Developmental psychology
Chapter 6
Emotional development and attachment relationships

Introduction

Emotional development underlies many other aspects of development, and has serious implications for how we conduct research with children.

Emotional development

Children’s emotional development can broadly be divided into three areas.

• Young children’s ability to recognize different facial expressions and to convey their own emotions.
• Children’s understanding of emotions.
• Children’s ability to regulate their emotions.

Expressing and recognizing emotional expressions

Are expressions of emotions innate?

Cross-cultural evidence

There is good evidence for the universality of human facial expressions of emotion.
Understanding of how emotions are conveyed through facial expressions is universal, but does not necessarily mean that understanding emotional expressions is innate.

Expressions of emotion in infancy

Infants from birth spontaneously display a wide repertoire of emotions though their facial expressions.

Basic emotions: happiness, interest, surprise, disgust, sadness, distress, anger, fear.
Complex emotions: pride, shyness, jealousy, guilt, shame, embarrassment.

Adults are skillful in accurately reading infants’ expressions.
However, adults are less accurate in discriminating infant’s negative facial expressions indicative of fear, anger, sadness or disgust. This appears not to be due to a lack of subtlety in young infants’ expression, but to the fact that the facial expressions arising from these different emotions are quite similar.

There is a biological basis for infant’s emotional facial expressions.
Multiple facial cues are used to signal emotion and the ability to convey and accurately interpret emotional expressions is impressively robust.

Infants indisputably display basic emotions very early in life. But there is considerable debate about when complex emotions emerge.

Infant discrimination of facial expressions

3-month-olds can distinguish between photographs of people smiling and frowning.
4- to 7-month-olds can distinguish between expressions of happiness and surprise.

Can young infants empathize with others’ emotions?

Very young infants may be emphasizing with the emotion they see portrayed.
But we cannot be sure.

Social referencing

Social referencing: infants and young children look at their caregiver for ‘advice’ when faced with an difficult or uncertain situation and seek social cures to guide their actions.
This provides and excellent way to assess infants’ understanding of other people’s emotional expressions.

Emotion understanding

Children begin to talk about emotions at a surprisingly young age, and parents readily give anecdotal accounts of their children using emotion words in the second year of life.

There are differences between emotional responses of infants and young children and those of older children and adults.

Emotional ambiguity: the realization that a person’s feelings may not be clear-cut or match your own emotional response.

Emotion understanding tasks

There are links between young children’s task-based understanding of emotions and their naturalistic behavior during play.
Emotional understanding may be related to children’s ability to form harmonious close relationships with others.

There is evidence that infants as young as 18 months can appreciate that another person might like something that they themselves dislike.

4 year olds could not use the capacity of understanding false belief to predict the likely emotional response, and thus appeared unable to integrate their understanding of beliefs and emotions.
By age 6 they can.

Up to age 5 children are typically able to understand the public aspects of emotion.
Around age 7, children understand the mentalistic nature of emotions.
Between 9 and 11 years of age, children realize that one can feel two emotions in response to the same event, that cognitive strategies can be used to regulate emotions and that morals and moral transgressions relate to emotional responses.

There is a cross-cultural stability in the development of emotion understanding.

Factors relating to emotion understanding

There is a positive correlation between children’s emotion understanding and concurrent performance on theory of mind tasks.
There is evidence that emotion understanding is acquired earlier than theory of mind understanding. And emotion understanding may facilitate children’s acquisition of theory of mind abilities.
The quality of family interaction also relates to children’s emotion understanding.
A tendency to discuss people’s feelings and the causes of such emotions is related to children’s understanding of the emotional states of story characters and emotional conflicts.
Children are more likely to understand the relation between false belief and emotion if their mothers focuses on their mental characteristics when describing them.

Caregivers’ behavior early in the childhood has been found to predict children’s later emotion understanding.

Mind-mindedness: caregivers who are able to ‘read’ their infant’s signals appropriately. Maternal mind-mindedness is a good predictor of attachment security.

• Appropriate
  The caregiver has accurately interpreted the infant’s internal state.
• Non-attuned
  The caregiver has misinterpreted the infant’s internal state.

Callous-unemotional traits.
Include:

• General poverty of affect
• Showing a lack of remorse and a disregard of accepted values

High levels of CU traits in middle school and adolescence are associated with problems in emotion processing and emphasizing with others. These problems are specific to emotion understanding. (theory of mind is not a problem).
Interventions to improve these children’s emotion understanding are effective.

