Chapter 6

• Psychosocial development


  A combination of personality development intertwined with social relationships
• Personality


  The relatively consistent blend of emotions, temperament, thought, and behavior that makes a person unique
• Emotions


  Subjective reactions to experience that are associated with physiological and behavior changes
• First signs of emotion

  • Crying
  • Smiling & Laughing
• Patterns of crying


  • Hunger cry
  • Angry cry
  • Pain cry
  • Frustration cry
• The earliest faint smiles occur soon after birth, apparently as a result of subcortical nervous system activity
• Involuntary smiles frequently appear during periods of REM sleep
• Emotional development


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


  Embarrassment, empathy, and envy
• Self-awareness


  • Realization that one's existence and functioning are separate from those of other people and things
  • The cognitive understanding that they have a recognizable identity
• Self-evaluative emotions


  Pride, shame, and guilt
• Empathy


  The ability to put oneself in another person's place and feel what the other person feels
• Temperament


  • Characteristic disposition; style of approaching and reacting to situations
  • The HOW of behavior – not what people do, but how they go about it
  • Biologically based raw material of personality
• Types of temperament


  • Easy babies (40%)
  • Difficult babies (10%)
  • Slow-to-warm-up babies (15%)
• Goodness-of-fit


  The match between a child's temperament and environmental demands
• Asian babies have been found to be less active and irritable than babies in the US and Canada and appear to learn how to regulate their emotionality earlier and more easily
• North American view of shyness as a problem to overcome, in Asian cultures, shyness is viewed more positively
• Primary emotions evident within the 1st year of life

  • Anger
  • Sadness
  • Fear
  • Disgust
  • Surprise
  • Happiness
• 3 primary emotions evident in the early weeks of life

  • Distress (Anger, sadness, fear)
  • Interest (surprise)
  • Pleasure (happiness)
• Anger is expressed early in the form of a distinctive anger cry
• Sadness is rare in the 1st year of life, except for infants with depressed mothers
• Fear develops at 6 months of age; also becomes social at this age, as infants begins to show stranger anxiety in response to unfamiliar adults
• Surprise is indicated by an open mouth and raised eyebrows; evident about halfway through the first year
• Happiness is evident in changes in infants' smiles and laughter that take place during the early months
• Secondary emotions


  Sociomoral emotions that require social learning, such as embarrassment, shame, and guilt
• At few days old, neonates who hear another neonate cry often begin crying themselves – a phenomenon called emotional contagion
• At first, infants are better at perceiving emotions by hearing than seeing
• By 2-3 months, infants' eyesight has improved substantially and they have begun to be able to differentiate between happy, sad, and angry faces
• Social referencing


  Infants become more adept at observing other's emotional responses
• Cultural themes of infant social life

  • Infants are with their mothers almost constantly during the early months of life
  • After about 6 months, daily infant care is done by older girls rather than the mother
  • Infants are among many other people in course of a day
  • Infants are helped or carried almost constantly
  • Fathers are usually remote or absent during the first year
• Theories of the foundation of social development

  • Erik Erikson - central crisis on trust vs. mistrust
  • John Bowlby - Attachment Theory focused on the important of the infant's relationship with the primary caregiver