Socioemotional development in Infancy
Cognitive Development in Late Infancy
PSYC 206: Life-Span Development
Lecture 7
Aylin Küntay
Socioemotional development: social
smiling
Social smiling: a specific response to human face and voice,
which develops around 3 months of age
Watson (1972) explained the social smile response as a process
of operant conditioning. In order to demonstrate the effect of
facial orientation on smiling, Watson used faces of 3 different
orientations.
Social smiling
• during the 3rd and 4th months, the baby
smiles vigorously only in response to faces
in the 0° orientation
– Watson’s interpretation: the baby, through
experience, associates the 0° orientation with
social interaction and responds accordingly
– the 0° facial alignment is the marker of a
special situation
Social smiling
• Kagan et al. showed 4 months three-dimensional
faces all in 0° orientation
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a regular face
one in which the features were rearranged
one with no eyes
one without any features
• the regular face elicited much more smiling
behavior than the other three faces
– for e.g., smiling responses to the regular face was 3
times as numerous as comparable responses to the
scrambled face
• both studies indicate that recognition of or
familiarity with facial patterns is a factor in
eliciting the infant’s smile
Recognizing emotions
• the mother can regulate the baby’s behavior
through a display of affective responses
• babies younger than 6 weeks are not good in
scanning faces for detail, so they do not recognize
different emotional expressions
• around 3 months, they show some evidence of
discriminating facial expressions of emotions
– when habituated to a photo of a smiling face,
they show renewed attention to one depicting a
frowning face
• but probably without understanding the link
to the underlying emotion of joy or anger or
sadness
Recognizing emotions
• at 6 months, babies begin to display the
same emotion as the face they are viewing
• near the end of the first year, infants begin
to use the emotional expressions of other to
regulate their own behavior-- a process
called social referencing (Feinman, 1992;
Klinnert et al., 1983)
– 1-year-old infants and their mothers were
studied as they interacted on the visual cliff
apparatus
Social referencing study
• the baby was placed on the shallow side, while the
mother and an attractive toy were positioned at the
deep end
– a situation that produced uncertainty in the infant
such as a scary but interesting toy to was used
– infant responded cautiously and checked the
mother as if to gain more info about the situation
• mothers were trained to produce a number of
affective responses, such as happiness, interest, fear,
or anger
• when the mother produced joy or interest, most
babies crossed over to the deep side
• fear or anger --> stayed on the shallow side
Face-to-face interactions
• since much of the caregiver-infant contact in the
early months occurs thru face-to-face interactions
– microanalysis of the interactivity:
simultaneously videotape the facial and
behavioral cues and responses of the dyad.
Then examine the tapes side by side.
• Trevarthen refers to the emotional sharing that
happens between very young infants and their
caregivers as primary intersubjectivity
– the baby will not follow the gaze or the point of the
caregivers
• around 7 months, secondary intersubjectivity
– emergence of joint visual attention: following points
and gazes of adults to ‘talk’ about a third object
Other social referencing stuff
• Between 7 and 10 months, infants learn
about selective social referencing
– Refer to an adult to inquire about a barking
dog, only if the adult is attending/looking
towards them
• Gaze following by 6-, 7-months of age
• Pointing between 7 and 9 months
• Moving into language development
Emergence of attachment
• a long term and stable affectional bond
between the child and a particular
individual
– appears between 7 and 9 months of age and
undergoes changes from then on
– according to E. Maccoby, the signs of
attachment are
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seeking to be near the caretaker
showing distress when separated
being happy when reunited
orienting (listening to or watching) the caretaker
even when engaged in something else
Strange Situation paradigm
• conducted in the lab, usually when the
infant is about 12 months of age
– based on the belief that attachment can best be
observed when the child is studied in an
unfamiliar, stress-producing situation
– consists of 8 episodes
Strange situation paradigm:
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Episode number
Persons Present
Duration Action
1
Mother, baby and observer 30 sec. Observer introduces mother and
baby to experimental room, then leaves
2
Mother and baby 3 min. Mother is nonparticipant while baby
explores. If necessary, play is stimulated after 2 min.
3
Stranger, mother, and baby 3 min. Stranger enters. Min. 1: Stranger
silent. Min. 2: Stranger converses with mother. Min 3: stranger approaches
baby. After 3 min., mother leaves unobtrusively.
4
Stranger and baby 3 min or less*
First separation episode.
Stranger’s behavior is geared to that of baby.
5
Mother and baby 3 min or more** First reunion episode. Mother
greets and comforts baby, then tries to settle in him again in play. Mother then
leaves, saying good-bye.
