The emotional and embodied nature of human understanding: sharing narratives of meaning (original) (raw)
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Routledge International Handbook of Young Children's Thinking and Understanding, 2015
This paper presents the child as a creature born with the spirit of an inquisitive and creative human being, seeking understanding of what to do with body and mind in a world of invented possibilities. He or she is intuitively sociable, seeking affectionate relations with companions who are willing to share the pleasure and adventure of doing and knowing with ‘human sense’. Recent research traces signs of the child’s impulses and feelings from before birth, and follows their efforts to master experience through stages of self-creating in enjoyable and hopeful companionship. Sensitive timing of rhythms in action and playful invention show age-related advances of creative vitality as the body and brain grow. Much of shared meaning is understood and played with before a child can benefit from school instruction in a prescribed curriculum of the proper ways to use elaborate symbolic conventions. We begin with the theory of James Mark Baldwin, who observed that infants and young children are instinctive experimenters, repeating experience by imitating their own as well as other’s actions, accommodating to the resources of the shared world and assimilating new experiences as learned ideas for action. We develop a theory of the child’s contribution to cultural learning that may be used to guide practice in early education and care of children in their families and communities and in artificially planned and technically structured modern worlds of bewildering diversity.
Narrative as co-regulation: A review of embodied narrative in infant development
Infant Behavior and Development, 2022
We review evidence of non-verbal, embodied narratives in human infancy to better understand their form and function as generators of common experience, regulation, and learning. We examine their development prior to the onset of language, with a view to improve understanding of narrative as regular motifs or schemas of early experience in both solitary and social engagement. Embodied narratives are composed of regular patterns of interest, arousal, affect, and intention that yield a characteristic four-part structure of (i) introduction, (ii) development, (iii) climax, and (iv) resolution. Made with others these form co-created shared acts of meaning, and are parsed in time with discreet beginnings and endings that allow a regular pattern to frame and give predictive understanding for prospective regulation (especially important within social contexts) that safely returns to baseline again. This characteristic pattern, co-created between infant and adult from the beginning of life, allows the infant to contribute to, and learn, the patterns of its culture. We conclude with a view on commonalities and differences of co-created narrative in non-human primates, and discuss implications of disruption to narrative co-creation for developmental psychopathology.
Sharing Experiences in Infancy: From Primary Intersubjectivity to Shared Intentionality
Frontiers in Psychology, 2021
We contrast two theses that make different assumptions about the developmental onset of human-unique sociality. The primary intersubjectivity thesis (PIT) argues that humans relate to each other in distinct ways from the beginning of life, as is shown by newborns' participation in face-to-face encounters or “primary intersubjectivity.” According to this thesis, humans' innate relational capacity is the seedbed from which all subsequent social-emotional and social-cognitive developments continuously emerge. The shared intentionality thesis (SIT) states that human-unique forms of interaction develop at 9–12 months of age, when infants put their heads together with others in acts of object-focused joint attention and simple collaborative activities. According to this thesis, human-unique cognition emerges rapidly with the advent of mind-reading capacities that evolved specifically for the purpose of coordination. In this paper, we first contrast the two theses and then sketch t...
Representation and internalization in infancy: Three principles of salience
Psychoanalytic Psychology, 1994
Three principles of salience describe interaction structures in the first year of life. The principles of ongoing regulations, disruption and repair, and heightened affective moments are variations on the ways in which expectancies of social interactions are organized. The term ongoing regulations captures the characteristic pattern of repeated interactions. Disruption and repair describes a specific sequence broken out of the broad pattern. In heightened affective moments, one dramatic moment stands out in time. Over the course of the first year and beyond, these three principles constitute criteria by which interactions will be categorized and represented at a presymbolic level. The three principles of salience can simultaneously illuminate the origins of representation and internalization. Interactive regulation is the central concept in both. We propose that internalization in the first year is not a process distinct from the organization of representations. Both partners jointly construct dyadic modes of regulation, which include interactive and self regulations. The expectation and presymbolic representation of the dyadic modes of regulation, as organized by the three principles of salience, constitute the inner organization. What is central in the infant's experience? What organizing principles determine the salience of events to the infant? What does the infant expect from his or her interactive encounters? We reviewed current work on the organization of infant experience and Requests for reprints should be sent to Beatrice Beebe,
Gallagher 2012. Neurons, neonates and narrative: From empathic resonance to empathic understanding
How are we able to understand other people – their intentions, their behaviors, their mental processes? All of the different titles for this problem are problematic and in some way beg the question. To cast the problem in terms of ‘mind’, ‘inter-subjectivity’, ‘cognition’, ‘empathy’, or ‘motor resonance’, already biases the way one is tempted to solve the problem. One strategy for balancing out, if not canceling out these di#erent biases, is to take an interdisciplinary approach, and that is what I will do here. I review several debates that are ongoing across these various disciplines, and, in contrast to certain standard views, I map out an alternative position that will draw support from neuroscience, developmental psychology, phenomenology, and narrative theory.
