5.3 Psychosocial Development in Infancy and Toddlerhood: Emotional Development and Temperament

What’s psychosocial growth like in the first two years?

Psychosocial development occurs as children form relationships, interact with others, and understand and manage their feelings. In emotional and social development, forming healthy attachments is very important and is the major social milestone of infancy. Attachment is a long-standing connection or bond with others. Developmental psychologists are interested in how infants reach this milestone. They ask questions such as: how do parent and infant attachment bonds form? How does neglect affect these bonds? What accounts for children’s attachment differences?  Attachment and psychosocial development will be covered in the next section.

Emotional Development and Temperament

Infant Emotions

At birth, infants exhibit two emotional responses: Attraction and withdrawal. They show attraction to pleasant situations that bring comfort, stimulation, and pleasure, and they withdraw from unpleasant stimulation such as bitter flavors or physical discomfort. At around two months, infants exhibit social engagement in the form of social smiling as they respond with smiles to those who engage their positive attention (Lavelli, M & Fogel, 2005). Pleasure is expressed as laughter at 3 to 5 months of age, and displeasure becomes more specific to fear, sadness, or anger (usually triggered by frustration) between ages 6 and 8 months. Where anger is a healthy response to frustration, sadness, which appears in the first months as well, usually indicates withdrawal (Thiam et al., 2017).

Social smiling becomes more stable and organized as infants learn to use their smiles to engage their parents in interactions. Pleasure is expressed as laughter at 3 to 5 months of age, and displeasure becomes more specific as fear, sadness, or anger between ages 6 and 8 months. Anger is often the reaction to being prevented from obtaining a goal, such as a toy being removed (Braungart-Rieker et al., 2010). In contrast, sadness is typically the response when infants are deprived of a caregiver (Papousek, M. 2007). Fear is often associated with the presence of a stranger, known as stranger wariness, or the departure of significant others, known as separation anxiety. Both appear sometime between 6 and 15 months after object permanence has been acquired. Further, there is some indication that infants may experience jealousy as young as 6 months of age (Hart & Carrington, 2002).

• Stranger wariness actually indicates that brain development and increased cognitive abilities have taken place. As an infant’s memory develops, they are able to separate the people that they know from the people that they do not. The same cognitive advances allow infants to respond positively to familiar people and recognize those that are not familiar.
• Separation anxiety also indicates cognitive advances and is universal across cultures. Due to the infant’s increased cognitive skills, they are able to ask reasonable questions like “Where is my caregiver going?” “Why are they leaving?” or “Will they come back?” Separation anxiety usually begins around 7-8 months and peaks around 14 months and then decreases. Both stranger wariness and separation anxiety represent important social progress because they reflect not only cognitive advances but also growing social and emotional bonds between infants and their caregivers.

Emotions are often divided into two general categories: Basic emotions, such as interest, happiness, anger, fear, surprise, sadness, and disgust, which appear first, and self-conscious emotions, such as envy, pride, shame, guilt, doubt, and embarrassment. Unlike primary emotions, secondary emotions appear as children start to develop a self-concept and require social instruction on when to feel such emotions. The situations in which children learn self-conscious emotions vary from culture to culture. Individualistic cultures teach us to feel pride in personal accomplishments, while in more collective cultures, children are taught not to call attention to themselves unless they wish to feel embarrassed for doing so (Akimoto & Sanbinmatsu, 1999).

Social Referencing

Facial expressions of emotion are important regulators of social interaction. In the developmental literature, this concept has been investigated under the concept of social referencing, that is, the process whereby infants seek out information from others to clarify a situation and then use that information to act (Klinnert et al., 1983). To date, the strongest demonstration of social referencing comes from work on the visual cliff. In the first study to investigate this concept, Campos and colleagues (as cited in Sorce et al., 1985) placed mothers on the far end of the “cliff” from the infant. Mothers first smiled at the infants and placed a toy on top of the safety glass to attract them; infants invariably began crawling to their mothers. When the infants were in the center of the table, however, the mother then posed an expression of fear, sadness, anger, interest, or joy. The results were clearly different for the different faces; no infant crossed the table when the mother showed fear; only 6% did when the mother posed anger, 33% crossed when the mother posed sadness, and approximately 75% of the infants crossed when the mother posed joy or interest.

Other studies provide similar support for facial expressions as regulators of social interaction. Experimenters posed facial expressions of neutral, anger, or disgust toward babies as they moved toward an object and measured the amount of inhibition the babies showed in touching the object (Bradshaw, 1986). The results for 10- and 15-month-olds were the same: Anger produced the greatest inhibition, followed by disgust, with neutral the least. This study was later replicated using joy and disgust expressions, altering the method so that the infants were not allowed to touch the toy (compared with a distractor object) until one hour after exposure to the expression (Hertenstein & Campos, 2004). At 14 months of age, significantly more infants touched the toy when they saw joyful expressions, but fewer touched the toy when the infants saw disgust.