6
Baby alone
3 min or less*
Second separation episode.
7
Stranger and baby 3 min or less*
Continuation of second
separation. Stranger enters and gears her behavior to that of baby.
8
Mother and bay
3 min
Second reunion episode. Mother enters,
greets baby, then picks him up. Meanwhile, stranger leaves unobtrusively.
Assessment of the strange situation
behavior
• 3 patterns of responses
• Type B babies: secure attachment
– use the caregiver as a secure base to explore freely
during the pre-separation episodes
– displays distress when the caregiver leaves
– responds enthusiastically upon their return
– about 2/3 of babies
• Type A babies: anxious-avoidant babies
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avoid the caregiver
show little distress during separation
avoid the caregiver upon return
about 1/4 of babies
Assessment of the strange situation
behavior
• Type C babies: anxious-resistant
– give evidence of distress throughout the
procedure, but particularly during separation
– reunions produce a mixture of relief at seeing
the caregiver and anger directed toward her
– about 10% of infants
• 2 major questions:
– what factors produce different attachment
patterns?
– what significance do these patterns have for the
the child’s development?
Maternal responsiveness and attachment
• Ainsworth believes that attachment security
depends on how sensitive the caregiver is to the
infant’s signals
– Pederson et al. also found that securely attached babies
were likely to have mothers who are more accepting,
expressive of affection, and who adjust their behavior
to that of their babies
– for e.g., mothers feeding babies at a comfortable pace,
recognizing when they are done and ready for more,
and recognizing their taste and texture preferences
– for e.g., mothers who are less likely to ignore crying,
are quicker to respond, and are more effective in
comforting the child
– for e.g., mothers who hold babies more affectionately,
and who synchronize better in face to face interactions
Maternal sensitivity and attachment
• Smith and Pederson (1988) Post-StrangeSituation study
– asked mothers to stay in the room with their
infants to fill out a questionnaire after the
Strange Situation procedure
– but the toys were removed from the room to
make it likely that the child would seek out the
mom’s attention while she did her work
– observed how the caregivers coped with this
situation
– found that mothers of securely attached infants
were more sensitive and effective in handling
the situation
Long-term effects of early
attachment
• linkages between secure attachment and many
other aspects of children’s development have been
found, such as being more socially competent,
better performance (grades) at elementary school
• Adult Attachment Interview
– caregivers were asked to describe their own
childhood attachment experiences
– parents’ own attachment experiences with their
own parents form reasonably good predictors of
their attachment patterns with their children
– interviews with pregnant mothers about
their attachment to own parents predict
later attachment patterns with their child
Attachment across cultures
• Grossmann et al. finds that the percentage of Type
B (secure) attachment is less in Germany than in
the US; more Type A (anxious-avoidant)
attachment patterns
– German mothers’ emphasis on building
independence in their children results in the
infants appearing less interested during
reunions
• Miyake et al. found a higher percentage of Type C
(anxious-resistant) patterns in Japan
– Japanese mothers rarely leave their babies with
others, and so the Strange situation may prove
more stressful
Theories of attachment
• psychoanalytic theory: the object of
attachment is associated with gratification
of the infant’s basic needs
– children become attached, during the oral stage,
to those who satisfy their hunger drive
• Erik Erikson’s psychosocial theory:
attachment is related to children’s
development of trust in their caretakers
during the earliest stage and to the
development of autonomy during stage 2
Theories of attachment
• Bowlby’s ethological explanation:
attachment serves to regulate the distance
between infants and their caregivers
– the attachment relationship serves as an
internal working model for guiding children’s
interactions with caregivers and others
– in unfamiliar situations, the caregiver serves as
a secure base from which the infant can
explore, occasionally returning for reassurance
Harlow studies with monkeys
• suggest that bodily contact rather than
drive-reduction is important in fostering
attachment
– baby monkeys display more attachment to cloth
surrogates than to wire surrogates
• attachment by itself did not lead to healthy
development-- monkeys with surrogate
mothers did not know how to behave with
other monkeys
– a two-way interaction with a responsive
caregiver is crucial
Other achievements of first year:
Self-recognition
• toward the end of the second year children
develop a sense of self
– a method of visual self recognition has been
developed, borrowing the experimental
paradigm developed by Gordon Gallup to study
consciousness of self in chimps
• Gallup had chimps look at their images on a
mirror
– after a few days of treating the image as another
monkey, the chimps used the mirror to groom
themselves or to pick up pieces of food from
their face
Self-recognition
• Gallup painted a spot on some part of the
face of the chimps while they were
anesthetized
– when they woke up and saw their images in the
mirror, they immediately began to explore those
spots
– indicating that they have learned to recognize
themselves in the mirror
– the ability not present in all types of monkeys:
macaque monkeys after 2400 hours of exposure
to their image do not show any sign of selfrecognition
Self-recognition: human babies
• Bertenthal & Fischer and Lewis & BrooksGunn
– applied the mirror self-recognition method to
infants of 3- to 24 months
– babies do not reach a spot that has been placed
on their nose without their awareness until 18
months of age
• at 18 months, they try to rub the spot off their nose
• earlier interest in mirrors (during the first year or so)
does not mean that babies recognize their own
reflections as their own image
What accompanies the development
of self-awareness?
