Physical Development: Age 0–2

Infants (birth to age 1) and toddlers (ages 1 to 2) grow quickly; bodily changes are rapid and
profound. Physical development refers to biological changes that children undergo as
they age. Important aspects that determine the progress of physical development in infancy and
toddlerhood include physical and brain changes; development of reflexes, motor skills,
sensations, perceptions, and learning skills; and health issues.

The first 4 weeks of life are termed the neonatal

period. Most babies weigh between 5 1/2 and 10
pounds, and are between 18 and 22 inches long. Male
babies are generally slightly heavier and longer than
female babies. Neonates born weighing less than 5 1/2
pounds are of low birthweight. Infants who arrive
before their due date are preterm or premature, and
these babies may or may not have a low birthweight.
Babies who arrive on or shortly after their due date
are full‐ term. Infants who arrive 2 or more weeks after
their due date are postmature. Both premature and
postmature babies are at higher risk of complications
such as sickness, brain damage, or death, than are
full‐term babies.

Physical growth is especially rapid during the first 2

years. An infant's birthweight generally doubles by 6
months and triples by the infant's first birthday.
Similarly, a baby grows between 10 and 12 inches in
length (or height), and the baby's proportions change
during the first 2 years. The size of an infant's head
decreases in proportion from 1/3 of the entire body at
birth, to 1/4 at age 2, to 1/8 by adulthood.

Fetal and neonatal brain developments are also rapid.

The lower, orsubcortical, areas of the brain
(responsible for basic life functions, like breathing)
develop first, followed by the higher areas,
or corticalareas (responsible for thinking and
planning). Most brain changes occur prenatally and
soon after birth. At birth, the neonate's brain weighs
only 25 percent of that of an adult brain. By the end of
the second year, the brain weighs about 80 percent; by
puberty, it weighs nearly 100 percent of that of an
adult brain.

Reflexes and motor skills

Because infants cannot endure on their own, newborns

have specific built‐in or prewired abilities for survival
and adaptive purposes.Reflexes are automatic
reactions to stimulation that enable infants to respond
to the environment before any learning has taken
place. For instance, babies automatically suck when
presented with a nipple, turn their heads when a
parent speaks, grasp at a finger that is pressed into
their hand, and startle when exposed to loud noises.
Some reflexes, such as blinking, are permanent.
Others, such as grasping, disappear after several
months and eventually become voluntary responses.
Common infant motor reflexes appear in Table 1.
Motor skills, or behavioral abilities, develop in
conjunction with physical growth. In other words,
infants must learn to engage in motor activities within
the context of their changing bodies. At about 1 month,
infants may lift their chins while lying flat on their
stomachs. Within another month, infants may raise
their chests from the same position. By the fourth
month, infants may grasp rattles, as well as sit with
support. By the fifth month, infants may roll over, and
by the eighth month, infants may be able to sit without
assistance. At about 10 months, toddlers may stand
while holding onto an object for support. At about 14
months, toddlers may stand alone and perhaps even
walk. Of course, these ages for each motor‐skill
milestone are averages; the rates of physical and
motor developments differ among children depending
on a variety of factors, including heredity, the amount
of activity the child participates in, and the amount of
attention the child receives.

Motor development follows cephalocaudal (center and

upper body) and proximodistal (extremities and lower
body) patterns, so that motor skills become refined
first from the center and upper body and later from the
extremities and lower body. For example, swallowing is
refined before walking, and arm movements are
refined before hand movements.

Sensation and perception

Normal infants are capable of sensation, or the ability

to respond to sensory information in the external
world. These infants are born with functioning sensory
organs, specialized structures of the body containing
sensory receptors, which receive stimuli from the
environment. Sensory receptors convert
environmental energy into nervous system signals that
the brain can understand and interpret. For example,
the sensory receptors can convert light waves into
visual images. The human senses include seeing,
hearing, smelling, touching, and tasting.

Newborns are very nearsighted, but visual acuity, or

ability, develops quickly. Although infant vision is not
as good as adult vision, babies may respond visually to
their surroundings from birth. Infants are particularly
attracted to objects of light‐and‐dark contrasts, such
as the human face. Depth perception also comes
within a few months. Newborns may also respond to
tastes, smells, and sounds, especially the sound of the
human voice. In fact, newborns may almost
immediately distinguish between the primary
caregiver and others on the basis of sight, sound, and
smell. Infant sensory abilities improve considerably
during the first year.