Developmental Psychology
Emotions remain something of a mystery for most of us even when we accept their centrality to development in general and to infancy in particular. I make two arguments in this paper. One: that the most crucial thing about emotions is that they allow mutuality of engagement with other emotional beings-not only evoking responses, but also provoking further emotions in others. Mutual engagements-sometimes called moments of meeting or encounters with other minds-can be transformational. They allow us to be 'seen', to be 'known' by others, and in achieving that, they allow us to be persons. Some key phenomena of emotional encounters in infancy are discussed to illustrate this point. Evidence of such meetings is abundant in our lives and needs a committed focus for study within developmental psychology. Two: that we need to open out the idea of emotions (as well as probe at a micro-level) and the terms affect or affectivity might help encompass a greater breadth. Daniel Stern's 'vitality affects' and Ben Anderson's 'affective atmospheres' both cross disciplinary boundaries in contemplating emotional phenomena. It seems crucial for developmental psychology to incorporate such different aspects-neurological, kinematic, situational and socio-political-into discussions of emotional development.
Models of psychological development have taken a relational turn. From this view, human psychological development is an integrative, dynamic, emergent, and coactive process. It is integrative in the sense that psychological processes never operate in isolation of each other. There is no such thing as a purely cognitive, emotional, or behavioral act. Any given instance of psychological activity necessarily involves the structured integration of multiple component psychological systems. Despite their organization, psychological structures are dynamic processes rather than fixed states. Their structure varies as a function of person, task, time, context, emotional state, culture, and many other variables. Psychological development is coactive in the sense that novel psychological structures emerge over time as a product of the dynamic interplay between and among elements of a hierarchically nested person [LEFTWARDS ARROW][RIGHTWARDS ARROW] environment system. In this chapter, we show how integrated structures of thinking, feeling, and action arise in both real and developmental time through complex coactions that occur between biological, psychological, and sociocultural processes. Drawing on a theory of the dynamic development of skills, the discussion first addresses the coactive nature of sensorimotor-affective development in infancy. It then illustrates alternative trajectories in the coactive development of integrative structures of moral thinking, feeling, and acting as they occur within particular moral domains and social contexts. We complete the chapter with an analysis of how integrative psychological structures undergo microdevelopment in real time as a result of processes that occur between individuals in joint interaction.
American Educational Research Journal, 2017
Social-affective neuroscience is revealing that human brain development is inherently social-our very nature is organized by nurture. To explore the implications for human development and education, we present a series of interdisciplinary studies documenting individual and cultural variability in the neurobiological correlates of emotional feelings. From these studies, we derive educational research hypotheses and a theoretical framework that facilitates integrating sociocultural and neurobiological levels of analysis. Our over-arching aim is to begin to conceptualize a role for neurobiological evidence in educational studies of sociality, emotion, culture, and identity. Overcoming the historical distance between educational and neuroscientific research on social-affective development would enable a more complete science of human experience and enhance appreciation of cultural learning, benefiting both fields. KEYWORDS: identity development, educational neuroscience, embodied learning, social-emotional learning, fMRI R esearch on learning in the mid-to late-20th century was dominated by cognitive scientific and computational approaches that divorced cognition MARY HELEN IMMORDINO-YANG is an associate professor of education, psychology, and neuroscience at the University of Southern California, at the Brain and Creativity Institute and the Rossier School of Education, 3620A McClintock Ave, Room 267,. Her research focuses on the psychological and neurophysiological bases of social emotions, self-awareness, and acculturation through development and education. A former public junior high school science teacher, Immordino-Yang received her doctorate from the Harvard Graduate School of Education. REBECCA GOTLIEB is a PhD student at the Rossier School of Education and at the Brain and Creativity Institute, University of Southern California. She studies social, emotional, and identity development and their relations to students' learning and creative thinking.
Infants' meaning-making and the development of mental health problems
American Psychologist, 2011
We argue that infant meaning-making processes are a central mechanism governing both typical and pathological outcomes. Infants, as open dynamic systems, must constantly garner information to increase their complexity and coherence. They fulfill this demand by making nonverbal "meaning"-affects, movements, representations-about themselves in relation to the world and themselves into a "biopsychosocial state of consciousness," which shapes their ongoing engagement with the world. We focus on the operation of the infant-adult communication system, a dyadic, mutually regulated system that scaffolds infants' engagement with the world of people, things, and themselves, and consequently their meaning-making. We argue that infant mental health problems emerge when the meanings infants make in the moment, which increase their complexity and coherence and may be adaptive in the short run, selectively limit their subsequent engagement with the world and, in turn, the growth of their state of consciousness in the long run. When chronic and iterative, these altered meanings can interfere with infants' successful development and heighten their vulnerability to pathological outcomes. Cultural variations in meaning-making and implications for clinical practice are discussed.