Introduction

• Attachments between infants and caregivers develop in the context of a differentiating emotional and social world. Younger infants' become social partners who can anticipate others' actions, respond to social overtures, and purposefully direct social give-and-take and older infants acquire specific attachments and regulate emotional expression more effectively.

Development in the First Six Months

• Beliefs about newborn capacities have seen two extremes: the historical view of the incompetent infant (e.g., William James's view) and the more recent view of even young infants possessing desires, expectations, purpose, and will. Neither view is satisfactory. Babies are attuned to becoming social in the presence of responsive social partners.
• The Newborn as Preadapted to Social Exchanges
1. Built-in ability to signal psychological and physiological needs in ways adults can interpret and are likely to respond to. Babies will cry, at first due to overexcitation of the nervous system.
2. The capacity to detect contingencies in the environment. Infants notice events caused by their behaviors and repeat these behaviors.
3. Built-in attraction to social stimuli. Newborns are preadapted to respond to facial stimuli, speech sounds, and to look toward auditory stimuli.
4. The baby's inclination to fall in step with the caregiver's behavior.
• Origins of Reciprocity
1. Reciprocity - social interactions involving mutual exchanges. Development sets the stage for true social interactions as babies become increasingly more communicative with coos and smiles, more alert and active, more controlled in their attention, more able to coordinate looking and reaching, and more able to turn voluntarily from stimulation.
2. Social learning theorists emphasize the mutual reinforcement of reciprocity.
3. Brazelton sees the caregiver as providing a holding framework for the baby.
4. Attunement - caregivers draw forth and enhance the infant's attention and involvement, pacing and modifying the stimulation in coordination with signs from the baby, which is part of a more general style of behavior known as sensitive care. Aware of a baby's feelings and needs and responding to them promptly and effectively
• The beginnings of sensitive care can be seen in the feeding of newborns.
• By age 3 or 4 months, baby's involvement in social interactions becomes more complex-facial expressions increase in complexity, sounds made become more communicative, head and eye movement control is advanced, will search for interesting stimuli, and will pull away from overstimulation.
• Becoming an Active Participant: The Example of Social Smiling
1. Newborns' smiles are spontaneous discharges of messages from the lower brain structures; parents often attribute higher order emotionality to these smiles which is important for relationship development as it encourages their interactions with the infant (adults are preadapted to interact with infants).
2. There are gentle fluctuations in arousal around a critical threshold, causing facial muscles to relax into a little smile.
3. Recognitory assimilation - assimilates an event into an established scheme-describes smiling between about 8 to 10 weeks where infants smile when interacting with caregivers and when recognizing objects. Fluctuations of arousal bring about smiling due to cognitive effort. By 4 months, infants smile at people they know.
• Emotional Development
1. Includes the emergence of various emotions and development of emotional regulation.
2. Forerunners of Basic Emotions
• Emotion - a state of feeling that arises when a person evaluates an event in a particular way. Usually there are physiological and behavioral correlates.
• Basic emotions emerge gradually during the first six months as emotional responses become increasingly differentiated and increasingly tied to the meaning of specific events.
• By 3 months, infants begin to show more specific emotional responses to events.
• Between 3 and 6 months, infants begin to show wariness after prolonged inspection of an unfamiliar face and frustration when prevented from carrying out an established motor routine (e.g., grasping and mouthing a toy). These differ from mature emotions:
1. Require time to build up.
2. Very general meanings are attached to these emotions.
3. Responses are global and not well differentiated.
3. The Beginnings of Emotional Regulation and Coping
• Babies gradually acquire the capacity to cope with or manage emotionally arousing situations. Newborns have deep sleep after experiencing unpleasantness. By 4 or 5 months, they will turn away from a source of stimulation.
• Crying is a coping technique.

