Making Sense (Routledge Revivals)

The Child's Construction of the World

Jerome S. Bruner, Helen Haste, Jerome S. Bruner, Helen Haste

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781136823343
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Éducation
• Subtopic: Éducation générale

The growing child comes to understand the world, makes sense of experience and becomes a competent social individual. First published in 1987, Making Sense reflected the way in which developmental psychologists had begun to look at these processes in increasingly naturalistic, social situations. Rather than seeing the child as working in isolation, the authors of this collection take the view that 'making sense' involves social interaction and problem-solving. They particularly emphasize the role of language; its study both reveals the child's grasp of the frames of meaning in a particular culture, and demonstrates the subtleties of concept development and role-taking.

1
Understanding feelings: the early stages

JUDY DUNN

When do children begin to understand the feelings and wishes of other people in their world? It is a crucially important development for an individual born into a complex social world. Yet we know relatively little about the beginning of this understanding. Answers to the question have been sought in two ways: first, by giving children experimental tasks that require them to take perspective of another, to report on the feelings of a story-book character, or to identify an emotional state from a picture or drawing; second—and much less frequently—by attempting to make inferences about children’s understanding of another person’s feelings from their naturally-occurring responses to others’ behaviour or actions, and from their spontaneous conversations. Both these research strategies present major problems of interpretation, and leave the answer to our question still clouded. The difficulties presented by the second strategy are obvious. It is a hazardous business attempting to establish the nature of children’s understanding simply from observing their behaviour, especially as with very young children this is frequently non-verbal behaviour.

The experimental tasks of the first strategy have resulted in a range of contradictory findings, and the interpretation of these contradictions is full of pitfalls. While it is generally accepted from experimental studies that ‘significant increases in understanding others’ emotions and situations that elicit emotions occur between the ages of three and six’ (Shantz, 1983, p. 517), the ability of 3- and 4-year-olds to identify others’ emotions remains a matter of dispute, and such studies are rarely conducted with children under 3. The early stages of children’s understanding of emotion remains, from studies within this experimental paradigm, unclear. It is a familiar argument that it is in interaction with other children that the crucial developments in social understanding take place (Hartup, 1983). What then of the period between infancy and this stage of the arguments and disputes between articulate 5- and 6-year-olds, forcing each other to face each other’s feelings and point of view? The period of transition from infancy to childhood has been very much a blank page as far as children’s growing understanding of emotions is concerned.

The problems of tracing the beginnings of this social intelligence are formidable. One of the difficulties is that the social world in which young children first begin to develop their understanding of others’ emotions is the family—and it is within the family that they must be studied if we are to understand the nature of the developments that take place. We know from the illuminating work of Tizard and Hughes (1984) on 4-year-olds that if children are studied within their family world the picture that we gain of their intellectual power and curiosity is dramatically different from the picture gained from studying the same children at school, or indeed from the accepted view of 4-year-olds’ cognitive ability. What then of the abilities of even younger children, thinking and talking about other people in their family world? Hood and Bloom (1979) have clearly shown, in their analysis of early expressions of causality, that in their third and fourth years children talk about psychological causality: well before they talk about physical causality they refer to intentions and motives. In this chapter I shall discuss different lines of evidence from observational studies of even younger children at home, that demonstrate the growing capacity of children during the second year of life to read and anticipate the emotions and intentions of others. The methodology of the studies on which I shall draw has been described in detail elsewhere (Dunn and Kendrick, 1982; Dunn and Munn, 1985). They are longitudinal studies of two-child families, with observations focused upon the children’s interaction with their siblings and mothers, and their response to interaction between mother and sibling. We have examined a number of different features of their behaviour and those that I shall consider here include children’s behaviour in conflict, their conversations about feelings and their participation in pretend play.

The first hints that children showed considerable grasp of their siblings’ feelings and wishes came from our initial study of siblings (Dunn and Kendrick, 1982). The firstborn children in that study of forty families, who were in many cases under 3 years old, made frequent comments on the feelings and intentions of their baby siblings, and indeed ‘explained’ the expressive behaviour and actions of the baby to the observer. The following examples are quotations from the transcripts of the tape recordings made during the observations (see Dunn and Kendrick, 1982):

Judy B: She wants to come to you.

Bruce S: He likes that. He a silly boy.

Harvey M: He likes me.

Jim E: Jackie not like monkey. (after Jackie had thrown down toy monkey)

Laura W: Callum’s laughing for his dinner isn’t he? He sometimes gets Bonzo’s dinner [the dog’s] ‘cause he likes his dinner quick.

Jill J (showing O a toy): He likes this. He likes it squeaky.

Laura W: Callum’s crying ‘cause he wants his food cold.

Harvey M: Ronnie’s happy.

