Emotional Development In Infants

Bronfenbrenner and Evans (2000) signify that environment is a dominate factor with child development and as emotions are central to all humans; a child’s environment produces significant influence on emotion development and emotion expression. The base emotions (happiness, sadness, fear, anger, disgust, interest and surprise) are considered universal as they appear across all cultures, are present from

The early years of life provide the foundation for a child’s social development. Social development is a gradual process and the rates of social development vary among children, however, children are active learners and have ample opportunities to learn. Social development involves the learning and skill building that enables children to effectively relate to others and to contribute to their family, school, and community in a positive way. The social development of a child is influenced by many factors including attachment, temperament, self-esteem, and emotional reactions. This essay will further examine these four factors and the effects they have on the early social development of children. For the purpose of this paper, the focus will

Emotion regulation involves intrinsic and extrinsic processing of monitoring and modifying emotional reactions in both positive or negative situations (Martins, 2012). In order for individuals to have the ability to regulate emotions, they must beware of their emotions. Although infants are unaware and lack the ability to regulate their emotions, it then becomes the role of a primary carer to nurture the infant, thus acting as a model for regulating emotions. Evidently, infants grow to reflect the ways in which their carers control and modify their emotions as well as social boundaries. Furthermore, emotion regulation is considered an important aspect of an individuals life as it 'can moderate emotions and keep them in a manageable range

Observing a child is a fascinating and eye opening experience. It is amazing to see how children view certain things differently than adults. Things that some adults take for granted, children see as a miracle. I recently observed a little girl. For the purposes of confidentiality, the name of the little girl has been changed to Katy. She is five years old and has two older sisters. She will start kindergarten this year. I observed Katy on June 20, 2016 at twelve in the afternoon at the park with her mother present. It was nearly 100 degrees outside. There were a couple other children at the park as well.

At 6 weeks infants develop a social smile, at 3 month laughter and curiosity develop, at 4 months full responsive smiles emerge, from 4-8 months they develop anger, from 9014 months they develop a fear of social events, at 12 months the are fearful of unexpected sights and sounds, and at 18 months they are self-aware, feel pride, shame, and embarrassment. In the first two years, infants develop from reactive pain and pleasure to complex patterns of social awareness. Emotions in infants are produced from their body as opposed to their thoughts. Therefore fast and uncensored reactions are common in infants. During their toddler years, the strength of their emotions will increase.

Saxe identifies this group as preverbal babies. By studying the behaviors of these infants, psychologists are able determine that basic instinct that humans share. These babies, aged between four and twelve months, are much too young to be influenced by the institution around them. The infants are also too young to communicate their thought processes, so psychologists analyze the only responses these infants can communicate, looking and crawling. In the experiment involving these preverbal infants, babies were shown videos of one man being “nice” to a girl while another was “mean” to the girl.

There are six milestones to understand the emotional role in the cognition development the begin life cycle. The first one is making sense of sensations. This is the first time the infant makes sense of the world around them. The next milestone is Intimacy and Relating. This is when they start to react to other feeling by their emotional cues and actions. The third milestone is Buds of Intentionality. This is when te infant uses gesture and expressions to initiate and respond to a

When an infant is born determines in large part the emotions of his or her parents and relatives. Moreover, whether or not the infant is the first child,

After reading chapter 6 of the textbook, I have realized that children early years are severely important because they provide the foundation for the rest of their life, as adolescent, and as adult. Children that are well nurtured can live well and be sociable. Early childhood is the most rapid period of development in a human life. A child creates their own sense of identity. Indeed, it is important for a child to have a sense of identity. Although individual children develop at their pace, all children progress through an identifiable sequence of physical, cognitive, and emotional growth and change. The early child development approach is based on that children respond best when caregivers use specific techniques designed to encourage and stimulate progress to the next level of development. Early childhood is the time during which essential, intellectual, and emotional abilities form. Keeping young children safe and nurturing them is protective against lifelong problems. Including the risk of becoming involved in violence. Early experiences affect the brain development, shaping the brains physical growth and sculpting neural connections. This occurs primarily between birth and school age years. Besides, the family, community and society are powerful in shaping young children’s development. They grow at a very rapid rate during the first one and a half years of life. Their development is not only physical, it is also mental, emotionally, and social. These developments are

At a certain age infants begin to resist the unfamiliar and are very vocal in expressing their feelings (Brazelton, 1992).

Denham, Mitchell-Copeland, Strandberg, Auerbach and Blair (1997) conducted a study that involved preschoolers from 60 families. The research was held in both home and classroom settings. They used observational and self-report methodologies to measure the emotional ability. The results showed that children whose parents’ responses were more positive, had a better relationship with peers and were more socially competent. Instead, children whose parents’ responses were more negative, they displayed a negative emotion to peers. They suggested that children observed how their parents reacted and they reacted in the same way in similar situations. The research showed that children learnt to self-regulate their emotion through social

Infants are very helpless and extraordinarily dependent. Their earliest behaviors are goal driven for gaining a caregiver to focus and engage reciprocity in their behavior (Sroufe, 2011). The infants task is to gain their survival needs and regulate fear and stress by creating contingent responses so that the world may be predictable and comprehensible (Sroufe, 2011). Regulating emotions can only occur in relationship with the parents; an infant is ill equipped to reduce arousal on their own (Seigel, date, Sroufe, 2011, cite.) The infants work is most effective when circumstances and contingent responses are anticipated and more challenging when they encounter unpredictability and transitions (Hughes, 2014).

Often times we look at movement to represent a sign of life and intelligence. Movement and independence of speech however are not the only signs that someone is responding or learning. Subconsciously we know this as we naturally and drastically change our tone of voice and movements become more dramatic when we are working with a child. This is a way for us to both teach and communicate with our deepest instincts. Instincts in many cases that we have learned from listening in the womb and reacting based on our mother reactions at the time. Thus infants may be frightened by loud noises if their mother was or they may not be bothered at all by it. Through this infants learn tone and voice as it relates to emotions. A higher tone or laugher being related to joy and likewise a deeper and or loud tone as it relates to anger.

Observation of an infant in the family setting 'provides the observer with an opportunity to encounter primitive emotional states in the infant and his family...' (Rustin in Miller, 1989, 7). According to Rustin infant observation allows to 'explore the emotional events between infant and mother' and 'the aim is to describe the development of the relationship between infant and others (...) and try to understand the unconscious aspects of behaviour and patterns of communication' (Rustin in Miller, 1989, 7). Early infant observation plays a vital role in the psychodynamic training and it gives a thesis of how early emotional development is being influenced by subconscious family dynamics.

From the beginning, babies are born with their own personalities. Crying is the first sense of emotion and is used to communicate many different things. Psychosocial development increases, as they are able to express more emotions. Between zero to three months of age, babies can smile. They start to become curious and show interest in certain things. By three to six months, infants can