Symposium
Chair: Riccardo Draghi-Lorenz
Discussant: Judy Dunn
Mainstream theories of emotional development suggest that so-called 'complex' emotions, such as jealousy, do not emerge before the child is well into the second year. However, where jealousy of significant others is concerned recent evidence from several different research programs suggests otherwise. The case seems to be that jealousy of loved others can be manifested during the first year and by the end of it, is within the potential of most infants. In fact, some researchers have moved beyond issues of early manifestation and difference from other emotions, and started exploring other important aspects of its development - such as the relation with attachment and maternal depression, and the ways adults react to infant jealousy. This symposium is the first specifically collecting presentations from most research programs concerned with jealousy in early infancy. Its main aims are to provide an informative and integrated picture of this new area of research, and an opportunity to discuss some of the implications of the findings for theories of social and emotional development. The first presentation reports parental and naturalistic observations of jealousy during the second half of the first year (and in some cases even before), corroborated by experimental evidence that five-month-old infants can be distressed by the mother paying loving attention to another infant. This presentation will also briefly argue against current representational accounts of jealousy and explore a possible ecological alternative. The second presentation explores the relations between jealousy and attachment in twelve-month-old infants of depressed and non-depressed mothers. Findings reported here show that jealousy and attachment behaviours are associated but that jealousy measures are robust. Further, an association between elevated jealousy protest and secure attachment suggests that infant jealousy is a normal feature of healthy affective development. The third presentation looks at the role played by contextual information in adults attributions of jealousy and other 'negative' emotions to young infants. Results suggest that an attribution of jealousy is made when information on an appropriate social context is provided, otherwise infant expressive behaviour is interpreted as anger. It is concluded that jealousy is recognised/contructed as a socially embedded emotional reaction. Finally, the last presentation illustrates how infant jealousy and anger are not treated alike. The data reported here also show that adults make distinctions between jealousy and anger, even in young infants, but (again) that such distinctions are based on features of context, rather than behaviour alone. Further, they show that jealousy precipitates adults' greater lenience, suggesting that jealousy is interpreted more favorably, possibly because it is seen as implying love. The findings reportedin these presentations bear possible interesting implications for theories of social and emotional development. Collectively, they suggest that by the end of the first year socialization of jealousy may be well under way, and they lend further support to emerging views that call for a reconceptualization of the interpersonal life of infants as being more complex than previously thought.
Details of individual items:
paper
Until a number of decades ago, several authors reported instances of jealousy within the first 8 months of life (e.g. Baldwin, 1897; Tracy, 1894; Gesell, 1906; Guillaume, 1926; Piaget, 1934). In the current literature these reports are rarely if ever mentioned as most authors believe that jealousy emerges only during second year or even later (e.g. Mahler, Pine & Bergman, 1975; Izard & Malatesta, 1987; Rothbart, 1994; Lewis, 1995). Current theorists argue that younger infants are incapable of the interpersonal awareness required by jealousy because they lack the necessary representational skills. Contrarily, older authors such as Baldwin believed that young infants are capable of some 'organic' pre-reflective empathic awareness of others allowing jealousy and other 'complex' emotions (Baldwin, 1897). Apart from the older reports there is no evidence to support either view, even though with very few exceptions (Trevarthen, 1993; Barrett, 1995) the current one is widely taken as an 'established fact'. This paper reports results from two studies suggesting that young infants may in fact be capable of interpersonal jealousy. In the first study, parental reports and videotaped naturalistic interactions were collected of nine infants followed from the age of 2 to 11 months. Most parents reported first observing jealousy at about 7-9 months and a few as early as 4-5 months. By the time infants were eleven-month-old all parents had reported several convincing instances of jealousy. Parental reports also suggest that individual differences may be due to a combination of temperamental and contextual factors such as the behavior of significant others towards other infants. Videotaped interactions confirmed parental reports of jealousy from about 8 months onward, but failed to provide sufficiently clear examples of jealousy in younger infants. The second study was designed to address this problem and used an experimental methodology to test jealousy in 24 five-month old infants. The results showed that more than a half of the infants became distressed when the mother expressed love for another infant, as opposed to only about ten percent when the mother interacted with other adults. When infants did not show distress to the experimental situation they appeared to be either enjoying it, interested, indifferent or actively avoiding it. Such variety of responses rules out the interpretation of early jealousy as a kind of automatic emotional reaction that does not require any form of psychological differentiation between self and other. These results have a variety of possible implications for the way we conceive emotional development, the difference between basic and 'non-basic' emotions, early forms of attachment and, underlying all these issues, the origins of interpersonal awareness. Early jealousy undermines the idea that interpersonal awareness depends upon conceptual representation. It is also argued that lower forms of representation cannot account for the origins of interpersonal awareness either, because representationalism paradoxically assumes a solipsistic start for social development. Within a ecological-relational approach, a non-representationalist account will be briefly outlined that allows early 'complex' emotions such as jealousy.