• emergence of secondary emotions takes
place between 18 and 24 months
– pride, embarrassment, guilt, and envy
• M. Lewis thinks that these are selfconscious and social emotions that require
an understanding of some social standard
and their own situation with respect to that
standard
– can start to evaluate their behaviors in terms of
those social standards
Late Infancy: Cognitive
Development
PSYC 206: Life-Span Development
Lecture 8
Aylin Küntay
Piaget: Sensorimotor Stage (Infancy)
Sub Age (M)
Description
5 12 – 18 Tertiary circular reactions:
Deliberate variation of problemsolving means, with experimentation
to see what the consequences will be
6 18 – 24 Beginning of symbolic
representation: Images and words
come to stand for familiar objects;
new means of problem solving
through symbolic combinations
Piaget’s sm stages
• Stage 5 (12 to 18 months): Tertiary Circular
Reactions
– interest in experimentation
• “at 0;10(11) Laurent is lying on his back …. He
grasps in succession a celluloid swan, a box, etc.,
stretches out his arm and lets them fall. He distinctly
varies the positions of the fall. Sometimes he
stretches out his arm vertically, sometimes he holds
it obliquely, in front or behind his eyes, etc. When
the object falls in a new position (for e.g., on his
pillow), he lets it fall two or three times on the same
location, as though to study the spatial relation; then
modifies the situation” (OI)
Tertiary circular reactions (TCR)
• instead of rigid and simple repetition of a
certain event, the child initiates behavioral
changes that produce variations in the event
itself
• TCR: discovery of new means to reach
goals through active experimentation
– varying actions to reach goals
– e.g.: pull the pillow (i.e., create new means) to
reach an object (a familiar goal)
• but cannot yet imagine the consequences of
these actions
– all based on physical actions
Sm substage 6 (18-24 months)
• Stage of Representation and Symbolizing: the
child uses mental images that can represent actions
that are not actually occurring and things not
actually present
• the child uses images, words and actions to stand
for objects
• invention of new means through mental (not
physical) combinations
– description of emergence of symbolic thought: next
slide
• Piaget is playing with Lucienne at 1;4(0) and hides
an attractive watch chain inside an empty match box
– (see next slide)
“I put the chain back into the box and reduce the opening to 3
mm. It is understood that Lucienne is not aware of the
functioning of the opening and closing of the match box
and has not seen me prepare the experiment. She only
possesses two preceding schemas: turning the box over in
order to empty it of its contents, and sliding her fingers
into the slit to make the chain come out. It is of course the
last procedure she tries first: she puts her finger inside and
gropes to reach the chain, but fails completely. A pause
follows during which Lucienne manifests a very curious
reaction… She looks at the slit with great attention; then,
several times in succession, she opens and shuts her
mouth, at first slightly, then wider and wider!
[Then]… Lucienne unhesitatingly puts her finger into the slit,
and instead of trying as before to reach the chain, she pulls
so as to enlarge the opening. She succeeds and grasps the
chain.” (OI)
• to get the chain out of the box, first tries
methods that had been successful in the past
• What does the opening and closing of the
mouth signify?
