Attachment--and loss.

http://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/201/4359/899.2.full.pdf

Phenomenology of perception.

The cultural origins of human cognition

Important advances have recently been made in studying emotions in infants and the nature of emotional communication between infants and adults. Infant emotions and emotional communications are far more organized than previously thought. Infants display a variety of discrete affective expressions that are appro- priate to the nature of events and their context. They also appreciate the emotional meaning of the affective displays of caretakers. The emotional expressions of the infant and the caretaker function to allow them to mutually regulate their interactions. Indeed, it appears that a major deter- minant of children's development is related to the oper- ation of this communication system. Positive development may be associated with the experience of coordinated in- teractions characterized by frequent reparations of inter- active errors and the transformation of negative affect into positive affect, whereas negative development appears to be associated with sustained periods of interactive failure and negative affect. How is it that some children become sad, withdrawn, and lacking in self-esteem, whereas others become angry, un- focused, and brittlely self-assertive, whereas still others become happy, curious, affectionate, and self-confident? As clinicians, researchers, and polieymakers, our goal must be to understand the processes that lead to these outcomes, not just to generate indexes of them, so that problematic and compromised developmental outcomes can be prevented and remediated. Although the nature of these processes is not yet known, an answer is taking shape on the basis of recent work on the nature of infant- caretaker emotional communication. The emerging answer is that the infant and adult are participants in an alfective communication system. A central hypothesis is that the operation of this system has a major influence on how well the infant accomplishes his or her goals, the emotions the infant experiences, and the infant's developmental outcome. If this hypothesis is correct, then the key issue is to understand how this sys- tem works. We need to explore the inextricable links among infant emotions and behavior, caretaker emotions and behavior, and the success, failure, and reparation of interactive errors that the infant experiences when striving to accomplish his or her goals. Two contrasting examples of infant-mother interaction drawn from the work of Brazelton (Brazelton, Koslowski, & Main, 1974) will serve as a base for the initial exploration of the functioning of this affective communication system. Imagine two infant-mother pairs playing the game of peek-a-boo. In the first, the infant abruptly turns away from his mother as the game reaches its "peek" of inten- sity and begins to suck on his thumb and stare into space with a dull facial expression. The mother stops playing and sits back watching her infant. After a few seconds the infant turns back to her with an interested and inviting expression. The mother moves closer, smiles, and says in a high-pitched, exaggerated voice, "Oh, now you're back!" He smiles in response and vocalizes. As they finish crow- ing together, the infant reinserts his thumb and looks away. The mother again waits. After a few seconds the infant turns back to her, and they greet each other with big smiles. Imagine a second similar situation except that after this infant turns away, she does not look back at her mother. The mother waits but then leans over into the infant's line of vision while clicking her tongue to attract her attention. The infant, however, ignores the mother and continues to look away. Undaunted, the mother per- sists and moves her head closer to the infant. The infant grimaces and fusses while she pushes at the mother's face. Within seconds she turns even further away from her mother and continues to suck on her thumb. I will not yet focus on the issue of who is responsible

/pdf/emotions-and-emotional-communication-in-infants-lyk1mc1oj9.pdf

Emotions and emotional communication in infants.

We review research evidence on the emergence and development of active "self-and-other" awareness in infancy, and examine the importance of its motives and emotions to mental health practice with children. This relates to how communication begins and develops in infancy, how it influences the individual subject's movement, perception, and learning, and how the infant's biologically grounded self-regulation of internal state and self-conscious purposefulness is sustained through active engagement with sympathetic others. Mutual self-other-consciousness is found to play the lead role in developing a child's cooperative intelligence for cultural learning and language. A variety of preconceptions have animated rival research traditions investigating infant communication and cognition. We distinguish the concept of "intersubjectivity", and outline the history of its use in developmental research. The transforming body and brain of a human individual grows in active engagement with an environment of human factors--organic at first, then psychological or inter-mental. Adaptive, human-responsive processes are generated first by interneuronal activity within the developing brain as formation of the human embryo is regulated in a support-system of maternal tissues. Neural structures are further elaborated with the benefit of intra-uterine stimuli in the foetus, then supported in the rapidly growing forebrain and cerebellum of the young child by experience of the intuitive responses of parents and other human companions. We focus particularly on intrinsic patterns and processes in pre-natal and post-natal brain maturation that anticipate psychosocial support in infancy. The operation of an intrinsic motive formation (IMF) that developed in the core of the brain before birth is evident in the tightly integrated intermodal sensory-motor coordination of a newborn infant's orienting to stimuli and preferential learning of human signals, by the temporal coherence and intrinsic rhythms of infant behaviour, especially in communication, and neonates' extraordinary capacities for reactive and evocative imitation. The correct functioning of this integrated neural motivating system is found to be essential to the development of both the infant's purposeful consciousness and his or her ability to cooperate with other persons' actions and interests, and to learn from them. The relevance of infants' inherent intersubjectivity to major child mental health issues is highlighted by examining selected areas of clinical concern. We review recent findings on postnatal depression, prematurity, autism, ADHD, specific language impairments, and central auditory processing deficits, and comment on the efficacy of interventions that aim to support intrinsic motives for intersubjective communication when these are not developing normally.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/3DC59499840534E5455EEDB895666BF6/S0021963001006552a.pdf/div-class-title-infant-intersubjectivity-research-theory-and-clinical-applications-div.pdf

