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displays of anger because they understand not only that their goals are being blocked, but also that someone is preventing them from getting what they want. That’s why they get angry when being put down for a nap. However, infants cannot tell scientists what they are feeling. And so researchers make their best guesses about infant emotions. Are infants truly angry when their arms are restrained? When and whether infants experience specific emotions in ways similar to children and adults has generated much debate (Camras & Shutter, 2010) ( FIGURE 7.6 ). Fear The emotion of fear has strong roots in infancy. From an evolu- tionary perspective, an innate, universal, and early fear of snakes, spiders, heights, and other potentially threatening stimuli may benefit survival and thus be adaptive (Poulton & Menzies, 2002). Alternatively, infants may rapidly learn to fear certain threatening stimuli through experience rather than inborn tendencies (Öhman & Mineka, 2001; Seligman, 1971). How do researchers test whether infants “fear” certain stimuli? One approach is to present infants with pictures or replicas of threatening and nonthreatening stimuli—such as snakes versus frogs—and compare infants’ responses to each. Early studies suggested that infants quickly learn to avoid certain stimuli over others. For example, when researchers presented 14-month-old infants with a toy spider, infants avoided the spider when their mothers expressed fear. Even after mothers later expressed joy at seeing the toy spider, infants continued to avoid the spider (Zarbatany & Lamb, 1985). Similar findings have been documented in nonhuman animals. Researchers presented lab-reared rhesus monkeys with videos of wild rhesus monkeys displaying fear in the presence of real and toy snakes and nonfearful behav- iors in the presence of wooden blocks or plastic flowers. The rhesus monkeys quickly learned to express fear in the presence of snakes, but not to the blocks or flowers ( FIGURE 7.7 ) (Cook & Mineka, 1989, 1990). However, the interpretation that infants innately experience “fear” in the presence of certain threatening stimuli has been challenged (e.g., LoBue & Adolph, 2019). If infants naturally find spiders, snakes, and the like to be scary, they should show a high startle response and quickened heart rate— physiological markers of fear in adults. But infants do not show any such evidence of fear when presented with pictures of snakes versus frogs. They do, however, look more at snakes and spiders than at nonthreatening stimuli (Thrasher & LoBue, 2016). Thus, infants may be biased to detect and attend to threatening stimuli, even if they are not naturally afraid. Such perceptual biases may then facilitate learning to fear snakes and other threats after brief exposures, as infants learn through others or their own discoveries that such stimuli are indeed dangerous (LoBue & Adolph, 2019; LoBue & DeLoache, 2010; LoBue & Rakison, 2013) ( FIGURE 7.8 ). Self-Conscious Emotions Although it may be difficult to infer the meaning of infants’ emotional expressions in the first year of life, emotions become more differentiated in the second and third years. Furthermore, toddlers begin to display behaviors that suggest the emergence of the self-conscious emotions. Self- conscious emotions relate to a sense of self and other awareness, such as embarrassment, pride, guilt, and shame (Tracy, Robins, & Tangney, 2007). For example, infants avoid eye contact and hide their face when they are the

© iStock.com/wildcat78 FIGURE 7.6  Expressions of anger generalize to a range of situations in toddlerhood.  In the sec- ond year, infants extend their anger (or distress) to a wide range of situations such as when someone blocks their goals (e.g., being put down for a nap).

Tamis-LeMonda Child Development: Context, Culture, and Cascades 1E Sinauer Associates/OUP Morales Studio TAMIS1e_07.06 06-30-21

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© iStock.com/Cvrk FIGURE 7.7  Learning fear.  Michael Cook and Susan Mineka (1990) presented rhesus monkeys who had never been in the wild and never seen a snake with edited videos of two other monkeys expressing fear: one monkey expressed fear toward a plastic flower and the other toward a plastic snake. When examiners later presented the rhesus monkeys with the two objects, the monkeys responded with fear to the snake, but did not express fear to the flower. Such findings suggest

UNIVERSITY PRESS

Tamis-LeMonda Child Development: Context, Culture, and Cascades 1E Sinauer Associates/OUP Morales Studio TAMIS1e_07.07 06-30-21 preparedness toward learning to fear certain types of stimuli. Here is a photo of a frightened juvenile monkey seeking comfort from an adult.