Chapter 2 Affect and the Development of the Self: A New Frontier

The central role of affect in development has increasingly captured the attention of researchers, theoreticians, and clinicians alike. Affect is thought to play an essential part in empathic exchanges, to be the primary medium of communication between infants and caregivers, and to remain an important nonverbal element in all communication throughout life. But what information is communicated by affects? Affective information is thought to be important because we assume it contains motivational information about the other person or about oneself. Thus, if we know what a person is feeling, we have information about the quality of his or her inner experience, whether it is intrinsically rewarding or punishing: the kinds of thoughts, intentions, fantasies, and memories likely to be associated with it; the kinds of behaviors likely to occur; and the kinds of defensive maneuvers likely to be adopted in order to avoid or to escape the experience. Affect, then, has both a communicative and a motivational function within the organism.

Much of the work on affect in infancy thus far has concentrated on the communicative importance of affective expressions. Attachment theorists, such as Bowlby (1969) and Ainsworth and Bell (1970), have emphasized the role of infant crying and smiling as built-in signals that promote physical closeness and bonding between infant and