The Social and Emotional Development of the Pre-School Child

Katharine M. Banham Bridges

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351714624
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychologie
• Subtopic: Entwicklungspsychologie

Originally published in 1931, the study reported in this book was undertaken as part of the research programme of the Canadian National Committee for Mental Hygiene. It represents a systematic inquiry into the social and emotional behaviour of pre-school children as observed from day to day in a nursery school. The study extended over a period of three years, and it concerned children between the ages of two and five years who were in attendance at the McGill University Nursery School and child laboratory. It can now be read and enjoyed in its historical context.

PART I

APPROACH TO THE PROBLEM

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION

THE problem of finding out the nature and rate of mental development in pre-school children has been made much easier, in the last few years, by the establishment of various standardized test situations and the classification of normative behaviour. Moreover, the scientific study of child behaviour, which the making of these tests necessitates, has added greatly to our knowledge of pre-school mental development. Among such behaviour scales and mental tests for pre-school children the more important to date are the Stanford and the Kuhlman-Binet tests, Gesell's developmental schedules, Stutsman's performance tests, and Wallin's, Baldwin's, Goodenough's, Bayley's, and Hallowell's tests.¹

These tests and behaviour scales in most instances were designed to measure the development of so-called intelligence, or the ability to adjust to certain kinds of new situations. More specifically they indicate a child's development relative to other children, with regard to sensory discrimination, motor co-ordination, sensory-motor co-ordination, attention, memory, association of ideas and reasoning. They are concerned, therefore, chiefly with the development of more and more discriminating and skilful behaviour with regard to inanimate objects and non-social situations.

Experimental studies made with the help of these devices possess certain advantages over the descriptions of the behaviour of individual children, and the theoretical speculations which constituted the bulk of child psychology two or three decades ago. Such studies isolate problems and thus clarify knowledge. They offer more reliable information, since they combine observations on many children; and they are more practical in that both situation and behaviour are described in such exact terms that repetition and comparison can be made. They have a disadvantage in that they take into account at one time so few mental factors. Each of the mental tests for instance throws light only on some specific aspect of behaviour. Even combined scales of several tests measure only certain aspects of mental development. In fact, nearly all the existing scales of pre-school behaviour measure only linguistic and motor skills.

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¹ The books and articles containing these tests are given in the Bibliography at the end of the book.

There are as yet no standardized tests and, to the writer's knowledge, only two or three partial scales of social behaviour of the pre-school child. This aspect of mental development has been given only very general description. The same may be said with regard to the development of emotional behaviour and the motivation of behaviour. We are still obliged to go back to the older literature, to rely on individual studies, or to make unwarranted inferences from adult psychology in order to get information on these aspects of child psychology.

It was with a view to the collecting of information which would in some measure fill the above-mentioned gap in our behaviour scales and our knowledge of pre-school mental development that the writer undertook the study described in this book. Social and emotional behaviour were selected for study as these are topics of current interest and controversy, and seem to be intimately linked together. No attempt was made to study the motivation of behaviour, much as the information is required. This would include a study of the development of desires, incentives, and instinctive drives, and would make a separate and complete topic for another volume.

The aim was to find out from the literature and from firsthand observation of pre-school children in a nursery school, what constitutes the nature of their social and emotional behaviour, and how this may be described, classified and perhaps arranged in a scale. For this purpose about fifty children were observed almost daily by the writer at the McGill University Nursery School for a period of three years.

The children attended the school from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. five days a week for nine months in the year. They were all of them from average or superior homes and their parents were English-speaking Canadians. Roughly speaking they were normal children—that is, they had no marked physical or mental defects. Some of the children, however, came to the school as conduct or behaviour problems. The group under observation was thus small and somewhat selected. The conditions under which they were observed were essentially laboratory conditions, the school being the laboratory, and the children were only observed closely during the time they were at school. The findings described in the following chapters, therefore, are offered to the reader only as suggestions to which considerably more information of a similar nature must be added, before an adequate knowledge of the social and emotional development of young children is attained.

THEORETICAL CONSIDERATIONS

Before considering any method of approach to the problem it seemed advisable first to inquire into the meaning of the terms social and emotional development, and to adopt some working hypothesis or definition with regard to them. The meaning of the term social development is more or less clear, and is very much the same for the different schools of psychologists, for sociologists, teachers, and the ordinary educated laymen. The term almost invariably refers to the behaviour of the individual with regard to other individuals or groups, in other words to social behaviour. Social development consists in the acquisition of an increasing number of socially acceptable reactions with regard to others, and in the evolution of more and more adequate or suitable adjustments to social situations.

Emotional development is not so easily described. In the first place there is disagreement among psychologists as to the meaning of “emotional.” For some the word denotes certain kinds of behaviour, while for others it refers to certain conscious or sub-conscious phenomena not necessarily expressed in overt behaviour. If the latter use of the term were to be adopted it would rule out the possibility of studying the emotional life of pre-school children, since language is so incompletely developed at this age as to afford little or no clue to the conscious experience of the child. On the other hand, every one is agreed that the young child is often emotional in his behaviour. It was therefore decided for the purpose of this study to adopt the meaning of “emotional” that refers to behaviour only.

