Lifespan Development. Tara L. Kuther

(Dempsey, McQuillin, Butler, & Axelrad, 2016; Messer et al., 2018).

      What Do You Think?

      In your view, how can we best support mothers? If you were to create a program to help prevent depression or to help depressed mothers, what might you include?

      To sum up, over the first few months of life, infants display the full range of basic emotions. As their cognitive and social capabilities develop, they are able to experience complex social emotions, such as embarrassment. The social world plays a role in emotional development. Adults interact with infants, provide opportunities to observe and practice emotional expressions, and assist in regulating emotions. Much of emotional development is the result of the interplay of infants’ emerging capacities and the contexts in which they are raised, especially the emotional contexts within the home. The accompanying Lives in Context feature discusses the challenges maternal depression poses for emotional development.

      Thinking in Context 6.2

      1 Identify examples of how infants’ emotional development is influenced by their interactions with elements of their physical, social, and cultural context. Identify one aspect of each of these contexts that may promote healthy emotional development and one that might hinder emotional development. Explain your choices.

      2 In what ways might emotional display rules, such as those regarding the display of positive and negative emotions, illustrate adaptive responses to a particular context? Consider the context in which you were raised. What emotional displays do you think are most adaptive for infants?

      Temperament in Infancy and Toddlerhood

      “Joshua is such an easygoing baby!” gushed his babysitter. “He eats everything, barely cries, and falls asleep without a fuss. I wish all my babies were like him.” The babysitter is referring to Joshua’s temperament. Temperament, the characteristic way in which an individual approaches and reacts to people and situations, is thought to be one of the basic building blocks of emotion and personality. Temperament has strong biological determinants; behavior genetics research has shown genetic bases for temperament (Saudino & Micalizzi, 2015). Yet the expression of temperament reflects reciprocal interactions among genetic predispositions, maturation, and experience (Goodvin et al., 2015; Rothbart, 2011). Every infant behaves in a characteristic, predictable style that is influenced by his or her inborn tendencies toward arousal and stimulation as well as by experiences with adults and contexts. In other words, every infant displays a particular temperament style.

      Styles of Temperament

      Begun in 1956, the New York Longitudinal Study followed 133 infants into adulthood. Early in life, the infants in the study demonstrated differences several characteristics that are thought to capture the essence of temperament (Thomas & Chess, 1977; Thomas, Chess, & Birch, 1970). For example, infants differ in activity level; some wriggle, kick their legs, wave their arms, and move around a great deal, whereas others tend to be more still and stay in one place. Some infants have predictable patterns of eating and sleeping, and others are not predictable. Infants also differ in the intensity of their reactions, their tendency to approach or withdraw from new things, and their distractibility. Some aspects of infant temperament, particularly activity level, irritability, attention, and sociability or approach-withdrawal, show stability for months and years at a time and in some cases even into adulthood (Lemery-Chalfant, Kao, Swann, & Goldsmith, 2013; Papageorgiou et al., 2014). Thomas and Chess classified infant temperament into three profiles (Thomas & Chess, 1977; Thomas et al., 1970).

       Easy temperament: Easy babies are often in a positive mood, even-tempered, open, adaptable, regular, and predictable in biological functioning. They establish regular feeding and sleeping schedules easily.

       Difficult temperament: Difficult babies are active, irritable, and irregular in biological rhythms. They are slow to adapt to changes in routine or new situations, react vigorously to change, and have trouble adjusting to new routines.

       Slow-to-warm-up temperament: Just as it sounds, slow-to-warm-up babies tend to be inactive, moody, and slow to adapt to new situations and people. They react to new situations with mild irritability but adjust more quickly than do infants with difficult temperaments.

      Although it may seem as if all babies could be easily classified, about one third of the infants in the New York Longitudinal Study did not fit squarely into any of the three categories but displayed a mix of characteristics, such as eating and sleeping regularly but being slow to warm up to new situations (Thomas & Chess, 1977; Thomas et al., 1970).

      Another influential model of temperament, by Mary Rothbart, includes three dimensions (Rothbart, 2011; Rothbart & Bates, 2007):

       Extraversion/surgency: the tendency toward positive emotions. Infants who are high in extraversion/surgency approach experiences with confidence, energy, and positivity, as indicated by smiles, laughter, and approach-oriented behaviors.

       Negative affectivity: the tendency toward negative emotions, such as sadness, fear, distress, and irritability.

       Effortful control: the degree to which one can focus attention, shift attention, and inhibit responses in order to manage arousal. Infants who are high in effortful control are able to regulate their arousal and soothe themselves.

      From this perspective, temperament reflects how easily we become emotionally aroused or our reactivity to stimuli, as well as how well we are able to control our emotional arousal (Rothbart, 2011). Some infants and children are better able to distract themselves, focus their attention, and inhibit impulses than others. The ability to self-regulate and manage emotions and impulses is associated with positive long-term adjustment, including academic achievement, social competence, and resistance to stress, in both Chinese and North American samples (Chen & Schmidt, 2015).

      Infant temperament tends to be stable over the first year of life but less so than childhood temperament, which can show stability over years, even into adulthood (Bornstein et al., 2015). In infancy, temperament is especially open to environmental influences, such as interactions with others (Gartstein, Putnam, Aron, & Rothbart, 2016). Young infants’ temperament can change with experience, neural development, and sensitive caregiving (e.g., helping babies regulate their negative emotions) (Jonas et al., 2015; Thompson et al., 2013). As infants gain experience and learn how to regulate their states and emotions, those who are cranky and difficult may become less so. By the second year of life, styles of responding to situations and people are better established, and temperament becomes more stable. Temperament at age 3 remains stable, predicting temperament at age 6 and personality traits at age 26 (Dyson et al., 2015).

      Context and Goodness of Fit

      Like all aspects of development, temperament is influenced by reciprocal reactions among individuals and their contexts. An important influence on socioemotional development is the goodness of fit between the child’s temperament and the environment around him or her, especially the parents’ temperaments and childrearing methods (Chess & Thomas, 1991). Infants are at particular risk for poor outcomes when their temperaments show poor goodness of fit to the settings in which they live (Rothbart & Bates, 1998). For example, if an infant who is fussy, difficult, and slow to adapt to new situations is raised by a patient and sensitive caregiver who provides time for him or her to adapt to new routines, the infant may become less cranky and more flexible over time. The infant may adapt her temperament style to match her context so that later in childhood, she may no longer be classified as difficult and no longer display behavioral problems (J. Bates, Pettit, Dodge, & Ridge, 1998). If, on the other hand, a child with a difficult temperament is reared by a parent who is insensitive, coercive, and difficult in temperament, the child may not learn how to regulate her emotions and may have behavioral problems and adjustment difficulties that worsen with age, even into early adolescence and beyond (Pluess, Birkbeck, & Belsky, 2010). Accordingly, when children are placed in low-quality