Infant Social Development

Flashcards on infant social development, covering preferences, emotional cues, social referencing, joint attention, sense of self, helping behavior, sharing behavior, comforting behavior, theory of mind, and autism spectrum disorder.

Newborn Preferences

Newborns show preferences for face-like stimuli, human speech over artificial sounds, and maternal language sounds and accents.

Sensitivity to Emotional Cues

Infants develop sensitivity to emotional cues within the first six months, showing recognition of different emotions.

Responding to Emotions

Infants recognize emotional cues and respond appropriately, with smiles related to fullness in the first month and social smiles around three months.

Still Face Experiment

Demonstrates that infants are actively involved in social interactions, becoming distressed when a mother shows a neutral expression.

Joint Attention

Infants seek information through joint attention from around six months, using gaze and pointing to share focus and learn object names.

Social Referencing

Infants develop social referencing around 10 to 12 months, looking at their mothers to see how she is reacting to situations.

Scaffolding

Mothers play a key role in scaffolding infants' understanding of mental states, such as desire, thoughts, and beliefs, between 6 and 18 months.

Sense of Self

Infants start to show a sense of self around 18 months, assessed through the mirror self-recognition test.

Self Versus Other Distinction

Around 18 months, infants understand that other people might have different desires from themselves.

Helping Behavior

Helping behavior emerges around 14 months, demonstrated through tasks like returning dropped objects.

Sharing Behavior

Sharing behavior develops around 18 months, often requiring explicit cues at the beginning to prompt sharing.

Comforting Behavior

Comforting behavior emerges around 24 months and is one of the hardest prosocial behaviors for children to demonstrate since children cannot see pain or sorrow very clearly, as it's really an internal state.

Theory of Mind

Develops around age 4, involving the ability to understand others' mental states, predict behavior, and known as mindreading or mentalizing.

False Belief Test

A test, created by Wimmer & Perner in 1983, used to assess theory of mind, illustrating the understanding that behaviors and knowledge can vary among individuals.

Autism Spectrum Disorder

Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder often struggle with developing a theory of mind, contributing to deficits in social abilities.