Part 1: Symposium on Emotion
EARLY EXPERIENCE AND EMOTIONAL DEVLOPMENT:
The Emergence of Wariness of Heights
Joseph J. Campos, et al.
Abstract
They’re trying to show fear of heights is not innate as is widely believed, and provide cotrary information.
- locomotor experience accounts for wariness of heights
- ‘artificial experience’ generates evidence of wariness of heights
- orthopedically handicapped infant test longitudinally did not demonstrate
- duration of locomotor experience and not age that predicts avoidance
Suggest that experience shapes wariness of heights
Paper
Gottlieb coined ‘bootstrapping’ processes probabilistic epigenesis
- Evidence for this in animal literature (Held and Hein), rearing kittens with active locomotion showed avoidance of heights while passive littermates showed no such avoidance
Anecodotal evidence supports this. Infants are commonly reported to go through phases:
- Fearlessness - show no avoidance of heights and will go over the edge of a bed e.x.
- Intense wariness - Follows the fearless state.
They also bring up the idea that the parents emotional state and infants perceptiveness to it can play a role
- Pride when crawling
- Fear around heights
Video: Babies on the Brink
Learning relations between body and their environment
- Multiple differnet learning curves for different modes of locomotion
Interesting Takeaways:
Heart rate for measuring fearfulness in infants:
- Decreases in infants who are in a state of nonfearful attentiveness
- Accelerates when infants are showing either a defensive response or a precry state
Bayley Developmental Quotient?
- is 126 good?