The parent?infant dyad and the construction of the subjective self

Developmental psychology and psychopathology has in the past been more concerned with the quality of self-representation than with the development of the subjective agency which underpins our experience of feeling, thought and action, a key function of mentalisation. This review begins by contrasting a Cartesian view of pre-wired introspective subjectivity with a constructionist model based on the assumption of an innate contingency detector which orients the infant towards aspects of the social world that react congruently and in a specifically cued informative manner that expresses and facilitates the assimilation of cultural knowledge. Research on the neural mechanisms associated with mentalisation and social influences on its development are reviewed. It is suggested that the infant focuses on the attachment figure as a source of reliable information about the world. The construction of the sense of a subjective self is then an aspect of acquiring knowledge about the world through the caregiver's pedagogical communicative displays which in this context focuses on the child's thoughts and feelings. We argue that a number of possible mechanisms, including complementary activation of attachment and mentalisation, the disruptive effect of maltreatment on parent-child communication, the biobehavioural overlap of cues for learning and cues for attachment, may have a role in ensuring that the quality of relationship with the caregiver influences the development of the child's experience of thoughts and feelings

The Socialisation of Pride in Young Children

A total of 40 target children, ranging in age from 10 months to 4 years 10 months (mean age 31 months) and their mothers, took part in a study, involving a game of ''feeding fish'' with different sized marbles in order to test the relation between maternal praise and performance in children. The mothers and children were videotaped in their homes. It was established that children improved their performance on the task as they grew older, that at a mean age of 35.1 months they smiled selectively more often when performing at their higher levels of capability and that mothers praised the highest level of performance relatively more often than lower levels of performance. Furthermore, mothers praise directed to younger children included reference to the person and the performance of the actor. Praise directed toward older children, however, included only reference to the performance of the child. The implications of these observations for the socialisation of pride are discussed