User:Kathlabelle/sandbox

Modeling and stranger anxiety
Parental attitudes also have an effect on a child’s fear acquisition. In their early months and years, infants acquire most of their behavioral information for their direct family and often, their primary caregivers. Young infants are more selective and preferentially learn about new threats for their mother's responses. High risk mothers can easily influence their child’s responses since are more likely to mimic their actions. For example, a child who sees their mother demonstrating negative reactions towards a specific person, then the child is more likely to have a negative response towards that same person. While most studies have researched the impact of mothers' behaviors on their children, it is important to note that the effect of parental modeling is not unique to mothers, but the phenomenon occurs for both mothers and fathers. However, feared responses seem to decrease with time if infants are provided with opportunities to have physical contact with the stimuli which helps alleviate the stimuli's fearful properties.

Fear beliefs that occur vicariously can be reversed using the same form of acquisition through a vicarious counter-conditioning procedure. For example, a parent can show a stranger’s angry face with happy face or a scared-paired animal with happy faces as well and vise versa.

Stranger fear is less likely in older children (i.e. at least six years old) since there is a greater readiness for them to accept behavioral information from outside the family. However, studies show that older children do exhibit increased anxiety to new threats and avoidant responses following discussions with their parents. The impact of parental modeling of anxiety on children may go beyond influencing anxious behaviors in children, but also have an impact on their subjective feelings and cognition during middle childhood.

This has important implications for parents and those working with school-age children because it suggests that they can potentially prevent or reverse fear developing if they recognize a child is involved in a fear-related vicarious learning event. In cases where infants become fearful of strangers or unknown entities (such as foreign objects), parents should respond positively towards the stranger, only after the child has a phobic response to it.

STRANGER TERROR

The DSM- V describes stranger terror as infants with a reactive attachment disorder, inhibited type and do not respond to or initiate contact with others, but rather show extreme trepidation and ambivalence about unknown adults. 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. The age of the child seems to play an important role in the development of stranger terror in infants. Older infants (i.e. at least 12 months) seem to be more effected than younger infants because their cognitive development to know and remember has matured more than younger infants and their attachment to caregivers is stronger than younger infants.