CHAPTER 2 The Development of the Person: Social Understanding, Relationships, Conscience, Self ROSS A. THOMPSON SOCIAL UNDERSTANDING 26 Early Social Discriminations and Expectations 27 Intentions and Inferring Intentionality 30 Social Referencing 33 Understanding Social Events 35 Feelings and Desires 36 Understanding Psychological Characteristics and Social Roles 39 Summary 41 RELATIONSHIPS 42 Attachment and its Development 43 Differences in Attachment Security 45 Security of Attachment in the Strange Situation 47 Other Behavioral Assessments of Attachment Security 50 Origins of Attachment Security 52 Consistency and Change in the Security of Attachment 57 What constitutes the development of a person? In moral philosophy, "personhood" is not inherent in human exis- tence but rather is contingent on the achievement of self- awareness, moral autonomy, and other constituents of distinctly human capability. Developmental scientists offer a more nuanced answer to this question, describing how the development of personhood emerges in a contin- uous relational context in which infants and young chil- dren develop their earliest understandings of who they are, who others are, and how to relate to other people. Early Attachment and Subsequent Psychological Development 60 Internal Working Models 65 Summary 69 CONSCIENCE 70 Intuitive Morality of Early Childhood 70 Moral Emotion 71 Relational Influences 73 Summary 76 SELF 77 Developmentally Emergent Dimensions of Self 77 Self-Regulation 80 Development of Autobiographical Memory 81 - Summary 84 CONCLUSION 84 REFERENCES 85 This chapter is concerned with early sociopersonal- ity development. Because other chapters of this Hand- book are devoted to temperamental individuality, the development of emotion, peer relationships, and other processes related to personality, the goal is not to com- prehensively describe the emergence of early personal- ity or to identify individual characteristics that foreshadow adult personality traits. Instead, and consis- tent with a developmental perspective, the goal is to de- scribe how central facets of social and personality Every author of a Handbook chapter should have such an op- portunity to write a revision-to try to portray the field more accurately, to correct mistakes and misinterpretations, and to see how far the field can advance in a few years. In the previ- ous edition, I gratefully thanked many colleagues who were willing to contribute to my "meandering ponderings" about the issues of this chapter. I remain grateful to them because they have continued to stimulate my thinking. I am also grateful to a remarkable group of student colleagues: Rebecca Goodvin, Debbie Laible, Sara Meyer, Lenna Ontai, and Abbie Raikes. They have contributed to the ideas considered here, and the chapter is dedicated to them. My deepest appreciation also to Nancy Eisenberg, whose patience and good heart made it eas- ier to complete this project during a period of personal chal- lenge. Although I have sought to identify major contributors to each of the topics reviewed here, the length limitations prohib- ited appreciative citations to all relevant and important papers. Consequently, I offer an apology to respected colleagues whose work is not explicitly noted as frequently as they merit, but whose thinking and research have been influential.The Development of the Person 25 development emerge through the growth of social under- standing, self-awareness, early conscience and coopera- tion, and the relationships that infuse these early achievements. These are some of the most important ways that make a 6-year-old a fundamentally different person from a newborn and form the foundation for in- dividuality and social relatedness in the years to come. The development of social understanding, relationships, self, and conscience constitute the most important ways that developing individuality intersects with the social world. These topics have also provoked the most con- certed research attention in the study of sociopersonal- ity development during the past decade. The research literatures surveyed in this chapter identify several themes about early sociopersonality de- velopment and developing persons. First, relationships are central. Indeed, this chapter is a study of relation- ships and their developmental influence, whether con- sidering face-to-face interaction and the growth of social expectations, parent-child discourse and autobio- graphical self-awareness, the growth of a mutually co- operative orientation between parent and child, security of attachment, or children's representations of self and relational processes. This chapter reflects an emerging view that relational experience is generative of new un- derstanding, whether of emotions, self, morality, or peo- ple's beliefs, and highlights the need for a developmental relational science of the future that focuses on relational influences across diverse developmental domains. Such a developmental relational science could integrate the most valuable perspectives offered by attachment the- ory, neo-Vygotskian thinking, sociolinguistic ap- proaches to cognitive growth, and other perspectives into a thoughtful understanding of how early relational experience contributes to fundamental competencies and the emergence of individual differences in thinking, sociability, and personality development. Second, because relational experience is important, early sociopersonality development is best understood not as socialization or constructivism but rather as the appropriation of understanding from shared activity (Rogoff, 1990). The literatures reviewed in this chapter describe how psychological development arises from the powerfully inductive capacities of the young mind inter- acting with the conceptual catalysts of social exchange, whether in the conflict of wills between parents and a locomoting toddler, interactions about broken toys and mishaps, or conversations about the day's events that re- ( flect cultural values. Integrating understanding of the constructivist mind with the influence of relationships in early sociopersonality development requires compre- hending the nature of the shared activity of young chil- dren and those who care for them. This is an important research challenge because a model of appropriated