Perception is the psychological process by which the

human brain processes the sensory data collected by
the sensory organs. Visually, infants are aware
of depth (the relationship between foreground and
background) and size and shape constancy (the
consistent size and shape of objects). This latter
ability is necessary for infants to learn about events
and objects.

Learning

Learning is the process that results in relatively

permanent change in behavior based on experience.
Infants learn in a variety of ways. Inclassical
conditioning (Pavlovian), learning occurs by
association when a stimulus that evokes a certain
response becomes associated with a different
stimulus that originally did not cause that response.
After the two stimuli associate in the subject's brain,
the new stimulus then elicits the same response as
the original. For instance, in psychologist John B.
Watson's experiments with 11‐month‐old “Little Albert”
in the 1920s, Watson classically conditioned Albert to
fear a small white rat by pairing the sight of the rat
with a loud, frightening noise. The once‐neutral white
rat then became a feared stimulus through associative
learning. Babies younger than age 3 months generally
do not learn well through classical conditioning.

In operant conditioning (Skinnerian), learning occurs

through the application of rewards and/or
punishments. Reinforcements increase behaviors,
while punishments decrease behaviors. Positive
reinforcements are pleasant stimuli that are added to
increase behavior; negative reinforcements are
unpleasant stimuli that are removed to increase
behavior. Because reinforcements always increase
behavior, negative reinforcement is not the same as
punishment. For example, a parent who spanks a child
to make him stop misbehaving is using punishment,
while a parent who takes away a child's privileges to
make him study harder is using negative
reinforcement. Shaping is the gradual application of
operant conditioning. For example, an infant who
learns that smiling elicits positive parental attention
will smile at its parents more. Babies generally
respond well to operant conditioning.

In observational learning, learning is achieved by

observing and imitating others, as in the case of an
infant who learns to clap by watching and imitating an
older sibling. This form of learning is perhaps the
fastest and most natural means by which infants and
toddlers acquire new skills.
Health

Normal functioning of the newborn's various body

systems is vital to its short ‐term and long‐term health.
Less than 1 percent of babies experience birth
trauma, or injury incurred during birth. Longitudinal
studies have shown that birth trauma, low birth
weight, and early sickness can affect later physical
and mental health but usually only if these children
grow up in impoverished environments. Most babies
tend to be rather hardy and are able to compensate for
less‐than‐ideal situations early in life.

Nevertheless, some children are born with or are

exposed to conditions that pose greater challenges.
For example,phenylketonuria (PKU) is an inherited
metabolic disorder in which a child lacks
phenylalanine hydroxylase, the enzyme necessary to
eliminate excess phynelalanine, an essential amino
acid, from the body. Failure to feed a special diet to a
child with PKU in the first 3 to 6 weeks of life will
result in mentally retardation. Currently, all 50 states
require PKU screening for newborns.

Poor nutrition, hygiene, and medical care also expose

a child to unnecessary health risks. Parents need to
ensure that their infant eats well, is clean, and
receives adequate medical attention. For instance,
proper immunization is critical in preventing such
contagious diseases as diptheria, measles, mumps,
Rubella, and polio. A licensed health‐care specialist
can provide parents with charts detailing
recommended childhood immunizations.

Infant mortality refers to the percentage of babies that

die within the first year of life. In the United States
today, about 9 babies out of every 1,000 live births die
within the first year — a significantly smaller
percentage than was reported only 50 years ago. This
decrease in infant mortality is due to improvements in
prenatal care and medicine in general. However,
minority infants tend to be at a higher risk of dying, as
are low birthweight, premature, and postmature
babies. The leading causes of infant death are
congenital birth defects, such as heart valve problems
or pregnancy complications, and sudden infant death
syndrome (SIDS).

