1
Q
Amygdala and fear
A
- Schore theorizes that two major brain systems contribute to the processes of attachment; the right hemisphere and the orbitofrontal region in the right hemisphere, as well as associated subcortical regions, in particular the limbic system, which specializes in processing fear. The amygdala is part of the limbic system and responds to external stimuli and modulates autonomic and arousal systems. This system is responsible for appraising the salience of a stressor and then initiating and organizing a psychobiological response through its extensive connection to the autonomic nervous system → fight/flight response
1. According to Schore, caregivers neglect or maltreatment of a child results initially in a fear response mediated by the amygdale and sympathetic nervous system. However in the second stage, the child disengages from the stimuli of the external world and this response is controlled by the parasympathetic nervous system.
2
Q
Anxious avoidant attachment
A
– The child presents no apparent preference between the caregiver and a stranger. Child is not distressed when caregiver leaves the room, nor is the child interested when the caregiver reenters the room.
3
Q
Attachment as social releaser of maternal behavior
A
- The baby has an inborn tendency to engage with the mother, developing attachment, which in turn triggers her maternal instincts. Attachment is a reciprocal relationship and there are behaviors (i.e., crying) that babies are born enacting, which serve to maintain control over proximity to a caregiver, active from about age one to age three.
4
Q
Attachment behaviors of the child
A
- Behaviors intended to enhance attachment levels. One major example is crying. When a child cries, it is their means to demonstrate distress, and attracting the mother’s attention and care. Through the interactions that ensue, the child is dopaminergically stimulated, soothed, and attachments are formed.
5
Q
Autistic phase
A
- Mahler - phase in 1st few weeks of life where infant is detached and self absorbed. (*was later abandoned)
- Stern disagrees with this notion of Mahler’s “normal autism” phase in development, asserting that the term denotes a “primary lack of interest in and registration of external stimuli, in particular of human stimuli.” He argues that infants are deeply engaged in and related to social stimuli from the moment they are born.
6
Q
Autobiographic memory
A
– A deeper level of memory that is activated in the hippocampus through affect, and is not accessible through cortical regions. This is where RIGs exist, and exists as an important aspect of personality as it relates to how one thinks of him or herself and expectations one has of others.
7
Q
Categorical affects
A
– (Stern) Basic affects (happy, sad, angry), which are experienced by the infant in response to amodal qualities. Werner argues that infants are not responding to perceptual qualities such as shape, intensity, and number; rather, they experience a type of “feeling perception,” such as those seen in categorical affects.
8
Q
Chronic stress response
A
- (Hart) Chronic stress in early developmental stages may either cause chronic stress activation or reduced emotionality, which leads to highly negative emotionality or passive avoidance behavior. In children with an insecure attachment pattern, the mother’s presence has not been as effective in regulating the stress response system as it has in children with a secure attachment. The reduced stress response activation appears to cause children to develop intense conflicts with his or her environment as the child becomes impulse governed and lacks empathy and understanding of his responses might affect others. (p.189)
9
Q
Coherence in a narrative
A
- Main’s adult attachment interview is meant to assess attachment of adults in regards to their family of origin. It is a series of questions about childhood and the relationship with the parents. When adults have secure attachments to their families they will have detailed memories about their childhood, will have a balanced perspective and narrative coherency when telling stories. When the attachment is not secure, the narratives about the families will be inconsistent and will lack specific details, or the person may change stories in midstream to avoid painful affect.
10
Q
Cohesiveness of the self (Kohut)
A
We feel more cohesive if we can eliminate anxiety. Tension is between mirroring and idealizing – what results is a healthy sense of self and healthy ambition and values. If you don’t get have mirroring and idealizing, then there will be threats to the cohesiveness.
11
Q
Consequences of complete deprivation and partial deprivation (Bowlby)
A
- Distinctive behaviors emerge following a separation from or the loss of a significant other. In the initial phase, the child’s overt behavioral displays are protest, which reflect separation anxiety. Next are behaviors that demonstrate the child’s despair that reflect the processes of grief and mourning. Children in this phase will withdraw and become increasingly hopeless that a reunion with their mothers will occur. The child will demonstrate signs of loss, and eventually, show signs that indicate deep grief and mourning for her. After the grief and mourning period, a child who has experienced the loss of a significant other will manifest detachment from the external world as a defense against the intolerable psychic pain to which he or she undergoes. In this phase, children appear indifferent to their surroundings. If their mothers reappear for a brief period, the children will seem indifferent, lacking the ability to discriminate among caregivers and appearing to relate to them superficially. If this phase becomes prolonged, they will potentially lose the ability to become attached to any single person and to manifest signs of being affected by the loss should occur. These responses on the part of children are characteristic of a defense against the feelings engendered by the loss of their mothers.
12
Q
Conservation/withdrawal (Tronick)
A
- A primary regulatory process for organismic homeostasis in infants, which can be reflected by gaze aversion and avoidance of the mother who herself withdraws from her infant. Attempts to recover from sympathetic process of shame by turning to parasympathetic arousal state by conserving or withdrawing. When a child becomes over-stimulated, they turn-away and temporarily withdraw in order to process what they learned and/or to conserve energy. The not-attuned mom sees the child withdraw, but will keep stimulating the baby; this creates a manic phase in the baby and these babies may later become bipolar or avoidant.
13
Q
Constructionist view
A
- The constructionist view assumes that infants initially perceive the human form as disparate physical stimuli that require assembling. They are first able to delineate physical aspects of a person such as size, motion, and other attributes, which they then gradually integrate into a whole, such as a face, or later, a whole human body. (p.248) 4 processes that allow us to organize an experience are - assimilation, accommodation, association, and identification of invariants. Learning is the underlying process of this approach. This view states that knowledge is constructed by the developing child and that new information is not written on a “blank slate”, as the child is an active participant in the learning process, constantly seeking out and trying to make sense of new information.
14
Q
Core relatedness (Stern)
A
- A developmental transformation or creation that occurs somewhere between the second and sixth months of life. This is when infants sense that they and the mother are quite different agents, have distinct affective experiences, and have separate histories. This occurs outside of awareness and without being rendered verbally and cannot be described (p.27)
15
Q
Cortisol
A
-Stress hormone; involved in fear response.
16
Q
Critical period
A
- A time in the early stages of an organism’s life during which it displays a heightened sensitivity to certain environmental stimuli, and develops in particular ways due to experiences at this time. If the organism does not receive the appropriate stimulus during this “critical period”, it may be difficult, or even impossible, to develop some age-appropriate functions later in life. This is when one is most susceptible or sensitive to external stimulation. Growth promoting and inhibiting environments influence the ontogeny of homeostatic self-regulatory and attachment systems. Critical periods for pathogenic influences might be prolonged in these more slowly maturing systems, of which the prefrontal cortex is exemplary. Growth of the brain occurs during critical periods and is influenced by social environments. (From second year study guide).
1. These are phases during which some brain systems are experience-dependent, that is these brain systems must have certain types of stimuli in order to develop. For example, if an infant hears only the sound of his native language, his auditory cortex will not develop the capacity to hear or reproduce some sounds used by other languages (p.322).
