Reaching experience increases face preference in 3-month-old infants

The developing infant learns about the physical and the social world by engaging with objects and with people. In the study reported here, we investigated the relationship between infants' interactions with the physical and the social world. Three-month-old infants were trained for 2 weeks and experienced either actively manipulating objects themselves or passively having objects touched to their hands. Following active or passive experiences, spontaneous orienting towards faces and objects was compared between the trained groups and untrained 3- and 5-month-olds. It is known that the onset of reaching behavior increases infants' interest in objects. However, we report that active, self-produced reaching experiences also increase infants' spontaneous orienting towards faces, while passive experiences do not affect orienting behavior. Regression analyses provide evidence for a link between manual engagement and the development of orienting towards faces. Implications of orienting towards faces for the development of triadic interactions, joint attention, and social cognition in general are discussed.     

Coherent accounts of coping with a chronic illness: convergences and divergences in family measurement using a narrative analysis

Researchers and clinicians have shown increasing interest in family narratives as an avenue for accessing the family meaning-making process. In this study, we examine the convergences and divergences between narrative assessment, family self-report, and verbal accounts of family climate. Sixty-two families with a child with pediatric asthma were interviewed about the impact that asthma had on family life. These interviews were coded for narrative coherence, relationship expectations, and engagement with the interviewer. Primary caregivers were also interviewed using the Five Minute Speech Sample (FMSS) and completed self-report assessments of family functioning (Family Assessment Device [FAD]; Impact on the Family Scale [IOF]). Contrary to prediction, narrative coherence was higher in those cases where Emotional Over-involvement (EOI) was present on the FMSS. Narrative coherence and engagement with the interviewer were positively related to self-report of family problem solving, communication, and affective responsiveness as measured on the FAD. Divergences and convergences between different types of family measurement are discussed in light of meaning-making processes associated with coping with a chronic illness.     

“Of Course All Relationships Are Unique”: How Co-creative Processes Generate Unique Mother–Infant and Patient–Therapist Relationships and Change Other Relationships

The question of the uniqueness of relationships is examined: How do relationships come to be unique? What are some of the features of their uniqueness? And how can relationships, be it the mother—infant relationship or the patient—therapist relationship, have unique rather than archetypical effects on other relationships? A model of relationship uniqueness is presented that argues that mother and infant, and patient and therapist, co-create dyadic states of consciousness—states of making implicit and explicit sense of the world—out of their normally messy exchanges of age-possible meanings. These co-creative processes lead to change in the infant's and child's state of knowing the world, and also change the way the patient makes sense of the world and ways of being with others. Additionally presented are (I) a critique of attachment theory's assumption that the mother—infant relationship is the prototype of later relationships; (2) a critique of models of therapeutic change that see adult analysis as working primarily in the same domain as the workings of the mother-infant relationship; (3) a brain model of co-creative relational processes, Relational Activation Patterns (RAPs); and (4) possible psychodynamic processes in infants.     

Mothers' insightfulness regarding their infants' internal experience: relations with maternal sensitivity and infant attachment

This study examined the associations among mothers' insightfulness into their infants' internal experience, mothers' sensitivity to their infants' signals, and infants' security of attachment to their mothers. The insightfulness of 129 mothers of 12-month-old infants was assessed by showing mothers 3 videotaped segments of observations of their infants and themselves and interviewing them regarding their infants' and their own thoughts and feelings. Interviews were classified into 1 insightful and 3 noninsightful categories. Mothers' sensitivity was assessed during play sessions at home and at the laboratory, and infant-mother attachment was assessed with the Strange Situation. Mothers classified as positively insightful were rated as more sensitive and were more likely to have securely attached children than were mothers not classified as positively insightful. Insightfulness also accounted for variance in attachment beyond the variance explained by maternal sensitivity. These findings add an important dimension to research on caregiving, suggesting that mothers' seeking of explanations for the motives underlying their infants' behavior is related to both maternal sensitivity and infant attachment.     

