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264  CHAPTER 7

case, parent behaviors show a goodness of fit with the infant’s temperament. The infant will learn that it is okay to approach other people, and that noth- ing bad happened as a result. The importance of goodness of fit for develop- ment explains why infants who show high levels of anger or frustration and experience negative parenting continue to be angry and frustrated at later ages (Calkins, 2002). CHECK YOUR UNDERSTANDING 7.12 1. What is goodness of fit? 2. How do social experiences contribute to changes in temperament, in line with the notion of “goodness of fit”? Parenting Context of Emotional Development LEARNING OBJECTIVE 7.13  Identify aspects of parenting that influence infants’ emotional development. Parenting is pivotal to emotional development. Parents (and other caregivers) socialize children’s emotional development bymodeling emotional expressions and responding sensitively or harshly to infants’ emotions. Furthermore, par- ents’ psychological functioning shapes how parents interact with their infants. Parental Emotional Expressivity Children learn about emotions by observing how caregivers express emotions in different situations. Ameta-analysis that aggregated results across several studies found that parents’ expressions of happiness, surprise, and interest related to children’s positive expressiveness from infancy through adoles- cence (Halberstadt & Eaton, 2002). Furthermore, infants from families who were high on expressiveness were better able to match happy emotions in faces and voices at 9 months of age than infants from families low on expres- siveness (Ogren, Burling, & Johnson, 2018). Parents’ abilities to regulate their emotional experiences also affect their infants’ emotional development. Parents with strong distress tolerance — the ability to persist when faced with negative emotions and cope with everyday stressors including the demands of parenthood—may be more able to develop positive relationships with children. Indeed, parents low on distress tolerance may increasingly struggle when interacting with infants with difficult temperaments. In turn, parents’ abilities to tolerate stress may reduce over time, further heightening the challenges of parenting (Morford, Cookston, & Hagan, 2017). Parental Depression and Anxiety Depressed and anxious parents sometimes display low emotional expres- sions when responding to their infants’ emotional expressions. Par- ents’ emotional disconnect to infants then shapes infants’ emotional development. The classic still-face experiment illustrates how paren- tal depression and anxiety may affect infant emotions. In this experi- ment, a researcher instructs mothers to interact naturally with their infants for 3 minutes as usual, and to then interact with their infants for another 3 minutes while maintaining a flat, unresponsive still face ( FIGURE 7.15 ). After the still-face period, mothers resume natural interactions and soothe their infants if necessary. Typically, infants become upset by their mother’s still face, and engage in strategies such as looking away to alleviate their distress (Cohn & Tronick, 1983; Ekas, Lickenbrock, & Braungart-Rieker, 2013). When mothers re-engage their babies, infants typically calm down. Infants who are able to calm down and regulate their emotions after being ✓

distress tolerance  The ability to persist when faced with negative emotions and cope with everyday stressors

still-face experiment  An experi­ ment in which caregivers interact naturally with their infants for a brief period, followed by maintaining a still, unresponsive face for several minutes; the caregivers’ still face elicits distress and negative emotions in infants that can be viewed as a measure of infant and mother emotional connection (among other things) PROPERTY OF OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS