User:Andyszabo/sandbox

Stranger terror is seen as extreme stranger anxiety, some children at the appearance of strangers will exhibit intense fear in their facial expression and curl up in an apparent panic state. Anxiety and fear around strangers usually appears around 6 months of age and it slowly increases throughout the first year of life. This increase in stranger anxiety correlates with the same time as when the child starts crawling, walking and exploring its surroundings.

Stranger anxiety and stranger terror is associated to the Attachment Theory, to the attachment to caregiver. Seen across different species, attachment increases the chances of the infant’s survival in the world. In a research conducted by Tyrrell and Dozier (1997), they found that infants in foster care show more attachment-related difficulties than control infants in their families. Those foster children were sometimes unsoothable after the contact or even just the presence of a stranger. There have been hypotheses that for these infants the appearance of the stranger represented a potential loss of the new attachment figure and it was the fear of reexperiencing this loss that prompted their behavior (Albus et al. 1999). Those children with stranger anxiety will rarely go beyond their caregiver to explore their surroundings.

Strange Situation
In a Strange Situation experiment, a child of the age of 20 months was in a room with their mother and a stranger would enter. The child would go hide behind the legs of the mother. The mother was then asked to leave the room and leave the child with the stranger. After the first separation, the child began to scream was extremely upset. He refused all contact with the stranger and when the adult tried to pick up the child he would scream louder until put back down. Any attempts by the stranger to sooth the child was unsuccessful. When the mother came back in the room for the first reunion, the child somewhat calmed down, but he was still very upset and distressed. For the second part of the experiment, the child was left alone in the room for a couple of minutes before the stranger entered again. The second the stranger entered the room the child began crying loudly again even if no contact was made.

To conclude, although resistance to a stranger is common for children, the extreme reactions was far more urgent and depicted terror. In addition, most babies in the experiment show some evidence of settling when the stranger enters the room the second time. In contrast, children with stranger terror showed an increase in distress upon the stranger’s entry.