Emotional Self-Regulation

A final emotional change is in self-regulation. Emotional self-regulation refers to strategies we use to control our emotional states so that we can attain goals (Thompson and Goodvin, 2007). This requires effortful control of emotions and initially requires assistance from caregivers (Rothbart et al., 2006). Young infants have very limited capacity to adjust their emotional states and depend on their caregivers to help soothe themselves. Caregivers can offer distractions to redirect the infant’s attention and comfort to reduce emotional distress. As areas of the infant’s prefrontal cortex continue to develop, infants can tolerate more stimulation. By 4 to 6 months, babies can begin to shift their attention away from upsetting stimuli (Rothbart et al, 2008). Older infants and toddlers can more effectively communicate their need for help and can crawl or walk toward or away from various situations (Cole et al., 2010). This aids in their ability to self-regulate. Temperament also plays a role in children’s ability to control their emotional states, and individual differences have been noted in the emotional self-regulation of infants and toddlers (Richardson, 1980; Rothbart et al, 2006).

Throughout toddlerhood, caregivers remain important for the emotional development and socialization of their children. Particularly important is synchrony, the quick back-and-forth of emotional behaviors between an infant and caregiver. It’s like a dance where a baby might smile, and the partner smiles quickly in return. Researchers measure this rapid interpersonal coordination through their facial expressions, sounds, and gestures. More recently,  researchers have looked at how pairs sync up internally, including hormones, bodily rhythms, and brain scans (Markova et al., 2019).

Self Awareness

Development of sense of self: During the second year of life, children begin to recognize themselves as they gain a sense of self as objects. In a classic experiment by Lewis and Brooks (1978), also known as the “Rouge Test,” children 9 to 24 months of age were placed in front of a mirror after a spot of rouge was placed on their nose, and their mothers pretended to wipe something off the child’s face.

If the child reacted by touching his or her own nose rather than that of the “baby” in the mirror, it was taken to suggest that the child recognized the reflection as him- or herself. Lewis and Brooks (as cited in Kopp, 2011) found that somewhere between 15 and 24 months, most infants developed a sense of self-awareness. Self-awareness is the realization that you are separate from others (Kopp, 2011).

Figure 2: Baby sees self in the mirror. (Image Source: roseoftimothywoods/Flickr, CC BY 2.0)

Cognitive psychologist Philippe Rochat (2003) described a more in-depth developmental path in acquiring self-awareness through various stages. He described self-awareness as occurring in five stages beginning from birth.

Once a child has achieved self-awareness, the child is moving toward understanding social emotions such as guilt, shame or embarrassment, and pride, as well as sympathy and empathy. These will require an understanding of the mental state of others, which is acquired around age 3 to 5 and will be explored in the next module (Berk, 2007).

Temperament

Perhaps you have spent time with a number of infants. How were they alike? How did they differ? How do you compare with your siblings or other children you have known well. You may have noticed that some seemed to be in a better mood than others and that some were more sensitive to noise or more easily distracted than others. These differences may be attributed to temperament. Temperament is the innate characteristics of the infant, including mood, activity level, and emotional reactivity, noticeable soon after birth. Temperament is not the same as personality but may lead to personality differences. Generally, personality traits are learned, whereas temperament is genetic. Of course, for every trait, nature and nurture interact.

In a 1956 landmark study, Chess and Thomas (1996) evaluated 141 children’s temperament based on parental interviews. Referred to as the New York Longitudinal Study, infants were assessed on 9 dimensions of temperament, including:

1. Activity level. Does the child display mostly active or inactive states?
2. Rhythmicity or Regularity. Is the child predictable or unpredictable regarding sleeping, eating, and elimination patterns?
3. Approach-Withdrawal. Does the child react or respond positively or negatively to a newly encountered situation?
4. Adaptability. Does the child adjust to unfamiliar circumstances easily or with difficulty?
5. Responsiveness. Does it take a small or large amount of stimulation to elicit a response (e.g., laughter, fear, pain) from the child?
6. Reaction Intensity. Does the child show low or high energy when reacting to stimuli?
7. Mood Quality. Is the child normally happy and pleasant or unhappy and unpleasant?
8. Distractibility. Is the child’s attention easily diverted from a task by external stimuli?
9. Persistence and Attention Span. Persistence – How long will the child continue at an activity despite difficulty or interruptions? Attention span – For how long a period of time can the child maintain interest in an activity?

