CHAPTER 6 : PSYCHOSOCIAL DEVELOPMENT
DURING THE FIRST THREE YEARS
(LECTURE NOTES)
NAME: Santos, Shaina Mae S. BLOCK: CAS-06-301A
Newborn Stage – 0-2 months
Infant Stage – 2-12 months
Toddler Years – 1-3 years
• Beginning to be more mobile (exploring
surroundings)
• A child who’s already started walking
• It is in the early stage of exploring the
environment that they belong to
• A stage where they develop basic motor skills
TABLE 1 : Highlights of Infants' and Toddlers'
Psychosocial Development, Birth to 36 Months
Approximate Age, Months Characteristics
Infants are open to
stimulation. They begin to
0-3 show interest and
curiosity, and they smile
readily at people.
Infants can anticipate what
is about to happen and
experience disappointment
when it does not. They
3-6 show this by becoming
angry or acting warily.
They smile, coo, and
laugh often. This is a time
of social awakening and
early reciprocal exchanges
between the baby and the
caregiver.
(formulates attachment,
stranger anxiety,
separation anxiety)
Infants play social games
and try to get responses
from people. They talk to,
6-9 touch, and cajole other
babies to get them to
respond. They express
more differentiated
emotions, showing joy,
fear, anger, and surprise.
Infants are intensely
preoccupied with their
principal caregiver, may
become afraid of
9-12 strangers, and act subdued
in new situations. By 1
year, they communicate
emotions more clearly,
showing moods,
ambivalence, and
gradations of feeling.
Toddlers explore their
environment, using the
people they are most
12-18 attached to as a secure
base. As they master the
environment, they become
more confident and more
eager to assert themselves.
Toddlers sometimes
become anxious because
they now realize how
18-36 much they are separating
from their caregivers.
They work out their
awareness of their
limitations in fantasy and
in play and by identifying
with adults.
Psychosocial Development
• Where we began to become more conscious
about a lot of things that we don’t really expect in
the early years of a child/an infant
• The sense of self is just beginning to emerge
• Assumptions like: the child have infused identity
with their parents/they identify with their parents,
the source of security are the parents/caregivers
or the ones who immediately responds with our
needs
Emotions such as fear are subjective reactions to
experience that are associated with physiological and
behavioral changes
First Signs of Emotion
Crying – is the most powerful way Infants can
communicate their needs. There are four patterns of crying
(Wolff, 1969):
1. Basic hunger cry (a rhythmic cry, which is not
always associated with hunger);
2. Angry cry (a variation of the rhythmic cry, In
which excess air is forced through the vocal
cords);
3. Pain cry (a sudden onset of loud crying without
preliminary moaning, sometimes followed by
holding the breath);
4. Frustration cry (two or three drawn-out cries,
with no prolonged breath-holding)
 (Crying in infants have meaning, they just can’t
express it yet because they do not have the capacity to
do so)
Colic (when a baby cries more than 3 hours a
day/more than 3 weeks with no apparent reason for
distress) – is when a healthy baby cries for a very long
time, for no obvious reason. It affects some babies
during the first 3 to 4 months of life. Colic usually
begins suddenly, with loud and mostly nonstop crying.
It may be due to digestive problems, immaturity of the
bowel, food allergies and 'gas' or 'wind' etc.
Smiling and Laughing – these early smiles are
sometimes known as "windy grins" because they can
occur in response to gas.
• The earliest faint smiles occur spontaneously
soon after birth, apparently as a result of
subcortical nervous system activity. These
involuntary smiles frequently appear during
periods of REM sleep.
• 1 month of age, smiles are often elicited by
high-pitched tones when an infant is drowsy.
• 2nd month, as visual recognition develops,
babies smile more at visual stimuli (like
familiar faces).
• Social smiling, when newborn infants gaze
at their parents and smile at them, develops
during the 2nd month of life. Social smiling
signals the infant's active, positive
participation in the relationship. Laughter is
a smile-linked vocalization that becomes
more common between 4 and 12 months.
• Through 6 months of age, infant smiles
reflect an emotional exchange with a partner
(can communicate through their smiling).
• As babies grow older, they become more
actively engaged in mirthful exchanges.
• A 6-month-old may giggle in response to the
