Infant Temperament: A Psychological Analysis

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The developmental stage came about as a proposed theory by Erik Erikson. Erikson’s theory was of psychosocial development that included eight stages and started from birth and covered all adulthood. Erikson believed that during each of these stages an individual would encounter some kind of crisis that would impact them in either a negative or positive way. The purpose of the eight stages is to develop certain life skills and abilities to help expand personality development. The concept I chose to write about is infant temperament, which falls in line with the first two stages of Erikson’s chart. Infant temperament is exactly what you think it would be. According to (LeFrancois, 2016) temperament implies inherited predispositions toward …show more content…

While reading through “Mainstreaming Culture in Psychology” it became clear that most of our studies in the past relied heavily on the United States. Arnett (2008) challenged American psychology for having neglected 95% of the world’s population whose living conditions differ vastly from those of the Americans on which most psychological studies published in major APA journals have been based. With the increase in immigration of families coming to the United States it is imperative that we expand our knowledgebase on the different cultures of the world (Federal Interagency Forum on Child and Family Statistics, 2002; Hernandez et al., 2007, 2008; Reuters, 2004). One of the articles I chose conducted several experiments to link early childhood temperament in three different U.S. cultural groups. The three groups chosen were Latin American, Japanese American, and European American. The overview of the experiment proved that there were very few temperament differences between immigrant children and non-immigrant children. I think a better approach to this could have been to survey children outside of the U.S. due to the fact that the children listed above were born in the U.S. Although the children were born in the U.S. the upbringing from their parents in the culture group did not make a difference. Understanding the value of cultural awareness goes back to what was said about hindering our ability to understand other