The New Start

If you accidentally touched a very hot kettle, your hand would instantly jerk away, without conscious your part. This kind of unlearned, involuntary reaction to a stimulus is called a reflex. Reflexes are simple, inborn, automatic responses of some parts of the body. The entire reflex, from touching the kettle to withdrawing your hand, occurs in a fraction of a second, because it involved transferring information between only three neurons. In comparison, it takes much longer before you can yell “ouch”. By the time you can yell your hand has already withdrawn from the kettle.

In reflexes, message is transmitted directly from sensory to motor neuron forming what is called a sensory-motor are, which causes the person to react even before such messages reach the cerebral cortex.

Reflexes have a significant role in everyday behavior, whether learned or unlearned – the protection of the organism. The papillary reflex or the narrowing of the pupils of the eye in response to excessive illumination, the gagging reflexes when an object is placed on the back of the tongue is examples of protective reflexes. There are also reflexes of the spinal cord like the knee jerk and the flexion of extension reflexes.

Emotions help individuals survive by signaling physiological needs and psychological moods and by motivating behaviors. For instance, the loud piercing cry of a newborn is a powerful communication that often signals discomfort of distress, and they certainly get the attention of parent or caretakers. The researchers found that newborns had limited repertoires of emotional expression, which included, interest startles, distress, disgust, and neonatal smile.  We have no way of knowing what, if any, inner feelings accompany a newborn’s emotional expressions. Over the next years, infants develop a wide range of emotional expressions and feelings, including social smiling, anger, surprise, and sadness.

The first step involves the biological capacity of infants to produce, imitate, and discriminate among emotional expressions. The second steps involve feedback from the parents’ emotions or moods that influences and alters the infants’ behaviors looks up and sees her father smiling, the infant may continue to explore. On the other hand, if the exploring the infants sees her father frowning; she may stop exploring and return to her father’s side.