Where does jealousy come from and where does it come from?
To find out this fact, we conducted a test against an 11-month-old boy. This is a well-nourished child who has no conditional fears at all. However, he was very attached to his mother and had no attachment to his father.
Because this child likes to suck his own fingers, and the father will hit his hand when he sees this situation to stop his sucking, and use various methods to interfere with him and break his tranquility. By the time the child was 11 months old, he was able to crawl very quickly for a long distance.
The child paid no attention to the mutual embrace of the parents. It can be said that in the early life of a child, this has never been taken seriously. After repeated experiments, the child did not show the slightest intention of crawling towards them, let alone blocking in their midst.
Of course, our experiment did not end there, but arranged for the parents of the children to attack each other to observe the children's behavioral reactions.
At that time, the floor of the room was carpeted, so the sound of fighting was not loud, and the whimpering of the mother (or father) was relatively low. However, the sound of parents fighting still attracted the attention of the child, and the child immediately stopped crawling and stared at the mother for a long time.
Notice that here the child only gazes at the mother, not at the father. After watching for a while, he had no intention of participating, that is, he had no intention of helping someone fight, but only made a whimpering sound.
Here, the sound of parents fighting, the floor shaking caused by the two pulling, and the child seeing the parent's face, these visual stimuli are almost the same as the visual stimuli when the child is beaten, so he will cry when he sees this.
That is to say, it is this series of stimuli that allows us to observe the behavior of the child in this situation, which belongs to the type of fear, and some of which forms a visual conditioned reflex.
Apparently, in this experiment, the child's parents, whether they hugged each other or fought, we did not see jealousy in the child.
So, we think that as an 11-month-old, he was too young to be jealous.