There were many incidents in which the firstborn children commented on the baby’s behaviour in a way that appeared to be ‘detached’: it did not reflect the interests of the first child, but was finely tuned to the baby’s apparent wishes. It is important to note that the firstborn were sometimes quite explicit about the baby’s feelings being different from their own:

Bruce S (B playing with a balloon): He going to pop it in a minute. And he’ll cry. And he’ll be frightened of me too. I like the pop.

Laura W (to baby sibling): You don’t remember Judy. I do.

These observations do not fit the interpretation put forward for instance by Chandler and Greenspan (1972) that children of this age can merely project their own feelings onto others. These children were not confused about the situation of self and ‘other’ when the ‘other’ was their sibling.

From these comments on the baby’s feelings and capabilities, and from the children’s empathetic responses to their baby siblings’ distress, we concluded that children of 3 were skilful at reading, anticipating and responding to the feelings of their baby siblings. Most strikingly, a few incidents in that study suggested that the secondborn siblings—aged only 14–15 months—were beginning to grasp how to comfort and how to provoke their older siblings. In the next two studies of siblings we pursued this possibility in more detail, following second-born children through the second and third year of their lives. The fights, disputes, conversations and games of the children’s family life provided a context in which different aspects of the children’s growing understanding of other people were revealed. We first consider conflict.

Family conflict

In the course of the second year children’s behaviour when involved in disputes with their siblings or parents changes markedly (see Dunn and Munn, 1985, for a detailed analysis of these changes). One development that indicates a growing grasp of the feelings of the person with whom the child is in conflict is the appearance of teasing behaviour. As young as 14 months some children, in confrontation with their siblings, perform acts that apparently reflect some understanding of what will annoy the other person. Very often, at this age, the act involves removal of the older child’s comfort object or destruction of his or her favourite possession. By 20–24 months however the teasing becomes more elaborate: for instance one child whose older sister had three imaginary friends named Lily, Alleluia and Peepee would in the course of disputes announce that she was Alleluia. It was an act that was followed by fury or distress on her sister’s part, and was surprisingly sophisticated behaviour for a 24-month-old, involving transformation of identity as well as some understanding that the act would provoke her sister. Forty-three per cent of the 18-month-olds were observed to tease their older siblings, and forty-eight per cent of the 24-month-olds. They also anticipated their mothers’ response to their physical aggression and teasing acts. There was a significant difference in the probability that they would appeal to the mother for help after they had teased or been physically aggressive, and the probability that they would appeal to the mother after the sibling had acted in these ways. Appeals were made by the secondborn in only 4 per cent of incidents in which they had teased or been physically aggressive, but in 66 per cent of incidents in which the sibling had acted in this way.

In these children’s family lives there was also, of course, plenty of opportunity to witness disputes between others, and we examined systematically the children’s responses to arguments between their siblings and their mothers. They rarely ignored such interactions: arguments and quarrels were clearly of much salience to them. And our analyses of their responses showed that certain features of the dispute—such as the emotion expressed by the antagonists—were closely linked to the children’s response. If the sibling or mother was upset or angry, the children were more likely to watch, or to act in a supportive manner, than to laugh, imitate or punish. They acted, that is, in a manner appropriate to the needs of one of the antagonists, and provided practical support. Their response to disputes in which the sibling was amused or teasing the mother was very different. They were most likely to join the sibling in laughing. By 24 months the children sometimes commented explicitly, during disputes, upon the feeling state of themselves or others, or on the responsibility of the other people for the dispute.

It appears from the children’s behaviour in these family conflict incidents that they do during the second year develop a considerable pragmatic understanding of what will annoy or distress others. They use this understanding in their relationships with mother and with sibling as a source of power, in conflicts of interest. They also use it as a source of shared humour with other family members. They make jokes—looking and laughing when someone transgresses, in a manner that strongly suggests some grasp of the shared nature of the rules that have been broken, and of the expectations about family behaviour.

Conversations about feeling states: deceit and narrative

Our analyses of the conversations about feeling states between the children and their mothers and siblings showed that the children not only discussed the cause of feelings (Dunn, Bretherton and Munn, 1987), but also used their understanding of feeling states for an impressively wide range of social functions. They communicated about feeling states when they attempted to reassure, to comfort, to provoke, to prohibit and to restrain. Especially interesting were incidents in which children apparently attempted to deceive their mothers about feeling states in their efforts to gain what they wanted. In the following example a 24-month-old girl, very lively and definitely not tired, demanded chocolate cake. When her demand was refused she ‘put on’ a tired voice to say Tired’, and repeated the demand:

Family T. Child 24 months. Child sees chocolate cake on table.

Child: Bibby on.

Mother: You don’t want your bibby on. You’re not eating.

Child: Chocolate cake. Chocolate cake.

Mother: You’re not having any more ...