Welcome to the Class Wiki for Psych 732

This class is a topical seminar on Infancy.  The instructor is Dr. Peter Marshall.

The class consists of the following people:

Kelly Sowers, Becky McGill, Julia Alexander, Tilbe Goksun, Julia Parish, Sarah Roseberry, Bing Shi, Joanna Lee, Kate Wilson, and Justin Kenney.

Over the coming semester, we will be building this wiki into a lasting record of the course.  We will provide a weekly summary of the class activities, including links to some of the researchers whose work we are reading.

Wednesday, January 25

Our class session was spent reviewing some recent work on emotional expressions in infancy.  We began by discussing a chapter from an infancy textbook by Michael Lamb, Marc Bornstein, and Doug Teti.  This chapter introduced us to the study of infant emotion as well as to some of the current debates in the field.  The jigsaw groups then presented three other articles:  A review paper by Harriet Oster, an empirical article by Margaret Sullivan and Michael Lewis, and finally another article from Carroll Izard and Jo Ann Abe.

We closed the class with a discussion of the opening chapters in “Early experience and the life path” by Ann Clarke and Alan Clarke.  Related to this discussion was the recent developmental symposium given in the Psychology Department by Avi Sagi-Schwartz.

Wednesday, February 1

 

We began the class session with a discussion of the core reading, which was a review article by Riccardo Draghi-Lorenz, Vasudevi Reddy and Alan Costall.  This article mainly contrasted two approaches to the conceptualization of “nonbasic emotions” in infancy, specifically the approaches espoused by Michael Lewis and Colwyn Trevarthen. 

The jigsaw reading for the week was based on the premise that major theories of emotional development see the development of a meta-representation of self as being essential for the ability to express and experience emotions such as jealousy, empathy, embarrassment and pride.  One of the main experimental tasks for assessing the development of such a metarepresentation is the rouge task.  In our first paper, Michael Lewis and Douglas Ramsay explored the confluence of self-recognition in the rouge task, pretend play, and the use of personal pronouns in the second half of the first year of life.  The second paper was a very detailed study by Mary Courage, Shannon Edison, and Mark Howe which concerned the variability and stability of self-recognition from 15 to 24 months of age.  The third paper by Philippe Rochat and Tricia Striano described quite a different research paradigm which involved assessing young infants’ behavioral reactions to seeing either their own reflection or the image of an adult experiment who was mirroring their physical movements.  Finally, we drew from two review papers from Mary Courage and Mark Howe which summarized some of the issues that we had been talking about.


The early intervention reading for this week was the next two chapters in Early Experience in the Life Path by the Clarkes.  

 

Wednesday, February 8


Today's topic was emotion regulation, which as we know, can be difficult to define.  The core reading for the week was a chapter by Susan Neufeld and Claire Kopp from the Handbook of Affective Sciences.  These authors provided a helpful history of research trends in infant emotion research, although the most salient part of the chapter for today's class was the closing section on emotion regulation.  We used the chapter to frame the various regulatory strategies that are available to infants of different ages, as well as the constraints on regulation in terms of infant cognitive and social capacities.

The first jigsaw reading was a particularly interesting paper by Marinus van Ijzendoorn and Frans Hubbard concerning the relations between infant crying and maternal responsiveness in the first nine months and attachment at 15 months of age.  Although the paper had a number of interesting findings, the one that was most relevant for us concerned the "benign neglect" of infant crying in the first months of life being associated with shorter durations of crying bouts in the second period of the study.  The other jigsaw papers used various methods to explore emotion regulation.  Julia Braungart-Rieker and colleagues examined regulation in the still-face paradigm in relation to maternal and paternal sensitivity.  A paper by Cindy Stifter and colleagues found relations between emotion regulation in frustration tasks in infancy and compliance at 2.5 years. Finally, Ruth Feldman, Charles Greenbaum, and Nurit Yirmiya related affective synchrony during early mother-infant interactions to self-control at 2 years of age.

For this week’s early experience reading, we finished “Early experience and the life path” by Ann and Alan Clarke.  We closed our class session with a short but spirited discussion of the overall merits of the book.


Wednesday, February 15


Today’s class was mostly spent in a discussion of various aspects of emotion perception and social referencing.

