A relational perspective on the development of self and emotion

Journal ArticleThis work was funded in part by a grant to the author from the United States National Institute of Mental Health (MH48680 and MH57669). I am grateful to the following individuals for their comments on this chapter: Kari Applegate, Trevor Burnsed, Jacqueline Fogel, J'lene George, Ilse de Koeijer, Tom Malloy, Andrea Pantoja, Cory Secrist, and Dankert Vedeler

Developing through relationships origins of communication, self, and culture

Journal ArticleI began to consider the study of relationships as an intellectual vocation in 1970, the result of two years of college teaching that was part of my work as a United States Peace Corps volunteer in Bogota, Colombia. After another year I began my doctoral training in the Department of Education at the University of Chicago, working on Kenneth Kaye's mother-infant communication studies and struggling to fill the gaps in my knowledge of developmental psychology left by undergraduate and master's degrees in physics and mathematics. I am still struggling, as I believe all professionals struggle, with incompleteness and ambiguity, wavering between conviction and uncertainty. The work that follows is part of an ongoing learning process. Apart from what I have said about these limitations in the body of the text I can also add that it feels finished enough for now, ready for public scrutiny, but open to revision in the future. This book is the product not only of the year over which the writing took place, but also of the past twenty years of my professional development and of my personal life history

Expressing affection and love to young children

Journal ArticleFew people would seriously contest the proposition that children need love. The belief that children thrive on love is not universal, but in our western culture it has become the foundation for the work of educators and parents (Kagan, 1978). Yet, for all of our certainty about the principle, the practice of giving love is often accompanied by confusion and ambivalence

A relational perspective on the development of self and emotion

Journal ArticleBegin with two premises. First, psychological experience always implies a connection, a relationship: with another person, with cultural tools or language, or with the natural environment. Life is a network of relationships. Second, psychological experience is always dynamic and changing. The simplest visual perception requires a change, either in a movement of the object or a movement of the eyes, head, or body. Thoughts and feelings fluctuate in a continuous pattern of change. These patterns of change themselves change as people develop. Life is a series of changes. On the other hand, part of psychological experience is a sense of one's uniqueness (the self) and a sense of one's permanence through time (identity). How can this occur? How can people have a sense of themselves and their stability over time if psychological experience is fundamentally relational and dynamic

Relationships that support human development

Journal ArticleWhen Susan was one-and-one-half years old, she had been playing the "lion game" with her mother for the past few months. With a lion puppet on her hand, Susan's mother made the lion roar, tickle, bite, and tease Susan, who seemed delighted to be aroused and frightened. Susan and her mother first concocted this curious blend of happiness and fear, approach and withdrawal, when they discovered tickling games. Susan was only six months old at the time. As her mother loomed in for the tickle, Susan would pull away, turn her body to the side, and at the same time reach out for her mother, look at her, and laugh heartily with her mouth wide open. From early in the first year, simple games create emotional challenges - such as a conflict between approach and withdrawal - that are negotiated in the long-term parent-infant relationship

Social dynamics of early human development

Journal ArticleI present the outlines of theory of social dynamics that combines a dynamic systems perspective and a Gibsonian ecological perspective to an understanding of the development of action (Fogel, in press). Different physical and social environments afford different opportunities for action. A rattle affords noise making, for example. To activate this affordance, the individual has to identify the specific microscopic movements necessary to evoke sound from the rattle: the arm and wrist movements related to shaking. How does a baby come to acquire this action? Partly by exploratory play, but at first this play is embedded in social interaction. A social dynamic perspective suggests that during adult-infant interaction, adults identify action affordances that the infant is potentially capable of doing. Then, development occurs by two processes. In the first, the adult engages a child in a joint construction of the action afforded by the situation, helping the child perform the action via a co-regulation of the relevant movement parameters (e. g., demonstrating rattle shaking then placing the object in the infant's hand, or moving the infant's hand. In the second process, the adult transmits or receives information that highlights the relevant parameters of movement related to action affordances

Course in modern physics for Colombia

Journal ArticleThe problems on encounters in teaching physics in Colombia have been recognized for a number of years and can be easily generalized to almost every country in Latin America. These problems are sufficiently widespread, reaching not only across international lines but throughout all the levels of the educational system, that they constitute a serious barrier to any educational reform. In what follows, we describe an attempt to meet some of these problems with a modern physics course that orients itself toward the specific weaknesses of the student and the educational system

Maternal speech to three-month-old infants in the United States and Japan

Journal ArticleAn American-Japanese comparison of maternal speech to 3-month-old infants is presented. Mother-infant dyads were videotaped in the laboratory, and the maternal speech was analysed by function and syntactic form. US mothers were more information-oriented than were Japanese mothers; they also used more question forms, especially yes/no questions. Japanese mothers were affect-oriented, and they used more nonsense, onomatopoeic sounds, baby talk, and babies' names. The differences between countries in maternal speech addressed to 3-montholds appear to reflect characteristic culture-specific communicative styles as well as beliefs and values related to childrearing

Noninnatist alternatives to the negative evidence hypothesis

Journal ArticleIn this commentary we consider three issues. First, we suggest that Crain's definition of innateness is not biologically plausible. Second, we show how the criteria he uses as hallmarks of innateness can have alternative explanations. Finally, we reinterpret his research findings on grounds that do not involve innatist explanations

Dynamic systems approach to the life sciences

Journal ArticleEach of the chapters in this book points to expanding our understanding of the multiple and complex relationships that surround development through the lifespan. In this chapter, we as the organizing committee of the Council for Human Development give a brief description and overview of the science of dynamic systems that is exemplified in the other chapters in this book. The goal of this chapter is to help people see how dynamic systems research helps us to understand human development and how it can assist in creating relevant policies and funding priorities. The dynamic systems approach is fundamentally different from existing ideas about simple cause and effect. It begins with the realization that the living world is too complex for any one factor to have a significant effect on an outcome in the absence of many other competing and cooperating factors, all of which change over time. Dynamic systems scientists, such as the authors of the chapters in this book, seek to understand certain aspects of this constantly changing network of mutual influences according to their focus of study