In their first two years, infants progress from reactive pain and pleasure to complex patterns of social awareness (see At About This Time), a movement from basic instinctual emotions to learned and then thoughtful ones (Panksepp & Watt, 2011). Infant emotions arise more from the body than from thought, so speedy, uncensored reactions—crying, startling, laughing, raging—are common.

At first there is pleasure and pain. Newborns are happy and relaxed when fed and drifting off to sleep. They cry when they are hurt or hungry, tired or frightened (as by a loud noise or a sudden loss of support).

Some infants have bouts of uncontrollable crying, called colic, probably from immature digestion; some have reflux, probably from immature swallowing. About 20 percent of babies cry “excessively,” more than three hours a day, for more than three days a week, for more than three weeks (J. S. Kim, 2011).

Soon, additional emotions become recognizable. Curiosity is evident as infants (and people of all ages) respond to objects and experiences that are new but not too novel. Happiness is expressed by the social smile, evoked by a human face at about 6 weeks. Preterm babies smile a few weeks later because the social smile is affected by age since conception, not age since birth.

Infants worldwide express social joy, even laughter, between 2 and 4 months (Konner, 2007; Lewis, 2010). Laughter builds as curiosity does; a typical 6-month-old laughs loudly upon discovering new things, particularly social experiences that balance familiarity and surprise, such as Daddy making a funny face. They prefer looking at happy faces over sad ones, even if the happy faces are not looking at them (Kim & Johnson, 2013).

The positive emotions of joy and contentment are soon joined by negative emotions, which are expressed more often in infancy than later on (Izard, 2009). Anger is evident at 6 months, usually triggered by frustration, such as when infants are prevented from moving or grabbing.

To investigate infants’ response to frustration, researchers “crouched behind the child and gently restrained his or her arms for 2 minutes or until 20 seconds of hard crying ensued” (Mills-Koonce et al., 2011, p. 390). “Hard crying” was not infrequent: Infants hate to be strapped in, caged in, closed in, or even just held in place when they want to explore. In that study, frustrated infants whose fathers were less nurturant tended to be quicker to react with elevated cortisol, the stress hormone—an indication that the infants were already developing learned emotional reactions.

In infancy, anger is generally a healthy response to frustration, unlike sadness, which also appears in the first months. Sadness indicates withdrawal and is accompanied by a greater increase in the body’s production of cortisol.

205

This is one conclusion from experiments in which 4-month-olds were taught to pull a string to see a picture, which they enjoyed—not unlike the leg-kicking study to move the mobile, described in Chapter 6. Then the string was disconnected. Most babies reacted by angrily jerking the string. Some, however, quit trying and looked sad (Lewis & Ramsay, 2005); their cortisol rose markedly. This suggests that some babies learn, to their sorrow, to repress their anger.

Since sadness produces physiological stress (measured by cortisol levels), sorrow negatively impacts the infant. All social emotions, particularly sadness and fear, probably shape the brain (Fries & Pollak, 2007; M. H. Johnson, 2011). As you learned in Chapter 5, experience matters. Sad and angry infants whose mothers are depressed become fearful toddlers (Dix & Yan, 2014). Too much sadness early in life correlates with depression later on.

Fear in response to some person, thing, or situation (not just being startled in surprise) is evident at about 9 months and soon becomes more frequent and obvious. Two kinds of social fear are typical:

Separation anxiety—clinging and crying when a familiar caregiver is about to leave

Stranger wariness—fear of unfamiliar people, especially when they move too close, too quickly

Separation anxiety is normal at age 1, intensifies by age 2, and usually subsides after that. Fear of separation interferes with infant sleep. For example, infants who fall asleep next to familiar people may wake up frightened if they are alone (Sadeh et al., 2010). The solution is not necessarily to sleep with the baby, but neither is it to ignore the child’s natural fear of separation. (Developmental Link: Co-sleeping and bed-sharing are discussed in Chapter 5.)

Some babies are comforted by a “transitional object,” such as a teddy bear or blanket beside them, as they transition from sleeping in their parents’ arms to sleeping alone. Music, a night light, an open door, may all ease the fear.

Transitional objects are not pathological; they are the infant’s way of coping with anxiety. However, if separation anxiety remains strong after age 3 and impairs the child’s ability to leave home, go to school, or play with friends, it is considered an emotional disorder. Separation anxiety as a disorder can be diagnosed at any age and is quite different from the “strong interdependence among family members,” which is normative in some cultures (American Psychiatric Association, 2013, p. 193).