17
Q
Effects of abuse and neglect
A
- Neglect - maternal stress associated with higher arousal & agitation and less positive mood → associated with emotional dysregulaton, depression, anxiety, attachment difficulties in the newborn (Cozolino).
- Abuse - rapid triggering of anxiety and subsequent defensive maneuvers aimed to achieve safety, forms of insecure attachment, impairments in cognitive and social functioning, negative bias in appraisal system, affect dysregulation, pathological self-soothing behaviors, and slow to recovery, and impaired ability or reliance on interpersonal means of affect regulation.
18
Q
Accommodation
A
– (Piaget) A concept referring to a way of relating to the environment in terms of already available information structures (i.e. internal schemes) are modified to fit the changing demands of the environment.
19
Q
Activation contour
A
The patterned change in level of intensity of sensation over a period of time that leads to the arousal of vitality affects (levels of arousal). They can be rushes of thought, feeling, or action and can be applied to any kind of behavior, and give rise to a way of feeling, not a specific content of feeling.
20
Q
Affect attunement
A
The performance of behaviors that express the quality of feeling of a shared affect state without imitating the exact behavioral expression of the inner state. Used to describe a mother’s intuitive sense to know that the infant needs a new level of interaction, which is a part of a positive therapeutic relationship.
21
Q
Affect matching
A
- The automatic induction of an affect in one person from hearing or seeing someone else’s affect display. An example of this is “contagious crying. Affect matching may be one of the underlying mechanisms behind affect attunement but it cannot account for the phenomenon of responding in different modes or with different forms of behavior, with internal state as the referent.
22
Q
Affect synchrony
A
- The infant and the mother both learn to respond to the affects of the other in a manner that reflects the other’s affect, resulting in affect synchrony, which exists from moment-to-moment. They modify their behaviors to reflect the affective needs of the other, which indicates a bond of unconscious communication. This process is vital to the social development of the infant’s control system.
23
Q
Aggressive attachment disorder
A
- Child has a clear preference for an attachment figure, but comfort seeking is often interrupted by the child’s aggressive, angry outbursts directed toward the attachment figure or toward the self as a result of inconsistent attachment early on.
24
Q
Ainsworth
A
– Contemporary of Bowlby; developed the “Strange Situation” Study, in which a child was left in a room with a stranger and their response when the mother reentered the room was measured and described their attachment style. There were three developed by Ainsworth and a fourth added by Main:
25
Alert inactivity
- A state in which the infant is physically quiet but continues to take in information from the external world. Provides information about processing through sucking, head-turning and looking.
26
Ambivalence
The simultaneous existence of strong opposing feelings, such as love and hate, felt for the same person.
27
Amodal perception
- In infants, the appearance of an innate capacity to take information received in one sensory modality and translate it into another sensory modality. Most likely the information does not belong to any one particular sensory mode (hearing, seeing, etc.) but instead transcends mode or channel and exists in some unknown supra-modal form.
1. E.g., infant hears mother’s voice and is soothed by shifting the auditory (hearing of mother’s voice) to a visual representation of the mother.
28
Cross-modal matching
- Infants appear to have an innate general capacity (amodal perception) to take information received in one sensory modality and somehow translate it into/match it to another sensory modality (p.51). Example of this is the pacifier experiment - The researchers blindfolded 3 week old infants and gave them a pacifier with either a spherical shaped nipple or a nipple with nubs protruding from various points around the surface. After the baby has some experience feeling the nipple with only its mouth, the nipple was removed and placed side by side with another kind of nipple. The blindfold was taken off. After a quick visual comparison, infants looked more at the nipple that they had just sucked. Therefore, this shows that infants are predesigned to be able to perform a cross-modal transfer of information that permits them to recognize a correspondence across touch, vision, light, sound, and other tested modalities. Depressive Position (Klein) - Occurs during age 2 when the child integrates positive object relations and negative images and fuses them together, thus taking in the mother as a whole person. The infant no longer needs to use splitting or good and bad object representations as a defense as it did in the Paranoid-Schizoid Position. While this occurs, the child is using aggression towards the mother. The baby then comes to find that the person they were hating and acting aggressive towards is the person they love, giving the baby the impression that they have hurt the object they need/love. This causes the infant to feel guilty/depressed. The child then comes back to the mother and tries to repair the relationship. In the gap between the aggression and the repair is the depressive position.
1. From my notes - The people we love are sometimes the people that hurt us. When we integrate this, we move into the depressive position. Child struggles with aggressive feelings and also guilt in that, they feel bad and then they experience remorse and try to repair the relationship.
29
Differentiation subphase (Mahler)
- (5-10 months) Most critical period of process of separation/individuation. Encompasses the following - the process of hatching from the ‘autistic shell,’ i.e., developing more alert sensorium that reflects cognitive and neurological maturation helping the infant become more attune to the outside world; the beginning of comparative scanning, i.e.; comparing what is and what is not mother, or scanning to compare facial expressions; and, stranger anxiety, which involves curiosity and fear (most prevalent around 8 months) of unfamiliar people.
30
depressive position
- (Klein) Infants no longer need to use splitting and begin the process of integrating good and bad object representations.
- This begins around 3-4 months and lasts until 6 months.
- Infant begins to see objects as whole rather than as partial-objects; thus can see the mother as both good and bad.
- This stage results from the gradual separation from the mother, resulting in the child emerging as a separate person.
31
Disavowed self (Stern)
- Dissonance between what the child believes they should feel and what they actually feel. If the parents don’t attend to sad feelings with a sad child, the child has to disavow some of their own experiences. This can turn into a false self in that, the child disavows his/her own experience in order to have the shared experience with the caregiver. We have a part of ourselves that we don’t share with others (private self), a self that we present to others (social self), and a part of us that we deny (disavowed self). In other words, there is a splitting of experience in which two different versions of reality are kept apart and form separate self representations, both equally “real” but with the true experience given full weight.
1. From Stern - “Disavowal separates the true personal, emotional meaning from the linguistic statement of what is reality. Since language provides the major vehicle for relating knowledge of the self to the self, the disavowal experiences are less than other experiences to inform self-knowledge, and they remain less integrated because they are cut off from the organizing power existing in language.”
32
Disintegration products
- Result of when people are under threat of disintegration (disruption of cohesion); products such as anger, drug use, or any other action designed to create cohesion attempt of the individual to consolidate. For example, drug abuse - the pain/anxiety/disintegration is threatening them to use narcotics to chemically alter themselves so that they don’t feel the disintegration anxiety.
33
Disorganized attachment (Ainsworth)
- Mothers have conflictual behaviors, alternately acting frightened of and frightening their children when the mother returns in strange situation, the infants react in a chaotic way with physical dysregulation, falling down, spinning around, walking toward mom but looking the other way, and sometimes self-injurious behaviors. Also baby might demonstrate trance like behavior upon mother’s return, hands in the air, may rise at parent’s entrance, then fall onto the floor. Or, they might cling while crying hard and leaning away with a gaze averted (p.310)When there is a failure to demonstrate a clear attachment style/behaviors, these children often show mixed behaviors including avoidance or resistance (argued that this particularly occurs when the parent is both a figure of fear and reassurance). Most predictive of Borderline Personality Disorder!!