Infant intersubjectivity: research, theory, and clinical applications.

Although theories of early social development emphasize the advantage of mother-infant rhythmic coupling and bidirectional coordination, empirical demonstrations remain sparse. We therefore test the hypothesis that vocal rhythm coordination at age 4 months predicts attachment and cognition at age 12 months. Partner and site novelty were studied by recording mother-infant, stranger-infant, and mother-stranger face-to-face interactions in both home and laboratory sites for 88 4-month-old infants, for a total of 410 recordings. An automated dialogic coding scheme, appropriate to the nonperiodic rhythms of our data, implemented a systems concept of every action as jointly produced by both partners. Adult-infant coordination at age 4 months indeed predicted both outcomes at age 12 months, but midrange degree of mother-infant and stranger-infant coordination was optimal for attachment (Strange Situation), whereas high ("tight") stranger-infant coordination in the lab was optimal for cognition (Bayley Scales). Thus, high coordination can index more or less optimal outcomes, as a function of outcome measure, partner, and site. Bidirectional coordination patterns were salient in both attachment and cognition predictions. Comparison of mother-infant and stranger-infant interactions was particularly informative, suggesting the dynamics of infants' early differentiation from mothers. Stranger and infant showed different patterns of vocal rhythm activity level, were more bidirectional, accounted for 8 times more variance in Bayley scores, predicted attachment just as well as mother and infant, and revealed more varied contingency structures and a wider range of attachment outcomes. To explain why vocal timing measures at age 4 months predict outcomes at age 12 months, our dialogue model was construed as containing procedures for regulating the pragmatics of proto-conversation. The timing patterns of the 4-month-olds were seen as procedural or performance knowledge, and as precursors of various kinesic patterns in the outcomes of 12-month-olds. Thus, our work further defines a fundamental dyadic timing matrix--a system that guides the trajectory of relatedness, informing all relational theories of development.

Rhythms of Dialogue in Infancy: Coordinated Timing in Development.

Infant Research and Adult Treatment: Co-constructing Interactions

A microanalysis of 4-month mother-infant face-to-face communication revealed a fine-grained specification of communication processes that predicted 12-month insecure attachment outcomes, particular...

/pdf/the-origins-of-12-month-attachment-a-microanalysis-of-4-7wyrq6iypd.pdf

The Origins of 12-Month Attachment: A Microanalysis of 4-Month Mother-Infant Interaction

The contribution of mother-infant mutual influence to the origins of self- and object representations.

Using research on the purely social face‐to‐face exchange, we examine patterns of mother—infant interaction and their relevance for the presymbolic origins of self and object representations, focusing on the representation of inter‐relatedness between self and object. Based on a dyadic systems view in which the system is defined by both self‐ and interactive‐regulation processes, we argue that characteristic patterns of self and interactive regulation form early interaction structures, which provide an important basis for emerging self and object representations. What will be represented, presymbolically, is the dynamic interactive process itself, the interplay, as each partner influences the other from moment to moment. This is a dynamic, process view of “interactive”; or “dyadic”; representations. The argument that early interaction structures organize experience is based on a transformational model in which there are continuous transformations and restructurings, where development is in a constant stat...

Beatrice Beebe

Papers

Rhythms of Dialogue in Infancy: Coordinated Timing in Development.

Infant Research and Adult Treatment: Co-constructing Interactions

The Origins of 12-Month Attachment: A Microanalysis of 4-Month Mother-Infant Interaction

The contribution of mother-infant mutual influence to the origins of self- and object representations.

Mother—infant interaction structures and presymbolic self‐ and object representations