Early Social Interaction: A Case Comparison of Developmental Pragmatics and Psychoanalytic Theory

This book brings together various threads of the research work I have been involved with over a number of years. This research is based on a longitudinal video recorded study of one ofmydaughters as shewas learning howto talk. The impetus for engaging in this work arose from a sense that within developmental psychology and child language, when people are interested in understanding howchildren use language, they seem over-focused or concerned with questions of formal grammar and semantics. My interest is on understanding how a child learns to talk and through this process is then understood as being or becoming a member of a culture. When a young child is learning how to engage in everyday interaction she has to acquire those competencies that allow her to be simultaneously oriented to the conventions that inform talk-ininteraction and at the same time deal with the emotional or affective dimensions of her experience. It turns out that in developmental psychology these domains are traditionally studied separately or at least by researchers whose interests rarely overlap. In order to understand better early social relations (parent–child interaction), I want to pursue the idea that we will benefit by studying both early pragmatic development and emotional development. Not surprisingly, the theoretical positions underlying the study of these domains provide very different accounts of human development and this book illuminates why this might be the case. What follows will I hope serve as a case-study on the interdependence between the analysis of social interaction and subsequent interpretation

Modelling individual variability in cognitive development

Investigating variability in reasoning tasks can provide insights into key issues in the study of cognitive development. These include the mechanisms that underlie developmental transitions, and the distinction between individual differences and developmental disorders. We explored the mechanistic basis of variability in two connectionist models of cognitive development, a model of the Piagetian balance scale task (McClelland, 1989) and a model of the Piagetian conservation task (Shultz, 1998). For the balance scale task, we began with a simple feed-forward connectionist model and training patterns based on McClelland (1989). We investigated computational parameters, problem encodings, and training environments that contributed to variability in development, both across groups and within individuals. We report on the parameters that affect the complexity of reasoning and the nature of ‘rule’ transitions exhibited by networks learning to reason about balance scale problems. For the conservation task, we took the task structure and problem encoding of Shultz (1998) as our base model. We examined the computational parameters, problem encodings, and training environments that contributed to variability in development, in particular examining the parameters that affected the emergence of abstraction. We relate the findings to existing cognitive theories on the causes of individual differences in development

Participation and engagement: Some possible challenges for research on early social interaction

The study of caregiver–child social interaction during infancy and the early years has expanded considerably over the last 30–40 years as a result of technological advances and associated methods of analysis. Through a consideration of recent research on the emergence of participation in social interaction, this paper considers whether sufficient attention is paid to the background presuppositions and assumptions underscoring contemporary approaches in the field. Following introductory comments on different aspects of three perspectives – child-focused conversation analysis; developmental social interaction; and psychosocial formulations – a number of issues, challenges and puzzles are highlighted through an examination of examples from recently presented research. Concluding comments focus on the value of seeking to ensure that the interdependencies between background theory, and data analysis and interpretation, remains a central focus for work on children and social interaction

Psychoanalytic Underpinnings of Socially-Shared Normativity

Alongside social anthropology and discursive psychology, conversation analysis has highlighted numerous ways in which cultural forms of perceiving and acting in the world are primarily rooted in socially shared normativity. However, when consideration turns to the origins and purposes of human affect and emotion, ethnomethodology, and conversation analysis appear to face particular difficulties that arise from the over-arching focus on sense-making practices. This article considers the proposal that psychoanalytic thinking might inform our understanding of how socially shared normativity emerges during infancy and early childhood. First, a framework is sketched out that highlights the fact that from the beginning, an infant’s earliest experience is bound up with those procedures, practices, and social actions that make up what conversation analysts call members’ methods. Second, comparisons are drawn between conversation analysis and psychoanalytic accounts of early experience for infants during the first years of life. Discussion then moves to the Kleinian notion of object relations and the concept of projective identification. Essentially, this is a theoretical account of how “what-was-once-one” (the mother-infant unit) somehow differentiates resulting in the gradual emergence of the “individuated being.” What is often glossed over in this account is the discursively embedded nature of projective identification; a process that is itself interdependent with the embodiment that makes up the infant’s lived engagement with the world. Whatever might constitute consciousness emerges from somatic, embodied, material-physical, tactile/affective experience – that is, a fundamentally social milieu. Ultimately, this raises the question of how transformation (i.e., from the social to the individual) occurs. One answer may be Winnicott’s idea of the transitional space, where the “good-enough” parent is said to be somebody, who can “contain” both negative and positive identifications coming from the infant, transform and re-project such identifications, but in modified form. In this way, the infant begins to recognize/experience what it is they are “feeling.” Such projective identifications are conveyed within and through the prevailing discourses that constitute all social practices. Concluding comments note that conversation analysis may find in psychoanalytic thinking a framework for understanding the interdependence between affect and action, given that in psychoanalytic thought, we find a thoroughly relational conception of human nature

