Early Experience and Emotional Development: The Emergence of Wariness of Heights

Campos, Joseph J.; Bertenthal, Bennett I.; Kermoian, Rosanne

doi:10.1111/j.1467-9280.1992.tb00259.x

Cited by 147 publications

(121 citation statements)

References 11 publications

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“…Infants' experiences of fear might also dramatically increase later in the first year, again perhaps due to locomotion, which has been found to contribute to the emergence of a fear of heights (Campos, Bertenthal, & Kermoian, 1992). Locomotion also takes infants farther away from caregivers, which might lead to an increased sense of insecurity and fear.…”

Section: B the Negativity Bias In Emotional Contagionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Not all emotions are created equal: The negativity bias in social-emotional development.

Vaish¹,

Großmann²,

Woodward³

2008

Psychological Bulletin

937

615

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There is ample empirical evidence for an asymmetry in the way that adults use positive versus negative information to make sense of their world; specifically, across an array of psychological situations and tasks, adults display a negativity bias, or the propensity to attend to, learn from, and use negative information far more than positive information. This bias is argued to serve critical evolutionarily adaptive functions, but its developmental presence and ontogenetic emergence have never seriously been considered. Here, we argue for the existence of the negativity bias in early development, evident especially in research on infant social referencing but also in other developmental domains. We discuss ontogenetic mechanisms underlying the emergence of this bias, and explore not only its evolutionary but also its developmental functions and consequences. Throughout, we suggest ways to further examine the negativity bias in infants and older children, and we make testable predictions that would help clarify the nature of the negativity bias during early development. KeywordsNegativity bias; Affective asymmetry; Social-cognitive development; Emotion; Social referencing Infants are exposed to a great deal of social information from birth, and their ability to use this information effectively is critical for development in many domains and for survival in general. This raises several important questions: do infants attend equally to all facets of this information, or do they attend to certain facets more than others? Do they, in addition, learn and remember particular kinds of information better than others? What evolutionary and developmental consequences do these ways of approaching the environment have? In this paper, we propose that infants display a negativity bias: that is, infants attend more to, are more influenced by, and use to a greater degree negative rather than positive facets of their environment. We propose possible ontogenetic pathways for the emergence of the negativity bias, and we argue that this bias serves important evolutionary and developmental functions.

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Section: B the Negativity Bias In Emotional Contagionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Not all emotions are created equal: The negativity bias in social-emotional development.

Vaish¹,

Großmann²,

Woodward³

2008

Psychological Bulletin

937

615

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…For example, the emergence of rhythmic arm shaking of a rattle is associated with infant reduplicated babbling (e.g., Iverson, Hall, Nickel, & Wozniak, 2007), and the acquisition of upright sitting is related to infant perceptual completion of partially occluded objects (Soska, Adolph, & Johnson, 2010). A number of studies have also demonstrated the relation of infant self-produced locomotor experience (through crawling or experience in an infant walker) with a broad array of psychological phenomena, including cognitive development (Bertenthal, Campos, & Barrett 1984;Bai & Bertenthal, 1992), development of spatial search (Kermoian & Campos, 1988), perceptual development (Higgins, Campos, & Kermoian, 1996), social development (Campos, Kermoian, & Zumbahlen, 1992), emotional development (Campos, Bertenthal, & Kermoian, 1992), and neurophysiological processes (Bell & Fox, 1996). Experimental studies have demonstrated that some of the above relations are caused by locomotor experience, specifically by randomly assigning prelocomotor infants to a condition in which infants control a powered-mobility device and others do not (Dahl et al, in press;Uchiyama et al, 2008).…”

Section: Motoric Transitions As Epigenetic Phenomenamentioning

confidence: 99%

Infant language development is related to the acquisition of walking.

Walle

Campos

2014

Developmental Psychology

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216

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“…Gibson & Walk, 1960), 7-month-olds who are experienced crawlers often refuse to cross, and their heart rates accelerate (a sign of fear) when they are urged to do so. However, babies of the same age who are not yet crawling do not show signs of fear (Campos, Bertenthal, & Kermoian, 1992). The crucial difference seems to be the experience of self-generated locomotion, rather than crawling per se.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Visible embodiment: Gestures as simulated action

Hostetter

Alibali

2008

Psychonomic Bulletin & Review

653

552

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Gestures are often considered to be valid evidence of the embodiment of language and cognition. Since people use their bodies (i.e., gestures) to express knowledge, it is argued, the knowledge itself must be deeply tied to the body (Alibali & Nathan, 2007;Gallagher, 2005;Gibbs, 2006;Hostetter & Alibali, 2004;McNeill, 2005;Nuñez, 2005). This claim may hold some truth, but to date, there have been no explicit proposals about how embodied knowledge comes to be reflected in speech-accompanying gestures. The goal of this article is to explore how gestures may arise from embodied thinking; we will approach this goal by integrating research about perception, action, cognition, language, mental imagery, and gesture production.A variety of hand and body movements can be considered to be gestures, and much previous research has sought to describe these different types of gestures (e.g., Efron, 1972;Kendon, 2004;McNeill, 1992). In this article, we limit our discussion to representational gestures-that is, movements that represent the content of speech by pointing to a referent in the physical environment (deictic gestures), depicting a referent with the motion or shape of the hands (iconic gestures), or depicting a concrete referent or indicating a spatial location for an abstract idea (metaphoric gestures). We use the term gestures to refer specifically to representational gestures. Other types of gestures, including beat gestures (movements that emphasize the prosody or structure of speech without conveying semantic information) and interactive gestures (movements used to manage turn taking and other aspects of an interaction between multiple speakers), fall outside the scope of this article.Our aim is to describe a mechanism that may possibly give rise to gestures. We do not seek to address the issue of the functions of gestures (e.g., in communication, in speech production). Although we review some ideas about the functions of gestures, we do not take a strong stance here regarding gesture function. The goal of our framework is to explain what gestures are, rather than what they do.The article proceeds in seven sections. In the first section, we review ideas about links between perception and action and how these links are important in memory and cognition. In the second section, we review evidence that language processing is tied to the body. In the third section, we review evidence that mental imagery is also an embodied process. In the fourth section, we review evidence on the relationship between gesture production and mental imagery, and in the fifth, we propose a theoretical framework that explains how gestures may arise from the activation of perception and action. In the sixth section, we compare our framework with other models of gesture production. Finally, in the seventh section, we articulate predictions that derive from the framework. Perception, Action, and Embodied CognitionMany theorists have proposed that perception is for action (J. J. Gibson, 1979;Sperry, 1952); that is, the ability to perceive evolv...

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Early Experience and Emotional Development: The Emergence of Wariness of Heights

Cited by 147 publications

References 11 publications

Not all emotions are created equal: The negativity bias in social-emotional development.

Not all emotions are created equal: The negativity bias in social-emotional development.

Infant language development is related to the acquisition of walking.

Visible embodiment: Gestures as simulated action

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