Habituation, response to novelty, and dishabituation in human infants: tests of a dual-process theory of visual attention

Two experiments were conducted to test a dual-process theory of infants' performance on visual habituation-dishabituation tasks. The findings demonstrate that (a) infant habituation functions are often nonmonotonic, with fixation increasing before the eventual response waning; (b) this initial increment in responding is related to stimulus "complexity"; (c) response to novelty is enhanced by increasing the "complexity" of the novelty-test stimulus; and (d) dishabituation, followed by decay, occurs for familiarized patterns when retested after the introduction of a "complex" stimulus, but not after introduction of a "simple" stimulus. Following P. Groves and R. Thompson (1970, Psychological Review, 77, 419-450) we propose that infant visual attention to repeated presentations of a stimulus involves two processes, habituation and sensitization.     

Ricoeur and the pre-political

We argue that Paul Ricoeur’s work on narrative and alienation provides a largely untapped, though potentially fruitful way of re-thinking the question of political agency within the context of globalization. We argue that the political agency of many around the world has been placed in an exceedingly fragile position due to the rapid pace of globalization, the movement of multi-national corporations from their previous national headquarters, etc. We use Ricoeur’s work to argue that the alienation of globalization is not something that can be simply overcome either in a unified world-state or a retreat to protectionist nationalism, because institutional mediation—and consequently alienation—is in some sense constitutive of all politics: the world of political representation operates by its own set of rules, which are at least partially disconnected from the represented world. Using the work of Mouffe, a radical democratic theorist, we then flesh out an ideal of agonistic citizenship (which recognizes both the need for and the inevitability of discursive struggle in politics) in a number of overlapping communities of interest, rather than tying political participation solely to the sovereign government of my state. The state will remain important, but because globalization has disenfranchised so many from their participation in “local” modes of self-governance (tied to the state in which they live), we have a responsibility to re-envision what political participation means outside the traditional context of the state. Rather than merely citizens of a particular state, we need to begin thinking of ourselves politically—and then acting—as “citizens” of Green Peace, Human Rights Watch, Doctors Without Borders, or whatever other supra-local concrete universals or communities of interest to which we belong, investing the time and energy there that we might previously have invested solely in our state’s government. (By implication, we must also ensure that these organizations work in transparent democratic ways themselves.) We believe that by re-plotting our narratives of political engagement in this way, we can positively respond to the alienation created by globalization, while avoiding both the extremes of “McWorld” (hyperglobalism) and “Jihad” (complete skepticism towards, or war against globalization) that Benjamin Barber and David Held have recently described.

Thinking Differently Principles of Process in Living Systems and the Specificity of Being Known

As a way of integrating emerging knowledge of biological systems, developmental process, and therapeutic process, we identify principles in the process of exchange between organism and its context of life support that are present at all levels of complexity in living systems, from the cellular to the organization of consciousness. These principles range from specificity, rhythmicity, recurrence, and pattern to coherence, wholeness, and a relative unity in the organization of component parts. By proposing that these principles are also governing the exchange between mother and infant as they negotiate a sequence of essential tasks of adaptation, or “fitting-together” between them over the first years of life, the author suggests that the biological level becomes integrated with the developmental. A sequence of adaptive tasks extends from specificity of recognition in the newborn state, to recognition of inner awareness, purpose, and intention—shaping conscious organization. The bridge to the therapeutic level is constructed as therapist and patient build increasingly inclusive and coherent moments of recognition between themselves at the level of conscious organization, which act as corrective experiences, bringing the patient's own senses of “true self” and of “agency-to-initiate” to new levels of validity and competence.     

Attachment as an informative relationship

Levels of awareness, a personal construct concept that explains varying levels of "consciousness" while respecting the felt experience of the client, has not been systematically explored within the personal construct literature. Six processes associated with varying levels of awareness are discussed in this article: (1) ways the client's meaning system may preclude possibilities experienced by the therapist, (2) implications of the system that have not been elaborated, (3) terror associated with exploring the contrast poles to meanings, (4) framing assumptions that limit our awareness of issues, (5) suspended events and the shutting down of meaning-making, and (6) nonverbal construing. These processes have implications for how the clinician will connect with and engage the creativity of the client.     

