Affect Regulation and the Origin of the Self

The Neurobiology of Emotional Development

Allan N. Schore

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN:
  9780805834598
  9780805813968
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135693923
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Cognitive Neuroscience & Neuropsychology
• Index: Psychology

During the past decade a diverse group of disciplines have simultaneously intensified their attention upon the scientific study of emotion. This proliferation of research on affective phenomena has been paralleled by an acceleration of investigations of early human structural and functional development. Developmental neuroscience is now delving into the ontogeny of brain systems that evolve to support the psychobiological underpinnings of socioemotional functioning. Studies of the infant brain demonstrate that its maturation is influenced by the environment and is experience-dependent. Developmental psychological research emphasizes that the infant's expanding socioaffective functions are critically influenced by the affect-transacting experiences it has with the primary caregiver. Concurrent developmental psychoanalytic research suggests that the mother's affect regulatory functions permanently shape the emerging self's capacity for self-organization. Studies of incipient relational processes and their effects on developing structure are thus an excellent paradigm for the deeper apprehension of the organization and dynamics of affective phenomena.

This book brings together and presents the latest findings of socioemotional studies emerging from the developmental branches of various disciplines. It supplies psychological researchers and clinicians with relevant, up-to-date developmental neurobiological findings and insights, and exposes neuroscientists to recent developmental psychological and psychoanalytic studies of infants. The methodology of this theoretical research involves the integration of information that is being generated by the different fields that are studying the problem of socioaffective development--neurobiology, behavioral neurology, behavioral biology, sociobiology, social psychology, developmental psychology, developmental psychoanalysis, and infant psychiatry. A special emphasis is placed upon the application and incorporation of current developmental data from neurochemistry, neuroanatomy, neuropsychology, and neuroendocrinology into the main body of developmental theory.

More than just a review of several literatures, the studies cited in this work are used as a multidisciplinary source pool of experimental data, theoretical concepts, and clinical observations that form the base and scaffolding of an overarching heuristic model of socioemotional development that is grounded in contemporary neuroscience. This psychoneurobiological model is then used to generate a number of heuristic hypotheses regarding the proximal causes of a wide array of affect-related phenomena--from the motive force that drives human attachment to the proximal causes of psychiatric disturbances and psychosomatic disorders, and indeed to the origin of the self.

I BACKGROUND AND OVERVIEW

1 Introduction

The understanding of early development is one of the fundamental objectives of science. The beginnings of living systems set the stage for every aspect of an organism’s internal and external functioning throughout the lifespan. It is often not appreciated that an individual’s genetic inheritance which encodes the unvarying sequence of development is only partially expressed at birth. Genetic systems that program the evolution of biological and psychological structures continue to be activated at very high rates over the stages of infancy, and this process is significantly influenced by factors in the postnatal environment. Of special importance are the incipient interactions the infant has with the most important object in the early environment—the primary caregiver. Events that occur during infancy, especially transactions with the social environment, are indelibly imprinted into the structures that are maturing in the first years of life. The child’s first relationship, the one with the mother, acts as a template, as it permanently molds the individual’s capacities to enter into all later emotional relationships. These early experiences shape the development of a unique personality, its adaptive capacities as well as its vulnerabilities to and resistances against particular forms of future pathologies. Indeed, they profoundly influence the emergent organization of an integrated system that is both stable and adaptable, and thereby the formation of the self.

The principle that the early events of development have far-reaching and long enduring effects is one of the very few elemental and overarching postulates that is shared by all disciplines studying living organisms. We now know that the concept of “early experiences” connotes much more than an immature individual being a passive recipient of environmental stimulation. Rather, these primordial events represent active transactions between the infant and the first external environment. Yet despite their fundamental importance, the scientific study of these phenomena has, perhaps until recently, been far from a unified pursuit. Each separate discipline contains a split-off “developmental” branch, and the transfer of information between these bodies of knowledge, especially those at different levels of analysis, has been quite restricted. The recent explosion of infant research has emphasized the essential importance of a multidisciplinary perspective, but it should be remembered that this field spans the gamut from developmental neurochemistry and neurobiology through developmental psychology to developmental psychoanalysis and infant psychiatry. And yet these seemingly disparate fields share the common assumption that the deeper apprehension of the individual’s early development can elucidate the mechanisms of all later function and dysfunction. A powerful impetus towards an integrated multilevel approach has come from recent studies which demonstrate that the early transactions with the social environment are “hidden” within the dyadic relations between mother and child, and that in this dialectic the mother acts as a crucial regulator of the child’s development. The characterization of these hidden processes is now a major focus of study, since it has been demonstrated that not only the infant’s overt behavior but its covert physiology and thereby its internal state are directly regulated by the mother. The consequences of these revolutionary findings to preexisting theory are turning out to be profound.