34
Dissociation (Hart)
- If a parent cannot be a source of warmth, comfort, or protection for the child and the child fails to receive support for regulation, the nervous system goes into a freeze state and the child dissociates. Dissociation involves numbness, avoidant behavior, and a reduction in affect. Traumatized children are often observed to have a glassy gaze, and they are passive and lack initiative.
35
Distal vs. proximal mode of interacting
- Distal (as child gets older) vs. proximal (younger child) modes of relating; Consider Kohut’s Developmental Line of Empathy
36
Dysregulation in shame interactions
- During the practicing period, instead of mirroring the child’s grandiosity, the mother shames them for their behavior, which hyperstimulates the child into a narcissistic rage. The child then develops a false self based on figuring out what the environment needs and becoming that. They constantly need adulation and attention and are unable to regulate their own self-esteem (Cannot handle criticism because of narcissistic injury)
37
Early practicing period
- 0-16 months; Early practicing period begins when the child plays at the mother’s feet and remains very close. We see some differentiation and a little practicing being separate, but the child is still really involved with the mother. Late Practicing Period is characterized by locomotion (crawling) and moving away from the mother. When the child moves away from the mother they lose energy and become fussy. This is when the child turns back and goes back to the mother to emotionally refuel and re-energize, using the mother as a secure base and is reassured about the availability of the mother. All children have some separation anxiety and require the use of the distance modalities of hearing and seeing mother in order to enable them to move physically from her.
38
Emotional refueling
- Mahler’s metaphor used to depict an exchange of energy between mother and infant. Occurs around 18-24 months (practicing and rapprochement phases). Parent changes role from symbiotic partner to more distant, yet emotionally supportive presence (“home base”) that toddler can return to during their struggle for autonomy. Ex. looking at the parent while playing to gain reassurance or climbing into their lap briefly
39
Empathy
- A combination of resonance, attunement, and sympathy. We make hypotheses about people based on visceral, emotional, and cognitive information. The mental state of another is experienced as one’s own mental state
40
Endorphins/opioids and bonding
- Endorphin and opioid levels in both mother and child rise and fall as they grow close, separate and come close again .
1. They learn that closeness feels good and distance causes pain
2. For the infant, the mother’s expressive face increases dopamine, which makes the mom the infant’s primary source of enjoyment and well-being
3. Mothers sense when the infant is over excited and break off activity to allow for re-regulation
4. When the mother is non-regulating or there are early cases of trauma there is a parasympathetic mechanism that creates detachment and dissociation from the unbearable situation, increasing neurotransmitters and reinforcing numbing and blunting behaviors
41
Epigenetic principle (hierarchical development)
- Growth on multiple lines (cognition, language, social, etc.) of development produce a higher complexity in people
1. This theory suggests that it starts at age 2-3 and continues throughout the lifespan
2. This growth is achieved gradually and with increasing complexity
42
Episodic memory (Stern)
- Refers to the memory for real-life experiences occurring in real time.
1. Has the advantage of being able to include actions, perceptions, and affects as the main ingredients or attributes of a remembered episode.
2. It attempts to render the daily personal events of a life in memorial and representational terms.
43
Evoked companion
- Another who is present within oneself.
1. Infants’ subjective experience of being with another is that the caregivers have their own organization, cohesion, and agency.
2. Infants have experiences that connect a set of related events within a specific context, which if repeated become RIGs.
3. The experience of being with the other gradually forms RIGs, which enables the infant to create an evoked companion.
4. Thus, the child is able to evoke the image of their mother even when she is not there
44
Harlow
- Researcher who studied attachment in monkeys. He raised infant monkeys in a cage, with a wire mother who provided milk and a ‘cloth mother’ who was soft, and found that the infant monkeys would cling to the ‘cloth mother’ except when they were feeding, which established that we need our moms for more than just milk.
45
Hatching
- Occurs during the differentiation subphase of Mahler’s theory of separation – individuation (age 4 – 6 months).
1. It is when intentioned and goal-directed behavior is seen in infants as they become more curious about the environment and leave the caregivers side in order to explore surroundings.
2. Begin to develop awareness of self and others
3. Emerging more fully from the undifferentiated fused state (symbiosis) and establishing a separate and individuated self
46
Hedonic experiences
- The degree to which a feeling quality is pleasurable or unpleasurable (seen as a dimension along which categorical affects are experienced)
1. Psychoanalytic theorists assume that the infant’s view of the world during intense moments of affective experience is the most important factor in the construction of object relations
2. The result is the notion that the first dichotomy of the world that an infant will make is between pleasurable (“good”) and unpleasurable (“bad”) experiences
3. This hedonically based split is thought to occur before the self/other dichotomy in achieved
4. They assume that Hedonic experiences can and will override all other experiences and serve as the privileged organizing interpersonal event.
5. Infant experience is so hedonic tone-dependent that pleasurable and unpleasurable experiences cannot talk to each other, be cross-referenced, or integrated
47
Homeostasis
- Refers to internal state of equilibrium
1. According to Mahler, infants struggle to maintain this state during the symbiotic phase (2/3 – 5 months)
2. It is a peaceful state that baby incorporates from the mom. It is baby’s self-regulation. It is an incorporated sense of self for healthy babies
3. Ex. Borderline’s never attained internalized homeostasis from mom and therefore can’t self-regulate; rather, they have to get it from others
48
Homeostasis and self-regulatory systems
1. Early on regulation period is shaped through social interactions with the mom.
2. The human baby is regulated effectively through their mother’s response, maternal gaze, social references, physical stimulation, etc.
3. How this develops is highly dependent on the primary caregiver and how she regulates the child.
4. The regulatory systems is negatively impacted by an unavailable and inconsistent mom.
49
Hospitalism
- A term used in the 1930-40’s; created by Spitz to describe the syndrome developed by infants in the hospital who suffered profound developmental retardation in all spheres.
1. The symptoms could include retarded physical development, and disruption of perceptual-motor skills and language
2. It is now understood that this wasting disease was mostly caused by to a lack of social contact between the infant and its caregivers
3. Connected to study that showed when children are not cared for, they may actually die from severe failure to thrive (similar to Brittany’s bell pepper)
50
Idealizing
- Refers to a self-object function in which the caregiver keeps the infant safe and the infant understands this.
1. Provides cohesiveness, integration of self, consolidation of self, and “brings infant together,” which lessens anxiety
2. It helps ward off infant vulnerability and states of disintegration
51
Implicit memory
- Memory characterized by a lack of conscious awareness in the act of recollection.