Separation anxiety may be apparent outside the home. Strangers—especially those who do not resemble or move like familiar caregivers—merit stares, not smiles, at age 1. This is a good sign: Infant memory is active and engaged. Fear of strangers is normative, which means that every toddler typically manifests it, but genes and parents make it stronger (with tears and hiding) or weaker (with a wary look). Children whose parents are themselves anxious are likely to fear new people throughout childhood (Brooker et al., 2013).

Many normal 1-year-olds fear anything unexpected, from the flush of the toilet to the pop of a jack-in-the-box, from closing elevator doors to the tail-wagging approach of a dog. With repeated experience and reassurance, older infants might enjoy flushing the toilet (again and again) or calling the dog (and might cry if the dog does not come). Note the transition from instinct to learning to thought (Panksepp & Watt, 2011).

Every aspect of early emotional development interacts with cultural beliefs, expressed in parental actions. There seems to be more separation anxiety and stranger wariness in Japan than in Germany because Japanese infants “have very few experiences with separation from the mother,” whereas in German towns, “infants are frequently left alone outside of stores or supermarkets” while their mothers shop (Saarni et al., 2006, p. 237).

206

Emotions take on new strength during toddlerhood, as both memory and mobility advance (Izard, 2009). For example, throughout the second year and beyond, anger and fear become less frequent but more focused, targeted toward infuriating or terrifying experiences. Similarly, laughing and crying are louder and more discriminating.

The new strength of emotions is apparent in temper tantrums. Toddlers are famous for fury. When something angers them they might yell, scream, cry, hit, and throw themselves on the floor. Logic is beyond them; if adults respond with anger or teasing, that makes it worse.

One child was angry at her feet and said she did not want them. When a parent offered to get scissors and cut them off, a new wail of tantrum erupted. With temper tantrums, soon sadness comes to the fore, at which time comfort—rather than acquiescence or punishment—is helpful (Green et al., 2011).

Temper can be seen as an expression of selfhood. So can new toddler emotions: pride, shame, jealousy, embarrassment, disgust, and guilt. These emotions require social awareness, which typically emerges from family interactions. For instance, in a study of infant jealousy, when mothers deliberately paid attention to another infant, babies moved closer to their mothers, bidding for attention. Brain activity also registered social awareness (Mize et al., 2014).

Culture is crucial here, with independence a value in some families but not in others. Many North American parents encourage toddler pride (saying, “You did it yourself”—even when that is untrue), but Asian families typically cultivate modesty and shame. Such differences may still be apparent in adult personality and judgment. Are you more likely to be annoyed at people who brag or who say they failed? Probably family values taught you that reaction.

Disgust is also strongly influenced by other people as well as by maturation. According to a study that involved many children of various ages, many 18-month-olds (but not younger infants) express disgust at touching a dead animal. None, however, are yet disgusted when a teenager curses at an elderly person—something that parents and older children often find disgusting (Stevenson et al., 2010).

In addition to social awareness, another foundation for emotional growth is self-awareness, the realization that one’s body, mind, and activities are distinct from those of other people (Kopp, 2011). Closely following the new mobility that results from walking is an emerging sense of “me” and “mine” that leads the infant to develop a new consciousness of others at about age 1.

Very young infants have no sense of self—at least of self as most people define it, but self-awareness grows during toddlerhood with

self-referential emotions …. By the end of the second year [about 20 months] and increasingly in the third [after 24 months], the simple joy of success becomes accompanied by looking and smiling to an adult and calling attention to the feat; the simple sadness of failure becomes accompanied either by avoidance of eye contact with the adult and turning away or by reparative activity and confession.

[Thompson, 2006, p. 79]

207

In a classic experiment (Lewis & Brooks, 1978), 9- to 24-month-olds looked into a mirror after a dot of rouge had been surreptitiously put on their noses. If they reacted by touching the red dot on their noses, that meant they knew the mirror showed their own faces. None of the babies younger than 12 months did that, although they sometimes smiled and touched the dot on the “other” baby in the mirror.

However, at some time between 15 and 24 months, babies become self-aware, touching their noses with curiosity and puzzlement. Self-recognition in the mirror/rouge test (and in photographs) usually emerges at about 18 months, along with two other advances: pretending and using first-person pronouns (I, me, mine, myself, my) (Lewis, 2010).

As another scholar explains it, “an explicit and hence reflective conception of the self is apparent at the early stage of language acquisition at around the same age that infants begin to recognize themselves in mirrors” (Rochat, 2013, p. 388). This is yet another example of the interplay of all the infant abilities—walking, talking, and emotional self-understanding all work together to make the 18-month-old a quite different person from the 8-month-old.