Emotion regulation

Emotion regulation: adjusting one’s emotional state to a suitable level of intensity. This prevents emotional ‘overload’ and allows one to function in a consistent manner.

Children as young as 3 years old show some ability to control their expression of mild negative emotions in a test situation.
There is evidence that, as early as the second year of life, children have begun to regulate their displays of emotion.

Reasons:

• Hiding one’s emotion is often explicitly dealt with in children’s general socialization.
• Children’s ability to control their feelings will be encouraged, particularly for social undesirable emotions.

Children’s tendency to feel guilty after staged missteps positively correlates with their ability to regulate their behavior.
Children’s conscience development between 2 and 5 years of age predicted their later competence and social behavior.

Factors that predict children’s conscience development:

• Early parent-child mutually response orientation (MRO)

Shared cooperation and positive affect between parent and child and parental responsiveness to the child.

Attachment relationships

Bowlby’s theory of attachment

Attachment as a innate drive

The infant’s expression of emotion and the caregiver’s response of these emotions lies at the heart of John Bowlby’s theory of attachment.
Before Bowlby, the predominant view of infant-mother attachment was that it was a secondary drive (a by product of the infant associating the mother with providing for physiological needs).

Bowlby argued that attachment was an innate primary drive in the infant.

• In the original theory: the focus was on how instinctual behaviors such as crying, clinging and smiling serve a reciprocal attachment response from the caregiver.
• In the 1969 version of his theory: highlight the dynamics of attachment behavior, with a move toward explaining the infant-mother tie in terms of a goal-corrected system in which environmental cues triggered instinctual attachment behaviors. The main function of the attachment function is to enable the infant to maintain proximity to the caregiver.

Bowlby recognized that the establishment of an attachment relationship was not dependent purely upon the social and environmental interplay between infant and caregiver.
It depends on the infant’s level of cognitive development in terms of being able to represent an object that is not physically present.

The phases of attachment

attachments develop in phases:

• 0-2 months, pre-attachment phase. Typically show little differentiation in their social responses to familiar and unfamiliar people.
• 2-7 months, second phase. The foundations of attachment are being laid, with infants beginning to recognize their caregivers, although they do not yet show attachment behaviors upon separation.
• After 7 months, clear-cut attachments are seen. Infants protest at being separated from their caregivers and become wary of strangers. (stranger anxiety).
• 2 years, the final phase of attachment. The attachment relationship has evolved into a goal-corrected partnership between infant and caregiver. This phase is marked by the child’s increased independence and recognition of the caregiver’s needs and motives that sometimes separation is necessary.
  • From this phase onwards, the child relies on representations or internal working models of attachment relationships to guide their future interactions.

Two most widely used instruments in developmental psychology to investigate Bowlby’s theoretical claims.

• The strange situation procedure
• Adult attachment interview (a semi-structured interview in which adults are asked to describe their childhood relationships with mother and father, and to recall times when they were separated form their parents or felt upset or rejected.

Mary Ainsworth and the strange situation procedure

Maternal deprivation: a term to describe the deprivation infants experience as result of long-term separation from their mother, or from being orphaned.

Strange situation procedure.
Typically conducted when the infant is between 1 and 2 years of age.
In the testing room, there are two chairs, one for the caregiver and one for the stranger, and a range of toys with which the infant can play.
Procedure:

1. Caregiver and infant introduced into room
2. Caregiver and infant alone, infant free to explore
3. Female stranger enters sits down, talks to caregiver and then tries to engage the infant in play.
4. Caregiver leaves. Stranger and infant alone
5. First reunion. Caregiver returns and stranger leaves unobtrusively. Caregiver settles infant if necessary, and attempts to re-engage infant in play.
6. Caregiver leaves. Infant alone
7. Stranger returns and tries to settle infant if necessary, and attempts to re-engage infant in play.
8. Second reunion. Mother returns and stranger leaves unobtrusively. Mother settles infant in necessary, and tries to withdraw to her chair.

Infant’s responses during the two reunion episodes are most crucial, and form the basis for assessing and infant’s security of attachment.
Infant behavior is described according to four indices:

• Proximity-seeking
• Contact-maintenance
• Resistance
• Avoidance

Different attachment types

Secure attachments

• Infants who find comfort and consolation in the presence of a caregiver, and who seek comfort from that person if distressed by separation.
• The dynamics of the attachment relationship is a balance between exploratory behavior directed toward the environment and attachment behavior directed toward the caregiver.
• Securely attached infants may or may not become distressed by being separated from their caregivers, but regardless of their response to separation, securely attached children are marked by their positive and quick response to the caregivers return. Shown by their readiness to greet, approach and interact with the caregiver.

