PSYC 255: CH. 6 - SOCIOEMOTIONAL DEVELOPMENT IN EARLY CHILDHOOD

Socioemotional development in early childhood includes advances in the development of what?

• Self-understanding.

• Emotional maturity.

• Moral understanding.

• Gender awareness.

Erikson’s psychosocial stage associated with early childhood is?

Initiative versus guilt.

Initiative versus guilt

During which children show much initiative in widening their social worlds, which might bring them rewards, but can also bring guilt. 

According to Erikson, the governor of initiative is the?

Conscience. 

According to Erikson, __________ begins to develop in early childhood and is the representation of self or our self-conceptions. 

self-understanding

In the younger years of early childhood, self-descriptions primarily involve what?

• Bodily attributes.

• Material possessions.

• Physical activities.

At age 4 to 5, children hear others use what?

Psychological trait and emotion terms and begin to include these in their self-descriptions. 

The self-descriptions of children tend to be unrealistically?

positive and optimistic.

The self-descriptions of children tend to be unrealistically positive and optimistic because what?

• They don’t yet distinguish between their desired competence and their actual competence.

• They tend to confuse ability and effort.

• They don’t engage in spontaneous social comparison of their abilities with those of others, but rather compare their present abilities with their past abilities.

Theory of mind in early childhood includes the understanding that other people have what?

emotions and desires.

At age 4 to 5, they begin to perceive and describe others in terms of?

Psychological traits. 

Around age 3, children understand?

joint commitments.

Joint commitments

Collaborative interactions with others that involve obligations to them. 

With awareness of the self and others, children are able to what?

• Feel an expanding range of emotions. 

• Make sense of other people’s emotional reactions. 

• Begin to control their own emotions.

Self-conscious emotions require the child to what?

• Be able to refer to themselves. 

• Be aware of themselves as distinct from others.

What becomes more commonly experienced emotions by children in early childhood and are influenced by their parents’ responses to their behavior?

Pride and guilt.

In early childhood, children increasingly understand that?

• Certain situations are likely to evoke particular emotions. 

• Expressions indicate specific emotion.

• Emotions affect behavior and can be used to influence others. 

Between ages _ and _ children considerably increase the number of terms they use to describe emotions.  

2; 4.

At 4 to 5 years old, children show an increased ability to?

reflect on emotions. 

By age 5, most children can accurately?

Identify emotions that are produced by challenging circumstances and describe strategies they might call on to cope with everyday stress. 

Emotional regulation

Plays a key role in children’s ability to manage the demands and conflicts they face in interacting with others. 

Emotional regulation is fundamental to the development of?

Social competence. 

Emotional regulation is an important component of?

Self-regulation and executive function. 

Parents can be described as taking an?

Emotion-coaching or an emotion-dismissing approach when talking with their children about emotions. 

Moral development

Involves the development of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors regarding rules and conventions about what people should do in their interactions with other people.  

According to Freud, the ______ is the moral element of the personality.  

superego.

According to Freud, the superego is developed when children?

Identify with their parents and internalize their parents’ standards of right and wrong. 

According to Freud, children identifying with their parents is an attempt to what?

• Reduce anxiety.

• Avoid punishment.

• Maintain parental affection.

A big motivator of moral development is?

Empathy.

Empathy

Involves responding to another person’s feelings with an emotion that echoes those feelings. 

Empathy often requires?

Perspective taking.

Perspective taking

The ability to discern another person’s emotional states.  

Piaget was interested in how children?

Think about moral issues, and through his research concluded that children go through two distinct stages in the development of their moral reasoning.

Piaget was interested in how children think about moral issues, and through his research concluded that children go through two distinct stages in the development of their moral reasoning, which are?

• Heteronomous morality (ages 4 to 7)

• Transitional period (ages 7 to 10)

• Autonomous morality (ages 10 and older)

Heteronomous morality (ages 4 to 7)

Children think of justice and rules as unchangeable properties that are beyond the control of people.

Transitional period (ages 7 to 10)

Children show some features or heteronomous morality and some features of autonomous morality.

Autonomous morality (ages 10 and older)

Children become aware that rules and laws are created by people, and in judging an action they consider the actor’s intentions as well as the action’s consequences.

In early childhood, children are in Piaget’s first stage of moral development, meaning they are?

Heteronomous moralists. 

In early childhood, children are in Piaget’s first stage of moral development, meaning they are heteronomous moralists who what?

• Judge the rightness or goodness of behavior by considering the consequences of behavior, not the intentions of the actor. 

• Believe that rules are unchangeable and are handed down by all-powerful authorities. 

• Believe in immanent justice.

Immanent justice

The concept that if a rule is broken, punishment will be meted out immediately.

The behavioral and social cognitive approach holds that the processes of?

Reinforcement, punishment, and imitation explain the development of moral behavior.

When children are _______ for moral behavior (or behavior that is consistent with laws and social conventions), they are likely to repeat that behavior.

rewarded

When children are _______ for immoral behavior, those behaviors are likely to be reduced or eliminated.

punished

When models who ______ are provided, children are likely to adopt their actions.

behave morally

Social cognitive theorists emphasize that the ability to resist acting immorally is closely tied to the development of?

self-control, which involves learning to delay gratification.

Gender

refers to characteristics related to femininity and masculinity based on cultural norms. 

Gender identity

refers to a person’s inner sense of being a girl/woman, boy/man, another gender, or no gender. 

Sex

refers to a person’s biological or genetic makeup as female or male based on hormones, chromosomes, and internal/external genitalia. 