mother making unusual sounds or appearing
with a towel over her face;
• a 10-month-old may laughingly try to put
the towel back on her face when it falls off.
• By 12 to 15 months, infants are intentionally
communicating to the partner about objects.
Anticipatory smiling – in which infants smile at an object
and then gaze at an adult while continuing to smile-may be
the first step. Anticipatory smiling rises sharply between 8
and 10 months and seems to be among the first types of
communication in which the infant refers to an object or
experience.
Differentiation of Emotions during the First 3 Years –
The primary, or basic, emotions emerge during the first 6
months or so; the self- conscious emotions develop
beginning in the 2nd year, as a result of the emergence of
self-awareness together with accumulation of knowledge
about societal standards. Note: There are two kinds of
embarrassment. The earlier kind does not involve
evaluation of behavior and may simply be a response to
being singled out as the object of attention. Evaluative
embarrassment, which emerges during the 3rd year, is a
mild form of shame.
First 6 months – contentment joy
– intense surprise
– distress sadness, disgust
anger, fear
From 15 to 24 months – embarrassment, envy, empathy
From 2 ½ to 3 years – embarrassment, pride, shame, guilt
Self-conscious emotions – emotions, such as
embarrassment, empathy, and envy, that depend on self-
awareness.
they develop after the emergence of what we call as:
Self-awareness – realization that one's existence and
functioning are separate from those of other people and
things.
• Typically happens between 15-24 months of age
• It is the cognitive understanding that a child has a
distinct identity that separates from others/their
caregivers
• It’s a pre requisite for being aware of being the
focus of the attention, understanding the emotion
of others and experiencing envy
Self-evaluative emotions – emotions, such as pride,
shame, and guilt, that depend on both self-awareness and
knowledge of socially accepted standards of behavior.
• At around age 3, children with self-awareness
and their knowledge about the society, they can
somehow expect or relatively evaluate their own
thoughts and actions or even their desires
Altruistic Helping, Empathy, and Social Cognition
Altruistic Behavior – the activity intended to help another
person without any conditions or when we act to promote
someone else's welfare, even at a risk or cost to ourselves.
• Altruistic behavior seems to come naturally to
toddlers. However, the environment also
influences how much altruism babies engage in.
• The roots of empathy can be seen in early
infancy. Two- to 3-month- olds react to others'
emotional expressions (Tomasello, 2007), Six-
 month-olds engage in social evaluation, valuing Responds well Responds poorly Responds
someone on the basis of that person's treatment of to novelty and to novelty and slowly to
others (Hamlin, Wynn, & Bloom, 2007). change change novelty and
• Research suggests that social cognition begins in change
the test year of life. In one study, 9 months old Quickly Sleeps and eats Sleeps and eats
(but not 6 months old) reacted differently to a develops regular irregularly more regularly
sleep and than the difficult
person who was unwilling to give them a toy than
feeding child, less
to a person who tried to give them a toy but
schedules regularly than
accidentally dropped it. the easy child
(The environment plays a role in nourishing the tendencies Takes to new Accepts new Shows mildly
foods easily. foods slowly. Is negative Initial
and capabilities)
Smiles at suspicious of response to new
Empathy – it’s the ability to put oneself in another person’s strangers. strangers. stimuli (a first
situation where you’re able to feel how a person feels. Adapts easily to Adapts slowly to encounter with a
new situations new situations, new food,
“Mirror Neurons” Accepts most Reacts to person, place, or
frustrations with frustration with situation)
• Responsible for our demonstration of empathy little fuss tantrums
and altruism Adapts quickly Adjusts slowly Gradually
• It is located in different parts of our brain to new routines to new routines develops liking
and rules of new for new stimuli
• It’s triggered when a person does something but
games after repeated,
also when he/she observes someone else doing unpressured
the same thing exposures
• By “mirroring” the activities and motivation of
others, they allow a person to see the world from
someone else’s point of view GOODNESS OF FIT

