Child, adolescent, and adult psychiatrist Dr Daniel Emina discusses child psychology and the link between unconscious biases in the latest Working In podcast.
Dr Emina, who earned his medical degree from the University of California Los Angeles School of Medicine, joins host Dan Murray-Serter to unpack where we pick up our unconscious biases as babies and how they can manifest as we grow older.
In the conversation, Daniel shares the key psychological elements that develop in a baby’s brain: “We have this perspective that the way we see the world now is the way we’ve always seen the world, even as a baby, but that’s not really quite how it is,” he says, “We come into this world completely helpless – everything is foreign.”
He explains that we come from a warm and cozy place into a world which isn’t as warm and cozy, through the trauma of birth. The result, he says, is the brain struggles to distinguish you from your mother.
Daniel goes on to explain how babies build the foundation of bias: “From around the age of seven to eight months, children begin to develop stranger anxiety which is then followed by separation anxiety. We can see that this is actually where we start the foundation of bias, it’s required initially to establish safety, trust, and survival – who’s going to feed me, or care for me?”
You can hear the full conversation between Dan and Daniel in the latest two-part episode of the Working In with Heights podcast, launching on Friday 30 October and Sunday 1 November, available on Apple, Spotify and all major podcast platforms.