Perhaps the best way to give the reader a sense of the state-of-the-art, as it were, of current developmental knowledge is to briefly outline some of the major questions that are being addressed by contemporary multidisciplinary researchers. The nature of the problems that are presently being explored reflects a confidence in the rapidly expanding and exciting field of infant research. Questions that have been up until recently considered as outside of scientific exploration are now being translated into testable hypotheses.

1. How do early experiences induce the growth of structure in the developing human infant?

2. What internal and external factors influence development, and how exactly do these factors interact?

3. What kind of psychobiological mechanisms mediate the regulation of developmental processes by these internal and external factors?

4. How does the variation of these influences shape the organism’s inherited genetic contributions? What processes transform genotype into phenotype?

5. Because it is now known that the expression of inherited genetic information is not completed at birth but continues at high rates in infancy, what common fundamental gene-environment processes operate both pre- and postnatally?

6. How does the primary caregiver influence genetically programmed mechanisms that are responsible for the infant’s growth?

7. What essentially is the early environment, and what part does the organism’s contacts with its mother play in establishing the child’s social environment?

8. How do various stresses influence the course of development?

9. Why does development occur in stages?

10. What mechanisms regulate the onsets and offsets of critical periods for the maturation of particular structures and functions?

11. Why are early critical periods of development so important to the functioning of the individual throughout the rest of the lifespan, and why and how do the events of early childhood imprint permanent effects?

In addition to these questions about the general nature of development, more specific ones arise from the study of human socioemotional development.

1. What part do early social-affective experiences play in the postnatal maturation of the human brain?

2. How does the infant’s early social environment influence the growth of structural systems involved in emotional functioning that are maturing in infancy?

3. How does the earliest relationship with a specific human being, the attachment to the primary caregiver, permanently influence the individual’s capacities to enter into all later relationships?

4. What psychobiological mechanisms underlie the attachment process?

5. What is the role of emotional communications in the child’s continuing dialectic between himself and the social environment?

6. How does the child respond to the changes in the social environment that occur over the stages of infancy, and how do these changes effect the course of socioemotional development?

7. How does the developing child retain continuity and self-regulate as it traverses these changes?

8. What factors facilitate or inhibit the emergence of the adaptive capacity for self-regulation?

9. What is the relationship among failures of development, impairments of adaptive capacities, and psychopathology?

10. How can an elucidation of the events of infancy, especially early socioemotional transactions, lead to a deeper understanding of adult normal and abnormal phenomena?

11. How can developmental knowledge be utilized to formulate heuristic strategies toward the treatment of psychological developmental disorders?

12. What defines a self, and how does it evolve?

13. How do early events influence the development of consciousness?

I believe that the answers to the foregoing questions—which are further addressed in subsequent chapters—will not come from single or even multiple discoveries within any one discipline. Rather, an integration of the findings of many related fields is essential to the ultimate creation of a heuristic model of development that can accommodate interdisciplinary data, and can freely shift back and forth between their different levels of analysis.

A primary purpose of this volume is to bring together and to present in one place the latest observations, data, and concepts from the developmental branches of various disciplines. Such an integrative approach prescribes that the reader is presented with a number of different bodies of current literatures. It is difficult enough to keep up to date within one’s own area of study, let alone to be aware of the newer concepts in related fields. Nevertheless, this is an absolute necessity in light of the current emphasis on multidisciplinary research. To that end, a major goal of this study of socioemotional development is to supply psychological researchers and clinicians with relevant up-to-date developmental neurobiological insights and findings, and to expose neuroscientists to recent developmental psychological and psychoanalytic studies of infants. Contemporary infant research is now directed towards much more than merely describing the development of overt behaviors. Over the past 2 decades a paradigmatic shift away from the narrow constraints of a strict behaviorism has occurred in all areas of psychology. This has allowed for a sanctioning of the scientific study of internal states, and has created an environment that supports the generation of new methodologies that more directly access the proximal internal causes of overt behavior. As a result the developmental sciences have produced a large amount of information about the ontogeny of both cognitive and affective internal processes. This approach is paralleled by the rapidly expanding intense interest in the covert, hidden aspects of the relationship the growing child has with a changing environment.

Another fundamental intention of this work is to focus specifically on social and emotional development, particularly as it occurs in the human infant. Much of the data from developmental neuroanatomy and neurochemistry comes from animal research, yet these studies uniquely reveal the biological and chemical changes that comprise the internal processes underlying the complex affective and cognitive capacities that come to be so highly developed in humans. It is now very clear that well before the advent of language the baby’s capacities to interact with the social and physical environments, functions supported by these internal processes, are extremely complex and sophisticated. The fast acting, psychobiological mechanisms that mature in early and late infancy continue to operate throughout life. Indeed they serve as the keystone of all future human intra-organismic, intrapsychic, and interpersonal functioning, as the manifestation of all later developing capacities is contingent upon their initiatory expression.

