EMOTIONAL AND PERSONALITY DEVELOPMENT IN INFANTS

EMOTIONS

What are emotions like for an infant? Are they the feeling of sadness when a parent leaves the room, the feeling of anger when a bottle is empty, or the feeling of happiness at the site of a new toy? Emotion is the feeling or affect that involves a mixture of physiological arousal (a fast heartbeat) and overt behavior (a smile, for example).

Classifying Infant Emotions

There are many ways you can classify different emotions. Sometimes it may be difficult to tell what type of smile the infant is giving you, or why the infant is really crying. In both of these instances the infant can be showing positive or negative emotions.

Positive affectivity (PA) refers to the range of positive emotions form high energy, enthusiasm, and excitement to calm, quiet, and withdrawn. Joy, happieness and laughter involve positive affectivity.

Negative afftectivity (NA) refers to emotions that are negatively toned, such as anxiety, anger, guilt and sadness.

Affect in parent-infant relationships
Emotions are the first forms of communications between parents and their infants before the infant is able to speak. Infants react to their parents facial expressions and the tones of their voices, while parents communicate to the infant by responding to their actions.

 

Personality

When psychologists discuss personality amoung infants the three central characteristics they use are trust, self and independance.

 

Trust is what Erik Erikson emphasizes in the first year of life. In his eight stages of personality development, trust verses mistrust is the first stage. Erikson states that trust in the infant years sets the stage for a lifelong expectation of what the world will be.

Self is something that infants develop at about 18 months. In two different tests that were done on infants in the second half of their second year of life, they recognized their own image in a mirror and coordinated with the actions of touching their own body.

Independence also surfaces in the second year of life according to psychologists Margaret Mahler and Erik Erikson. Mahler believes that the infants go through two processes, seperation then individuation. Seperation is the movement away from the mother and individuation involves the development of self. For Erikson, independence is the centerpiece in his second stage of development, the stage of autonomy verses shame and doubt. Autonomy builds on the infant's development of mental and motor abilities. Erikson believes this stage has important implications for the development of independence and identity during adolescence.

[Reference: Life-Span Development, (7th ed.) by John W. Santrock,1999, The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.]