Development in the Second Six Months

• Cognitive development makes babies increasingly able to recognize specific people as separate, independent entities who act and can be acted upon. There is the capacity for intentional behavior and a rudimentary sense of self is present. Brain organization underlies emotional changes as well.
• Between 6 and 12 months, babies' social behavior becomes increasingly organized around their principal caregivers, with purposefulness.
• Development during this period involves qualitative change.
• Emotional Development
1. Emotional reactions become more frequent and change in fundamental ways:
• Clearly differentiated specific emotions emerge.
• Emotional responses become increasingly immediate, rather than requiring time to build up.
• All the classic facial expressions of emotion begin to appear regularly.
2. By the end of this period, infants recall past events, anticipate outcomes, and behave intentionally. Their emotional reactions respond to events with particular meanings. Will see genuine emotions of joy, anger, fear, and surprise.
3. Emotional Reactions to the Unfamiliar
• Stranger distress - babies react negatively to strangers; begins around 7 to 10 months and continues for another several months.
• Context influences reactions to strangers. Rapid approach by a stranger and a stranger picking the child up often results in distress. If the caregiver is close by and is not upset by the stranger, the distress is less.
4. Emotional Regulation and Coping
• Techniques for emotion regulation expand and become more subtle, flexible, and serviceable (stranger approach example).
• Moving toward the caregiver and purposeful signaling to the caregiver (e.g., calling, gesturing, emitting distress signals) are now used for coping. It is dydactic regulation-is accomplished by caregiver and infant together.
• The Formation of Attachments
1. Attachment - an enduring emotional tie between an infant and caregiver. Has special emotional qualities. These are seen by 12 months of age.
2. Hallmarks of Attachment
• The development of attachment follows a regular course across diverse cultures. One sign of attachment is separation distress-cry when caregivers temporarily leave them.
• Greeting reactions - immediate joy response upon seeing caretaker.
• Secure-base behavior - explore more confidently when the caregiver is present, and monitor the caregiver's accessibility, checking back from a distance.

The Bases of Attachment

• Attachment is distinct from bonding-the parent's tie to the newborn. Unlike bonding, attachment is a two-way relationship between parent and infant that develops over a long period of time.
• Attachment does not occur only with biological parents. Infants can become attached to more than one person and show a hierarchical attachment pattern, which makes evolutionary sense.
• Psychoanalytic theory and traditional learning theory suggested that infants became attached to the mother because she was associated with feeding.
• Erikson and Bowlby placed more emphasis on the interaction between caregiver and infant. According to Bowlby all that is required for an attachment to form is that an adult be present to engage the infant; food need not be involved.
• Harlow's classic studies support Bowlby's view. Baby monkeys preferred a soft, terry cloth "mother" over a wire "mother" who fed the monkey.
• Not all attachments are the same.

Explaining Individual Differences in Early Social and Emotional Development

• There are two major approaches for explaining individual differences in infant behavior. One is based on Erikson and Bowlby's ideas emphasizing quality of care the infant receives and the resulting variability in the security of infant-caregiver attachment. The other emphasizes the infant's inborn temperament, based on genetic makeup and other biological influences.
• The Attachment Framework
1. In all but the most extreme cases, infants become attached to a caregiver.
2. As Bowlby noted, when infants experience sensitive care, they become confident the caregiver will be responsive, giving the infant a secure base for exploration. This is what Erikson meant by trust and Bowlby meant by secure attachment. The negative result is mistrust or insecure/anxious attachment.
3. Patterns of Attachment
• Quality of attachment is usually assessed by placing infants in a laboratory procedure called the Strange Situation, where an infant is left alone briefly with a stranger after the mother leaves the room, and then is reunited with mother in the room. Reactions are thought to reveal attachment quality.
• Most infants (around 70 percent) form a secure attachment; they use their mothers as secure bases for exploration, seek and receive comfort from them, and show positive emotional responses to them.
• Infants with an anxious attachment are unable to use the caregiver as a secure base for exploration.
1. In anxious-resistant attachment, infants have trouble separating from their mothers to explore, yet show ambivalence toward contact with them. In the face of inconsistent or chaotic care, these infants may be called upon to respond with great intensity to get the caregiver to respond adequately.
2. In anxious-avoidant attachment, infants separate readily from their mothers and avoid them when mothers return after a brief separation. The more stress there is, the more they avoid her. Result of past rejection from the caregiver.
3. In disorganized-disoriented attachment, infants have no consistent way of interacting with their caregivers. Show contradictory features. Often the result of abusive in the infant-caregiver relationship.
4. Quality of Care and Security of Attachment
• Two approaches to assessing care:
1. Assess parent-infant interaction when the baby is very young and later assess security of attachment. Sensitive care is associated with secure attachment to mothers and to fathers.
2. Identify parents who clearly neglect or maltreat their infants and compare their babies' attachments with those of infants whose parents do not neglect/maltreat. Anxious attachments have been found in the prior group.
• Particular types of insensitive care appear to be associated with a caregiver who is indifferent and emotionally unavailable or who actively rejects the baby when he seeks closeness (e.g., Anxious-resistant attachment is associated with inconsistent care, including exaggerated behaviors on the part of the mother and ineffective soothing that often becomes over-stimulation).
• Children do not learn to be "crybabies" through reinforcement. Prompt and effective response to cries causes less crying in infants and more secure attachment. By 12 months, they are confident of prompt responses and don't need to signal alarm at the slightest stress.

