Basic Modes of Social Interaction: Their Emergence and Patterning During the First Two Years of Life.

Abstract

The literature on the social development of infants and young chil dren has dealt more with the ages at which important new social skills are first shown and with developmental landmarks that usher in new levels of behavior organization, than with the manner in which social perceptions and action skills are put to use in everyday life. Once a child learns to recognize strangers and familiars; once he knows how to communicate wishes as well as his aversions; once reciprocity is established through gesture or through words,· how do these new ac quisitions affect the totality of his functioning in social contexts? By the same token, relatively little is so far known about the variety and range of social contacts that occur day by day and month by month between an infant and other people in the family milieu. As has been pointed out with increasing frequency in the literature, what we lack is a comprehensive view of the totality of events and circumstances that form the matrix of normal development. In short, a behavioral ecology of infant life guided by a developmental and psychological orientation is desirable. Our research group has attempted to make a start in this direc tion through an intensive longitudinal study of development dealing with the first two years of life. As an important part of the ambitious plan to record and systematically deal with all observable behavioral events that constitute an infant's waking life, we recorded all social encounters between the baby and other persons that occurred during

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 39 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.