

  • Explore their environment, using the people they are most attached to as a secure base; they become more confident and more eager to assert themselves
• Infants' and Toddlers' Psychosocial Development (18-36 months)

  • Become anxious because they now realize how much they are separating from their caregivers; work out their awareness of their limitations in fantasy and in play
• Crying


  Primary way that infants communicate their needs and is considered to be an honest signal of need
• Some parents worry that picking up a crying baby will spoil the infant. However, this is not the case, especially when levels of distress are high. Respond right away when they cry
• Earliest faint smiles


  Occurs spontaneously after birth; result of subcortical nervous system activity
• Social Smiling


  When newborn infants gaze and smile at their parents, develops in the 2nd month of life
• Clowning


  Includes silly, nonverbal behaviors such as odd facial expressions or sounds, actions such as revealing a hidden body part (such as a belly button), and imitating another's odd actions
• Anticipatory Smiling

  Infants smile at an object and then gaze at an adult while continuing to smile
• Emotions


  Subjective reactions to experience that are associated with physiological and behavioral changes
• Emotional Development


  An orderly process; complex emotions unfold from simpler ones
• Self-conscious emotions


  Emotions such as embarrassment, empathy, and envy, that depend on self-awareness
• Self-awareness


  The cognitive understanding that they have a recognizable identity (existence and functioning), separate and different from the rest of other people and things; emerge between 15 and 24 months
• Self-evaluative emotions


  Emotions, such as pride, shame, and guilt, that depend on both self-awareness and knowledge of socially accepted standards of behavior; develops by about age 3
• Altruistic Behavior


  Activity intended to help another person with no expectation of reward
• Empathy


  The ability to imagine how another person might feel in a particular situation
• Mirror Neurons


  Neurons that fire when a person does something or observes someone else doing the same thing
• Collaborative activities increase during the 2nd year of life as toddlers become more adept at communication
• Young children engage in what is known as over-imitation, closely copying all actions they see an adult do, even if some of the actions are clearly irrelevant or impractical
• Temperament


  Refers to characteristic disposition or style, that is biologically based tendency of approaching and reacting to the environment in predictable ways
• The New York Longitudinal Study, a study on temperament that followed 133 infants till adulthood
• Infant Behavior Questionnaire (IBQ)


  A parental report instrument, have found strong links between infant temperament and childhood personality at age 7
• Cultural dimensions identified as affecting infant temperament are: power distance (how equally distributed power is in a culture), long-term orientation (how focused on the future a culture is), masculinity, and uncertainty avoidance
• Goodness of Fit


  The key to healthy adjustment; the match between a child's temperament and the environmental demands and constraints the child must deal with
• Behavioral Inhibition


  Has to do with how boldly or cautiously a child approaches unfamiliar objects and situations
• The amygdala detects and reacts to unfamiliar events, and, in the case of behaviorally inhibited children, responds vigorously and easily to most novel events
• The basal ganglia (the globus pallidus, putamen, and caudate) and the prefrontal cortex (the middle frontal gyrus)
• Monkey Mother Experiment by Harry Harlow


  Rhesus monkeys were separated from their mothers 6 to 12 hours after birth
• In an unfamiliar room, the babies "raised" by cloth surrogates showed more natural interest in exploring than those "raised" by wire surrogates. None of the monkeys in either group grew up normally, and none was able to nurture their own offspring
• Mothering


  Includes the comfort of close bodily contact and, at least in monkeys, the satisfaction of an innate need to cling
• Gender


  Significance or what it means to be male or female
• A preference for sex-typed toys, such as trucks for boys and dolls for girls, appears as young as 3 months of age, and before infants could have formed an understanding of masculine or feminine conceptual categories
• Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia (CAH)


  A genetic condition involving the overproduction of androgens (testosterone) in utero
• Gender-typing


  The process by which children learn behavior their culture considers appropriate for each sex
• Erikson's trust vs. mistrust stage


  If we are successful, we develop a sense of the reliability of people and objects in our world. We feel safe and loved. The risk, however, is that, instead, we develop a sense of mistrust and feel that those around us cannot be counted on in times of need