Our core article was a review by Arlene Walker-Andrews of some of her own work looking at multimodal matching of emotions by young infants.  We then discussed four other jigsaw papers.  The first was by Marc Bornstein and Martha Arterberry and it concerned categorization of smiling by 5-month-old infants.  The remaining papers illustrated a variety of methods for studying social referencing.  Donna Mumme and Anne Fernald used video presentations of an experimenter behaving in a positive or negative manner with novel objects, and then observed infants’ reactions when presented with these objects.  Betty Repacholi took a different approach and had the experimenter react to opening boxes (or putting her hand inside them) that contained objects which elicited the emotional responses.  The final reading was a book chapter by Catherine Tamis-Lemonda and Karen Adolph who proposed to assess social referencing in relation to infants’ tendencies to negotiate risky slopes and gaps.

We closed the class session with a discussion of the early experience reading for the week, which was a chapter by Jerome Kagan entitled “The allure of infant determinism”.   Judging by the submitted thought papers and the class discussion, this chapter elicted a range of reactions from the class.

 

Wednesday, February 22

 

What is temperament?  That was the question that we posed at the start of class. Our core reading, a chapter by Ted Wachs and John Bates from the Handbook of Infant Development, defined temperament as biologically-based, early appearing individual differences that are relatively stable across time and contexts. Although temperament can be measured in various ways, we chose to examine a variety of questionnaires formulated by Mary Rothbart to see how these instruments change according to age in terms of their basic factor structure and item content.  Following that, we discussed the three jigsaw articles for the week.  One of them, by Hui-Chin Hsu and Christin Porter, underlined why assessing temperament in the first three months of life is a problematic endeavor.  The second and third articles concerned the utility of behavior genetics in the understanding of infant temperament.  While twin studies have inherent limitations, these and related techniques are one place to look in terms of understanding genetic contributions to temperament. Kimberly Saudino wrote the first of the two articles, which was a review outlining recent findings and future studies. The final reading came from Hill Goldsmith and colleagues, and concerned a twin study which used both parental report of temperament and behavioral assessment of temperament in the laboratory.


We didn't have enough time to cover the early experience reading for this week.  We planned to cover the same reading next week.

 

Wednesday, March 1

Dr. Marshall began class with a discussion of Fox, Henderson, Marshall, Nichols, & Ghera's (2005) article on behavioral inhibition, a temperament style marked by early appearing reactivity and reticence in novel situations.   The authors integrated findings that link behavioral observations of reactive and inhibited infants and young children with animal models of fear; presented evidence suggesting that inhibition is a categorical trait with a distinct biological substrate; explained the moderating influences of cognitive processes; and, described the relationship between inhibition and risk of internalizing problems. 

We next discussed our jigsaw readings. Aksan and Kochanska (2004) examined the relationship between early and late appearing inhibition, and argued that inhibited children may have an advantage in that their characteristic slow approach in novel situations may facilitate effortful inhibition.  Fox, Henderson, Rubin, Calkins, & Schmidt (2001) studied the continuities and discontinuities of groups of reactive, inhibited infants (including a low reactive group), and those who were classified as exuberant.  They found moderate continuity of behavioral inhibition among inhibited infants, but high continuity of exuberance among exuberant infants.  Additionally, inhibited children displayed evidence of right frontal asymmetry(associated with high cortisol and startle), whereas exuberant children displayed left frontal asymmetry (associated with expression of positive emotion). Kagan, Snidman, & Arcus (1998) examined how low and high reactive infants at 4, 14, and 21 months continue to display inhibited or uninhibited behavior at 4 and half years of age and found only a small percentage of children continued to have inhibited or uninhibited behavior at all ages. In the last jigsaw article, Putnam and Stifter (2005) examined the relations among seperable components of positivity, negativity, and beahvioral approach-inhibition that are displayed in response to and low and high intensity situations.

 

We again didn't have enough time to cover the early experience reading for this week.



Wednesday, March 15


The focus of today's class was the interaction between infant temperament and parenting and its effect on inhibition and externalizing behaviors in early childhood. We started the class off with a review article from Kathleen Gallagher which discussed how infant temperament and parenting interact in the context of a number of developmental theories (interestingly, the review was originally written as part of a preliminary examination requirement for the PhD program in Human Development at the University of Wisconsin, Madison). In the review Gallagher discussed developmental models such as the bioecological systems model and the differential susceptibility hypothesis. The differential susceptibility hypothesis is championed by such researchers as Jay Belsky, who authored and co-authored two of the three jigsaw articles for todays class. In the articles, Belsky, Keith Crnic and colleagues attempted to link positive and negative tempermental characteristics at one year with behavioral inhibition and externalizing behavior at three years. Most importantly, they were interested in how different mother and father parenting styles interacted with the temperament of their infant. Their results yielded some support for the differential susceptibility hypothesis, but it was not as robust as they intended. The third jigsaw article by Crockenberg and Leerkes explored how quality and quantity of daycare mediated the relationship between infant temperament and externalizing behavior.