A paradigm for restenosis after angioplasty: clues for the development of new preventive therapies

Restenosis after intravascular intervention is one of the most important unsolved clinical and economic problems in the management of cardiovascular disease. Although neither its pathogenesis nor its prevention are yet defined, the early and late histologic appearance of the angioplasty state are known. Immediately after angioplasty, the atheroma has fissures, and the normal segment of the vessel circumference is stretched. There is substantial evidence of intimal injury. When restenosis develops at 1-4 months the histologic appearance of the restenotic lesion is intimal hyperplasia. Given this endpoint, we may theorize that the proximate cause of this response is denuding and stretching vascular injury. Since the healing response to tissue injury has been studied extensively, we can hypothesize the major milestones in the temporal sequence of restenosis are platelet aggregation, inflammatory cell infiltration, release of growth factors, medial smooth muscle cell modulation and proliferation, proteoglycan synthesis and extracellular matrix remodeling. At each of these steps, there are potential inhibitors. The resolution of the problem of restenosis may require both removal of atheroma mass and appropriate timing and effective delivery of inhibitors of intimal hyperplasia to the injury site in adequate concentration.Biomedical Reviews 1992; 1: 13-24

Youth Sport Market Segmentation with the Theory of Planned Behavior

Approximately half (54%) of all American youth between the ages of 6 -17 play in at least one organized sport (SGMA: Sporting Goods Manufacturers Association, 2004). By adulthood; however, only 15.4% of American adults report that they participate in the same organized sport (SGMA, 2004). While this deficit can be explained by an expansion of alternate activities available to adults or a lack of continued opportunities, there is evidence that adult participation in sports and other leisure activities is significantly influenced by the repertoire of activities they participated in as children (Scott & Willits, 1989; 1998). Sport managers wound benefit from a more thorough understanding of the reasons for initial involvement and the intentions to continue participation in guiding future retention efforts

The means and ends of two styles of analysis.

Psychoanalytic psychotherapy has placed great emphasis on 'talk' with the analyst enjoined to attend to the fine detail of utterance. We explore the consequences of a tension between the injunction to a careful attention to the detail of speaking and the lack of a shared set of guidelines for the recording and representation of speech. We consider the possibility that standard conventions of CA transcription are inadequate to the task of representing psychoanalytic talk in a way which could ground an understanding of the process of psychotherapy. The centrality of 'countertransference' emerges as key to the psychoanalytic mode of understanding psychotherapeutic interaction, a point we illustrate with examples

Moving from informal talk to performance: The use of musical prompting as an interaction device for resuming practice in musical theatre rehearsals

In research on communication in music lessons, masterclasses, and rehearsals, there is a growing focus on multimodal interaction using conversation analysis (CA), where the combination of talk and embodied actions (e.g., using musical instruments, gestures, voice, and score) provides the opportunity to study this complex area in microscopic detail and the potential for findings to inform practice. A methodological approach informed by CA was used to explore processes in peer-led musical theatre rehearsals in a university, where students adopted the roles of both musical director and performer. The data consisted of 12 hr of video-recordings of rehearsals that took place over the course of 5 weeks and involved 24 participants; the data were analyzed to identify patterns in relation to informal interruptions (talking that did not relate to the task at hand) that occurred during the rehearsals, and how they were managed by the student director so that rehearsing could be resumed. Management often involved musical prompting as part of a three-stage sequence: (1) orienting to the piano, (2) giving directives, and (3) initiating performance. The directors’ prompts included vocalizing, playing the piano accompaniment, and making bodily movements. These actions served to capture the performers’ attention, interrupt the informal talk, bring the focus back to performing, and indicate performers’ starting notes. The director completed the sequence by initiating a run-through of the previously rehearsed segment of the performance. The findings not only have implications for students’ management of rehearsals but also highlight the value of studying multimodal rehearsal interactions and techniques generally to ensure effective and efficient delivery in typically time-constrained rehearsal periods

Prenatal factors contribute to the emergence of kwoshiorkor or marasmus in severe undernutrition: evidence for the predictive adaptation model

Severe acute malnutrition in childhood manifests as oedematous (kwashiorkor, marasmic kwashiorkor) and non-oedematous (marasmus) syndromes with very different prognoses. Kwashiorkor differs from marasmus in the patterns of protein, amino acid and lipid metabolism when patients are acutely ill as well as after rehabilitation to ideal weight for height. Metabolic patterns among marasmic patients define them as metabolically thrifty, while kwashiorkor patients function as metabolically profligate. Such differences might underlie syndromic presentation and prognosis. However, no fundamental explanation exists for these differences in metabolism, nor clinical pictures, given similar exposures to undernutrition. We hypothesized that different developmental trajectories underlie these clinical-metabolic phenotypes: if so this would be strong evidence in support of predictive adaptation model of developmental plasticity