Some behaviouristic psychologists describe emotion as a pattern reaction involving chiefly responses of the smooth muscles and glands of the body. Others describe emotional behaviour more in terms of responses of voluntary or skeletal muscles which accompany the visceral responses. Running away, crouching, hiding, for instance, are regarded as forms of fear, but these are responses of the large body muscles.

The most satisfactory description of emotion seems to lie in a compromise between these two views. Close observation of individuals cringing in fear or shouting in anger generally reveals also evidences of increased activity of the sympathetic nervous system and certain duct and ductless glands. Such evidences are, rapid breathing, pallor, perspiration, dilated pupils, and so forth. In all probability both visceral and skeletal responses are involved in emotion, though the former is the most essential feature. It is fairly generally agreed that more marked reaction of the voluntary muscles does not necessarily imply correspondingly greater emotion, though this may be true in some cases. For example, one cannot be sure that the louder a child shouts the greater is his distress, though this may sometimes be true. On the other hand, it is generally conceded that the greater the response of the smooth muscles and glands the greater the emotion—that is, the more the individual is emotionally disturbed.

Not only is emotional behaviour a controversial subject among psychologists, but so also is the question of emotional development. Some psychologists believe that emotional reactions are inherited and unchanging things. Emotional behaviour is regarded as primitive or infantile behaviour, and development can only mean control of it, or emancipation from it. Others believe that although emotional reactions remain essentially the same throughout the lifetime of the individual, they may be aroused by different objects or situations in the course of development. Development would therefore consist in changing the attachments of emotional reactions to more and more complex and socially approved situations. For instance, an infant may struggle in rage when his arms are held, a schoolboy may fly into a rage when another insults him, while a grown man may exhibit an outburst of rage at a social injustice. There are still other psychologists who hold that the emotional response may not only become associated progressively with a series of different situations, but also that the nature of the response itself may change. An infant may kick and wave his arms when his feet are held, and an older child may behave in the same way when he is teased without actually being held. The older child may also react to either situation by merely shouting in protest without kicking and slashing his arms.

No definite position was taken with regard to the meaning of “emotional development” till after several months’ daily observation of the children in the nursery school. On the basis of this empirical observation it was decided to adopt, as a working basis for the study, the hypothesis that emotional development consists in the decreasing frequency of intense emotional responses, in the progressive transfer of responses to a series of stimuli determined by experience and social approval, and in the gradual change of the nature of the overt responses in accordance with social dictates. This view of development is really a combination of the standpoints mentioned in the previous paragraph. All three theories were found to be based on facts observable in the children's behaviour.

It was obvious from the outset of this study that social and emotional development are intimately connected. Social situations both cause and control emotional behaviour and even determine the nature of its development. In fact, emotional development might almost be considered as a form of social development. But since some emotional behaviour is not prompted directly by social situations, and since emotional behaviour in general constitutes a separate psycho-logical problem, it seemed desirable to think of the two aspects of behaviour separately, but to study them conjointly in the children.

In brief, “social development” in this study is regarded as increase in ability to adjust to social situations, especially in ability to act or behave in a socially desirable way. The more markedly emotional aspects of such adjustments are included in the term “emotional development”. This latter term is taken to mean increase in ability to adjust to emotion-producing situations in both a biologically and socially adequate way, and a progressive substitution of emotion-producing situations according to the dictates of chance experience and social demand. Social desirability is the chief criterion of development, though physiological, motor, and intellectual maturity are in part determining factors.

If it is desired to preserve the misleading expression “general intelligence” in psychology to denote ability to adjust, then ability to make social and emotional adjustments should be considered also as marks of intelligence. Many psychologists of the present day, however, are agreed that an individual instead of possessing general intelligence may have a number of “specific intelligences”. There may, therefore, be such human capacities as “social intelligence” and “emotional intelligence”, and these may be measurable in much the same way as are “language intelligence” and “motor intelligence”, —that is, by measures of achievement to date in these fields of behaviour.

It might be expected that these different intelligences would be somewhat independent of each other—that is, they would show no high degree of correlation. On the other hand, there would probably be some correlation, since the same sensory and response mechanisms are involved in each, and since the test situations designed to measure specific intelligences do not completely isolate the desired adjustment problems. There is an overlapping in all test situations. For instance, the present language and performance tests do not eliminate either the social or the emotional situation. A child's ability to solve the problems set in the tests will be in part determined by his ability to make social and emotional adjustments. For this reason it seemed highly desirable to the writer that some scheme for roughly isolating and measuring social and emotional adjustments should be made. Although it is obvious that such a scheme could not eliminate other intelligence factors, still it would shift the emphasis and should form an essential complement to the already existing mental tests. The scales described in this book offer a tentative scheme of this sort.

PROPOSED PROCEDURE

A perusal of the literature disclosed the fact that remarkably little has been recorded regarding the social and emotional b...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• Table of Contents
• LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
• PART I APPROACH TO THE PROBLEM
• PART II SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT
• PART III EMOTIONAL DEVELOPMENT
• PART IV APPLICATION OF THE SCALES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX