Chapter Six

1. Chapter Six Emotional Development and Attachment

2. Explanations of emotional development: Genetic-maturational, cognitive, and learning. • Genetic-maturational, cognitive, and learning may each may be important for different aspects of emotional development.

3. Explanations of emotional development: Genetic-maturational, cognitive, and learning. • Genetic-Maturational explanations: • 1.) Twin studies: MZ twins are more similar than DZ twins in when they begin to smile and how often they smile (sociability); same for fear of strangers and general fearfulness (behavioral inhibition) • 2.) Smiling occurs at 46 weeks conceptual age, regardless of when baby is born. I.e., premies smile 6 weeks after they should have been born.

4. Explanations of emotional development: Genetic-maturational, cognitive, and learning. • Genetic-Maturational explanations: • 3.) Stranger distress occurs at same age in all cultures regardless of childrearing practices. Separation Protest (infant's distress at being separated from mother, from ~6 mos. to 39 mos.) also occurs in all cultures at about the same time. • 4.) Performance anxiety occurs around 18-24 mos. Concerned about being evaluated. (Shame, embarrassment would be typical emotions.)

5. Explanations of emotional development: Genetic-maturational, cognitive, and learning. • Cognitive perspective: • 1.) Infants acquire mental representations (= schemata) and become better able to assimilate new events to schemata they already have. (This is a Piagetian meaning of assimilation.) • 'Confronting a novel event causes buildup of tension; the infant responds with cognitive effort to master the meaning of the event; when the infant is successful, tension is released and he smiles.' (p. 216) • = Smile of assimilation; • reflects intrinsic motivation as central to cognitive development.

6. Explanations of emotional development: Genetic-maturational, cognitive, and learning. • Cognitive perspective: • 2.) Context effects in fear of stranger (see above) can be explained by increasing cognitive sophistication. E.g., how close the mother is, whether the stranger is smiling or sober.

7. Explanations of emotional development: Genetic-maturational, cognitive, and learning. • Functionalist perspective: • 1.) Combines aspects of the cognitive and learning explanations into a unified theory. • 2.) Emotions are linked to goals. For example, how would emotions like hope, joy, frustration, anger, and fear be linked to goals? • Some goals are innate: Baby wanting to be near mother; love, sex, rock n’ roll • Some goals are learned: Wanting a new car • 3.) Emotions are also linked to establishing and maintaining social relationships. (Be able to give some examples where we use emotional information in social relationships.)

8. Perspectives on emotional development • Learning perspective: • 1.) Some parents may reinforce smiling more than others and some may be more effective in getting their children to control their emotions. (This competes with the genetic explanation for individual differences in fearfulness.) • 2.) Some fears can be learned by classical conditioning, operant conditioning, or social referencing (social learning) (e.g., seeing that mom is afraid of a bee).

9. Early Emotional Development: Carroll Izard • Timetable of emotional facial expressions: • Birth: Startle, disgust, distress, 'rudimentary smile' -- i.e., reflexive smile, not responsive to external events. • 4-6 weeks: True smile in response to social situations. • 2-1/2-3 mos.: anger, interest, surprise, sadness • 7 mos.: fear • 6-8 mos.: shyness • 12-36 mos.: pride, guilt, embarrassment, contempt, etc.--the 'social emotions.' These require greater cognitive sophistication and a sense of self.

10. Early Emotional Development: Alan Sroufe • 1.) Dates emergence of emotions later than Izard because he is unwilling to consider baby as having real emotions until baby is capable of cognitive appraisals • How does anger differ from distress?

11. Early Emotional Development: Alan Sroufe • 2.) Differentiation (later emotions evolve out of earlier emotions; emotions become more differentiated; • babies start out with distress—a global negative emotion; • this differentiates into other negative emotions like anger, defiance, and rage. • Wariness at 4–5 mos. differentiates into: • stranger distress (9–11 mos), • anxiety and fear (12–17 mos), • shame (18–35 mos) • guilt (36–54 mos) (Some say guilt develops later).

12. Early emotional Development: Alan Sroufe • 3.) Emotions become more psychologically (cognitively) based with age. E.g., distress versus anger: Distress has no cognitive component; newborns are distressed if they feel pain, but they don't direct anger at a specific person inflicting the pain until later in the first year. Fear does not develop until 7 months of age; requires cognitive ability to differentiate between familiar versus unfamiliar people. • 4.) Emotions are more contextually sensitive with age. With age, infants respond emotionally to the meaning of the situation; e.g., laughter in response to tickling versus laughter when mom makes a funny face.