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Previous research has shown that 12-month old infants can protest when their mothers attend to a doll and show increased mother-directed gaze, proximity and touch. This pattern of behaviour has been offered as evidence of jealousy. Many of the behaviours that evidenced jealous responses are also viewed as components of the attachment system and indicative of the infant-mother attachment relationship. The primary goal of this investigation was to explore the relations between attachment behaviors, jealousy behaviors and attachment classification. Previous research also showed that jealousy inducement results in infants of depressed mothers demonstrating reduced jealousy protests. A secondary goal was thus to explore whether attachment mediates the relationship between reduced jealousy and maternal depression. Ninety-seven 12-month old infants of depressed and nondepressed mothers were observed while interacting with their mothers during three situations: a toy-play session in which mothers were interactive and responsive and two situations of maternal unresponsiveness. In one of the latter situations the infant was ignored while his/her mother attended to a book, whereas in the other the infant was observed while his/her mother attended to a doll. Independent observers coded infant behaviors during the three sessions on two different scales. Jealousy behaviors included the amount of time the infant engaged in gaze, proximity, touch and protest. Attachment classifications, using the standard A-D classification system, and attachment behaviors, (i.e., proximity seeking, contact maintaining, contact resistance, proximity avoidance) were coded. Bivariate correlation coefficients yielded significant relationships between attachment behaviors and jealousy behaviors during the doll session. Specifically, greater contact maintenance and contact resistance were related to greater mother-directed gaze, proximity, touching, and protest and less proximity avoidance was related to greater mother-directed gaze, proximity, touch, and protest, suggesting that the doll situation was stressful and elicited regulatory behaviors. This pattern of association was not evident during the book condition. To further examine the inverse relationship between maternal depression and jealousy, we asked whether the relation would still be apparent even when controlling for attachment. We conducted partial correlations between maternal depression and jealousy behaviors, partialling out attachment. These analyses revealed that the relationship between jealousy behaviors and maternal depression remained robust. Further, a 2 (depressed/nondepressed) x 2 (secure/insecure) ANOVA, using jealousy protest behavior as the dependent variable, revealed contrasting patterns. Greater jealousy protest occurred among secure/nondepressed groups. Lesser jealousy protests occurred among the three remaining groups: secure/depressed, insecure/nondepressed, and secure/depressed groups. Using attachment to examine jealousy behaviors adds insight into our understanding of individual differences in levels of jealousy protest. Adding to earlier reports that maternal depression predicts flatter patterns of jealousy protest, recognition of the role of the attachment relationship helps explain higher levels of jealousy. That secure attachment is associated with greater jealousy protest further supports notions that infant jealousy is a feature of normative affective development.
