Thinking in Context 6.4
1 Children reared in impoverished orphanages are at risk of receiving little attention from adults and experiencing few meaningful interactions with caregivers. What might this experience mean for the development of attachment? What outcomes and behaviors might you expect from children reared under such conditions? In your view, what can be done to help such children?
2 How does an infant’s emotional capacities, coupled with the goodness of fit between her temperament and that of her parent, influence attachment outcomes?
The Self in Infancy and Toddlerhood
What do babies know about themselves? When do they begin to know that they have a “self”—that they are separate from the people and things that surround them? We have discussed the challenges that researchers who study infants face. Infants cannot tell us what they perceive, think, or feel. Instead, researchers must devise ways of inferring infants’ states, feelings, and thoughts. As you might imagine, this makes it very challenging to study infants’ conceptions of self, as well as their awareness and understanding of themselves.
Self-Awareness
Maya, 4 months of age, delights in seeing that she can make the mobile above her crib move by kicking her feet. Her understanding that she can influence her world suggests that she has a sense of herself as different from her environment (Rochat, 1998). Before infants can take responsibility for their own actions, they must begin to see themselves as physically separate from the world around them.
Some developmental researchers believe that infants are born with a capacity to distinguish the self from the surrounding environment (Meltzoff, 1990). Newborns show distress at hearing a recording of another infant’s cries but do not show distress at hearing their own cries, suggesting that they can distinguish other infants’ cries from their own and thereby have a primitive notion of self (Dondi, Simion, & Caltran, 1999). Newborns’ facial imitation, that is, their ability to view another person’s facial expression and produce it (see Chapter 4), may also suggest a primitive awareness of self and others (Meltzoff, 2007; Rochat, 2013). It is unclear, however, whether these findings suggest that newborns have self-awareness because infants cannot tell us what they know.
Others argue that an awareness of oneself is not innate but emerges by 3 months of age (Neisser, 1993). Some researchers believe that this emergence is indicated by infants’ awareness of the consequences of their own actions on others (Langfur, 2013). As infants interact with people and objects, they learn that their behaviors have effects. With this awareness, they begin to experiment to see how their behaviors influence the world around them, begin to differentiate themselves from their environments, and develop a sense of self (Bigelow, 2017).
Self-Recognition
How do we know whether self-awareness is innate or develops in the early months of life? One way of studying self-awareness in infants is to examine infants’ reactions to viewing themselves in a mirror. Self-recognition, the ability to recognize or identify the self, is assessed by the “rouge test.” In this experiment, a dab of rouge or lipstick is applied to an infant’s nose without the infant’s awareness—for example, under the pretext of wiping his or her face. The infant is then placed in front of a mirror (Bard, Todd, Bernier, Love, & Leavens, 2006). Whether the infant recognizes himself or herself in the mirror depends on cognitive development, especially the ability to engage in mental representation and hold images in one’s mind. Infants must be able to retain a memory of their own image in order to display self-recognition in the mirror task. If the infant has an internal representation of her face and recognizes the infant in the mirror as herself, she will notice the dab of rouge and reach for her own nose.
This toddler recognizes herself in the mirror, as shown by her touching the rouge mark on her face.
Thierry Berrod/Mona Lisa/Science Source
Mirror recognition develops gradually and systematically (Brandl, 2018). From 3 months of age, infants pay attention and react positively to their mirror image, and by 8 to 9 months of age, they show awareness of the tandem movement of the mirror image with themselves and play with the image, treating it as if it is another baby (Bullock & Lutkenhaus, 1990). Some 15- to 17-month-old infants show signs of self-recognition, but it is not until 18 to 24 months that most infants demonstrate self-recognition by touching their nose when they notice the rouge mark in the mirror (Cicchetti, Rogosch, Toth, & Spagnola, 1997). Does experience with mirrors influence how infants respond to the rouge test? Interestingly, infants from nomadic tribes with no experience with mirrors demonstrate self-recognition at the same ages as infants reared in surroundings with mirrors (Priel & deSchonen, 1986). This suggests that extensive experience with a mirror is not needed to demonstrate self-recognition in the mirror task. In addition, research with Canadian toddlers shows that their performance on the mirror task is unrelated to their experience with mirrors in the home (Courage, Edison, & Howe, 2004).
Mirror recognition is not the only indicator of a sense of self—and may not be the earliest indicator. A recent study suggests that self-recognition may develop before infants can succeed on the mirror task (Stapel, van Wijk, Bekkering, & Hunnius, 2017). Eighteen-month-old infants viewed photographs of their own face, the face of an unfamiliar infant, the face of their caregiver, and the face of an unfamiliar caregiver while their brain activity was registered via electroencephalography (EEG). The infants showed more brain activity in response to their own face, suggesting self-recognition, yet only half of these infants succeeded on the mirror task.
By 18 to 24 months of age, children begin to recognize themselves in pictures and refer to themselves in the pictures as “me” or by their first names (Lewis & Brooks-Gunn, 1979). One study of 20- to 25-month-old toddlers showed that 63% could pick themselves out when they were presented with pictures of themselves and two similar children (Bullock & Lutkenhaus, 1990). By 30 months of age, nearly all of the children could pick out their own picture.
With advances in self-awareness, toddlers begin to experience more complex emotions, including self-conscious emotions, such as embarrassment, shame, guilt, jealousy, and pride (Lewis & Carmody, 2008). An understanding of self is needed before children can be aware of being the focus of attention and feel embarrassment, identify with others’ concerns and feel shame, or desire what someone else has and feel jealousy toward that person. In a study of 15- to 24-month-old infants, only those who recognized themselves in the mirror looked embarrassed when an adult gave them overwhelming praise. They smiled, looked away, and covered their faces with their hands. The infants who did not recognize themselves in the mirror did not show embarrassment (Lewis, 2011). A developing sense of self and the self-conscious emotions that accompany it lead toddlers to have more complex social interactions with caregivers and others, all of which contribute to the development of self-concept.
Emerging Self-Concept
In toddlerhood, between 18 and 30 months of age, children’s sense of self-awareness expands beyond self-recognition to include a categorical self, a self-description based on broad categories such as sex, age, and physical characteristics (Stipek, Gralinski, & Kopp, 1990). Toddlers describe themselves as “big,” “strong,” “girl/boy,” and