86 I. THEORETICAL  PERSPECTI vES AND  CONCEPT uAL uNITS
The Need for  Acceptance
The need for positive social engagement is 
the most basic form of social need. I call it 
the need for acceptance  (see Ainsworth, 
1979 [attachment]; Baumeister & Leary, 
1995 [belonging]; Bowlby, 1969 [attach -
ment]; Deci & Ryan, 2000 [relatedness]; 
Fromm, 1955 [relatedness]; McClelland, 
1987 [affiliation]; Murray, 1938 [affection]; 
Maslow, 1943 [love, belonging]; Rank, 1945 
[connectedness]; Rogers, 1961 [acceptance]; 
Spitz, 1965 [affection, attachment]; Stevens 
& Fiske, 1995 [belonging]), because it rep -
resents children’s early need to participate 
in supportive relationships. In line with the 
criteria for a basic need, there is a great deal 
of evidence that young infants are attuned 
to social cues, recognize positive social inter -
actions, and are ready to pursue acceptance- 
related goals. For example, newborns come 
with a preference for faces and human voices 
(e.g., Vouloumanos & Werker, 2007). They 
are also attentive to “accepting” (i.e., recip -
rocal or synchronous) social interactions and 
ready to engage in them: Some newborns ap -
pear to engage in imitation of adult actions 
(Meltzoff & Moore, 1977); 2- to 3-week-olds 
react when mothers violate the reciprocity of 
a social interaction (Tronick, Als, Adamson, 
Wise, & Brazelton, 1978); 3-month-olds 
seem to recognize and prefer positive social 
agents (Hamlin, Wynn, & Bloom, 2010). In 
other words, young infants tune into, prefer, 
and seek positive social interactions, that is, 
those indicative of acceptance.
Also in line with the criteria for a basic 
need, a vast literature attests to the neces -
sity of accepting relationships for optimal 
development and well-being. Parental accep -
tance or warmth, even apart from parental 
predictability, is critical for optimal social 
and cognitive development (e.g., Davidov & 
Grusec, 2006; Eisenberg et al., 2005). Re -
search also documents the highly disruptive 
effects of detached or depressed caregivers 
(e.g., Field, 1995).
The Need for  Optimal  Predictability
The need for optimal predictability  (see 
Glass & Singer, 1972 [predictability]; Hig -
gins, 2012 [truth]; Murray, 1938 [informa -
tion]; Stevens & Fiske, 1995 [understand -ing]; van den Boom, 1994 [responsiveness]) 
is defined here as the desire to know the re -
lationships among events and among things 
in one’s world, such as what belongs with 
what, what follows what, or what causes 
what. Young infants are highly tuned in to 
prediction-  relevant cues, ready to learn from 
them, and prepared to pursue prediction- 
related goals. Even in the first hours of life, 
infants can learn associations between a 
stimulus and a subsequent event (e.g., Lit -
tle, Lipsitt, & Rovee-  Collier, 1984), and in 
20-day-olds these associations are remem -
bered over a period of 10 days (Little et al., 
1984). Newborns can extract statistical pat -
terns from an ongoing stream of auditory 
and visual stimuli (e.g., Bulf, Johnson, & 
Valenza, 2011; see Aslin & Newport, 2012), 
and infants as young as 6 months of age are 
so statistically sophisticated that they are 
surprised when a sample of items drawn 
from a glass jar does not match the numeri -
cal representation of those items in the jar 
(Denison, Reed, & Xu, 2013).
Thus, a wealth of findings indicate that 
very young infants constantly extract infor -
mation from events in in their environment 
in ways that allow them to understand the 
structure of those events and to predict the 
occurrence of future events. This is highly 
consistent with current theory and research 
in cognitive science suggesting that the brain 
may be built for “predictive coding,” that 
is, for the generation, application, and revi -
sion of predictive models (see Clark, 2015). 
Moreover, consistent with the criteria for 
a basic need, predictability is necessary for 
well-being. For example, the importance of 
caretaker predictability for optimal devel -
opment, independent of caretaker warmth 
(Davidov & Grusek, 2006) and indepen -
dent of environmental harshness (Baram et 
al., 2012), has been well-  documented, with 
lower predictability predicting increased 
vulnerability to stress. Such effects have 
also been documented in animal studies, 
in which the predictability of the environ -
ment can be carefully controlled (Seligman 
& Meyer, 1970; Weiss, 1971).
The Need for  Competence
Whereas the need for optimal predictability 
is the desire to know the relationships among 