Vowels in early words: an event-related potential study

Previous behavioural research suggests that infants possess phonologically detailed representations of the vowels and consonants in familiar words. These tasks examine infants' sensitivity to mispronunciations of a target label in the presence of a target and distracter image. Sensitivity to the mispronunciation may, therefore, be contaminated by the degree of mismatch between the distracter label and the heard mispronounced label. Event-related potential (ERP) studies allow investigation of infants' sensitivity to the relationship between a heard label (correct or mispronounced) and the referent alone using single picture trials. ERPs also provide information about the timing of lexico-phonological activation in infant word recognition. The current study examined 14-month-olds' sensitivity to vowel mispronunciations of familiar words using ERP data from single picture trials. Infants were presented with familiar images followed by a correct pronunciation of its label, a vowel mispronunciation or a phonologically unrelated non-word. The results support and extend previous behavioural findings that 14-month-olds are sensitive to mispronunciations of the vowels in familiar words using an ERP task. We suggest that the presence of pictorial context reinforces infants' sensitivity to mispronunciations of words, and that mispronunciation sensitivity may rely on infants accessing the cross-modal associations between word forms and their meanings.     

Risk factors for infant attrition and low engagement in experiments and free-play

Forty-three 2-month-old infants participated with their mothers in a laboratory study of factors associated with variations in infants' attrition and levels of attention/engagement in a cognitive-perceptual experiment, and in free-play with their mothers. Increased risk of attrition from the experiment was strongly associated with analgesic medication having been administered during labor and with more restricted maternal perceptions of infants' capacities. Attrition rates and levels of engagement varied independently, showing different patterns of association with explanatory variables. Infants' levels of engagement in the experiment and in free-play were correlated across settings and low levels were associated with a lack of maternal identification with the foetus during early pregnancy and more limited maternal perceptions of their infants' capacities, but were not associated with analgesic medication during labor.     

SELF OR NO-SELF? CONVERGING PERSPECTIVES FROM NEUROPSYCHOLOGY AND MYSTICISM

Abstract. The nature of self is examined in relation to psychological observations which reveal some form of dissociation of knowledge from consciousness. Such dissociations are apparent in cases of blindsight, and amnesic patients displaying implicit memory effects, among others. While amnesic patients, for example, are unable consciously to recall material previously presented, such material does influence subsequent physiological and psychological processes. Thus, it is not the memories themselves that have been lost, but the ability to make conscious connection to them. In attempting to account for such observations, theoreticians generally have posited some kind of "consciousness system" that may become dissociated from brain modules dealing with specific processing.
It is argued here that a view of self along the lines of the Buddhist concepts of no-self and the conditioned nature of "I" introduces a more parsimonious perspective on the neuropsychological data. A theory of the nature of self is presented that constitutes a synthesis between key ideas drawn from Buddhist and other mainly mystical traditions and the scientific observations in psychology. Central to this theory is the role that the left hemisphere's interpreter (Gazzaniga 1985; 1988a; 1988b) plays in constructing a unified "I." This "I" is, in effect, a hypothesis that the mind generates to introduce some coherence into otherwise fragmentary mental elements. Although it appears to be the causal focus of the individual's behavior and experience, it is in fact a retrospective construction and not a true causal structure of the mind. This theoretical view is discussed in relation to various meanings of the term consciousness and also in relation to the relevant neuropsychological cases.     

THE CRY FOR THE OTHER: THE BIOCULTURAL WOMB OF HUMAN DEVELOPMENT

Abstract. The human experience of meaning-making lies at the roots of consciousness, creativity, and religious faith. It arises from the basic experience of separation from a loved object, suffered by all mammals, and, in general terms, from the experienced gap between ourselves and our environment. We fill the gap with transitional objects and symbols that reassure us of basic continuity in ourselves and in the world. These objects and symbols also serve the neurognostic function of demonstrating what the world is like. Thus, humanity lives by faith, as manifested in its pattern-making capacity, and not by literal sight.     