(Empathy depends on social cognition, it’s the ways in • The key to healthy adjustment.
which we process information about other people) • The match between a child's temperament and the
environmental demands and constraints the child
Temperament must deal with.
• It is our early individual differences that are • It is how well a child is soothed to their
biologically-based tendency of how we react in environment
our environment in certain patterns or what we
call “predictable ways”
• It plays a role mostly on evocative gene- EARLIEST SOCIAL EXPERIENCES: THE INFANT
environment correlation IN THE FAMILY
• It affects how children approach and react to the
outside world (so, the outside world also reacts
based on our temperament)
• It has something to do with how we regulate our
mental emotion and behavioral functioning

(Are all babies the same? No, because even in the first day
of your life, you are unique.)

TABLE 2 : Three Temperamental Patterns

(according to the New York Longitudinal Study)
Harry Harlow's Experiment – “The Monkey Mother
“Easy” Child “Difficult” Child “Slow-to-Warm-
Experiment Harlow” removed young monkeys from their
Up” Child
natural mothers a few hours after birth and left them to be
Has moods of Displays intense Has mildly
mild to and frequently Intense "raised" by these mother surrogates. The experiment
moderate negative moods; reactions, both demonstrated that the baby monkeys spent significantly
Intensity, cries often and positive and more time with their cloth mother than with their wire
usually positive. also laughs negative mother. Harlow wanted to explore the relationship between
loudly social isolation and mental illness, so he was trying to use
social isolation to induce psychopathology and depression
in monkeys.
 Erik Erikson’s Psychosocial Theory:
Mary Ainsworth’s Strange Situation – Mary Ainsworth's
attachment theory is a culmination of her work in Uganda,
with the Baltimore Project, and John Bowlby's theories of
research and development. Her theory states that children
and infants need to develop a secure dependence on their
parents before seeking unfamiliar situations.
What were the researchers measuring?
• Proximity and Contact-Seeking
• Contact Maintaining
• Avoidance of Proximity and Contact
• Resistance to Contact and Comforting
Secure Attachment – (70% of infants) show distress when
separated from mother. Avoidant of stranger, unless
accompanied by mother, and happy to see mother after
separation.
Ambivalent Attachment – (15% of infants) show intense
distress when separated from mother. Significant fear of
stranger, and approach mother but reject contact after
separation.
Avoidant Attachment – (15% of infants) show no interest
when separated from mother, play happily with stranger,
and ignores mother after separation.
Disorganised Attachment – (4% of infants) show
inconsistent attachment behaviors (added by Main and
Solomon in 1990)
Caregiver Sensitivity Hypothesis – Differences in infants'
attachment styles are dependent on the mother's behaviour
during a critical period of development.
Bowlby's Stages of Separation Anxiety:
1. Protest – wanting you to stay
2. Despair – crying and withdrawing
3. Dettachment – holding together until you come
back
Mutual regulation – Process by which infant and caregiver
communicate emotional states to each other and respond
appropriately.
Social referencing – Understanding an ambiguous situation
by seeking another person's perception of it.
DEVELOPMENTAL ISSUES IN TODDLERHOOD
EMERGING SENSE OF SELF – the self-concept is our
image of ourselves-our total picture of our abilities and
traits. It describes what we know and feel about ourselves
and guides our actions.
Autonomy vs. Shame and Doubt:
Socialization – The process whereby individuals
unconsciously and consciously learn to act, feel, and think
dependably together but not necessarily alike in behalf of
human welfare outside their own. It rests on internalization
of the standards that we learn about.
Self-regulation – A child's independent control of behavior
to conform to understood social expectations. It is the
foundation of socialization, and it links all domains of
development-physical, cognitive, emotional, and social.
Origins of Conscience: Committed Compliance

Conscience. Internal standards of behavior, which usually

control one's conduct and produce emotional discomfort
when violated.

Situational Compliance – Kochanska's term for obedience

of a parent's orders only in the presence of signs of ongoing
parental control.

Committed Compliance – Kochanska's term for

wholehearted obedience of a parent's orders without
reminders or lapses.

Receptive Cooperation – Kochanska's term for eager

willingness to cooperate harmoniously with a parent in
daily interactions, including routines, chores, hygiene, and
play.

Maltreatment: Abuse and Neglect

Maltreatment can take several specific forms, and the

same child can be a victim of more than one type
(USDHHS, Administration on Children, Youth and
Families 2008). These types include the following:

• Physical abuse, injury to the body through

punching, beating, kicking, or burning
• Neglect, failure to meet a child's basic needs,
such as food, clothing, medical care, protection,
and supervision
• Sexual abuse, any sexual activity involving a
child and an older person
• Emotional maltreatment, including rejection.
terrorization, isolation, exploitation degradation.
ridicule, or failure to provide emotional support,
love, and affection

Nonorganic failure to thrive – Slowed or arrested physical

growth with no known medical cause, accompanied by
poor developmental and emotional functioning.

Shaken baby syndrome – Form of maltreatment in which

shaking an infant or toddler can cause brain damage,
paralysis, or death.