Summary Of Development Of Children And Adolescents

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While reading chapter seven of Development of Children and Adolescents, the concept of emotion really stood out to me. I have never considered the idea of infants having such complex processes to express, decode, and regulate emotions. This particular section of the text holds great importance to me. I recognize that these concepts are influenced by the care received as a child, and is reflective throughout the entirety of one’s life. What are these emotions? To begin to understand this, the text finds it important to illustrate the discrete emotions theory, which states that core emotions are fundamentally universal and commonly recognizable. Hauser-Cram, Nugent, Thies, and Travers (2014, p. 245) let the reader know that primary emotions…show more content…
I wonder if this is a survival tactic. They do not have the skills to voice their opinions, therefore they must make their surroundings aware of their feelings. For example, if you let an infant suck on a lemon, they will most likely scrunch up their facial muscles and squint their eyes to tell you that the object in their mouth is sour and they no longer want it. I think this is one of the reasons children can be so eager to try new adventures. Although they look for safety precautions, they have yet to develop their secondary emotions. These include shame, embarrassment, guilt, envy, and pride. In other words, they are self-conscious emotions (Hauser-Cram et al., 2014, p. 246). These feelings usually do not tend to emerge until around the age of two. To be completely honest, I find it saddening when toddlers start to develop these thoughts. Their self-awareness holds them back from new feats if they are not already confident in their abilities. Perhaps this is a contributing factor as to why toddlers have a hard time learning how to share toys or lose a game. They may feel an inherent need to be competitive and the absolute best at everything they try. Their sometimes inappropriate, manner of dealing with conflict may be due to the fact that they only see the loss in their status instead of the impact their actions may have on someone…show more content…
This comes with a lot of interacting with their caretakers, peers, and strangers. Through these interactions, they learn how society finds it acceptable to react in situations. The toddler will need to be able to interpret the emotions of others (Hauser-Cram et al., 2014, p. 250). This is done through decoding facial behavior and social referencing. The text says that even infants are able to detect small changes in facial expression. They particularly pay attention to people’s “gaze cues” and “mutual gazes” to identify communication between others. With this ability, they are able to develop social referencing by the end of their first year. “Social referencing studies confirm that infants guide their behavior based on the emotional cues people offer them” (Hauser-Cram et al., 2014, p.

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