1. By contrast, explicit memory requires conscious recollection of previous experience
2. Implicit memory may survive largely unimpaired at the same time as a person's powers of explicit memory decline with age or are devastated in Alzheimer’s Disease
3. Implicit memory is a type of memory in which previous experiences aid in the performance of a task without conscious awareness of these previous experiences
4. Evidence for implicit memory arises in priming, a process whereby subjects’ show improved performance on tasks for which they have been subconsciously prepared
52
Imprinting/critical periods
- Part of Bowlby’s theory; it is the learning process underlying social attachment.
1. A psychoneurological phenomenon that develops through mutual gaze
2. The baby imprints mothers gaze
53
Infant coping behavior system (Tronick)
- Related to the “still face”; When faced by a suddenly unresponsive social partner, young infants typically react by sobering and gazing away.
1. This reaction is a part of the infant coping behavior system, which has shown that infants appreciate the emotional meaning of the affective states of their caregivers and allow them to mutually regulate their interactions
54
Indiscriminate attachment
– (Hart) The child does not use the caregiver as a secure base, for example by checking in in insecure situations. Instead, the child indiscriminately goes to others for security or care. These kids either engage in risky behaviors or seek indiscriminate contact and have social difficulties.
55
Inhibition and affect regulation
- Inhibition is the conscious or unconscious restraint of a behavioral process, a desire, or an impulse. Affect Regulation is the interactive experience of mother and infant. The mother provides for an affect-regulating system in the infant. There are a variety of signals and negotiations between infant and mother that constitute a mutual regulating system. The infant's signaling and social negotiations occur automatically (i.e., what infant researchers call “implicit relational knowing”) and lead to increasingly complex dyadic regulation. When optimal, this interactive system eventuates in the coordination and synchrony of internal processes and external behavior in both mother and infant (e.g., when the mother and the infant share a bed during the night, there is similarity in their sleep cycles). Such a feedback system between the two offers infants opportunities for both mutual regulation and self-regulation. This affect regulation is a central ingredient of the attachment system that becomes determined by the nature of the infant's internalizations. That is, a defensive mental model (of self-regulation) can reflect interactive stress (a mutual regulatory pattern). A more coeval regulatory pattern between the infant and care-giver, when internalized, produces adaptive coping patterns (i.e., the internalized regulatory pattern issued from the secure attachment system).
56
Sharing of Intentions
- Intentional communication is a signaling behavior in which the sender is aware of the effect that the signal will have on his listener, and he persists in that behavior until the effect is obtained or failure is clearly indicated. These acts, which are directed at a referent person, imply that the infant attributes an internal mental state to that person – namely, comprehension of the infant’s intention and the capacity to intend to satisfy that intention. Intentions have become shareable experiences. For example, a child reaching out, grasping his hand, and making “eh, eh” noises when his mother is holding a cookie. The child is expecting his mother will comprehend the child's desire to obtain the cookie and will hand it to him (satisfy the intention).
57
Interaffectivity
- The term to define the match infants make between the feeling state as experienced within and as seen “on” or “in” another. It may be the first, most pervasive, and most immediately important form of sharing subjective experiences.
1. Stern (p. 132) - Recent preliminary findings in our laboratory suggest that infants at about 9 months notice the congruence between their own affective state and the affect expression seen on someone’s face. If infants are made sad and upset by several minutes’ separation from mother (this is the age of acute separation reactions), as soon as they are reunited with her they stop being upset but remain solemn and are judged by mother and experimenters still to be sadder than usual. If then, right after the reunion when they are still sad, the infants are shown a happy face and a sad face, they prefer to look at the sad face. This does not happen if the infants are either made to laugh first or had not been separated in the first place.
2. AKA affect attunement - the ability to be aware of the congruence between one’s own affective state and the emotional expression on someone else's face and the mirroring that takes place. The awareness of the correspondences between what one sees on the faces of their partners and what they sense proprioceptively on their own faces. Since both parent and infant recognize these correspondences, this provides a common language, and special moments of connection. This is a precursor to empathy and starts to emerge in infants at about 9 months.
58
Interattentionality
- The process by which the infant developes the sense that people, including himself/herself, can have individual, different, attentional focuses, which can be brought into alignment and shared. It concerns the exchange of attentions and can result in mutual interaction. Around the age of 9 months, infants have some sense that they can have a particular attentional focus, and that the mother can also have a particular attentional focus, and that these two mental states can be similar or not, and that if they are not, they can be brought into alignment and shared.
59
Internal Objects
- Intrapsychic role relationships depicted via mental representations, and forming part of a wish. In terms of RIGs, internal objects are intrapsychic representations of relationship with others, following their initial discovery via the instinctual projective identification of the infant.
60
Internal working models (of relationships)
- This represents Bowlby's attempt to link attachment theory and psychoanalytic theory. He stated that the difference between IWMs and mental representations is that IWMs are processed implicitly and stored in nondeclarative, procedural memory, whereas mental representations are processed explicity and stored in episodic memrory. According to Bowlby, in healthy development infants form IWM of the external world, internal world and interaction of the two. IWM are cognitive maps for all aspects of the external world; they are not simple replicas of the self & others, but complex structures that are affected & modifiable by experience (Pg. 294). These can be seen as RIGS, schemas or object relations that play a role in self-regulation and engagement in the world. People are biologically driven to form attachments with others, but the process of forming attachments is influenced by learning experiences. Individuals form different kinds of attachments depending on the expectations and beliefs they have about their relationships. These expectations and beliefs constitute internal "working models" used to guide relationship behaviors. Internal "working models" are relatively stable even though they can be influenced by experience. Individual differences in attachment can contribute positively or negatively to mental health and to quality of relationships with others.
1. Fonagy elaborated on IWM to help bridge the gap between attachment theory and psychoanalytic theory. He believed children formed internal representation through their reflection upon the mother’s mirroring of their internal state.
61
Intersubjectivity
- Operationally defined (in Stern) as the deliberately sought sharing of experiences about events and things by an infant with his/her caretaker. Intersubjective behavior can be interaffective (sharing affective states), interattentional (sharing joint attention), or interintentional (sharing intentions). Intersubjective relatedness appears at about 7 to 9 months of age and does not require the use of language (is pre-linguistic). It refers to the sharing of experiences either jointly, reciprocally, or by complementary interactions, often through eye gaze. Shared experiences occur in either the emotion, attention, or intention realms. These types of behaviors emerge as early as the first month as a way for the infant to interact and share their experience with others, specifically their caregiver.
62
Introjection
- The subject (infant) replicates in itself behaviors, attributes or other fragments of the surrounding world, especially of other subjects (and especially of early caregivers). It is the phantasy by which the infant takes into himself something that he perceives in the outside world (i.e. the infant that feels any danger of deprivation from the outside world will perceive that danger or deprivation as coming from a within danger. Frustrating objects and sources of anxiety, even though external to the infant, become internal persecutors of the terrified infant by means of introjection).
63
Invariant
- Stern defines an invariant as that which does not change in the face of all the things that do change. He uses this term in MANY contexts. Here are a couple of examples:
1. An invariant pattern of awareness is a form of organization. It is the organizing subjective experience of whatever it is that will later be verbally referenced as the “self.” This organizing subjective experience is the preverbal, existential counterpart of the objectifiable, self-reflective, verbalizable self.
