Emotional and Personality Development in Infancy

Still Face Experiment

• Edward Tronick, 1975
• Demonstrates some understanding of emotion, power of connection.
• Have a clear reaction to a lack of emotional connection from their caregivers.
• Even very young babies have demonstrated that they can respond to emotions of the adults who care for them.
• Reciprocity: babies are also actively engaging and shaping social interaction with the adults in their lives.

Emotional Development in Infancy

• Reciprocity: at 2-3 months, babies match the feeling tone of the caregiver.
  • At 4-5 months, they gradually discriminate a wider range of emotions
• Social referencing (8-10 months): actively seek emotional information from a trusted person in an uncertain situation
  • Toddlers use others’ emotional reactions and messages to evaluate the safety of surroundings, to guide actions, and to gather information

Altruism and Empathy

• Roots of empathy can be seen early on
  • 2-3 months old react to others’ emotional expression
  • Infants at 1, 3, 6, 9 months of age all found to respond to infant cries
    with cries of their own or facial expressions of distress
  • By 18 – 24 months, offer comfort at the distress of others
• Infants prefer helpers over non-helpers
  • By 15 months of age, showed expectations of ‘fairness’, unequal
    distribution of food

Personality Development

• Personality: the enduring characteristics of individuals, of which emotions and temperament are key aspects.
• Central to personality development is trust and the development of self and independence.
• Erikson’s trust versus mistrust stage: infants learn trust when they are cared for consistently and develop a sense of mistrust when not fed and kept warm on a consistent basis.
• Independence also becomes more central.
• Separation: the infant’s movement away from the mother.
• Erikson’s second stage, autonomy versus shame and doubt:
  • autonomy builds with mental and motor abilities, and infants feel pride in their new accomplishments
  • when caregivers are impatient and do for toddlers what they are capable of doing for themselves, shame and doubt develop.

Emotional Development: Concerns

• Little or no eye contact
• Frequent and long-lasting fussiness or irritability
• Unsmiling or withdrawn behavior
• Little or no preference for familiar adults
• Extreme, frequent and long-lasting tantrums that impede on learning and relationship building
• Lacks curiosity
• Sleeping too much or too little
• Troubles with eating/feeding- too much or too little
• For toddlers and/or preschoolers:
  • Often seems sad or worried
  • Fails to listen or respond
  • Rarely uses words to express feelings
  • Seems unable most of the time to control feelings

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