Thomas and Chess's New York Longitudinal Study (1956 onward) identified three broad temperament profiles. Which of the following correctly describes the "difficult" temperament type?

A: Positive mood, regular biological rhythms, rapid adaptation to new situations

B: Slow adaptation to new situations, initially withdrawn, but eventually adjusts positively

C: Intense emotional reactions, irregular biological rhythms, slow adaptation, frequent negative mood

D: Low activity level, mild emotional reactions, adaptable to routine changes

Thomas and Chess identified three broad temperament profiles from longitudinal parent interviews. The "easy" child (~40%) shows positive mood, regular rhythms, and rapid adaptation. The "slow-to-warm-up" child (~15%) is initially withdrawn and slow to adapt but eventually adjusts. The "difficult" child (~10%) shows intense, often negative emotional reactions, irregular biological rhythms (sleep, feeding), and slow adaptation to new people or situations. The remaining ~35% could not be clearly categorised. Thomas and Chess introduced the concept of "goodness of fit" — developmental outcomes depend not only on temperament itself but on how well the child's temperament matches parental expectations and environment.

Jerome Kagan's research showed that behavioural inhibition in toddlerhood (intense wariness in response to unfamiliar people and situations) is a stable temperamental trait with biological correlates and longitudinal links to anxiety disorders in adolescence.

Svar: Sant

Kagan and colleagues' prospective longitudinal research identified behaviourally inhibited infants at 14–21 months — characterised by prolonged clinging, cessation of play, and distress in unfamiliar situations — and followed them into adolescence. Inhibited toddlers showed elevated heart rate and cortisol stress responses, higher right frontal EEG asymmetry, and greater amygdala reactivity compared to uninhibited peers. By middle childhood and adolescence, they had significantly elevated rates of social anxiety and other anxiety disorders. This work established a temperamental pathway from early biological predisposition to internalising psychopathology.

Social referencing refers to:

A: The tendency for children to prefer peers who are similar to themselves in temperament and play style

B: The infant's use of a caregiver's emotional expression to guide their own response to an ambiguous situation

C: The process by which children learn social rules by observing the consequences others receive for their behaviour

D: The capacity to take another person's visual perspective, which develops in the concrete operational stage

Social referencing emerges at around 8–9 months, coinciding with the development of joint attention. The classic demonstration by Sorce et al. (1985) used the visual cliff apparatus: when mothers posed a fearful expression, virtually no infants (0%) crossed the deep side; when mothers posed a happy expression, the majority (74%) crossed. This shows that even very young infants look to caregivers' emotional faces as information sources about environmental safety — an early form of emotional communication that has significant implications for fear learning, safety appraisals, and the development of the attachment relationship as a "secure base."

The classic false-belief task (Wimmer & Perner, 1983) was designed to test:

A: Whether children understand that others can hold beliefs that differ from reality — a key index of Theory of Mind

B: Whether children can remember information presented at a different time and place

C: Whether children understand that their emotional expressions are visible to others

D: Whether children can inhibit a prepotent response in a social context

In Wimmer and Perner's original paradigm, a character places an object in location A and then leaves; while the character is absent, the object is moved to location B. Children are asked where the character will look for the object on return. Children typically begin to pass this task around age 4, correctly predicting the character will look in location A (where they falsely believe the object to be). Before ~4 years, children predict the character will look where the object actually is — conflating the character's belief with reality. Theory of Mind (Premack & Woodruff, 1978) is the capacity to attribute mental states to self and others; the false-belief task is its most widely used empirical index.

Zahn-Waxler and Radke-Yarrow's research found that prosocial responses to others' distress — including sharing and attempting to comfort — first appear around the second birthday, not earlier.

Svar: Falskt

Zahn-Waxler and Radke-Yarrow's naturalistic home observations (training parents to record infants' responses to emotional events) found evidence of empathic concern and rudimentary prosocial responses — offering objects, patting, making sounds of concern — as early as 14–18 months. This substantially earlier emergence than previously thought challenged accounts that required cognitive prerequisites such as self-awareness or Theory of Mind for prosocial behaviour. More recent laboratory work (Warneken & Tomasello, 2006) confirmed that infants as young as 14–18 months spontaneously help others achieve goals without being prompted or rewarded.

