Babies Notice

The connection that I found between these two videos was that the baby’s energy was directly related to the nonverbal communication with the caregiver. If the caregiver provided a negative reaction or no reaction at all, the baby would respond in a stressed, wary, or negative way. And the same happened for the opposite. If the mother was happy or relaxed, so was the child. 

Even without words, excitement, tension, stress, happiness, etc. can be transmitted from the parent to the child. And once this is understood, it allows parents to understand that how they act around their child directly affects the child. Even if you don’t notice it, the attitude of the caregiver is understood by the child. To a new mother, this information could be very helpful when it comes to dealing with a fussy baby. If the child senses that the caregiver is stressed or scared, the child’s attitude will not change for the better. A calm collected mother will get a better response from the child than a nervous one will.

Week 11 discussion

When I watched these videos on the two different experiments, I noticed that both of them were pretty much about nonverbal communication between a parent, in this case a mother, and a child. These experiments were showing the viewers that facial expression of emotions have a large impact on an infant. In the first study, the experiment showed that when the mother didn’t show an expression back her child, the child got upset and cried. So this shows that children can sense expressions from their caregiver. I think that this is something so important for parents to realize. If I were to give parents some advice, I would tell them that interacting and showing expression with their infant because it is really important for their child’s socio-emotional development.

Socio-Emotional Development

These two studies show how much infants respond to emotions. In the first video, a mother and baby interact with each other and the mother smiles, and shows a positive interaction with the baby. Then the mother does not interact with the baby or show any emotion. The baby gets upset and confused with the mother's actions. In the second study, a baby must cross a visual cliff to reach a toy and their mother. If the mother shows a negative or scared faced, the baby will not cross. But if the mother shows a positive or happy face, the baby will cross the barrier. The information found in these studies can be related to new parents. Babies learn most of their social referencing from their relationship with the parents. Parents demonstrate emotions to their babies to help them develop their own emotions and social referencing. The best advice that can be given to parents about emotional development is to play with their babies. Just by engaging with infants, and showing emotional responses, they will help them develop their socio-emotional skills. 

Week March 11th

Social referencing: When a child looks to their parent or caregiver and makes eye contact to
decide whether to engage in a specific behavior/activity or not.

Still-face paradigm: This is to observe how a baby reacts to the lack of response from a parent/
caregiver during social referencing.

• The babies tended to get aggravated if the adult in no way responded to them.

With these two concepts in mind, it is incredibly important for parents to engage with their
child using eye contact, sounds or expression. Studies found that children who were raised by
parents who are depressed, tend to not respond as much to the still-face experiment. Because
children find affirmation from eye contact, if a child lacks this connection they are more likely to
do their own decision making which would potentially lead to overly independent children etc.

Prompt for the week of March 11

The social world of infants is varied, complex, and possibly very important for later adjustment.  To see how developmental psychologists have studied socio-emotional development in infants, watch these two quick videos of research on the still-face paradigm

and social referencing.

Talk about how you might relate some of the concepts of these studies to new parents.  What kind of advice might you give?