Early Experience and Emotional Development

393 Words1 Page

The article was basically about how experiences, emotional development and wariness of heights are related. At a very early age, the child starts experiencing such as crawling. And this crawling leads to another experience for an infant. Infants development of height fear differs from adult acrophobia. Changes occur abruptly in fearfulness between the ages of six months to ten months. Gottlieb's "bootstrapping" approach stresses that possibly, under certain circumstances, psychological functions precedes the development of neuropsychological structures.

The first experiment that took place ninety-two infants at the age of seven and three hundredths months were tested. They took the babies and lowered them to each side of a cliff where visual placing responses were recorded. As predicted the locomotive infants showed a wariness of heights but the pre-locomotive infants did not show wariness of heights. Every infant tested showed visual placing responses to the shallow side of the cliff as opposed to no infant tested showed placing responses on the deep side of the cliff.

In the second experiment, the infants were introduced to a wheeled walker after at least thirty-two hours of voluntary forward motion in the device. The experiment provides an artificial means of loco-motor action. Infants were divided in to two groups:- pre-loco motor walkers and loco motor walkers. The average of the babies crawling in the loco motor walker was a total of about five days. The purpose of this was to show how each individual adapted to the walker. It showed the provisions of "artificial" loco motor experiment may facilitate or induce wariness.

In the next experiment, the infants were placed in the middle of the cliff and had the mothers on the other side of it and were calling out their child's name in order to encourage them to cross over from either the deep side or the shallow side. They experimented with different ages of infants, but the results showed that the older the child the more likely he or she was going to cross over to the mother by going through the deep side.

Studies show that near-falling is indeed a greater risk to a child's fear of heights because it happens so often. There are other ways that infants get wariness of heights, and that is when an infant crawls aimlessly and visualizes the surrounding.

Open Document