SIDS is the unexpected and unexplained death of an

apparently healthy infant. Postmortem autopsies of the
SIDS infant usually provide no clues as to the cause of
death. As far as authorities know, choking, vomiting, or
suffocating does not cause SIDS. Two suspected
causes include infant brain dysfunction and parental
smoking, both prenatally and postnatally. In the United
States, between 1 and 2 out of every 1,000 infants
under age 1 die of SIDS each year.
Infancy and Toddlerhood
This stage marks the physical growth during the first two years. It is also considered as one of the most remarkable an
learning, motor skills, and perpetual capacities.

Emotional Well-Being

1. Non-organic failure to thrive is a growth disorder usually present by 18 months of

age that is caused by lack of parental love.
2. If the disorder is not corrected in infancy, some children remain small and have
lasting cognitive and emotional problems.

Learning Capacities

Learning is the process that results in relatively permanent change in behavior based
on experience. Infants learn in a variety of ways.

Classical Conditioning

In classical conditioning (Pavlovian), learning occurs by association when a

stimulus that evokes a certain response becomes associated with a different stimulus
that originally did not cause that response. After the two stimuli associate in the
subject's brain, the new stimulus then elicits the same response as the original.

• An unconditioned stimulus (UCS), say, a nipple inserted into the mouth, elicits a
reflexive unlearned response (unconditioned response, UR), sucking.
• The infant can become conditioned to the nipple (now a conditioned stimulus, CS) so
that sucking occurs as soon as the baby sees a nipple (now a conditioned
response, CR).

For example Little Albert was conditioned to be afraid of white rats.

–Loud noise (UCS) = fear (UCR)
–Loud noise (UCR) + white rat (CS) = fear
–White rat (CS) = fear (CR)

Operant Conditioning

Operant conditioning is a form of learning in which a spontaneous behavior is

followed by a stimulus that changes the probability that the behavior will occur again.
A reinforcer is a stimulus that increases the occurrence of a response. The removal of a
desirable stimulus or the presenting of an unpleasant one to decrease the occurrence of
a response is called punishment. Operant conditioning allows researchers to determine
what stimuli babies perceive and which ones they prefer. Sudden infant death syndrome
, a major cause of infant mortality, may result when problems in brain function prevent
babies from learning certain lifesaving responses.

Some key concepts in operant conditioning:

Reinforcement is any event that strengthens or increases the behavior it follows.

There are two kinds of reinforcers:

 Positive reinforcers are favorable events or outcomes that are presented after the
behavior. In situations that reflect positive reinforcement, a response or behavior is
strengthened by the addition of something, such as praise or a direct reward.

Negative reinforcers involve the removal of an unfavorable events or outcomes

after the display of a behavior. In these situations, a response is strengthened by the
removal of something considered unpleasant.

In both of these cases of reinforcement, the behavior increases.

Habituation

Habituation refers to a gradual reduction in the strength of a response due to

repetitive stimulation. Looking, heart rate, and breathing rate may all decline, which
indicates a loss of interest (Berk, 2007). For example, sounds in your environment such
as street noise might initially draw your attention, but after repeated exposure to those
sounds, you will become accustomed to, and pay less attention to them [1]. Habituation
and recovery make learning more efficient by enabling us to focus our attention on those
aspects of the environment we know the least about. Researchers investigating infants'
understanding of the world rely on habituation and recovery more than any other
learning capacity (Berk, 2007).

Habituation research reveals that infants learn and retain a wide variety of
information just by watching objects and events (Berk, 2007). They are especially
attentive to the movements of objects and people, and have been reported to be able
to habituate themselves to the actions of older people for up to seven weeks after they
were first introduced to the actions in the first place.

In another habituation research, it was revealed that newborn babies required a long
time to habituate and recover to novel visual stimuli, usually about three or four
minutes (Berk, 2007). Once the infants reached four or five months of age, they required
as little as five to ten seconds to recognize different visual stimuli (Slater et al., 1996).
Psychologists believe that a reason for young babies'habituation times being so long is
that they have a hard time disengaging their attention from interesting stimuli
(Colombo, 2002).

Psychologists monitor habituation to determine whether infants hear a difference

between two sounds (Kalat, 2005). For example, infants who have
become habituated to the sound ba will increase their sucking rate when they hear the
sound pa. Apparently, they are able to tell the difference, which is important for later
language comprehension (Eimas, Siqueland, Jusczyk, & Vigorito, 1971).

