new opportunities for emotion regulation (Bretherton, Fritz, Zahn-Waxler, & Ridgeway, 1986). Vocabulary predicts self-regulation abilities in 24-month-old infants (Vallotton & Ayoub, 2011). In one longitudinal study of children from 18 to 48 months, toddlers with better language skill tended to engage in more support seeking and distracted themselves more, which was linked with showing less anger at 48 months (Roben, Cole, & Armstrong, 2013). Researchers have also found that infants’ abilities to self-regulate at 15 months predict executive functioning at 4 years (Ursache, Blair, Stifter, Voegtline, & The Family Life Project Investigators, 2013).
Social Interaction and Emotional Development
Infants and young children often need outside assistance in regulating their emotions. Warm and supportive interactions with parents and other caregivers can help infants understand their emotions and learn how to manage them.
Parental Interaction
Responsive parenting that is attuned to infants’ needs helps infants develop skills in emotion regulation, especially in managing negative emotions like anxiety, as well as their physiological correlates, such as accelerated heart rate (Feldman et al., 2011). For example, sensitive responses coupled with soft vocalizations aid 3-month-old infants in regulating distress (Spinelli & Mesman, 2018). Likewise, when mothers responded promptly to their 2-month-old infants’ cries, these same infants, at 4 months of age, cried for shorter durations, were better able to manage their emotions, and stopped crying more quickly than other infants (Jahromi & Stifter, 2007).
Parents help their infants learn to manage emotions through a variety of strategies, including direct intervention, modeling, selective reinforcement, control of the environment, verbal instruction, and touch (Waters, West, Karnilowicz, & Mendes, 2017). These strategies change as the infants grow older. For example, touching becomes a less common regulatory strategy with age, whereas vocalizing and distracting techniques increase (Meléndez, 2005). When mothers provide guidance in helping infants regulate their emotions, the infants tend to engage in distraction and mother-oriented strategies, such as seeking help, during frustrating events.
Parent–infant interactions undergo continuous transformations as infants develop. For example, infants’ growing motor skills influence their interactions with parents, as well as their socioemotional development. Crawling, creeping, and walking introduce new challenges to parent–infant interaction and socioemotional growth (Adolph & Franchak, 2017). As crawling begins, parents and caregivers respond with happiness and pride, positive emotions that encourage infants’ exploration. As infants gain motor competence, they wander further from parents (Thurman & Corbetta, 2017). Crawling increases a toddler’s capability to attain goals—a capability that, while often satisfying to the toddler, may involve hazards.
Responsive parenting helps infants learn to manage their emotions and self-regulate.
iStock/AleksandarNakic
As infants become more mobile, emotional outbursts become more common. Parents report that advances in locomotion are accompanied by increased frustration as toddlers attempt to move in ways that often exceed their abilities or are not permitted by parents (Clearfield, 2011; Pemberton Roben et al., 2012). When mothers recognize the dangers posed to toddlers by objects such as houseplants, vases, and electrical appliances, they sharply increase their expressions of anger and fear, often leading to fear and frustration in their toddlers. At this stage, parents actively monitor toddlers’ whereabouts, protect them from dangerous situations, and expect them to comply—a dynamic that is often a struggle, amounting to a test of wills. At the same time, these struggles help the child to begin to develop a grasp of mental states in others that are different from his or her own.
Changes in emotional expression and regulation are dynamic because the changing child influences the changing parent. In particular, mothers and infants systematically influence and regulate each other’s emotions and behaviors. Mothers regulate infant emotional states by interpreting their emotional signals, providing appropriate arousal, and reciprocating and reinforcing infant reactions. Infants regulate their mother’s emotions through their receptivity to her initiations and stimulation and by responding to her emotions (Bornstein, Hahn, Suwalsky, & Haynes, 2011; Bornstein, Suwalsky, & Breakstone, 2012). By experiencing a range of emotional interactions—times when their emotions mirror those of their caregivers and times when their emotions are different from those of their caregivers—infants learn how to transform negative emotions into neutral or positive emotions and regulate their own emotional states (Guo, Leu, Barnard, Thompson, & Spieker, 2015).
Social Referencing
Early in life, the ability emerges to discriminate facial expressions that indicate emotion. In one study, 2-day-old infants initially did not show a preference for a happy or disgust face, but after being habituated to either a happy or disgust face, they successfully discriminated between the two, suggesting an early sensitivity to dynamic-faced expressing emotions (Addabbo, Longhi, Marchis, Tagliabue, & Turati, 2018). Likewise, newborns are able to discriminate happy faces from fearful ones (Farroni, Menon, Rigato, & Johnson, 2007). It is thought that infants are innately prepared to attend to facial displays of emotion, because such displays are biologically significant and the ability to recognize them is important for human survival (Leppanen, 2011). Between 2 and 4 months of age, infants can distinguish emotional expressions, including happiness as opposed to anger, surprise, and sadness (Bornstein, Arterberry, & Lamb, 2013). Infants 6½ months old can identify and match happy, angry, and sad emotions portrayed on faces but also body movements indicating emotion (Hock et al., 2017).
Beyond recognizing the emotional expressions of others, infants also respond to them. Between 6 and 10 months of age, infants begin to use social referencing, looking to caregivers’ or other adults’ emotional expressions to find clues for how to interpret ambiguous events, which influences their emotional responses and subsequent actions (Walle, Reschke, & Knothe, 2017). For example, when a toddler grabs the sofa to pull herself up, turns, and tumbles over as she takes a step, she will look to her caregiver to determine how to interpret her fall. If the caregiver has a fearful facial expression, the infant is likely to be fearful also, but if the caregiver smiles, the infant will probably remain calm and return to attempts at walking. The use of social referencing is one way that infants demonstrate their understanding that others experience their own emotions and thoughts.
Older infants tend to show a negativity bias when it comes to social referencing. That is, they attend to and follow social referencing cues more closely when the cues indicate negative attitudes toward an object, compared with neutral or happy attitudes (Vaish, Grossmann, & Woodward, 2008). In addition, infants may be more influenced by the vocal information conveyed in emotional messages than the facial expressions themselves, especially within the context of fearful messages (Biro, Alink, van IJzendoorn, & Bakermans-Kranenburg, 2014).
How infants employ social referencing changes with development. Ten-month-old infants show selective social referencing. They monitor the caregiver’s attention and do not engage in social referencing when the adult is not attending or engaged (Stenberg, 2017). At 12 months, infants use referential cues such as the caregiver’s body posture, gaze, and voice direction to determine to what objects caregivers’ emotional responses refer (Brooks & Meltzoff, 2008). Twelve-month-old infants are more likely to use a caregiver’s cues as guides in ambivalent situations when the caregiver responds promptly to the infants’ behavior (Stenberg, 2017). In sum, social referencing reflects infants’ growing understanding of the emotional states of others; it signifies that infants can observe, interpret, and use emotional information