Tracing memories and meanings of festival landscapes during the COVID-19 pandemic

COVID-19 has deeply affected mass gatherings and travel and, in the process, has transformed festivals, festival landscapes, and people's sense of place in relation to such events. In this article we argue that it is important to better understand how people's memories of festival landscapes are affected by these larger shifts. We worked from the premise that information-rich cases could provide some initial insights in this respect. To that end, we interviewed seven individuals who are regular and longstanding in their engagement with festivals in one place, lutruwita/Tasmania, the island state of Australia. Key findings suggest that pandemic experiences mediate the range of meanings participants give to festival landscapes and their interpretations of such landscapes can be described as attachments and detachments, encounters, and reorientations. We conclude by proposing that participants' efforts to draw on memories, reflect on emotional geographies, and recast autobiographies help them adjust to crises, rethink their ways of moving to and from festival sites, and reframe their sense of place in relation to significant cultural events. Such insights have application beyond both the island state and the participants involved.     

Connectionism and the problem of systematicity: why Smolensky's solution doesn't work

In two recent papers, Paul Smolensky responds to a challenge Jerry Fodor and Zenon Pylyshyn posed for connectionist theories of cognition: to explain the existence of systematic relations among cognitive capacities without assuming that mental processes are causally sensitive to the constituent structure of mental representations. Smolensky thinks connectionists can explain systematicity if they avail themselves of "distributed" mental representation. In facts, Smolensky offers two accounts of distributed mental representation, corresponding to his notions of "weak" and "strong" compositional structure. We argue that weak compositional structure is irrelevant to the systematicity problem and of dubious internal coherence. We then argue that strong compositional (tensor product) representations fail to explain systematicity because they fail to exhibit the sort of constituents that can provide domains for structure sensitive mental processes.     

Coherence,Brain Evolution,and the Unity of Consciousness: The evolution of Planetary Consciousness in the Light of Brain Coherence Research

The law of coherence helps us understand the physical force behind the increasing complexity of the evolutionary process, from quanta, to cells, to self-awareness and collective consciousness. The coherent electromagnetic field is the inner glue of every system, the “intelligent” energy–information communication that assures a cooperative and synergic behavior to all the components of the system, as a whole, allowing harmonious evolution and unity of consciousness. Neuropsychological experiments show that the different brain areas communicate with more or less coherence according to different states of consciousness: high values are correlated with states of psychophysical integrity and well-being, whereas low values with states of conflict and depression. If we expand isomorphically these brain discoveries, we will have four main general states of coherence: from disgregation to unity, which represents an important element, in the General System Theory, to differentiate between inanimate and animate system, and to understand how billions cells become a single living organism, and then how billions of human beings could eventually generate planetary consciousness. In this light the resolution of the global ecosystem crisis implicates human transformation from a low to a highly coherent state of consciousness. The key to the entire process seems to be the coherent nature of consciousness.     

Effects of presence of mother versus preschool teacher on the behaviour of infants in a strange situation

Seventeen infants (10–24 months of age) were observed twice in a strange situation, once accompanied by mother and once in the company of a familiar preschool teacher. On basis of video-tape recordings a total of 13 behaviour items relevant to infant attachment were scored. The results failed to demonstrate definite differential effects of mother vs. preschool teacher on the infants' behaviors in this situation. In particular, the infants were just as ready to separate themselves from their companions and explore into an adjoining room when attended by the preschool teachers as when accompanied by their mothers. Implications for Ainsworth's and Bowlby's theory of infant attachment are briefly discussed.     