Gender roles

expectations that prescribe how people should think, act, and feel based on social and cultural norms about gender. 

Most children are aware of their sex by age?

2 even though their understanding of gender may come later.

For most people, ________ develops early in childhood and remains stable across time but may change and shift for some individuals throughout the life course. 

gender identity

During the preschool years, most children increasingly act in ways that match their culture’s gender roles, a phenomenon known as?

gender typing.

There are many influences on gender, which are?

• Social influences.

• Parental influences. 

• Peer influences. 

• Cognitive influences.

There are three main social theories of gender, which are?

• Social role theory

• Psychoanalytic theory

• Social cognitive theory

Social role theory

States that gender differences result from the contrasting roles of women and men.

Psychoanalytic theory

Stems from Freud’s view that the preschool child develops a sexual attraction to the opposite-sex parent.

• This is known as the Oedipus complex for boys or the Electra complex for girls.

Social cognitive theory

Children’s gender development occurs through observation and imitation of what other people say and do, and through being rewarded and punished for gender-appropriate and gender-inappropriate behavior. 

According to Freud, at age 5 or 6, the child what?

• Abandons their attraction to the opposite sex parent because of anxious feelings.

• Identifies with the same-sex parent, unconsciously adopting that parent’s characteristics.

Parents influence gender development through?

action and examples. 

Peers extensively?

reward and punish gender behavior. 

Gender influences the following aspects of peer relations, which are?

• Composition of friend groups.

• The size of friend groups.

• Interactions within friend groups.

Around age 3 what?

• Children already show a preference for spending time with same-sex playmates.

• Children are more likely to play in same-sex than mixed-sex groups.

The changes in gender composition of friend groups increase even more between?

4 and 6 years of age.

From about age 5 what?

• Boys are more likely to interact socially in larger clusters than girls are.

• Boys are more likely to participate in organized group games than girls are.

During early childhood what?

• Boys are more likely than girls to engage in rough-and-tumble play, competition, conflict, ego displays, risk taking and quests for dominance. 

• Girls are more likely to engage in "collaborative discourse,” in which they talk and act in a more reciprocal manner. 

Gender schema theory

states that gender typing emerges as children gradually develop gender schemas of what is gender-appropriate and gender-inappropriate in their culture.  

A ________ organizes the world in terms of male and female.  

gender schema

Gender schemas fuel?

gender typing.

Diana Baumrind

developed four classifications of parenting, involving combinations of the dimensions of acceptance/responsiveness on one end and demand/control on the other.

Diana Baumrind developed four classifications of parenting, involving combinations of the dimensions of acceptance/responsiveness on one end and demand/control on the other. The dimensions combine to produce the following parenting styles, which are?

• Authoritarian.

• Authoritative.

• Neglectful.

• Indulgent. 

Authoritarian parenting

A restrictive, punitive style in which parents urge the child to follow their directions and respect their work and effort. 

Authoritative parenting

encourages children to be independent but still places limits and controls on their actions. 

Neglectful parenting

a style in which the parent is uninvolved in the child’s life.

Indulgent parenting

a style in which parents are highly involved with their children but place few demands or controls on them. 

Most child psychologists recommend handling misbehavior by?

reasoning with the child, especially explaining the consequences of the child’s actions for others.

Time-out

entails removing the child from a setting that offers positive reinforcement. 

Types of child maltreatment include what?

• physical abuse

• child neglect

• sexual abuse

• emotional abuse

Physical abuse

the infliction of physical injury as a result of punching, beating kicking, biting, burning, shaking, or otherwise harming a child. 

Child neglect

failure to provide for the child’s basic needs. 

Physical child neglect

abandonment

Educational child neglect

allowing chronic truancy

Emotional child neglect

inattention to the child’s needs

Sexual abuse

includes fondling of genitals, intercourse, incest, rape, sodomy, exhibitionism, and commercial exploitation through prostitution or production of pornographic materials.  

Emotional abuse (also referred to as psychological abuse, verbal abuse, or mental injury)

includes acts or omissions by parents or other caregivers that have caused, or could cause, serious behavioral, cognitive, or emotional problems.  

Siblings ages 2 to 4 years old in each other’s presence have a conflict once every?

10 minutes, on average.

Sibling conflict declines somewhat between ages?

5 to 7. 

In addition to conflict, sibling relations include what?

• Helping. 

• Sharing. 

• Teaching. 

• Compromising. 

• Playing. 

• Emotional support. 

• Communication.

Judy Dunn described three important characteristics of sibling relationships, which are?

• The emotional quality of the relationship.

• The familiarity and intimacy of the relationship. 

• The variation in sibling relationship.

________, both positive and negative, pick up considerably during early childhood. 

Peer interactions

Functions of the peer group include providing?

A source of information and comparison about the world outside the family.

Functions of the peer group include receiving?

Feedback about their abilities.

Functions of the peer group include evaluating?

What they can do in terms of better than, as good as, or worse than.

Functions of the peer group include promoting?

Normal socioemotional development.

Concerns in peer relations include what?

• Withdrawn children.

• Aggressive children.

According to Freud and Erikson, play helps the child master?

anxieties and conflicts.

Play therapy

used by therapists to allow the child to work off frustrations and to analyze the child’s conflict and ways of coping with them. 

Piaget and Vygotsky concluded that play is the child’s work and is important for?

cognitive development. 

Piaget thought that play advances children’s?

cognitive development while their cognitive development constrains the way they play. 

Piaget thought that play is exercise for?

cognitive structures. 

Vygotsky was interested in the?

symbolic and make-believe aspects of play that are important for not only cognitive development but also creative thought.