There are studies that show that infants who have habituated to hearing one language,
such as Dutch, dishabituate when they hear a different language such as Japanese
(Kalat, 2007). By age 5 months, however, babies dishabituate when they hear an
adjustment from Dutch to English, apparently because the sounds and rhythms are
relatively similar (Jusczyk, 2002). These type of studies show that children can
distinguish relevant language sounds before they even know what the words mean.
When a change in a stimulus increases a previously habituated response, we say that the
stimulus produced dishabituation (Kalat, 2007).

Habituation can even be seen as early as the third trimester of pregnancy. A fetus
shows sensitivity to external stimuli in the third trimester of pregnancy by showing
changes in fetal heart rate when various repeated sounds are presented (Berk, 2007).

Imitation

Newborn babies come into the world with a primitive ability to learn through imitation
—by copying the behavior of another person. Infants from 2 days to several weeks old
imitating adult facial expressions (Field et al., 1982; Meltzoff & Moore, 1977). The
human newborn’s capacity to imitate extends to certain gestures, such as head
movements, and has been demonstrated in many ethnic groups and cultures (Meltzoff &
Kuhl, 1994). As the figure reveals, even the newborns of chimpanzees, our closest
evolutionary ancestors, imitate some facial expressions: tongue protrusion, mouth
opening, and lip protrusion (Myowa-Yamakoshi et al., 2004) (Berk).
imitation is more difficult to induce in babies 2 to 3 months old than just after birth.
Therefore, some investigators regard the capacity as little more than an automatic
response that declines with age,much like a reflex. Others claim that newborns imitate a
variety of facial expressions and head movements with apparent effort and
determination, even after short delays—when the adult is no longer demonstrating the
behavior. Furthermore, these investigators argue, imitation does not decline, as reflexes
do.Human babies several months old often do not imitate an adult’s behavior right away
because they try to play social games they are used to in face-to-face interaction—mutual
gazing, cooing, smiling, and waving their arms. When an adult models a gesture
repeatedly, older human infants soon get down to business and
imitate (Meltzoff & Moore, 1994). Similarly, imitation declines in baby chimps around 9
weeks of age, when mother–baby mutual gazing and other face-to-face exchanges
increase. (Laura Berk)

MOTOR DEVELOPMENT
A. The Sequence of Motor Development
1. Gross motor development refers to control over actions that help an infant
move around in the environment, such as crawling, standing, and walking.
2. Fine motor development involves smaller movements such as reaching and grasping.
3. Although the sequence of motor development is fairly uniform across children,
there are large individual differences in rate of motor progress.
4. Motor control of the head precedes control of the arms and trunk which
precedes control of the legs .
5. Head, trunk, and arm control appears before coordination of the hands and fingers .

http://www.med.umich.edu/yourchild/topics/devmile.htm

http://www.cde.ca.gov/sp/cd/re/itf09percmotdev.asp
Object Perception

1. Size and Shape Constancy:

a. To accurately perceive objects, we must translate changing retinal images into a
single representation.
b. Size constancy is the perception that an object's size is the same, despite changes in
its retinal image size.
c. Shape constancy is perception that an object's shape is stable, despite changes in
the shape projected on the retina.
d. Both of these perceptual capacities appear to be innate and assist babies in
detecting a coherent world of objects.
2. Perception of Objects as Distinct, Bounded Wholes:
a. The movement of objects relative to one another and to their background enables
infants to construct a visual world of separate objects.
b. At first, motion and spatial arrangements help infants identify objects. Then, as
babies visually track moving objects, they pick up additional information about an
object's boundaries, such as its distance from their eye, shape, and color.

Intermodal Perception

1. Intermodal perception combines information from more than one modality, or

sensory system.
2. Recent evidence indicates that babies perceive the world in an intermodal method
from the beginning. For example, newborn behaviors suggest that they expect
sight, sound, and touch to go together.