2. From birth on, there appears to be a central tendency to form and test hypotheses about what is occurring in the world. The infant will readily discover which features of an experience are invariant and which are variant. For example, an infant will discriminate a smile regardless of whose face it is on. One then can say that the infant has an abstract representation of the invariant (unchanging) properties that constitute smiles regardless of variant (changing) properties such as whose face the smile is on.
64
Islands of consistency
- Stern seems to use this term interchangeably with Invariant. Here are a couple of examples:
1. How are the interpersonal interactions mutually constructed so that the infant is in a position to identify the invariants (“islands of consistency”) that will come to specify a core self and a core other?
2. …the infant has the overall capacity to do so, in large part by identifying the invariants (“the islands of consistency”) that gradually provide organization to experience
65
Lateral tegmental circuit and shame
- Shame stress de-activates the ventral tegmental and activates the lateral tegmental limbic circuits. Shame transactions facilitate the expansion of the lateral tegmental and the growth occurs under this low-intensity stimulation. In shame states the individual reduces sensory input, especially visual input by gaze aversion. (However, the child needs a period of recovery, and the process of re-experiencing positive affect following negative experience may teach a child that negativity can be endured and conquered).
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Lateralization of emotions
- Research on the lateralization of emotions reveals the existence of two affective systems. The R hemisphere is dominant for the expression of nonverbal mood and affect, and the L hemisphere is involved in verbally mediated affective and mood states. The R hemisphere is all sensation-oriented and operates faster than the left (implicit, fast-acting). It processes emotion-evoking stimuli out of awareness, while the left responds to more conscious processing of emotional material (explicit, thoughtful, deliberate). Our reactions to situations begin even before information is conveyed to the L Hemisphere. One of the goals of therapy is teaching the client to become aware of the R Hemisphere functioning, but act based on L Hemisphere reasoning
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67. Limbic system (excitatory and inhibitory tracks)
1. Birth = limbic, subcortical, sympathetic
2. Maturation = cortical, parasympathetic.
3. The limbic system is a sort of ‘primitive core’ of our brains, and plays a major role in our emotions and affects. Maturation is dependent on our experiences and is influenced by the caregiver-infant relationship. Limbic areas of the human cerebral cortex show anatomical maturation at 15 months suggesting that cortiolimibic functional activity expressed in emotional activities and mechanisms of memory start operating at that time. Spontaneous emotional expression is mainly subcortical and that cortical control is inhibitory. Over the course of infancy sympathetic excitatory systems that are operating at birth are superceded by parasympathetic cortical inhibitory systems. (At birth it’s all limbic and subcortical. Over the course of development, the parasympathetic system (calming state) takes precedence over the sympathetic (high alert state). The interactions are creating the nervous system that regulates us.
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Maternal gaze transactions/function
- The mother’s face is the most potent visual stimulus for the child- the direct gaze from the mom can mediate powerful aggressive messages. For instance, while experiencing trauma, the infant is presented with an aggressive expression on the mother’s face. This aggressive face is then associated with the chaotic bodily states that the infant experiences and both are imprinted into subcortical limbic circuits, in the visuospatial R hemisphere. They become stored memories of “negative maternal attributions” which dysregulate the infant because they contain intense negative affect. The infant also experiences a maternal expression of fear-terror- which occurs when the mother withdraws from the infant as though s/he were the source of alarm.
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Maternal Regulation
- The mother/primary caregiver is the external regulator of the infant’s internal affective state through her affective responses and behaviors. Mom experiences infant’s affect or level of distress and matches it. Infant’s state is thus regulated by mom. This regulation directly influences the growth and assembly of brain structures and structural systems in the infant. The structures that the infant develops later assume the role of self-regulation.
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Mentalization
- The developmental acquisition that permits children to respond not only to another person’s behavior but to the conception of others’ attitudes, intentions, or plans. The key word here is “conception. When the child can operate in the viewpoint that I’m not just responding to Mom’s behavior, but to what she’s thinking about the situation or about me right now, that’s a conception, it’s not how Mom feels @ all times and @ all moments, it’s what she’s feeling right now. Many of our clients will always attribute something that has happened in a relationship with others to something in a very concrete way. In CBT, this is what we try and employ the idea that there are other ways we can try and see situation. So rather that it just is, it is seen as a representation of it (which is personally constructed, i.e., the take). Understanding the subjective worlds of self and other (advanced). It is a mental representation – to see in oneself and others is the capacity to mentalize (Fonagy). Mentalizing allows for containment; it allows us to think before just acting on impulse. Bion said, “A capacity for tolerating frustration thus enables the psyche to develop thought as a means by which the frustration that is tolerated is itself made more tolerable." There is both implicit and explicit mentalization - Implicit = automatic and unreflective (R hem); Explicit = conscious, deliberative, reflective (L hem). Aims of treatment include learning to mentalize about oneself, others, and relationships.
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Merger states
- These are various states in which the infant registers the objective experience with the self-regulating other as a subjective experience OR a fusion of identities. Examples - when a child sees self as one with mother, or in adults when a wife feels embarrassed for her husband as if she herself committed the embarrassing behavior.
1. Primary merger - the experience of boundary absence, the sense of oneself as a part of another due to the inability to differentiate self from other.
2. Secondary merger - the experience of losing one’s perceptual and subjective boundaries after they have been formed and, being engulfed by or dissolving into an other’s semi permeable personhood. These experiences are thought to be re-editions of primary mergers, brought about by regression secondary to some wish-related defensive operation.
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Mirror neurons
- Mirror neurons fire both when a person acts and when the person observes the same action performed by another. Thus, the neuron "mirrors" the behavior of the other, as though the observer were itself acting. They connect the observed and the observer by linking visual and motor experience. Mirror neurons may be important for understanding the actions of other people (such as understanding the intentions of another and empathy), and for learning new skills by imitation (such as language). Mirror systems are involved in many social functions, such as learning, gestural & verbal language evolution and empathetic attunement.
1. The "Broken Mirrors Theory of Autism" states that there is a possible link between mirror neuron deficiency and autism. EEG recordings from motor areas are suppressed when someone watches another person move, a signal that they may relate to the mirror neuron system. It appears as though this suppression is less in children with autism. Based on these results, some researchers have claimed that autism is caused by impairments in the mirror neuron system, leading to disabilities in social skills, imitation, empathy and theory of mind.
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Mirroring
- This is the behavior in which one person copies another person usually while in social interaction with them. It may include miming gestures, movements, body language, muscle tension, expressions, tones, etc. It is often observed among couples or close friends. Within self-psychology, being mirrored refers "to all the transctions characterizing the mother-child relationship, including not only reflections of grandiosity, but also constancy, nurturance, a general empathy and respect" (Kohut). Essentially, the parents' mirroring responses influence the development and maintenance of self-esteem and self-assertive ambitions. Their response will mirror back to the child a sense of worth, which in turn creates an internal self-respect. For example, the child fell down. The child can become overwhelmed and aroused (disintegration). The mother mirrors the child’s affective experiences by saying “Oh you skinned your knee. That’s an ouchy.” In the mirroring, the child becomes less overwhelmed.