• Lucienne is not yet fully proficient at
thought
– she is not yet fully capable of representing the
situation to herself fully in mental terms
– she “thinks out” the problem by way of
movements of the mouth
– but compared to substage 5, she does not need
to act out her solution
Other characteristics of substage 6
• Deferred imitation: can imitate a model
when the model is no longer present
– development of internalized schemes of action
and capacity of evoking the absent model in
some internal symbolic form, for e.g., by means
of visual image
– capacity to produce gestural or image-based
copies of events that are no longer present
• Symbolic play: the use of gestural or imagebased means to pretend that nonexistent
events are present
– the behavior associated with a certain object are
extended to another
• use of banana as telephone; use of box as car
Delayed imitation
• “At 1;4(3) Jacqueline had a visit from a
little boy of 1;6 whom she used to see from
time to time, and who, in the course of the
afternoon, got into a terrible temper. He
screamed as he tried to get out of a playpen,
stamping his feet. Jacqueline stood
watching him in amazement, never having
witnessed such a scene before. The next
day, she herself screamed in her playpen
and, stamping her foot lightly several times
in succession” (PDI)
Object permanence
• Substage 5: can follow correctly a visible
sequence of on object’s movements
– even if the object disappears successively in a number
of places the infant will search for it in the place where
it was last seen; not look for it in the place where it was
last discovered
• resolve A-not-B problems
– the object is no longer connected with a practical
situation (the infant’s past successes), but has acquired
a permanence of its own
• but… can understand only visible movements of
the objects
OP (substage 5)
• if the infant is unable to see all the
displacements and must infer some invisible
ones, he/she reverts to an earlier reaction
– looking for the object where he had been
successful in the past
• when invisible movements of the object are
involved, the infant must infer relationships
of position, but is not yet capable of
inference and imagination
Object Permanence
• Substage 6: development of representation
permits the child to conceive of objects that
are not present in the current situation and
leads to an internal expectation that when an
object disappears it does not dissolve
– can take into account invisible displacements,
because he represents the displacements to
himself
– next slide, where Jacqueline has seen the pencil
disappear only once and into Piaget’s hand
OP: substage 6
• “At 1;7(23) Jacqueline is seated opposite
three-object screens, A, B, and C (a beret, a
handkerchief, and her jacket) aligned
equidistant from each other. I hide a small
pencil in my hand saying, “Coucou, the
pencil.” I hold out my closed hand to her,
put it under A, then under B, then under C
(leaving the pencil under C); at each step I
again extend my closed hand, repeating,
“Coucou, the pencil.” Jacqueline then
searches for the pencil directly in C, finds it
and laughs.” (CR)
• She does not look into the hand to find the
pencil…
• her reaction indicates that the pencil
continued to exist within the hand during
the whole sequence of displacements
• and that she has inferred that the invisible
object was displaced from A to B to C
• has formed a mental image of the pencil and
can follow the image through a series of
complex displacements
Problem Solving
• Infant in substage 5
carries out deliberate
problem solving, but still
relies principally on trial
and error
• Infant in substage 6
pictures a series of events
in her mind before acting
(i.e., via inference)
Problem Solving
• Infant in substage 5
carries out deliberate
problem solving, but still
relies principally on trial
and error
• Infant in substage 6
pictures a series of events
in her mind before acting
(i.e., via inference)
Manifestations of mental
representations
• Search for invisible objects (full Object
Permanence)
• Symbolic play:
– up to 1 year, use objects in conventional ways, such as
banging a hammer on a block
– between 1 year and 2 years, they start to make one
object stand for another-- for e.g., use a rock for a baby
• Deferred imitation:
– recall other people’s action schemes observed in the
past…
– Piaget says that deferred imitation begins in sm
substage 6 (but compare to Meltzoff and Moore)
Manifestations of mental
representations
• Understanding of models: J. De Loache
studied children’s ability to use models to
guide their actions
– children younger than 3 were not able to use the
relationship between model room and an actual
room, when they were asked in an actual room
to find a toy that had been hidden in a
corresponding place in a model room
– but when 21/2 year olds were convinced that it is
possible to shrink an actual tent into a small
model or to expand the model into the tent
• they successfully used the model to find objects in
the tent
Manifestations of mental
representations
• Categorization: Sugarman gave children from 12to 30-month-old toddlers a randomly arranged
array of objects and asked them to “fix these up”.
– for e.g., dolls and cars of different colors
• 1-year-old: pick one object and touch it to the
other toys. Most likely to touch toys of the same
shape. Sequential touching.
• 18-month-olds: filled the work space in front of
them with a number of objects of a particular
category. One-group collection.
Manifestations of mental
representations
• Categorization:
– 24 months divide the objects into two groups,
but handle members of one category first, then
shift to the other. Two-group categorization.
– 30 months simultaneously coordinated their
work on both categories. Also divide the
collections into subcategories.
Subcategorization.
• for e.g., red dolls and blue dolls subcategorized
under “dolls”
Manifestations of mental
representations
• Early vocabulary development: use words to
represent objects and events
– early vocabulary acquisition develops hand in hand
with cognitive development
– first words appear as they gain sophistication with
search for hidden objects…
• a vocabulary spurt develops simultaneously with invisible
object search, insightful (not trial-and-error) problem solving
• Chapter 8 … detailed picture of language
development
– Skip Chapter 7
– Next thing to do after the midterm is language
development