PIAGET'S COGNITIVE-DEVELOPMENTAL THEORY

Key Piagetian Concepts

1. Piaget believed children move through four stages of development between infancy
and adolescence.
2. During the sensorimotor stage, infants and toddlers "think" with their eyes, ears,
hands, and other sensorimotor equipment.
3. What Changes With Development:
a. Piaget believed a child's schemes change with age.
b. Schemes are action-based at first and later will move to a mental level.
4. How Cognitive Change Takes Place:
a. Adaptation 1) Adaptation is the process of building schemes through direct
interaction with the environment,
2) Assimilation is a part of adaptation in which the external world is
interpreted through existing schemes.
3) Accommodation is the part of adaptation in which new schemes are
created or old ones adjusted to produce a better fit with the environment.
4) Equilibrium exists when children are not changing very much and
they are in a steady, comfortable cognitive state; assimilation is used more than
accommodation.
5) Disequilibrium is the state of cognitive discomfort which occurs
during times of rapid change; accommodation is used more than assimilation.
6) Back-and-forth movement between equilibrium and disequilibrium
leads to the development of more effective schemes.
b. Organization 1) Organization is an internal process of rearranging and linking
together schemes to form an interconnected cognitive system.
2) Schemes reach a true state of equilibrium when they become part
of a broad network of structures that can be jointly applied to the surrounding
world.

The Sensorimotor Stage

1. Piaget based the sensorimotor stage on his observations of his own children.
2. The Circular Reaction:
a. Circular reactions are the means by which infants explore the environment and
build schemes by trying to repeat chance events caused by their own motor
activity.
b. These reactions are first centered on the infant's own body. Subsequently, they
change to manipulating objects and then to producing novel effects in the
environment.
3. Substage 1: Reflexive Schemes -
a. Piaget regarded newborn reflexes as the building blocks of
sensorimotor intelligence.
b. At first, babies suck, grasp, and look in much the same way, no
matter what the circumstances.
4. Substage 2: Primary Circular Reactions - The First Learned Adaptations -
a. Infants develop simple motor skills and change their behavior in
response to environmental demands.
b. The first circular reactions are primary in that they are oriented
towards the infants' own bodies and motivated by basic needs.
5. Substage 3: Secondary Circular Reactions-Making Interesting Sights Last -
a. Circular reactions of this substage are secondary in that the infants
repeat actions that affect the environment.
 b. Infants can imitate actions that they have practiced many times.
6. Substage 4: Coordination of Secondary Circular Reaction -
a. Intentional, or goal directed, behavior is the combination of
schemes to solve problems.
b. Piaget regarded mean send action sequences as the first sign that
babies appreciate physical causality.
c. Object permanence is the understanding that objects continue to
exist when they are out of sight; it is not yet complete in this substage.
d. AB search errors are committed by infants in this substage. Infants
8- to 12-months-old only look for an object in hiding place A after the object is
moved from A to hiding place B.
7. Substage 5: Tertiary Circular Reactions-Discovering New Means Through Active
Experimentation -
a. Circular reactions in this substage are tertiary in that the infant
repeats actions with variation-exploring the environment and bringing about new
outcomes.
b. Experimentation leads to a more advanced understanding of object
permanence. Toddlers no longer make the AB search error.
8. Substage 6: Mental Representation-Inventing New Means Through Mental
Combinations -
a. Mental representations are internal images of absent objects and
past events.
b. The toddler can now solve problems through symbolic means
instead of trial-and-error.
c. Representation allows deferred imitation-the ability to copy the
behavior of models who are not immediately present.
d. Functional play is motor activity with or without objects during the
first year and a half in which sensorimotor schemes are practiced.
e. At the end of the second year, representation permits toddlers to
engage in make-believe play.

THE SOCIAL CONTEXT OF EARLY COGNITIVE

DEVELOPMENT
Vygotsky, formulated a theory that children first develop lower mental functions such as
simple perceptions, associative learning, and involuntary attention; then, through social
interactions with more advanced peers and adults, they eventually develop high mental
functions such as language, counting, problem solving skills, voluntary attention, and memory
schemas. Central to Vygotsky's theory of cognitive development is his theoretical construct of
the zone of proximal development. He proposed that a child's immediate potential for cognitive
growth is bounded on the lower end by what the child can accomplish on his/her own and on
the upper end by what the child can accomplish with the help of a more knowledgeable other,
such as a peer or teacher. This region of immediate potential is the zone of proximal
development. As a child learns to complete tasks with less and less assistance, the child's
cognitive skills develop. Vygotsky's ideas concerning the zone of proximal development provide
strong support for the inclusion of cooperative learning strategies in classroom instruction. The
five components of cooperative learning (positive interdependence, face-to-face interaction,
individual accountability, small groups and interpersonal skills, and group self-evaluation) are
discussed in the context of Vygotsky's theories, and a series of suggestions for using cooperative
learning are included. The paper concludes that cooperative learning is an effective formal
education strategy for presenting social and cultural experiences in a systematic manner.

LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT

On average, children say their first word at around 12 months of age, with a range of 8 to 18
months. Between 1.5 and 2 years, toddlers combine two words; soon their utterances increase in
length and complexity.

There are three Theories of Language Development

1. The Behaviorist Perspective: a. This perspective regards language development as entirely

due to environmental influences.
b. Through operant conditioning, parents reinforce their baby's
sounds that most sound like words.
c. Imitation combines with reinforcement to promote language
development.
2. The Nativist Perspective: a. This view assumes that children are born with a biologically-
based system-called the language acquisition device -for mastering language.
b. Chomsky maintained that the LAD contains a set of rules
common to all languages; thus, children speak in a rule-oriented way from the
beginning.
c. Children all over the world tend to master language milestones in
a similar sequence- evidence that fits with Chomsky's ideas.
d. Can Great Apes Acquire Language? Findings reveal that the
ability of chimps to acquire a human like language system is limited. Even
pygmy chimps, a highly intelligent species, require several extra years of training to
attain the basic grammar understood by human
2- and 3-year-olds.
e. Language Areas in the Brain: Humans have evolved specialized
regions in the brain that support language skills. Broca's area, located in
the frontal lobe, controls language production. Wernicke's area, located in the temporal
lobe, controls language comprehension.
f. Limitations of the Nativist Perspective: Researchers have had
difficulty identifying the single system of grammar believed to underlie all
languages. Research indicates that language acquisition is not immediate but occurs
in a steady and gradual manner.
3. The Interactionist Perspective: a. This view emphasizes that language achievements emerge
through the interaction of innate abilities and environmental influences.
b. Native capacity, a strong desire to interact with others, and a rich linguistic and
social environment contribute to budding a child's
language capacities.
c. A great deal of evidence supports the interactionist
position.

Getting Ready to Talk

1. Cooing and Babbling: Around 2 months, babies make vowel-like noises

called cooing. About 6 months, consonants combine with vowels and the baby
begins babbling. Babies must hear human speech for babbling to
develop further. Adult-infant interaction increases the amount of spoken
language a baby is exposed to.
2. Becoming a Communicator: By 4 months, infants and adults follow each
other's gaze. The adults label what is seen. Experiencing this joint attention
often speeds up language development. Simple infant games such as pat-a-
cake and peek-a-boo demonstrate conversational turn-taking. At the end of
the first year, infants use preverbal gestures to influence the behavior
of others.

First Words
1 . Children's first words usually refer to important people, objects that move,
familiar actions, or outcomes of familiar actions.
2. Under extension is a vocabulary error in which a word is applied to a
smaller number of objects and events than is appropriate.
3. In contrast, over extension occurs when a word is applied to a wider
collection of objects and events than is appropriate.

The Two-Word Utterance Phase

1. Vocabularies slowly build from age 12 to 18 months. However, between 18

and 24 months, children may add from 10 to 20 new words a week.
2. Telegraphic speech is the two-word utterance phase of toddlers which
leaves out smaller and less important words.

Comprehension versus Production

1 . Production is the words and word combinations that children use.

2. Comprehension is the language that children understand.
3. At all ages, comprehension develops ahead of production. Comprehension
only necessitates recognition of word meaning, whereas production requires
active recall of the word and its meaning.

