Social, Emotional, and Personality Development
This domain tests temperament, attachment, psychosocial stage theory, identity, emotional milestones, and adult personality stability and change.
Temperament
- Thomas & Chess: easy (~40%), difficult (~10%), slow-to-warm-up (~15%); outcomes depend on goodness of fit with the caregiving environment.
- Rothbart: reactivity plus self-regulation; dimensions include surgency, negative affectivity, and effortful control.
- Kagan: behavioral inhibition - high-reactive 4-month-olds are more likely to become inhibited toddlers; the pathway is biologically based, not simply a parenting product.
Attachment
- Bowlby: ethological attachment theory; phases from pre-attachment (0–6 weeks) through clear-cut attachment (6–8 months to 18 months) to reciprocal partnership.
- Harlow: contact comfort outweighs feeding - rhesus infants clung to the cloth mother.
- Ainsworth's Strange Situation (8 episodes, ~21 minutes, for 12–18-month-olds): secure (B, ~60–65% in middle-class U.S. samples; distressed at separation, seeks and accepts comfort, explores); insecure-avoidant (A; little distress, ignores caregiver at reunion); insecure-resistant/ambivalent (C; clingy, angry, not soothed); disorganized (D, Main & Solomon; contradictory or frozen behavior, associated with maltreatment).
- Internal working models guide later relationships; stability is moderate, and classification rates vary by culture.
Erikson's psychosocial stages
Trust vs mistrust (0–1.5), autonomy vs shame and doubt (1.5–3), initiative vs guilt (3–6), industry vs inferiority (6–12), identity vs role confusion (adolescence), intimacy vs isolation (young adulthood), generativity vs stagnation (midlife), integrity vs despair (late life).
Identity and emotion
Marcia's statuses - achievement, moratorium, foreclosure, diffusion - describe identity exploration and commitment. Self-conscious emotions (shame, guilt, pride, embarrassment) require self-recognition, emerging ~18–24 months (rouge test). Social referencing appears around 9–12 months.
Adult personality
Big Five traits show rising rank-order stability with age. Mean-level change follows the maturity principle: agreeableness and conscientiousness rise, neuroticism falls. The 'midlife crisis' is weakly supported by evidence.
Worked example
A 13-month-old plays calmly when the mother returns after separation and does not approach her. Reasoning: the classification hinges on reunion behavior. Ignoring the caregiver at reunion despite awareness of her return is the avoidant pattern. A resistant toddler would seek contact while also showing anger and resisting soothing; a disorganized toddler would show contradictory or freezing behavior.
Traps that cost marks
- Confusing disorganized with avoidant.
- Treating the Strange Situation as a temperament measure; it indexes attachment quality within a specific age band.
- Mixing up Erikson's stage ages or labels.
- Assuming a midlife crisis is a universal developmental stage.