During the final minutes of the class we discussed the first chapter from the book "Why Love Matters" by Sue Gerhardt. The book, aimed primarily at the lay person, generated much debate as it discussed evidence for how important infant/parent interactions are during the infants first years. Some in the class found such emphasis a bit overstated, possibly unnecessarily inciting guilt and fear in mothers, while others felt it laid out an ideal path for parenting that parents could strive toward.



Wednesday, March 22


We continued our discussion of temperament in today's class, although we broadened our focus a bit from last week.  The Core reading for today, a summary article by Sanson, Hemphill & Smart, discussed temperament as it relates to a variety of child functions, mostly beyond the scope of infancy.  Among these connections to temperament are internalizing and externalizing behaviors, peer relations, parenting, and social interactions.  All of the Jigsaw articles for the week continued with this theme, mostly focusing on the development of conscience and later conduct problem.  Again, most of the articles moved beyond the infancy period, although all of these issues have clear connections to the infancy period.  A review article by Frick & Morris specifically examined the role of emotion regulation in temperament and how this can be connected to a particular temperament that they call the "callous-unemotional" trait.  The specification of such a trait is relatively novel in the field, which makes their discussion of the potential relationship between this type of temperament and conduct problems quite interesting.  Kochanska's article elaborated more on predictors of conscience development, looking at the different disciplinary techniques that promote conscience development among both fearful and fearless children.  She found that fearful infants benefitted the most from gentle disciplinary techniques while fearless children's conscience development was not supported by the same gentle disciplinary methods, suggesting that parents of fearless children should use other techniques to promite conscience development in their children.  Finally, a study conducted by Mathiesen and Sanson looks at the same issue from a different perspective, finding predictors of stability of problems as early as 18 months.  More precisely, the authors examined four predictive factors (Social Adjustment, Overactive/Inattentive, Emotional Adjustment, and Regulation) to find stability from 18 months to 30 months of age.  The study results supported their hypothesis and the authors hint that their results will have implications in many areas, from early prediction of behavior problems to early strategies of intervention.

We ended our class again today with discussion about more chapters from "Why Love Matters" by Sue Gerhardt.  Although we did not have as much debate this week as we did last week, that may have been due to a general consensus that some of Gerhardt's examples in this portion of the book were rather extreme and might have been upsetting to the lay person.  The class members seemed to conclude that we have yet to find a book directed toward the general public that fairly and accurately presents scientific findings to the community-at-large.


Wednesday, March 29

This week we started by discussing and article by van Ijzendoorn and Bakermans-Kranenburg (2004).  This article is a meta-analysis concerning mother characteristics and its associations to attachment style.  The results of this study show that maternal sensitivity is related to secure attachment.  Furthermore, in reading this article, the class found it necessary to point out that van Ijzendoorn distinguishes between maternal sensitivity and maternal responsiveness.

The first of the jigsaw readings was written by Marshall and Fox (2005).  This paper looked at extremes of infant temperament: high negativity, high positivity, and low reactivity.  The authors used the Belsky Split to determine whether infant temperament wouuld predict later attachment.  The results showed that high negative infants had attachment styles high in distress, and the high positive infants had attachment styles low in distress.  The class discussed the fact that maternal sensitivity might explain which children fall into the traditional A, B, or C attachment styles (The Belsky Split separates A1, A2, B1, B2 from B3, B4, C1, C2).  We can't confirm our thoughts, though, because the Marshall and Fox paper does not include data on maternal sensitivity.

Thte second jigsaw article was by Kochanska (1998).  This article found that the mother-child relationship, as measured at 13-15 months, predicted child attachment security.  Child fearfulness did not predict attachment security versus insecurity, but did predict the type of insecurity the child showed during the Strange Situation.  Again, using the Belsky Split, children who were highly aroused and fell on the highly distressed side of the split were more fearful.  The children who were less distressed were also less fearful.

The third jigsaw reading was by Bokhorst et al (2003).  This article used a behavioral genetic approach to try to close the Transmission Gap found in attachment.  The AAI (Adult Attachment Interview) taps into parents' state of mind about attachment.  Typically, mothers who score in the dismissive range tend to have infants who are avoidant.  Mothers who are autonomous usually have secure babies, and preoccupied mothers have ambivalent babies.  Researchers have proposed many possibilities about what might account for the transmission gap, such as maternal sensitivity or infant temperament.  The Bokhorst et al (2003) paper used a twin study to successfully show that genetics do not close the transmission gap.

Our early experience reading for the week was the first chapter of the book The Myth of the First Three Years by John T. Bruer.  This book is about current research on early brain development and how it affects children later in life.  Some students in the class expressed a general liking for this chapter, while others did not seem to like it too much.  At the beginning of the semester, we talked about the Clarkes' book as possibly being a reaction to this book by Bruer.


Wednesday, April 5

The class session today was a discussion of cross-cultural issues in infant development.  After a brief discussion of the core article by Carlson, Feng, and Harwood on the intersection of temperament and culture, we moved onto a longer class discussion of the jigsaw reading.  These readings consisted of the chapters in a book by Meredith Small entitled "Our babies, ourselves".  The chapters covered a variety of issues, including an interesting examination of why human infants are so dependent.  Evolutionary theorizing on this issue suggests that the altricial nature of human infancy is a result of selection pressures for larger brain size combined with the development of bipedal locomotion in early hominids.  Other issues covered in the book and discussed in class were:  Cultural differences in parenting infants, with a particular emphasis on approaches to feeding, crying, sleeping, and holding.   The class discussion on these topics was involved and very interesting, and in part because of this we did not make it to the early experience reading for the week, which was the final chapter in Bruer's book.


Wednesday, April 12

Today's class discussion focused on atypical social and emotional development in infancy. Beginning with the core reading (Gelfand, 2001), the class discussed the historical perceptions, assessment, and treatment of infant mental health. The chapter described common difficulties in assessing infant mental health via behavioral and physiological measures (as opposed to self-report and interview measures found in adult assessment methodology). The chapter concluded with descriptions of diagnostic criteria for infant mental health disorders and treatment procedures. 

Following this discussion, the class reviewed three jigsaw articles concerning the detection of deficits in autism and the psychological effects of instiutionalization on Romanian children. Sigman et al. (2004) reviewed literature on the early detection of autism in infancy (prior to 18 months of age). After detailing typical social/emotional development in early infancy, the authors proposed that the examination of differences in the social/emotional development of infants at risk for autism may provide a foundation for early diagnostic criteria of disorders within the autism spectrum.  In a study conducted by Zeanah et al. (2005), Romanian children raised in institutions showed a higher rate of disturbance in attachment than those who had never been institutionalized. Rutter (2006) reviewed findings on the Romanian study, showing that institutionalization was associated with marked cognitive and attachment deficits.  Though deficits decreased after adoption, institutionalized children remained disadvantaged in cognitifve and attachment domains. 

This week's early experience readings focused on book reviews of John Bruer's "Myth of the First Three Years," Sue Gurhardt's "Why Love Matters," and the Clarkes' "Early Experience and the Life Path." In Zero to Three's review of Bruer's book, the authors agreed with Bruer's assertions on the overgeneralization of neuroscience findings, the limited scope of the neuroscience's understanding of brain development and functioning, and the continued development of brain past the age of three. However, Zero to Three disputed Bruer's claims against the long-lasting impact of early experiences during the first three years by reviewing research on the impacts of early foundations of trust, self-control, and motivation on adult adjustment. Pilyoung Kim and James Swain (2006) provided a positive review of Gerhardt's book, remarking on its use of simplistic language, review of the literature, use of  clinical antedotes, and the important implications of the book. However,the authors critically noted the omission of how parenting styles early in the lifespan can protect against psychological problems in adulthood. Lastly, Bruer's review of the Clarkes' book highlighted the author's arguments against early experience determinism and the type of research that would be necessary to refute the Clarkes' thesis that early experience is not deterministic. Bruer believes that the Clarkes may have conceded their thesis too soon, claiming the current literature still does not provide solid evidence that early experience determines later development.  While Bruer provided positive comments on the Clarkes' writing style, concise content, and logical reasoning, he did not believe this book, by itself, will sway popular deterministic views.