Processing Affect 1 Flashcards
What does affective communication to children provide?
Important input to their development such as regulating their emotions ect.
I want to unfold
I don’t want to stay folded anywhere,
Because where I am folded,
I am out of touch with the truth
Implication
There might be something as the truth in us. Unfolding this truth is deeply related to how we are
Sense/ expectation of wanting to grow and being related to
Sometimes young infants struggle to the adapt to the world
Synchronos- syn (together) chronos (in time)- what happens when two individuals meet each other at the same time and with the same level
We do a lot of things non-verbally
Intimacy
Need for communication often becomes prominated when we become isolated
Human Nest
- what is the idea?
- what are the key principle features?
Idea that human being has been evolved in growing up in a particular environment
Key principle features:
- Soothing perinatal experiences (e.g., no separation from mother)
- Breastfeeding on request for 2-5 years (quite different to western cultures)
- Affectionate touch; Responsivity; Free play
- Social embeddedness- other mature caregivers are also part of the infants life
Human nest 3 time points
- Inter-subjectivity (invisible influence in child’s dev)
- Intimacy, trust, security
- Coherence
Explain why empathy has deep roots
Empathy is critical for development
Emotional bridge between organism and environment (e.g., Freud- our first ego is an embodied ego, 1938; Ferreira, 1961)
Little empirical attention to infant’s affective capacities until the 1970s and 80s
Explain about intersubjective infant
- Experience-expectant (e.g., Narvaez et al., 2013)
- Infant sensory organism is highly receptive to stimuli arriving from social world (i.e., social fittedness; e.g., MacFarlane, 1975). To people in general but also caregivers.
– MacFarlane- infant is able to identify mothers breastmilk- this shows theres a pre disposition to connect and for social adaption - Engages dyadic, affectively charged exchanges and interactions (“proto-conversations”- conversations at a non-verbal level; Trevarthen, 1979)
- Young infants are highly attended to voices
Social Fittedness: Parental Brain
What happens to brains when we become parents
When we become a parent- It’s a period of high plasticity in the brain
Theres a caregiving network that becomes accentuate when a person becomes a parent
The caregiving situation is highly salient to the brain
Increased activity in limbic regions- which are connected to emotions and tied to reward
Relations to empathy
Relations to motivation-reward- nucleus accumbens
Relations to physicality as well
Affective Communication
- what does this communication become?
- what is being communicated?
- what do you see when infants and caregivers become synchronised
- what underpin healthy emotional development?
- This communication becomes synchronised- presence of affective communication system. Things start to happen at the same time and exchange of information starts to happen at the same time. Eg. the way the face is moving, eye contact, hands moving
- When it becomes synchronised a lot of innate developmental input is being communicated
- When infants and caregivers begin to synchronise in this way you see RH (intuitive non verbal representation of ourselves). The RH of caregiver is activating and amplifying RH of infant.
- Co-ordinated patterns of interaction underpin healthy emotional development
“In individual emotional development the precursor of the mirror is the mother’s face…what does the baby see when he or she looks at the mother’s face?
What does this suggest?
I am suggesting that, ordinarily, what the baby sees is himself or herself” (Winnicott, 1971)
Infant becomes what the relationship is. The young child will see how they have been mirrored.
This highlights importance of non-verbal affective processes
I See You
“When I look, I am seen, so I exist” (Winnicott, 1971)
Important that we are seeing for us to have a sense of who we are
The deeper our seeing is, the more opportunity for integration
Implied in the act of seeing
We see each other in our wholeness
- What did Strogatz, 2004 say about the tendency to synchronise?
- What did Leckman & March (2011) say about the dyadic relations between child and caregivers in the first year of life?
“For reasons we don’t yet understand, the tendency to synchronise is perhaps the most pervasive drives in the universe. It extends from people to planets, from animals to atoms” (Strogatz, 2004)
“It has…become abundantly clear that…the dyadic relations between child and caregivers within the first years of life can have direct and enduring effects on the child’s brain development & behaviour” (Leckman & March; 2011)
Synchrony
- what is it?
- elements relating?
Meeting together in time- create an affective communication system which is intrained with others
“…an overarching process that co-ordinates the ongoing exchanges of sensory, hormonal, and physiological stimuli between parent and child social interactions…” (Feldman, 2007, p. 340)
Motor activity
Body sensation
Emotion
Cognition
Experimentally inducing synchrony:
Paladino, et al (2010)
Study and results
- Pp who is seated in front of computer screen who is seeing another person
- Experimenter brushes cheek either in synchrony with the way the person on the screen cheek is being brushed, or not.
Found:
- The timing of this makes a difference to how the pp experiences this experiment
- In synchrony- they start to feel more close to the other person and they think they could relate (psychological)
- They start to see their own face as to the persons face on the screen (perceptual level)
- Sense of relating
- Synchrony has also been explored in infants- found they pay particular attention to when synchrony makes sense
Rabinowitch TC, & Knafo-Noam, A (2015).
Study and reuslts
- 2 children sitting next to each other but not looking at each other.
- They’re tapping something in front of them
- They don’t realise this is happening on an implicit level but they are encouraged to either tap in synchrony or out of synchrony
Found:
- When 2 children are tapping the object in synchrony to on another, they feel closer and more similar to the other person
- 2 children are reacting in a synchronised way even if they are unaware of this
Cirelli, Einarson % Trainor (2014)
A young infant is standing in opposition to experimenter and music begins to play.
They either bounced in synchrony or not
Again see them being close and liking each other
Idea that early synchronised changes makes infants feel closer.
However, were not always in synchrony with other people.
Best functioning mother-infant dyads are in attuned states about 28-34% of the time (Harris & Waugh, 2002; Tronick & Beeghly, 2011)- therefore it’s not all about synchrony.