Insecure avoidant

• Infants who appear indifferent toward their caregiver, and treat the stranger and caregiver in very similar ways.
• High levels of environment-directed behavior to the detriment of attachment behavior.
• Show little if any proximity-seeking, and even tend to avoid the caregiver, by averting gaze or turning or moving away, if the caregiver takes the initiative in making contact.

Insecure-resistant

• Infants who are over-involved with the caregiver, showing attachment behavior even during the pre-separation episodes, with little exploration or interest in the environment.
• Tend to become extremely distressed upon separation, but the over-activation of their attachment system hampers their ability to be comforted by the caregiver upon reunion. This lead s to angry or petulant behavior, with the infant resisting contact with and comfort form the caregiver.

Insecure disorganized

• Infants seem disoriented during the strange situation procedure, and show no clear strategy for coping with separation from and reunion with their caregivers.
• The infant may simultaneously demonstrate contradictory behaviors during the reunion episodes, such as proximity-seeking coupled with obvious avoidance. These infants may also respond to reunion with fearful, stereotypical or odd behaviors, such as rocking themselves, ear-pulling or freezing.
• The characteristic disorganized behaviors all share a lack of coherence in the infant’s response to attachment distress and betray the ‘contradiction or inhibition of action as it is being undertaken’.

The majority of infants are classified as secure, but over a third of infants fall into the three insecure attachment categories, so insecure attachment should not be regarded as abnormal.

Factors predicting attachment security

Individual differences in the caregiver’s sensitivity to the infant’s cues were the earliest reported predictors of attachment security.
Mothers who responded most sensitively to their infants’ cues during the first year of life tended subsequently to have securely attached infants.
The insecure-avoidant pattern of attachment was associated with mothers who tended to reject or ignore the infants’ cues. And inconsistent patterns of mothering were related to insecure-resistant attachment

Mothers of securely attached infants appeared to be capable of perceiving things form the child’s point of view.
Mind-mindedness has been shown to be a better predictor of attachment security.
Mind-mindedness can distinguish between the four attachment groups.

Internal working models and the adult attachment interview

Attachment theory proposes that children use their early experiences with their caregivers to form internal working models which incorporate representations of themselves, their caregivers and their relationships with others. The child will then use these these internal working models as templates for interacting with others.

Attachment categories in adults

Individuals’ representations of their early childhood experiences with attachment figures are assessed during the Adult Attachment Interview, a semi-structured interview in which adults are asked to describe their childhood relationships with mother and father, and to recall times when they were separated from their parents or felt upset or rejected.

Adults are placed into one of four attachment categories. There are based on the way their represent their experiences, be they good or bad.

Autonomous

• Adults who give a coherent, well-balanced account their attachment experiences, showing a clear valuing of close personal relationships.
• These adults may have experienced problems in childhood, or even had very difficult upbringings, but they talk openly about negative experiences and seem to have managed to resolve any early difficulties and conflicts.

Dismissing

• Adults who deny the importance of attachment experiences and insist they cannot recall childhood events and emotions, or provide idealized representations of their attachment relationships that they are unable to corroborate with real life events.

Preoccupied

• Adults who are unable to move on from their childhood experiences, and are still over-involved with issues relating to their early attachment relationships.

Unresolved

• Adults who have not been able to resolve feelings to the death of a loved one or to a trauma that they may have suffered.

Assessing internal models in children

Researches have developed various methods to assess internal working models of attachment during childhood. These methods are known as representational measures of attachment.
Can be used with children from age 3 upwards.
They assess attachment security in terms of children’s reaction to emotionally provocative themes that aim to trigger an attachment-related response. These themes can be presented in picture or photograph format, or as the beginning of stories. The child is asked how the story will end or what the child in the picture will do.
Attachment security is assigned on the basis of whether the child recognizes the distress, and the extend to which the child uses attachment figures to assuage any distress.
There is no definitive way of establishing whether the child’s responses in these tasks are actually anchored in their own experiences of attachment relationships.

Parental AAI classification and infant-parent attachment

Parental AAI classifications have been found to relate systematically to the security of the infant-parent attachment relationship.
The way in which a parent represents their own childhood attachment experiences is related to the types of relationship formed with their own children.

Longitudinal stability in attachment security

Attachment security remains stable in only about half of the infants over a 6-month period (12 to 18 months).

There is little evidence to suggest that patterns of attachment remain stable over either relatively short or very long periods of time.