Many of the latest findings are quite unexpected in terms of the predictions of older theories, and each field is now radically altering the fundamental assumptions that lie at the core of its conceptions of development. Although their methodologies are quite different, the data emerging from what appear to be distantly related fields are converging on certain common conclusions.

One such finding that appears again and again is the interactive nature of development. Development essentially represents a number of sequential mutually driven infant-caregiver processes that occur in a continuing dialectic between the maturing organism and the changing environment. It now appears that affect is what is actually transacted within the mother-infant dyad, and this highly efficient system of emotional communication is essentially nonverbal. Human development, including its internal neurochemical and neurobiological mechanisms, cannot be understood apart from this affect-transacting relationship.

A second fundamental conclusion is that the study of development must include more than just a documentation of changing functions. The problem of the maturation of structures responsible for the onset of new functional capacities must also be simultaneously addressed. In fact, development can only be understood in terms of a progression of structure-function relationships, since structure, by definition, is continually organizing, disorganizing, and reorganizing in infancy. Changes in the child’s behavior (studied by developmental psychology) or in the child’s internal world (studied by developmental psychoanalysis) can only be understood in terms of the appearance of more complex structure that performs emergent functions. At this stage of our scientific knowledge, any discipline that theorizes about structure needs to evaluate its models against what is now known about the veritable characteristics of biological structure as it exists in nature. This brings psychology back to biology, and emphasizes the importance of developmental neuroscience.

A third crucial finding is that we now know that the early environment is fundamentally a social environment, and that the primary social object who mediates the physical environment to the infant is the mother. Through her intermediary action environmental stimulation is modulated, and this transformed input impinges upon the infant in the context of socioaffective stimulation. The mother’s modulatory function is essential not only to every aspect of the infant’s current functioning, but also to the child’s continuing development. She thus is the major source of the environmental stimulation that facilitates (or inhibits) the experience-dependent maturation of the child’s developing biological (especially neurobiological) structures. Her essential role as the psychobiological regulator of the child’s immature psychophysiological systems directly influences the child’s biochemical growth processes which support the genesis of new structure.

And fourth, the concept of regulation is one of the few theoretical constructs that is now being utilized by literally every developmental discipline. The current focus on adaptive regulatory phenomena, from the molecular to the social levels, represents a powerful central linking concept that could potentially elucidate the “hidden” processes in development and thereby organize what appear to be disparate bodies of developmental knowledge. With respect to socioemotional ontogeny, it is now established that the infant’s affect is initially regulated by the mother, but over the course of development it becomes increasingly self-regulated. The elucidation of the psychobiological mechanisms that underlie the experience-dependent maturation of a structural system that can adaptively auto-regulate affect is a very active area of current multidisciplinary research.

2 General Principles of Growth of the Developing Brain

Current biological concepts focus on the organizational properties of living organisms…. The central question then becomes how organized systems retain continuity while changing in response to developmental and environmental pressures.

—Virginia Demos and Samuel Kaplan (1986)

The development of social behavior can be understood only in terms of a continuing dialectic between an active and changing organism and an active and changing environment, with cause and consequence closely interwoven. The most important part of that environment are the interactions and relationships that the child has with others….

—Robert A. Hinde (1990)

[T]he idea of developmentally regulated shifts in sensitivity to various aspects of the environment is absolutely central to the study of ontogenesis.

—Susan Oyama (1979)

The relationship between the dynamics of early interactional development and the ontogeny of the emergent function of self-regulation is perhaps the most fundamental problem of development. Although investigators of socioemotional development are using diverse biological and psychological models to study this problem, there is general agreement that the maturation of the capacity for regulating emotion and social interactions (Campos, Barrett, Lamb, Goldsmith, & Stenberg, 1983) and the ontogenetic attainment of the capacity for the “self-regulation of affect” (Krystal, 1988) are critical to the adaptive functioning of the individual throughout the lifespan. Developmental studies from the rapidly expanding field of infant research are valuable sources of clues in this pursuit, since “the ontogeny of self-regulation provides an entree to the ontogeny of psychic structures” (Sander, 1977b, p.29). In other words, the structural maturation of the brain in infancy and childhood essentially represents the ontogenetic development of more complex autoregulatory functional systems.

It has been said that the study of the developing brain may uniquely forge a link between basic and clinical research (Himwich, 1975). I would add that the integration of neurobiological with psychological perspectives, of structure-function relationships, is absolutely essential to a deeper understanding of early development. Extrapolations from neonatal to mature psychological functioning (and vice versa) can be misleading, sinc...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Part I: Background and Overview
• Part II: Early Infancy
• Part III: Late Infancy
• Part IV: Applications to Affect Regulatory Phenomena
• Part V: Clinical Issues
• Part VI: Integrations
• References
• Subject index
• Author index