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Misattunement
- The state in which the mother does not appropriately identify and/or match the infant’s internal state and become synchronized. These misattunements fall into two categories:
1. Purposeful misattunement/tuning - The mother “intentionally” over- or under-matches the infant’s intensity, timing, or behavioral shape, usually for the purpose of increasing or decreasing the infant’s level of activity and affect.
2. Nonpurposeful attunement/true misattunement - Either the mother incorrectly identified the quality and/or quantity of the infant’s feeling state or she was unable to find in herself the same internal state.
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Mutual gaze transactions
- The mother’s facial expression stimulates and amplifies positive affect in the infant. The child’s internally pleasurable state is communicated back to the mother, and in this interactive system of reciprocal stimulation both members of the dyad enter into a symbiotic state of heightened positive affect. (Schore Powerpoint)
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Mutual regulation model (Tronick)
- Infant’s expression of happiness signal that their goals are being achieved; negative interactions signal that the interaction is not going well for them. Emotional messages are being exchanged so that each partner is achieving his or her goals in coordination with those of the other. Emotions are communications; infant signals to parent and parent signals to infant and each alters behavior accordingly.
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Narrated self
- According to Stern, children construct (or co-construct with a parent) narratives that begin to form the autobiographical history that ultimately evolves into the life story of a person. The advent of language brings about the ability to narrate one’s own life story with the potential to change how one views oneself. Narrative-making is a universal human phenomenon which reflects the design of the human mind. The making of a narrative involves thinking in terms of persons who act as agents with intentions and goals that unfold in some causal sequence with a beginning, middle, and an end. The narrated self is one of two subdivisions of the domains of verbal relatedness in which the individual weaves elements from other senses of the self (agency, intentions, causes, goals, etc.) into its story. (FYI - The other subdivision is the categorical self which objectifies and labels.)
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Narcissism, primary
- The self-involvement all infants start out with. The investment of libido into oneself.
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Narcissism, secondary
- a turning of libido away from objects back to the ego, as with what we now call the narcissistic personality.
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Noradrenaline System
?
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Object
- a mental representation of a person made up of the individual+fantasy+needs in the context of need states.
- So don’t talk about the mother, talk about the maternal object because the mental image is partly a result of the child’s own mental imaging and unique experiences with the mother.
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Object constancy
- According to Mahler, object constancy can be defined as the capacity to recognize and tolerate loving and hostile feelings toward the same object, the capacity to keep feelings centered on a specific object, and the capacity to value an object for attributes other than its function of satisfying needs. Anna Freud also used this term to refer to the point at which the mother continues to be the most important person for the child regardless of whether she gratifies or frustrates his/her needs, which occurs around ages 6-8 months. Implies a capacity to differentiate between objects and to maintain a meaningful relationship with one specific object whether needs are being satisfied or not.
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Otogenetic niche
- Refers to the unique, adaptive characteristics of the emerging developmental responses in early environmental niches that exist for a limited time period. Many qualities seen early in development may be temporary adaptations to a particular stage of growth. These adaptations may require the creation of structures and functions that are adaptively suitable for that particular stage, but which may be unnecessary/incompatible with later stages. The adaptation requires a mechanism in which earlier characteristics are eliminated, suppressed, or reorganized. A defining characteristic of ontogenetic adaptations is that they are transient. (Shaf emphasized that there are sensitive periods and critical periods within the environmental niche and to note the difference.)
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Opiates as reinforcement (role of opiates)
- Opiates produce pain numbing and blunting. When the mother is non-regulating or there are early cases of trauma there is a parasympathetic mechanism that creates detachment and dissociation from the unbearable situation, an escape when there is none. Opiates increase in this situation and thus reinforces numbing and blunting behaviors. Children who may react like this inhibit their cries for help. The quality of early attachment is known to affect social relationships later in life.
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Orbitofrontal cortex
- Orbitofrontal areas are critically involved in attachment processes and homeostatic regulation. In impulsivity, Orbitofrontal systems are inadequately developed during attachment to engage in healthy self-soothing and inhibition of fear activation in the amygdala.
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Paranoid-schizoid position
- The infant split between wholly good experiences with “good” objects and wholly bad experiences with “bad” objects. Infant realizes that loved “good object” and hated “bad object” are aspects of the same object. Feelings of guilt arise for acts or fantasies of aggression towards the object and desires to make reparation. Position does not refer to a stage, but rather a configuration of object relations, anxieties, and defenses, which persist throughout life. Child sees the mother as nurturing and angry at the same time, resulting in splitting. The child is unable to hold both the good and bad representation of the mother
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Parcellation
- Cortical networks are generated by a genetically programmed initial overabundant production of synaptic connections, which is then followed by a process of competitive interactions (parcellation) to select those connections that are most effectively entrained to environmental information. Parcellation, the activity-dependent fine tuning of connections and winnowing of surplus circuitry, dominates the last maturational phase. Parcellation is responsible for the loss of early ontogenetic adaptations, but this same mechanism of functional segregation also allows the developing brain to become increasingly complex, a property of a self-organizing system. Process has been described as analogous to natural selection (survival of the fittest neurons).
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Part object
- The first part object for the infant is the mother’s breast. Klein suggested that early object relations are first part objects, and they may be extrapolated to represent the whole object. For example, the good breast part-object and the bad breast part object. The infant is unable to distinguish between the good and bad part objects, so the infant uses splitting to experience the good breast and the bad breast as separate. As an infant matures, it begins to integrate the two into a whole object.
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Plasticity
- Neural sprouting. In an infant, particularly during the first year, it is the social environment that calls forth and acts on the developing nervous system, exploiting what plasticity there is. In early development, the factors influencing the child’s emotional state will also influence the state of cortical plasticity. The social-emotional processing center (which connects the limbic system to the frontal cortex) is the most plastic part of the brain. During the process of therapy, the therapist acts as the good mother, soothing and calming in the face of dysregulation so the patient can build new structures through firing of new neural nets- a situation that previously resulted in anger now elicits a more adaptive or appropriate reaction.
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Positive hedonic affect
- During the period before the infant develops the ability to self-regulate affect, the infant engages in positive hedonic affect (10-14 months) as a practicing period. Research shows that infants between 10 and 13.5 months show significantly higher displays of positive emotion. This is the same time period in which the infant develops a sense of self (Piaget), it is a critical period for attachment (Bowlby), and it corresponds with the Practicing phase of separation-individuation (Mahler).
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Primary maternal preoccupation (Winnicott)
- The psychophysiological state of the mother right after giving birth. Winnicott stated that there is no such thing as an infant, meaning that an infant is not able to survive without a mother and is in no way differentiated or individuated from the mother at birth. Primary maternal preoccupation is characterized by decreased concentration, perceptual, and conceptual skills and increased body focus as the mother prepares to become part of the nursing couple. It is as if the mother regresses in order to become attuned to the baby’s bodily needs. The close maternal attunement in the earliest period after birth allows the baby to differentiate and become aware of its separateness from the mother.
