You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
This book predates both the increasingly sophisticated brain-imaging techniques and accompanying neuroscience of today, and Sroufe's own highly significant Minnesota longitudinal studies of children and attachment behaviour (2005). However, much of what we now understand about the links between a child's brain function, their emotional development, and the impact of relationship on both of these, is indicated in this forensic exploration of the nature of emotion, emotional expression, emotional development, and the capacity for emotional regulation.
In this book Sroufe seeks to clarify what an emotion is, and what we mean by development. He describes how specific emotions unfold, looking at the emergence of joy, anger, and fear, identifying the precursors for each emotion that can be observed in very young babies. Once the emotion is with us, Sroufe charts how cognition and affect work together to help the infant find meaning in environmental events. That is, the infant learns to evaluate the event and this affects what they feel about it. For those with an interest in attachment, Sroufe's central thesis is that this process of cognition and the capacity to evaluate is developed through relationship. This is where our more recent understanding demonstrated in the work of, for example, Tronick (1998), Siegel (1999), and Sunderland (2006), shows how important this thinking is: it seems that it is indeed through relationship that we become ourselves. Brain imaging shows us the right-brain to right-brain activity between infant and carer creates something that is more than the sum of its parts or, in Tronick's term, “a mutually expanded consciousness”.