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Little is known about the origin of the expression of jealousy, its developmental course and environmental determinants. In particular, in order to understand the complexities of the development of jealousy during infancy and possible linkages to its later expression across the life course, one of the first orders of research should involve demonstrating its distinctness from the expression of other 'negative' emotions, such as anger and fear. Unlike jealousy, these two emotions are accepted by most if not all researchers as evident during the first year of life. However, there are verbal and motoric expressions associated with jealousy and with other displays of negative affect that may be relatively isomorphic in the first years of life. For example, vocal expressions such as crying may occur with fear, anger and jealousy when infants display these emotions. It is likely that in order to respond appropriately to the infants' signals one must consider the contextual factors that give meaning to such signals. Thus, in order to interpret the differences and the correlates between jealousy and other negative emotions in infancy, it may be best considering the total behavior-environment circumstance rather than discrete behaviors in isolation. This paper presents data on naive observers' attributions of infant fear, anger and jealousy. Two hundred and ten participants viewed video recordings of infants expressing fear, anger and jealousy (three infants per emotion), and ranked eight emotion terms (fear, anger, jealousy, worry, sadness, disgust, grief, envy) as to how descriptive each term was of the infants' emotion. Infants from the fear video condition had been exposed to the approach of a stranger, infants from the anger condition had been exposed to maternal still-face conditions, and infants from the jealousy video condition had been exposed to their mothers' providing their formative attention exclusively to a twin sibling. For half of the sample contextual information on the circumstances provoking the emotion was included, whereas for the remaining half of the sample this information was edited out of the videotapes. Differences within and between participants' judgments of the eight terms in the two conditions were examined across the three emotion-provoking conditions. Results suggest that an attribution of anger rather than jealousy was made when the socio-contextual information for the jealousy video condition was not provided. When such contextual information was provided, attributions of both jealousy and anger were made in the jealousy video condition, but the attribution of jealousy was not made in either the fear and the anger video conditions. That jealousy was confused with anger without contextual information, but was recognized as jealousy when there was contextual information available, suggests that jealousy is perceived as a socially-embedded emotion.
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In previous research, infants as young as 12-months showed protest behaviors when their mothers attended to a doll as if it was a real infant. This response pattern appears to reflect sensitivity to the distribution of attention by an attachment figure, and may represent an early form of jealousy. Questioning the basis of infant jealousy led to comparisons between infants with different interaction histories. Surprisingly, comparisons between infants with and without siblings revealed no differences. Protests by onlies were as pronounced as those of infants who had siblings despite the fact that their first-year experiences did not include jealousy-inducingsituations. We have suggested that infant jealousy may be provoked bythe mother's failure to give the infant her undivided attention.Firstborns may easily develop this expectancy, since experience withcaregivers usually occurs in an exclusive context. Laterborns maydevelop a similar expectation, that of receiving preferentialtreatment, since mothers give younger infants, particularly newborns,disproportionate amounts of attention. Hence, maternal attentivenesstoward a doll may represent a violation of expectancies held by bothfirst- and later-born infants. Finding few distinctions betweeninfants with and without siblings suggests that triadic experienceswith siblings may not be essential to the emergence of jealousy. Thisraises interest in mothers and the dyadic relationship between infantsand mothers. In the first study presented here, we examined maternalreactions to infant behaviors precipitated by jealousy inducement, andcompared them with maternal reactions to infant behaviors precipitatedby maternal unresponsiveness which was unrelated to jealousyinducement. Results revealed that although the jealousy-inducementcondition precipitated more negative behaviors in infants, it provokedmore positive behaviors in mothers. These findings raised questioningwhether mothers' positive reactions to infants' negative behaviorsrepresent a generalized response to infant distress or a specificreaction to infant jealousy. To explore this issue, a second study wasconducted in which adults observed a videotape in which a 12-month-oldinfant demonstrated a temper tantrum. Half of the adults were toldthat the infant had been exposed to their mothers attending to anotherinfant. The other half was informed that the infant had beenfrustrated by having a toy withdrawn. Results revealed that bothgroups of adults interpreted infant reactions as anger, and both ratedthe anger at equivalently high levels. Yet, adults differed in theiropinions about the way in which parents ought to respond to a tantrum.Whereas frustration was seen as warranting greater firmness and lesswarmth, jealousy was seen as deserving greater warmth and lessfirmness. Infant anger and jealousy are not treated alike. Such differentiation suggests that infants are treated as if capable of jealousy, and that contextual features are critical to interpretations of jealousy. Adults' more favorable reactions to jealousy may reflect their recognizing love as a component of jealousy, and their perceiving jealousy as reflecting the quality of a dyadic relationship. These attributions may be factors contributing to difficulties reducing jealousy in various social contexts, including those which include siblings, and the socialization of jealousy in general.