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Print Now phenomenon
- This phenomenon neuropsychologically preserves a photographic image of a critical event in the brain. Following a “now print” experience, a neurohormonal influence is developed that favors future repetitions of the same neural activities. Early imprinting experiences may represent inceptive “now print” events that are registered in the right cortex. Such memories label events that are consequential for the individual by creating highly visual and detailed remembrances of an important adaptive significance to the individual’s survival.
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Projective identification
- Introduced by Melanie Klein, it is a defense mechanism that involves identifying with an object (Mom) in an effort to control their own aggressiveness onto whom they have projected their own aggressive impulses. It involves identifying with or internalizing impulses or characteristics that were projected onto the object.
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Proximal vs. distal mode of interacting
- Proximal modes can be thought of as direct, physical contact (holding, rocking, touching). Distal modes can be thought of occurring across space through vision, auditory cueing, and affect signaling. As children grow, distal interactions grow more common.
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Psychobiological state/autoregulating
- A child’s psychobiological states of activity and inactivity are regulated through the relationship and early interactions with the mother. When the child is aroused, the stimulation arousal can be inhibited by the mother’s influence, which establishes the child’s autonomic balance. The process of children moving in and out of attunement, the cycle of joining, separating, and reuniting is the central aspect of developing psychobiological regulation.
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Pupil dilation
- Social environments operate to generate and amplify infants’ affect. Large pupil size is a signal to others that we are having positive feelings and are interested in them. People with larger pupils are seen as more attractive, which results in more positive feelings. Dilated pupils are an “approach” signal to caretakers, friends and potential mates. Maternal gleam is a hyper-aroused fovea area of the retina.
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Rapprochement
- Introduced by Margaret Mahler, it is a subphase of the Separation-Individuation phase and occurs from 16-24 months. The toddler begins to feel a certain separation from the mother, as well as a lack of the omnipotence that was characteristic of the preceding practicing phase, so the relationship with the mother must then be renegotiated. Although the conflict begins in the second year of life, the issues involved arise at each new developmental stage, and the parent-child relationship must be renegotiated at each of these stages.
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Representation of Interactions that have been Generalized (RIG)
- around 7 months have powerful meanings
- A mental template which involves affects, sensations, and cognitions, or many different experiences that get synthesized into one experience, or one category of experience. RIGs constitute a basic representation of the core self. A RIG is not a memory but rather a representation of an experience which can be organized in terms of attributes, affects, and/or behaviors. At first, RIGs are unconscious, but in time people may become conscious of them.
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Right hemisphere (maturation/characteristics)
- The early developing right brain generates the implicit self, the human unconscious. The right hemisphere grows first and its neurons fire faster; therefore, we make a decision before the left side has chance to think about it. Dominant for the processing, expression, & regulation of emotional information. Synaptic growth and differentiation of prefrontal cortex of right hemisphere commences at end of 1st year. This developmental process is significantly influenced by stimulation embedded in infant’s socio-affective transactions with primary caregiver.
1. Self - Introduced by Kohut, one’s consciousness of one’s own being or identity; the uniting principle underlying all subjective experience.
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Self affectivity
- A linkage between feeling and behavior that makes sense. Self-affectivity is the sense of having inner emotional feelings that routinely go together with specific experiences, such as feeling happy when one's mother approaches and sad when she leaves.
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Self agency
- The sense that one is capable of generating one's own actions and expecting that these self-generated actions will have consequences
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Self reflective functioning
- Thru self-object functioning (ie mirroring, idealizing), one learns to self reflect. Self-talk is based on the reflection of the inner state of the object. The individual attempts to consolidate.
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Self-regulation
- Social interactions insure homeostasis. These are good or bad depending on caregiver. Stern suggests the infant experiences the process of emerging organization.
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Selfobject
- Introduced by Kohut, it is an extension of the self. It is not a self or an object; rather, it is the subjective aspect of a relationship that is supportive of the self. It contributes to organization and cohesiveness of self.
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Selfobject function
- An aspect of the relationship between self and others. They are psychological functions which are not innate. Provided by others, disintegration is warded off by the selfobject functioning parents provide. There are three types - Mirroring, Idealizing, and Twinship.
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Sensitive vs. critical periods
1. Critical - Growth of brain occurs in critical periods and is influenced by social environment. Brain growth is 5/6 postnatal and continues until about 18-24 months. Growth-promoting and growth-inhibiting environments influence ontogeny of homeostatic self-regulatory and attachment systems.
2. Sensitive - The onset & offset of sensitive periods are attributed to the activation and expression of particular genes at particular times in development. Infant’s interactions with mom directly elicit psychoendrocrinological changes that influence biochemical activation of gene-action systems that program critical periods. Growth and differentiation of cortocolimbic structure are responsible for self-regulation.
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Separation anxiety
- Introduced by Bowlby, whenever separations activate instinctive responses with no possibility of reaching termination, Bowlby maintains that separation anxiety will arise in the infant. Infants then are pushed toward their mothers by escape responses and pulled toward her by clinging and following. Escape responses are behaviors that increase the distance from mother and produce alarm in the child.
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Separation-Individuation
- Introduced by Mahler, the conceptualization of developmental progression which has two distinct aspects - (1) Separation refers to the process whereby the infant gradually forms an intrapsychic self-representation distinct/separate from the representation of mother and a sense of being able to function independently of mother. (2) Individuation refers to the infant’s attempts to form a unique individual identity and to assume their own individual characteristics. Mahler described the separation-individuation process as beginning at 4-5 months of age and compromised of four predictable, observable, and overlapping subphases - differentiation, practicing, rapproachment, and ‘on the way to object constancy’.
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Shame
- As an infant, shame is an emotional disconnection with caretakers that is experienced as a threat to survival. Shame is the experience of the self as defective, bad and worthy of rejection. It causes a shift from positive sympathetic NS arousal to negative parasympathetic NS withdrawal. It is felt more than thought and plays a role in inhibition and conscious forming.
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Shame recovery
- Empathy/affect attunement leads to provision of recovery by reestablishment of bond, positive affect, interactive repair, and learning. A healthy caregiver re-engages sympathetic nervous system and brings back stimulation.
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Social referencing
- Occurring in situations of uncertainty, it is the reading emotional cues from others to determine how to act in a situation. It has to do with comprehension of emotions and responding to the emotions of others, and it improves during the second year of life. Onset is sometime around 9 months. Infants are more sensitive to cues from a significant person.
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Spitz
- Researcher behind the hospitalism studies which established that if children’s emotional needs are not met they will become ill & die.
