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Fear of strangers in children and the orienting reaction
Author(s) -
Zegans Susan,
Zegans Leonard S.
Publication year - 1972
Publication title -
behavioral science
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.371
H-Index - 45
eISSN - 1099-1743
pISSN - 0005-7940
DOI - 10.1002/bs.3830170502
Subject(s) - psychology , ethology , arousal , stimulus (psychology) , cognition , developmental psychology , crying , cognitive appraisal , cognitive psychology , social psychology , neuroscience , ecology , biology
The phenomenon of fear of strangers ( FS ) is reviewed in light of recent findings in neurophysiology, ethology, developmental and cognitive psychology. Responses to strangers by infants are variable, including looking, withdrawal, clinging, rigidity and screaming. Visual fixation of strangers is invariable in humans and animals. The evolutionary survival value of FS in humans has been questioned. The theory that this behavior prevents the dilution of the attachment bond late in infancy when the child cannot flee an enemy is critically examined. Such a behavioral mechanism whereby infants were programmed to fear members of their own species would have been of little survival value in early human hunting and gathering societies where parent mortality was high. Fear of strangers has also been accounted for on the basis of cognitive conflict induced in infants by strangers. This theory does not explain why FS appears in human infants several months after discrimination of familiar from strange objects is perceptually possible. The orienting reaction ( OR ) elicited by changes in the environment and characterized by heightened arousal might be important in understanding the development of the FS response. The adaptive value of the OR may be the maintenance of an optimal distance between novel stimuli and the infant until such time as informational uncertainty about the stimulus is reduced. Maturation of the OR in the latter part of the first year of life permits the child to consider informational variables involved in a novel object or stranger and determine the nature of his response. Physiological measurements such as EKG could be used experimentally to determine whether an OR is evoked in infants by the appearance of a stranger.