The Context of Caregiving

• Factors Related to Attachment:
1. The amount of stress in the caregiver's life - when the amount of stress decreases, the caregiving becomes more sensitive.
2. The social support available to the caregiver - those who provide caregiving without support also tend to experience more financial pressure and stresses of other kinds.
3. The caregiver's own developmental history - using the Adult Attachment Interview (Main), there is a correlation between own attachment history and type of attachment one has to one's own child. Animal studies support this correlation.
• Infant Attachment and Later Development
1. Different patterns of attachment reflect differences in infants' expectations of the social world - internal working models.
2. These include expectations of the availability of the caregiver, the infant's own worthiness and ability to obtain care, and social relationships in general. These models influence later relationships. Influences the child's degree of self-confidence, sociability, and capacity to cope with challenges.
• The Temperament Framework
1. Temperament refers to an individual infant's general style of behavior across contexts; it includes a variety of behavioral characteristics such as general activity level, irritability, proneness to distress, reactivity, and inhibition.
2. Thomas and Chess conducted one of the first temperament studies. From their rating system, they derived three clusters of characteristics, resulting in three categories of infant temperament:
• Easy babies - high biological regularity, readily approached new objects and people, highly adaptable, mostly positive in mood.
• Difficult babies - biologically irregular, tend to withdraw from novelty, low in adaptability, and intense, mostly negative mood.
• Slow-to-warm-up - moderate regularity, mildly negative reactions to novelty, but adapted after repeated exposure.
3. Stability of Temperament
• Parent report studies did find stability in temperament but had flaws because they did not begin with newborns and parental reports may be biased by expectations. Recent research has attempted to correct these issues.
• Newborn behavior and later behavior are not highly correlated. By 12 months, there is greater predictability into childhood for characteristics such as frequency of negative and positive emotions and intensity of reactions to stimulation.
4. Biology of Temperament
• Infants who are wary in new situations have higher or more variable heart rates and blood pressure than less wary infants do. Associations have been found between hormone levels and a baby's emotional responses.
5. The Genetics of Temperament
• Many studies show more similarity in temperament between identical twins than between fraternal twins. Yet, environment may play a role as fraternal twins do not become more similar on temperament traits while identical twins do and twins separated at birth are less similar than identical twins raised together.
• Temperament and Attachment
1. Some researchers argued that attachment differences can be explained on the basis of temperament differences. More recent research does not support this notion.
2. Quality of attachment refers to organization of behavior with respect to a particular partner while temperament refers to style of behavior regardless of partner.
• Temperament is related to certain behaviors in the Strange Situation (e.g., tendency to get upset) but not to security of attachment itself.
• Temperament may help to determine what constitutes sensitive care, and in turn fosters secure attachment, for a particular infant.
• Match-mismatch hypothesis-caregiver and infant characteristics may clash.
• Early infant characteristics may feed into the quality of care parents provide (affecting attachment). Infant irritability is handled differently by different cultures and SES.
• Temperament can be related to attachment when an infant's characteristics tax caregivers' ability to cope (e.g., extremely premature infants).

The Importance of Early Care

• The sensitive period hypothesis -- idea that certain kinds of experiences are especially important at particular points in development. For example, many believe that the quality of attachments formed in infancy sets the stage for later development. Animal studies with primates support this.
• All evidence suggests that humans are adversely affected by inadequate care in infancy
• Cultural Diversity and Common Humanity
1. Caregivers in all cultures recognize the importance of providing consistent, responsive care for young infants. They differ in the methods used in their care.
2. Cross-cultural variations in attachment have been found but must be interpreted cautiously.
3. Young infants show great similarity in emotional reactions and emotional development in the early months. By 12 months, cultural differences in experience begin to have an impact on emotional life.
• Enhancing the Quality of Early Care
1. The idea that early care is of special importance has been good for intervention program development and for theoretical reasons (support for the sensitive period hypothesis)
2. Some intervention studies have identified infants at risk for developmental problems (e.g., premature infants; irritable newborns of low-income mothers). Those who received the intervention programs do help parents become more responsive (and educated to parenting issues).
3. Intervention study results have been inconsistent but resulted in some conclusions:
• Interventions aimed at improving attachment relationships must be comprehensive, addressing the infant-caregiver relationship and the surrounding context.
• Intervention efforts must be intensive, lasting many months.
• Intervention should begin early, even before the end of pregnancy. This makes it possible to focus on life difficulties of the caregiver before the baby is born.
• The Special Impact of Early Experience
1. Basic expectations about oneself and the social world are laid down in infancy.
2. Ill effects of this time period cannot be corrected since these experiences cannot be examined consciously (Psychoanalytic perspective).
3. Genuine change can occur. Resilience may be related to timing of changes in experience, the quality of later experiences, or both.