1. “When an infant experiences a need, it will provoke in him an affect that will lead to behavioral changes, which in turn provokes an affective response and its concomitant attitude in the mother; she behaves ‘as if she understood’ what particular need of the infant causes his affective manifestation”
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Splitting (Klein/Kernberg)
- Describes the process by which the good and bad or positive and negative aspects of the self and others are experienced as separate or are kept apart. Refers to how objects are seen prior to seeing them as whole. The individual deals with emotional conflict or internal or external stressors by compartmentalizing opposite affect states and failing to integrate the positive and negative qualities of the self or others into cohesive images. Because ambivalent affects cannot be experienced simultaneously, more balanced views and expectations of self or others are excluded from emotional awareness. Self and object images tend to alternate between polar opposites - exclusively loving, powerful, worthy, nurturant, and kind--or exclusively bad, hateful, angry, destructive, rejecting, or worthless. In terms of Klein, think good breast, bad breast- they are split into totally separate entities. According to Kernberg, splitting is used by borderline personalities as an active mechanism of defense in order to avoid the becoming conscious of certain ideational representatives which are intensely contaminated with aggression.
1. Normal splitting - The child recognizes that the person he loves is the same one he hates. This causes splitting before age 2, a healthy developmental defense. As cognitive development continues, the child becomes conscious of positive and negative experiences and represses the negative experiences by metabolization, but they remain in the person’s psyche. This allows the child to perceive the whole object. By age 3 the child can tolerate ambivalence.
2. Pathological splitting - Splitting is pathological when the person is stuck using this defense past its developmental expectancy. If there is an abundance of negative experience coupled with biological predispositions, there is a potential for dysregulation. The child is unable to repress, so will idealized and/or devalue objects.
1. Idealization - a byproduct of splitting; denial of actual parts of reality, denial of flaws in others.
2. Devaluation - primitive defense among those with a borderline personality organization. A derivative of splitting represented by depreciated and devaluated representations of others, including the projection of devalued aspects of the self. The counterpart of idealization, the complete devaluation of others, or the perception of others as persecutory and dangerous
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Still face
- The still-face interaction, during which the mother is asked to remain “still-faced” and quiet, is known to be disturbing to infants based on their behavioral and physiological responses. Infants who showed the greatest increases in negative affect and heart rate and decreased in vagal tone during the still-face showed less positive affect, lower vagal tone, and less behavior state matching during the spontaneous and reunion interaction periods. It was also discovered that it was the mother’s still-face and not her silence that contributed to the still-face effect.
1. Infants of depressed mothers compared to infants of non-depressed mothers showed less negative change (less increase in frowning) in their behavior. This finding was interpreted as the infants of depressed mothers being more accustomed to non-contingent behavior in their mothers, thus experiencing less violation of expectancy in this situation.
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Stimulus barrier (Mahler)
- The early pre-ego process (during mahler’s normal symbiotic phase, one to five months) in which the infant protects itself from unbearable overstimulation (mother plays an important role in reducing tension too). It is based on an innate ability to perceive and differentiate painful states of increasing tension and pleasurable states of decreasing tension.
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Strange Situation (Ainsworth)
- Laboratory procedure used to assess infant attachment style. The procedure consists of eight episodes -
1. Parent and infant are introduced to the experimental room.
2. Parent and infant are alone. Aren’t does not participate while infant explores.
3. Stranger enters, converses with parent, then approaches infant. Parent leaves inconspicuously.
4. First separation episode - stranger’s behavior is geared to that of infant.
5. First reunion episode - Parent greets and comforts infant, then leaves again.
6. Second separation episode - infant is alone.
7. Continuation of second separation episode - Stranger enters and gears behavior to that of infant.
8. Second reunion episode - parent enters, greets infant, and picks up infant; stranger leaves inconspicuously.
1. Observers are interested in the infant’s reactions to the mother upon reunion. Correlations were found between the four categories of behavior and the attachment styles of their mothers (secure, avoidant, anxious-ambivalent and insecure-disorganized.)
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Stranger Anxiety (Mahler)
- Despite infants being able to differentiate between their mothers and other people as newborns, stranger anxiety does not appear to develop until approximately 8/9 months of age (differentiation phase). This usually takes the form of fearful facial expressions and fussing in the presence of the stranger or when being held by a stranger and may be due to the infant’s increased ability to recognize phases. If the infant is regularly exposed to several adults, this anxiety diminishes (Field, 264).
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Symbiosis (as viewed by Mahler/Stern)
- Mahler applied the term to describe the type of object relating characteristics of the infant of 2-4 months (after the normal autism phase and before separation-individuation); she believed that the infant had no sense of being separate from the mother. It can be thought of as the fusion of two organisms and is experienced by both the mother and child as a merging or sharing of their needs. It is a state of undifferentiation, of fusion with mother, in which the “I” is not yet differentiated from the “not-I,” and in which inside and outside are only gradually coming to be sensed as different.
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Temperament
- Consists of a variety of traits that are present at birth and used to describe the infant’s personality. These traits include the infant’s activity level, adaptability, distractability, intensity, mood, persistence, regularity or rhythmicity, sensitivity, and weariness. When a child is described as an easy or difficult baby, one is referring to the child’s temperament. Some researchers have found that temperament traits such as introversion vs. extroversion seems fairly predictive and stable of the child’s future interactive style (Field, 268).
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Theory of mind
- The ability of typically developing children to attribute mental states such as desires, beliefs, and intentions to themselves and others as a way of making sense of and predicting the behavior of others. The ability entails understanding that other people’s behaviors are intentional or purposive, that a desire either to express their state of mind o to communicate with others motivates them.
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Transference (as related to RIG)
- The displacement of patterns of feelings, thoughts, and behavior, originally experienced in a relationship to significant figures during childhood, onto a person involved in a current interpersonal relationship. The process is largely unconscious. Transferences occur in a wide range of circumstances. In a psychoanalytic situation, transference is more apt to appear by the patient generating fantasies about the analyst so that the analyst may represent several figures from the past.
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Transmuting internalization (Kohut)
- The process through which self-structure is formed, consists in taking a in a function that a parent performs and integrating it into one’s sense of self. Infantile omnipotence is transformed into the consolidation of the internal nuclear self. First the parents offer empathetic responses to the child’s grandiosity, which enables the child to build an idealized image of the parent with whom he wishes to merge. Phase appropriate frustration permits a gradual modulation of the infantile omnipotence and allows the parental self-object to be internalized.
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Twinship
- A selfobject function; need is provided for the self to feel a degree of likenes with others. Initially, closeness sought may have merged quality, but through development, a greater toleration for being different is accepted. In therapeutic relationship, the idea that you and I are alike, we’ve been through this together. (relating to the patient, “it’s happened to me too”) Doesn’t have to be verbal recognition as in mirroring.
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Withdrawal behavior (TF)
-when child is too stimulated it withdraws
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Triune brain model
- primitive, reptilian brain
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Secure attachment
- minimal distress when separated, and upon return, reattach quickly and easily.
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Ambivalent attachment
- excessive distress when caregiver leaves and is very difficult to sooth even upon their return. Reattachment is difficult for the caregiver to achieve while the child is in this state.
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Disorganized-Insecure attachment
- fail to demonstrate a clear attachment style/behaviors. These children often show mixed behaviors including avoidance or resistance (argued that this particularly occurs when the parent is both a figure of fear and reassurance)
1. Precursor to borderline PD
716 - Developmental Psych
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