Susan Harter's developmental model predicts that children's self-descriptions will shift in which direction across middle childhood?

A: From psychological traits and abilities toward concrete physical descriptions and possessions

B: From global, positive, and undifferentiated self-views toward multidimensional, more realistic, and domain-specific self-evaluations

C: From peer-comparison-based self-evaluations toward criteria based entirely on individual achievement

D: From unstable, context-dependent self-concepts toward a fixed global self-esteem rating that remains stable across situations

Harter's developmental model of self-concept (1999) traces a trajectory across childhood. Young children (ages 4–7) tend to describe themselves in global, positive, and concrete terms (physical attributes, possessions, activities) and have inflated self-perceptions because they cannot yet integrate contradictory self-relevant information across domains. By middle childhood (8–12 years), children begin to use psychological trait terms, make social comparisons with peers, and hold more differentiated — and more accurate — self-evaluations across specific domains (academic competence, athletic ability, social acceptance, physical appearance, behavioural conduct). Global self-esteem is distinct from domain-specific competence beliefs and both matter for adjustment.

Match each self-conscious emotion to its defining psychological feature.

Emotional regulation in infancy initially depends primarily on:

A: The infant's own cognitive appraisal of whether situations are threatening or safe

B: Co-regulation by the caregiver — external support that modulates the infant's arousal until internal regulatory systems mature

C: Habituation — the automatic reduction in arousal that occurs when the same stimulus is repeated

D: Temperament alone — regulatory capacity is fixed at birth and does not change with experience

Infants are born with extremely limited capacity for self-regulation: the prefrontal cortex, which underpins deliberate emotional regulation, is the last major brain region to mature (continuing into the mid-20s). In infancy, emotional regulation is initially external and caregiver-mediated — the caregiver acts as an "external prefrontal cortex," modulating the infant's arousal through contact, vocal soothing, feeding, and contingent responding. Over the first years, this co-regulation is gradually internalised as children develop internal regulatory strategies. The quality of co-regulation provided in the attachment relationship shapes the trajectory of self-regulatory development: sensitive caregiving supports the development of regulatory capacity; chronic misattunement undermines it.

Harry Sullivan proposed that close peer friendships in middle childhood and early adolescence serve unique developmental functions that relationships with adults cannot provide — particularly intimacy, equality, and consensual validation.

Svar: Sant

Sullivan's interpersonal theory of development (1953) argued that close same-age friendships — particularly the "chumship" of late childhood — provide qualitatively different developmental experiences from parent-child relationships. While parental relationships are characterised by power differentials and unconditional acceptance, peer friendships involve equality, mutual negotiation, intimacy through disclosure, and consensual validation of one's worth and perceptions. Sullivan proposed that these experiences are essential for developing the capacity for intimate relationships in adulthood and for learning to take another's perspective under conditions of equality. His analysis influenced subsequent developmental research on peer relationships, friendship quality, and loneliness.

Nancy Eisenberg's longitudinal research on prosocial behaviour found that:

A: Prosocial behaviour in early childhood is unrelated to later social competence because it is driven entirely by parental demands

B: Empathy and emotional regulation in childhood predict social competence and low aggression in adolescence and adulthood

C: Children who show the highest levels of prosocial behaviour in childhood tend to show reduced prosocial behaviour in adolescence as peer norms shift

D: Prosocial behaviour is stable across development only in children who also show high emotional reactivity

Eisenberg's programme of longitudinal research across three decades established that individual differences in empathy-related responding and emotional regulation in childhood predict a range of positive outcomes: higher social competence, greater peer acceptance, and lower levels of aggression and externalising problems in adolescence and beyond. Critically, it is not empathy alone but the combination of empathic concern with adequate emotional regulation that predicts prosocial behaviour: children who are highly empathic but poorly regulated tend to become personally distressed rather than acting prosocially. This regulation-empathy interaction is one of the most robust findings in the developmental literature on moral development.