The New York Longitudinal Study, which began in the 1950s, was a long-term study of infants on these dimensions.  Most children do not have their temperament clinically measured, but categories of temperament have been developed and are seen as useful in understanding and working with children.  Based on this study, babies can be described according to one of several profiles: easy or flexible (40%), slow to warm up or cautious (15%), difficult or feisty (10%), and undifferentiated, or those who can’t easily be categorized (35%).

• Easy Child (40%): who is able to quickly adapt to routine and new situations, remains calm, is easy to soothe, and usually is in a positive mood.
• Difficult Child (10%): who reacts negatively to new situations, has trouble adapting to routine, is usually negative in mood, and cries frequently.
• Slow-to-Warm-Up Child (15%): who has a low activity level, adjusts slowly to new situations, and is often negative in mood.

No single type of temperament is invariably good or bad. However, infants with difficult temperaments are more likely than other babies to develop emotional problems, especially if their mothers are depressed or anxious caregivers (Garthus-Niegel et al., 2017). Children’s long-term adjustment actually depends on the goodness-of-fit of their particular temperament to the nature and demands of the environment in which they find themselves. Therefore, what appears to be more important than child temperament is how caregivers respond to it.

Think about how you might approach each type of child in order to improve your interactions with them. An easy child will not need much extra attention, while a slow-to-warm-up child may need to be given advance warning if new people or situations are going to be introduced. A difficult child may need to be given extra time to burn off their energy. A caregiver’s ability to work well and accurately read the child will enjoy a goodness-of-fit, meaning their styles match and communication and interaction can flow. The temperamentally active children can do well with parents who support their curiosity but could have problems in a more rigid family.

Parenting is bidirectional

Not only do parents affect their children, but children also influence their parents. Child characteristics, such as temperament, affect parenting behaviors and roles. For example, an infant with an easy temperament may enable parents to feel more effective, as they are easily able to soothe the child and elicit smiling and cooing. On the other hand, a cranky or fussy infant elicits fewer positive reactions from his or her parents and may result in parents feeling less effective in the parenting role (Eisenberg et al., 2008).  Over time, parents of more difficult children may become more punitive and less patient with their children (Clark et al, 2000; Eisenberg et al., 1999; Kliff et al., 2011). Parents who have a fussy, difficult child are less satisfied with their marriages and have greater challenges in balancing work and family roles (Hyde et al., 2004). Thus, child temperament is one of the child characteristics that influence how parents behave with their children.

Temperament and later personality

Temperament is largely biologically based, although that does not mean that it is genetically determined. Even at birth, a newborn’s neurophysiology has been shaped by the prenatal environment and birth process they experience. Moreover, during the first few months of life, the quality of an infant’s attachment and their experience of early adversity can have marked neurophysiological effects. Even if temperament does not change dramatically as we grow up, it may be modulated as one contributor to our childhood and adult personality. In contrast to temperament, personality, defined as an individual’s consistent pattern of feeling, thinking, and behaving, is the result of the continuous interplay between this initial biological disposition and experience. 

Personality also develops from temperament in other ways. According to Thompson, Winer, and Goodvin (2007), as children mature biologically, temperamental characteristics emerge and change over time. A newborn is not capable of much self-control, but as brain-based capacities for self-control advance, temperamental changes in self-regulation become more apparent. For example, a newborn who cries frequently doesn’t necessarily have a grumpy personality; over time, with sufficient parental support and an increased sense of security, the child might be less likely to cry.

In addition, personality is made up of many other features besides temperament. Children’s developing self-concept, their motivations to achieve or to socialize, their values and goals, their coping styles, their sense of responsibility and conscientiousness, and many other qualities are encompassed in personality. Biological dispositions influence these qualities, but even more by the child’s experiences with others, particularly in close relationships, that guide the growth of individual characteristics. Indeed, personality development begins with the biological foundations of temperament but becomes increasingly elaborated, extended, and refined over time. The newborn that parents gazed upon thus becomes an adult with a personality of depth and nuance.

In the next section, we will look at the impact of attachment on infant and toddler psychosocial development.

Attributions

“Lifespan Development: A Psychological Perspective, Second Edition” by Martha Lally and Suzanne Valentine-French is licensed under a CC-BY-NC-SA-3.0

Lifespan Development by Lumen Learning is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License

Child Growth and Development by College of the Canyons, Jennifer Paris, Antoinette Ricardo, and Dawn Rymond and is used under a CC BY 4.0 international license

Waymaker Lifespan Development, authored by Julie Lazzara for Lumen Learning and available under a Creative Commons Attribution license.

Some selections from Lumen Learning were adapted from previously shared content from Laura Overstreet’s Lifespan Psychology.

Human Growth and Development by Ryan Newton is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License,

Human Development by Human Development Teaching & Learning Group under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License,

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