EMOTIONAL DEVELOPMENT

Development of Some Basic Emotions

Basic emotions are those that can be directly inferred from facial expressions,
such as happiness, interest, surprise, fear, anger, sadness, and disgust.
A. Happiness: a. Happiness binds parent and baby and fosters the infant's
developing competence.
b. The social smile-the smile evoked by the stimulus of the
human face-first appears between 6 and 10 weeks.
c. Laughter first appears around 2 to 4 months in response to
active stimuli.
B. Anger and Fear: a. Anger is expressed during the first months when babies
cry in response to unpleasant experiences.
b. Both fear and anger rise during the second half of the
first year.
C. Stranger anxiety is an expression of fear in response to
unfamiliar adults. it depends on the infant's temperament,
past experiences with strangers, and the situation in which baby and
stranger meet.
d. Researchers believe that anger and fear have special
survival value as infants' motor capacities improve.

http://www.parents.com/baby/development/behavioral/month-by-month-
guide-to-babys-emotional-development/
Understanding and Responding to the Emotions of Others

Between 7 and 10 months, infants perceive facial expressions as organized

patterns, and they can match the emotional tone of a voice with the
appropriate face of a speaking person. Social referencing occurs when an
infant relies on a trusted person's emotional reaction to decide how to respond
in an uncertain situation. Social referencing provides infants with a method of
learning about the environment through indirect experience. By toddlerhood,
children use emotional signals to infer others' internal states and guide their
own actions.

Emergence of Self-Conscious Emotions

Self-conscious emotions appear at the end of the second year. They involve
injury to or enhance ment of the sense of self and include shame,
embarrassment, guilt, envy, and pride. Self-conscious emotions assist children
in acquiring socially valued behaviors and goals.

Beginnings of Emotional Self-Regulation

1. Emotional self-regulation refers to the strategies used to adjust emotional

states to a comfortable level of intensity.
2. By the end of the first year, babies' ability to move around permits them to
regulate feelings more effectively by approaching or retreating from various
stimuli.
3. Mothers encourage baby's positive feelings far more often than their
negative ones.
4. Infant boys get more training in hiding their unhappiness than do girls.
5. Growth in representation and language permits toddlers to describe their
emotions

TEMPERAMENT AND DEVELOPMENT

A. Temperament refers to stable individual differences in quality and

intensity of emotional reaction, activity level, attention, and emotional self-
regulation.
B. Thomas and Chess initiated the New York Longitudinal Study which was a
comprehensive examination of temperament. Results indicated:
1. temperament is predictive of psychological adjustment.
 2. parenting practices can modify children's emotional styles
C. The Structure of Temperament
1. Three types of children described the majority of the Thomas and Chess
sample: Easy children quickly establish regular routines, are cheerful,
and adapt easily to new experiences. Difficult children are irregular in daily
routines, slow to accept new experiences, and tend to react
negatively and intensely. Slow-to-warm-up children are inactive, have mild,
low- key reactions to stimuli, and adjust slowly to new experiences.
2. 35 percent of children did not fit any of these categories, demonstrating
blends of characteristics instead.
3. The difficult temperamental type places children at risk for adjustment
problems.
D. Measuring Temperament
1. Assessments of Behavior: Temperament is often assessed through parent
interviews and questionnaires, behavior ratings by medical
professionals or caregivers, and direct researcher observation. Parent ratings
have been criticized for being biased and subjective. Most measures can
assess temperament across only a narrow age range because the
way temperament is expressed changes with development.
2. Assessments of Physiological Reactions: Inhibited, or shy, children react
negatively to and withdraw from novel stimuli. Uninhibited, or sociable,
children display positive emotion to and approach novel
stimuli. Heart rate, hormone levels, and EEG waves in the frontal cortex
differentiate children with inhibited and uninhibited temperamental
styles.
E. Stability of Temperament
1. Early in life children show marked individual differences in
temperament, indicating the important role that biological factors play in
determining temperamental styles.
2. However, the changes shown by children suggest that temperament can
be modified by experience.
F. Genetic Influences
1. Findings of twin studies reveal that identicals are more similar than
fraternals across a wide range of temperamental traits and personality
measures.
2. About half of the individual differences among us can be traced to
differences in our genetic make-up.
3. Chinese and Japanese infants tend to be less active, irritable, and vocal
than Caucasian infants.
4. Boys tend to be more active and daring than girls.
G. Environmental Influences
1. Some differences in early temperament are encouraged by cultural
beliefs and practices. For example, Japanese mothers do more comforting and
American mothers more stimulating.
2. Parents more often encourage infant sons to be physically active and
daughters to seek help and physical closeness.
3. Research indicates that when one child in a family is viewed as easy,
another is likely to be perceived as difficult, even though the second child
might not be very difficult when compared to children in general.