Babies In Developmental Psychology

In both articles, infants’ gazes are crucial to the experiments conducted. Whether reacting to disappearing objects in Baillargeon's article or identifying with someone of the same skin color as said in Spelke and Kinzler’s article.

Saxe identifies this group as preverbal babies. By studying the behaviors of these infants, psychologists are able determine that basic instinct that humans share. These babies, aged between four and twelve months, are much too young to be influenced by the institution around them. The infants are also too young to communicate their thought processes, so psychologists analyze the only responses these infants can communicate, looking and crawling. In the experiment involving these preverbal infants, babies were shown videos of one man being “nice” to a girl while another was “mean” to the girl.

The physical development of a baby in its first six months of life shows limited range of movement but the beginnings of an ability to respond to stimulus around them. They show their reaction to people, sounds and movement by turning their head toward whatever attracts their attention. They will watch an adult’s face whilst feeding, but have already begun to shows signs of recognition as they will smile when familiar people are around them either because they can see them

Science released an article entitled “Facial Expressions—Including Fear—May Not Be as Universal as We Thought”, written by Michael Pierce on October 17, 2016. In this article Pierce discusses how 50 years ago it was assumed that facial expressions were universal. However, it has been found that in the present day, this may not be the case. Expressions such as happiness, anger, sadness, fear, disgust, or hunger, were all assumed to be expressed the same way as well as interpreted the same way. A study was conducted in the Trobriand Islands, were Trobrianders were shown as series of photos with facial expressions. They were asked to describe the emotions they interpreted from the photos, the results were intriguing. Pierce (2016) describes how

There are three main theories of development that I shall discuss in this assignment, 'Cognitive', the main theorist being, 'Piaget', (1896 - 1980), The, 'Psychosocial Theory', 'Erikson', (1902 - 1994), and, The 'Psychosexual', of, 'Freud', (1856 - 1939).

In David Eagleman’s documentary, “Why Do I Need You?” he describes the importance of social interaction in the development of our brain. It is fundamental to interact with others and work holistically because it helps our brain to grow ultimately benefiting both the individual and society. Understanding people’s facial expressions, something so quick it is almost done unconsciously, is a vital aspect in communication. Eagle man demonstrates how individual from a young age, as early as twelve months, can understand the importance of socialization from their “inborn instincts” and through the observation of others to decide who to play and not play with. We thrive from understanding people’s social signal and without it it can become very hard

It is important because from the findings of this experiment, we can relate it to the attractiveness adults see in other adults. Adults who are more attractive and have a symmetrical face are preferred over others. This experiment also brought up a good fact that, no matter what age you are, it is harder to distinguish a face if inverted. This experiment overall not only provides information about newborn infants perception, it provides a basis for development. We can use this information and connect it to development from birth to

Lewis and Brooks-Gunn (1979) ‘Rouge test’- looked at the age to which infants achieve self recognition. They found that; the majority of infants smiled at their image, irrespective of age, and many of them pointed to the mirror or stretched out to touch it. When the infants had no rouge, few touched their nose or any part of their body. When the rouge was applied the results depended on the age of the baby. Although the 9 and 12 month old babies could see they had a red dot on their nose, they did not touch it. They showed no evidence of self recognition.

I have discovered that language is expressed in a wide variety of ways; orally, written words, pictures, through facial expressions or a person’s posture. A perfect example of this is a video depicting two toddler’s talking with one another even at this young age the two toddles are communicating without any real speech patterns and as the observer I could not help but notice that they were effectively expressing their thought with facial expressions

Gazing plays a central role in the social and cognitive development of a child. It is documented that from the age of 3 months, a child will begin to develop perceptual learning. An example of this hypothesis was tested with an actor holding a stuffed kitten in front a 1 year old. The 1 year old stared at the kitten longer, therefore the infant’s desire for what the actor was holding caused the infant to interpret the actor’s behavior as

The children comprehension of emotions was tested on children as young as 2 years old (Widen & Rusell, 2003) and in addition

the kind of faces that have been seen during the early infancy. Evidence included a study

Another important factor of an infant’s development is their cognitive development. Cognition is the mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience, and the senses. The infant’s cognitive development can be assessed through measuring the five senses (Groark, McCarthy & Kirk, 2014). The baby’s senses start to develop in the womb and get better as they develop.

There are many ways a parents can affect an early childhood child psychosocial. During this time is crucial for the child not to receive a lot of stress from the parents because their brain is still developing. Extreme stress from the parents may cause cortisol to flood the brain. When there is too much cortisol in the brain parts of the hippocampus get destroyed. The hippocampus is in charge of memory, so the child will for sure suffer memory loss in the future. The hypothalamus will also be affected. The hypothalamus is in charge of emotion. Any child who experiences high levels of stress and lack a nurturing parent are at a high risk of having regulated emotions. The hormone production is caused by parental responses. Too much of the hormone early in life and the child will have major depression, post traumatic stress disorder, and attention-deficit/hyperactive disorder.

When mom and dad smile with their baby, the baby smiles back. If mom or dad makes a sad face, the baby sees there is no joy in their face and will start to instinctively begin to frown. Even though that this pattern of happy and sad facial expressions are intuitive, it is also providing the baby with experience of how facial expressions are displaying playing happiness and sadness.