13. Early Emotional Development • Two types of emotions: • Primary emotions (i.e., startle, distress, happiness, fear, ) • Secondary emotions (i.e., shame, pride, guilt) require more cognitive sophistication. • There are gender differences in emotional expressiveness: Girls > Boys

14. The Beginnings of Specific Emotions Smiling and Laughter • Smiling and laughter are the first expressions of pleasure • Smiling:Reflex smiling: Birth to 3-4 weeks. Spontaneous, not in response to any stimulus. • Weeks 3-8: Smile in response to external elicitors--bouncing, faces, especially faces. (Could it be an evolved bias?) • Special smile toward mother at 10 mos., the Duchenne Smile; face 'lights up with pleasure, including wrinkles around the eyes.

15. The Beginnings of Specific Emotions: Smiling and Laughter • Girls smile more than boys' could be evolved bias to greater social interest; this results in more social interaction for girls. • Smiling is central to infant social interaction, playing, pleasurable socializing • Figure 6.2: laughter in infancy is increasingly caused by social (making faces) and visual stimuli (jack-in-the-box); less by tactile (e.g., tickling); 3-5-year-olds: 'acting silly'

16. 35 Social 30 Visual 25 Laughter at stimuli (percent) 20 Tactile 15 10 Auditory 5 0 4-6 7-9 10-12 Age (in months) What Makes Children Laugh? Fig. 6-2

17. The Beginnings of Specific Emotions: Fear • Wariness (3 mos.): distress in response to events they can't assimilate; strangers are objects of interest and wariness, but not immediate negative reaction. • Fear (9 mos.): negative reaction to event with specific meaning, such as a stranger; implies greater cognitive sophistication than with wariness. what to express under what circumstances.

18. The Beginnings of Specific Emotions: Fear • Individual differences in fearfulness: Kagan: behaviorally inhibited children are shy, introverted; respond with fear and increased heart rates to mildly stressful situations. 'Fearful Temperament' • Contextual Features: Less fear at home or in mother's lap than in lab or away from mom. Less fear if mom is not afraid and reacts positively. This is social referencing: getting emotional cues from others. If mom is happy, baby sees this expression and is less afraid. • Stranger characteristics: Strange child less fearsome than adults or a midget; probably child-like facial features are the cue; also if stranger is smiley and positive, baby is less afraid.

19. 14 Compares faces 12 10 Shows distress Looks sober 8 Number of Children 6 4 2 0 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 Age (in months) The Onset of Stranger Distress Fig. 6-3

20. The Beginnings of Specific Emotions: Fear • Separation protest – a fear that is universal and peaks in Western infants at about 15 months • Separation anxiety sometimes reappears in other forms at later ages: e.g., day care, baby sitters,

21. 100 African Bushman 80 60 Percentage of Children who cried when mother left 40 Antiguan (Guatemala) 20 Guatemalan Indian Israeli (kibbutzim) 0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 Age (in months) Separation Protest Fig. 6-5

22. The Beginnings of Specific Emotions: Fear • Infants use social referencing to know how to act in uncertain situations: • Visual Cliff Study: Babies attend to mothers’ emotional expressions to get information on what to do. • An expression of fear means “Stop.”

23. The Beginnings of Specific Emotions: Pride, Guilt, Jealousy, and Shame • Pride, Guilt, Jealousy, and Shame: The Self-Conscious Emotions • Emerge toward middle of second year (~18 mos.) Require a sense of self; • Rouge test: Before this age, children show no embarrassment when seeing themselves in a mirror with rouge on their face

24. Age (in months) Lewis & Brooks-Gunn’s study Amsterdam’s study 9-12 15-18 21-24 What’s That On My Nose? 80 70 60 50 Children recognizing themselves (percent) 40 30 20 10 0 Fig. 6-10

25. The Beginnings of Specific Emotions: Pride, Guilt, Jealousy, and Shame • True guilt emerges only in middle childhood, around age 9 when children have a clear sense of personal responsibility: • 'I felt guilty because I didn't turn in my homework out of laziness.' • Younger children will say they are guilty but seem not to understand that their own responsibility is critical: • “I felt guilty when my brother and I had boxing gloves on and I hit him too hard. . . . sometimes I don’t know by own strength.” • Younger children may say they feel guilty even if they had no control over what happened.

