Reactivity in infants: A cross-national comparison.

Abstract

Four-month-old infants from Boston, Dublin, and Beijing were administered the same battery of visual, auditory, and olfactory stimuli to evaluate differences in level of reactivity. The Chinese infants were significantly less active, irritable, and vocal than the Boston and Dublin samples, with American infants showing the highest level of reactivity. The data suggest the possibility of temperamental differences between Caucasian and Asian infants in reactivity to stimulation. Most developmentalists agree that ease and intensity of behavioral arousal to external stimulation is a salient temperamental quality of infants. Rothbart (1989), who calls this characteristic reactivity, regards it as one of the two basic temperamental dimensions, along with self-regulation. However, because ease of arousal is a general term, several issues arise. The first of these is the need to specify response mode and class of incentive. Infants differ with respect to the behaviors that reflect their level of arousal (e.g., motor activity, vocalization, smiling, fretting, or crying) as well as the type of incentive that most often elicits arousal (e.g., visual, auditory, or olfactory stimulation). Most infants show more vigorous motor activity to moving objects than to sounds or speech, but they smile more often to speech than to visual stimuli during the first few months of life (Kagan & Snidman, 1991a). A second issue is whether the early variation in arousal, specified by incentive and behavioral modality, predicts variation in other psychological qualities displayed in later infancy or childhood. A third, related question asks whether infants of different nationalities, differing in genetic or cultural backgrounds or both, differ in ease of arousal. This article reports a difference between Chinese and Caucasian 4-month-old infants in the level of reactivity to stimulation. Anticipation of the major result can be found in earlier reports that suggested that Asian infants are at a lower level of arousal than Caucasian infants (Caudill & Weinstein, 1969; Freedman, 1974; Freedman & Freedman, 1969; Kagan, Kearsley, & Zelazo, 1978; Lewis, 1989). Over 20 years ago, Freedman and Freedman (1969) reported that newborn Asian-American infants, compared with European-Americans, were calmer, less labile, less likely to remove a cloth placed on their face, and