The Dynamics of Infidelity by Lawrence Josephs

Author:Lawrence Josephs [Неизв.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: American Psychological Association

OEDIPUS REVISITED: ARE BABIES JEALOUS?

Research in developmental psychology suggests that jealousy may come on line at 6 months of age. Hart and Carrington (2002) conducted an ingenious experiment to show that 6-month-old infants experience jealousy. The study builds on a previous study by Tronick, Als, Adamson, Wise, and Brazelton (1978) that used the “still-face” methodology. Six-month-old babies delight in making eye contact with their mothers and engaging in proto-conversations, in smiley “goo-goo gah-gah” dialogues. Babies connect to their mothers in this way. It makes them feel securely attached by feeling recognized as unique and special individuals in whom their mothers take delight. Here are the origins of that feeling of emotionally intimate bliss in the mother–infant relationship that Freud (1905/1953) and Bowlby (1969) recognized. Tronick et al. (1978) wanted to see how infants would react when deprived of their mothers’ lively responsiveness.

The still-face experiment has the mother face her 6-month-old infant sitting up and engage together in their usual playful back-and-forth interaction. Then the mother is instructed to be unresponsive by just looking at the infant with a blank face and stare. Initially, the baby tries to do all the usual tricks to seduce the mother into responding playfully. The infant gets upset if none of these overtures proves successful. Eventually, the infant gives up and turns away. This pattern exemplifies Bowlby’s (1973) sequence of angry separation protest followed by eventual detachment when attachment needs are frustrated.

Hart and Carrington (2002) used the same research methodology to determine whether infants experience jealousy. They had the mother face her 6-month-old sitting up and engage in their usual playful back-and-forth interaction, as in the still-face experiment. Instead of having the mothers stare at the infant with blank faces, they had them read a newspaper without responding to their infants’ overtures to engage them. As in the still-face experiment, the infants became upset. Hart and Carrington then tried a different experimental manipulation designed to evoke jealousy. They had the mothers start playing with a baby doll and engage in playful proto-conversations while being unresponsive to their babies’ overtures. Not only were the infants understandably distressed, they were significantly more distressed than when their mothers were reading the newspaper. The infants appeared to understand that their mothers were paying attention to another baby, a rival for mother’s attention, rather than just an inanimate object like a newspaper. Six-month-old babies get particularly upset and angry when their mothers are paying attention to another person while being unresponsive to them. Jealousy appears to be activated by a particular type of threat to the attachment relationship to the mother: losing the mother’s love and attention to another person.

Infants appear to get angrier when exposed to the jealousy induction than to the still-face situation (Hart, Carrington, Tronick, & Carroll, 2004), and insecurely attached infants respond more jealously than securely attached infants (Hart & Behrens, 2013). Insecurely attached children respond more jealously to parental interactions with infant siblings (Volling et al., 2014). Insecure attachment exacerbates jealousy, but secure attachment does

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