26. The Beginnings of Specific Emotions: Pride, Guilt, Jealousy, and Shame • Differentiating between pride and shame is linked to task performance and responses from others • 3-year olds: “easy” and “difficult”: More pride if task is difficult; more shame if task is easy. • Differentiating “joy” vs. pride; “sadness vs. shame”; • solving a not particularly difficult problem resulted in joy; • solving a difficult problem produced pride. • failing a difficult task resulted in sadness; • failing an easy task resulted in shame.

27. 2.5 2 1.5 Mean number of expressions of pride (=orange) and shame (= green) 1 0.5 0 Easy Difficult Task difficulty Pride (=orange), Shame (=green), and Task Difficulty Fig. 6-7

28. Regulating Emotions • Starts with sucking thumb (pre-natally), then more active methods like turning away, self-distraction by 18 mos. • Emotions more controlled and modulated as children move from infancy to toddlers • This involves greater inhibitory control = effortful control with development of prefrontal cortex; textbook emphasizes learning, but much of this is maturational.

29. Regulating Emotions • As children get older: Less frequent emotions, less intense, more conventionalized. • Children learn emotional display rules (what to express under what circumstances) beginning at age 2 when they exaggerate or minimize emotion in response to others; • 9-10 years old, children can smile when unhappy.

30. The Development of Attachment • Attachment is closely related to emotional development • Forms in second half of first year • Evidenced by separation protests • Enhances parents’ effectiveness in later socialization of their children • Evolves over first 2 years of life

31. The Development of Attachment • Theories of attachment • Psychoanalytic theory:attachment is linked to gratification of innate drives—basically the same as learning theory • Learning theory: • Traditionally, primary drive of hunger is reduced by primary reinforcer (food) and secondary reinforcer is one who feeds

32. The Development of Attachment • Harlow’s experiment • Harlow: monkeys are comforted by soft “contact comfort”, not feeding • Harlow and Zimmerman's (1959) experiment on monkeys: • Cloth surrogate preferred over wire-mesh surrogate; • this implies that babies innately like the contact comfort provided by the soft terrycloth surrogate. • Babies also form attachments to fathers even though the fathers don't feed them. • Therefore, babies don't learn to like contact by being fed. It's there to start with. • This destroyed both the psychoanalytic and learning views.

33. The Development of Attachment • Theories of attachment • Cognitive developmental theory: • Attachment depends on infants differentiating between mom and others and understanding that people continue to exist even when baby can't see them • Piaget called this object permanence. • These are cognitive achievements. • Objection: But can this account for the intense emotional reaction of separated infants? • Increasing cognitive sophistication means physical proximity to attachment figures lessens in importance as children grow • Increasing cognitive sophistication means that psychological contact maintained through words, smiles, and looks

34. The Development of Attachment • Theories of attachment • Bowlby’s ethological theory: • Infant attachment has roots in instinctual infant responses important for survival and protection: Crying, sucking, clinging. • Attachment is an adaptation designed to protect the baby by keeping it close to mom. • Adaptation = a mechanism designed by natural selection to perform a particular function.

35. The Development of Attachment • Theories of attachment • Bowlby’s ethological theory: • Based partly on animal’s imprinting process: A sensitive period for attaching to mom. • Infants have innate ability to engage in social signaling (i.e., smiling and crying) • These abilities play active role in formation of attachment. • Parents also have innate abilities to respond to their baby’s eliciting behaviors. • Attachment is a quality of a relationship, not a trait of the baby. Babies may have different attachments with different people (e.g., mom vs. dad).

36. The Development of Attachment • Attachment • Evolves in stages or steps • Develops for those regularly interacted with such as fathers, siblings, and peers • Father-child interaction affected by culture and type of society one lives in • Mothers and fathers differences in play modes or styles continue as children grow

37. The Development of Attachment • Phases in Development of Attachment • 1.) Preattachment (0-2 mos.): Indiscriminate social responsiveness • 2.) Attachment in the making (2-7 mos.): Recognition of familiar people • 3.) Clear-cut attachment (7-24 mos.): Separation protest; wariness of strangers, intentionalcommunication • 4.) Goal-corrected partnership (24 mos. on): Relationships more two-sided: Children understandparent's intentions, plans, goals, and needs.

38. Fathers and Attachment • 1. Fathers can become attached to babies and engage in many of the same behaviors with babies. • 2. Fathers also care for child at higher levels than in the old days, but they are less involved thanmothers in routine care.

39. Fathers and Attachment • 3. Mother predominance in childcare is generally true, but there are examples of cultures wherefathers play a larger role in care: the Aka in Africa; but this is not generally true ofhunter-gatherer societies. • 4. Father tend to play more physically with children: rough and tumble play, etc. But it is notuniversal; children like it more than relatively sedentary play with mothers--more arousing.

40. Assessing Attachment: Ainsworth’s Strange Situation Test: Table 6.4 • 1. Mother, baby, and observer • 2. Mother and baby • 3. Stranger, mother and baby • 4. Stranger and baby • 5. Mother and baby • 6. Baby alone • 7. Stranger and baby • 8. Mother and baby • Episodes #5 and #8 are Reunion Episodes

41. The Nature and Quality of Attachment • Early attachment formation is not uniform • Many seem to form highly secure attachments • Assessment is based on the Strange Situation and Ainsworth’s classifications • Styles of caregiving are linked to attachment; sensitive care linked to secure attachments, and unavailable or rejecting linked to insecurity • Deficient forms of parenting often result in approach/avoidance behavior in children

42. The Nature and Quality of Attachment • Tested at ~1 year of age (6 mos. to 2 yrs.), at a time when child uses mother as a SECURE BASE: • Secure Base: the attachment object is seen by the child as a base from which to explore new things and a haven in times of distress. • Four Classifications: A, B, C, and D

43. The Nature and Quality of Attachment • 1.) Secure (B Babies) (60% OF U.S. SAMPLE): • ACTIVELY SEEK PROXIMITY AND CONTACT AT REUNION; • EXPLORE WHILE MOM IS AROUND, SEE HER AS ASECURE BASE; • OFTEN DISTRESSED DURING SEPARATION, BUTCALM DOWN QUICKLY AT REUNION • 2.) Insecure-avoidant (A Babies); 20% : • OFTEN DO NOT CRY MUCH AT SEPARATION; DO NOT SEEK • PROXIMITY AND ACTIVELY AVOID THE MOTHER ATREUNION; • DO NOT RESIST CONTACT IF MOTHER INITIATES IT; • DO NOT CRY MUCH AT REUNION

44. The Nature and Quality of Attachment • 3.) Insecure-resistant (C Babies); 10-15%: • VERY UPSET AND DISTRESSED DURING SEPARATION; • ACTIVELY SEEK PROXIMITY AND CONTACT AT REUNION RESIST CONTACT AT REUNION, OFTEN SHOWING ANGER; • CONTINUE CRYING AT REUNION; THEY DO NOT CALMDOWN EASILY AT REUNION • 4.) Insecure-disorganized (D Babies): • DISORIENTED, DAZED, REPETITIVE BEHAVIORS; Extreme Approach/Avoidance

45. Caregiving and attachment status • 1.) Secure attachment (B babies): • associated with SENSITIVE CARE: • Responsive and consistently available whenbaby is in genuine need. • Mothers continually adjust behavior to infant so that there is INTERACTIVE SYNCHRONY, A SMOOTH-FLOWING DANCE; • Mothers use exaggerated speech and facial expressions. • Baby gets excited and averts gaze; mother doesn't intrude. Like a sine wave.

46. Dyadic Interaction during mother-infant playful interaction • Dyadic Interaction is like a sine wave: Baby becomes excited when looking at mom but turns away when too aroused.

47. Caregiving and attachment status • 2.) Insecure Avoidant attachment (A babies): • UNAVAILABLE, REJECTING, UNRESPONSIVE TO BABY'S SIGNALS; • mothers are intrusive rather than sensitive in dyadic interaction. • 3.) Insecure Resistant (C babies): • INCONSISTENTLY AVAILABLE; • mothers unresponsive or uninvolved in dyadic interaction

48. Caregiving and attachment status • 4.) Insecure Disorganized (D babies) • associated with neglect or abuse. • Approach/avoidant behavior iscommon; • 82% of abused infants had disorganized attachment vs. 19% of non-abused infants. • Mothers often depressed; • little mutual eye contact and mutual responsiveness; • lots of gaze aversion.

49. The Internal Working Model • Internal Working Model: A person's mental representation of himself as a child, his parents, and the nature of the interactions with the parents as he reconstructs and interprets their interaction. • Hypothesis: The IWM tends to result in people recreating their relationships with their ownchildren.

50. Recollections of relationship with parents tends to predict attachment with children. • One study found this effect when based on recollections of women before their babies were born, • This controls for the possibility that current relationship with the child would color perceptions of relationship with parents.