Asian American college students as model minorities: an examination of their overall competence

Educational success among Asian Americans has led to their being labeled the "model minority." At the University of California, Berkeley (UCB), Asian American students have higher grade point averages (GPAs) than Hispanic and African American but not White students, supporting the notion that Asian Americans are more successful compared with other racial minorities. However, success in the classroom does not implicate effective functioning in life, and nonacademic criteria ought to be considered in assessing the validity of the model minority image. Given the increasing diversification of the United States, cross-racial engagement may be an additional contributor to overall competence. This was empirically tested in a group of 642 undergraduates at UCB, including 291 Asian, 197 White, 20 African American, 67 Hispanic, and 56 multiracial students. Overall competence was operationalized by sense of coherence, that is, the extent to which the world is experienced as comprehensible, manageable, and meaningful (A. Antonovsky, 1979, 1987). As predicted, Asian Americans had significantly fewer numbers of cross-racial groups represented in their friendship network than did students of all other races. Lower cross-racial engagement and being Asian (as compared with White) were related to a lower sense of coherence, whereas lower GPA was not. Within the Asian American subsample, cross-racial engagement was again significantly associated with greater coherence, whereas GPA again was not. Thus, extending the definition of success to overall competence, these findings raise questions about the applicability of the model minority label to Asian Americans, despite their academic achievement. Future studies need to assess the reasons for their limited cross-racial engagement and lower sense of coherence and to examine means to assist the development of these strengths.     

Oxytocin trajectories and social engagement in extremely premature infants during NICU hospitalization

Extremely premature infants, born 28 weeks gestation or less, are at high risk for impaired socioemotional development, due in part to exposure to early stressful social experiences that alter brain development. Understanding mediators that link experience with outcomes is necessary to assess premature infant responses to social experiences that are critical to brain development. The hormone oxytocin (OT), released during supportive interactions, has potential as a biomarker of the premature infant's responses to social experiences. The purpose of this study was to examine associations among infant plasma OT trajectories and maternal-infant social engagement behaviors during initial hospitalization. This study also examined demographic correlates of engagement behaviors in mothers and infants. Plasma from 28 extremely premature infants, born gestational ages 25–28 6/7 weeks, was collected at 14 days of life, then weekly until 34 weeks. Social engagement behaviors were measured by the Parent-Child Early Relational Assessment during a videotaped feeding when the infant was receiving one-quarter full oral feeds. Maternal-infant demographics were extracted from the medical record. Higher infant plasma OT was associated with lower infant social engagement, but no associations were found with maternal social engagement. Infant social engagement was positively related to maternal social engagement. Maternal parity was related to maternal social engagement, and infant demographics did not predict infant social engagement. The significant, yet negative, association between infant OT and engagement provides support for the measurement of OT as a neurobiological antecedent to infant social behaviors. Finally, this research suggests that during the earliest period of infant socio-behavioral development, premature infants are behaviorally reactive to the social engagement behaviors of their mothers.     

Infant responses to maternal still-face at 4 and 9 months

This study investigated developmental changes in infant responses to maternal still-face (SF) situations. Infants (21 males and 25 females) of Japanese mothers were observed in a face-to-face SF paradigm, comprising four phases (normal/SF/normal/SF), at two infant ages (4 and 9 months). The infants' facial expression, gaze direction, and vocalization were coded in both SF and normal interaction conditions. The results indicated that infants at both ages showed a decrease in displaying positive facial expression and gazing at their mothers during SF conditions. The 4-month-old displayed emotional expression and directed their gaze toward their mothers more frequently than the 9-month-old. However, the 9-month-old vocalized more often in SF situations, attempting to elicit responses from their mothers. The "carry-over" effect was observed only in 9-month-old. The results were discussed in the context of developmental changes in infants' social skills to cope with an emotionally stressful situation.     

Key questions regarding work engagement

This article discusses the concept of work engagement and summarizes research on its most important antecedents. The authors formulate 10 key questions and shape a research agenda for engagement. In addition to the conceptual development and measurement of enduring work engagement, the authors discuss the importance of state work engagement. Further, they argue that the social context is crucial and may set the stage for a climate for engagement with an important role for management. Engaged employees conserve their own engagement through a process of job crafting. After discussing possible dark sides of engagement and the relationship between engagement and health, the article closes with a discussion of organizational interventions to increase work engagement.