Highlights
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This book takes up a similarly larger view of morality that includes an emphasis on flourishing in terms of not only psychology but also biology and ecology.
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Cooperative purpose and mutualism occupy every species, every ecosystem, and even our own bodies, which rely on vast numbers of bacteria to digest our food and keep us alive.
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understanding human evolution through the mammalian branch, with an appreciation of the vital and powerful nature of social and emotional development, can help humanity retrieve self-understanding.
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As developmental systems theory points out (e.g., Oyama, 2000), evolution provides extensive roots for our moral sensibilities—but they are not packaged traits like eye color that pass from one generation to the next. Instead, evolution provided a system for early development, a nurturing environment that shapes capacities (an evolved developmental niche).
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I will argue that early experience plays a vital role in how moral sensibilities are tailored, shaping systems when the maturational schedule brings them online. When childhood experience does not support evolved needs, it creates species-atypical outcomes. Physiological deficits from early experience—including stress hyperreactivity—influence perceptive, social, and cognitive capacities, pushing moral preferences toward self-protective imagination.
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Our capacity to spend more time in a prosocial-egalitarian mindset is reliant on well-functioning emotion systems.
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If humanity is to survive, it may need to restore its human essence as a partner with the natural world instead of its dominator.
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Humans are not who they used to be. People seem to be getting less social, and less socially capable,
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Perhaps we have grown accustomed to the less-than-optimal way children are being formed.
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In a way, the resiliency literature focuses on “good-enough” development—the upside of the downward slide of child well-being. As long as children do not end up as dropouts or inmates,8 their development can be termed a success.
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I believe that standards for what are normal, expectable outcomes for children have slipped over time, sometimes subtly, much like standards in environmental arenas have shifted, where each generation assumes their childhood experience is normal and over time there are less fish in the ocean, fewer old forests, fewer birds and butterflies (Pauly, 1995).
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Even when these child outcomes are recognized as unusual, the suggested remedy is often directed toward parents, who may be charged with undersupervising, underpunishing, or underadmonishing. Parents are blamed for lack of inculcating appropriate values, with the underlying assumption that coercion is the way to obtain moral outcomes. But I believe that this is a misunderstanding of human development on multiple fronts, and that to truly comprehend human development we must grasp the dynamic, coconstructive effects of caregiving on the child’s body and brain in early life.
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Are all the identified problems due to the random stresses of “modern life,” or is there some other systematic cause? Is there a moral cause to these problems? I believe so, but I think what looks moral within individuals has causal components “all the way down.” That is, implicated are not only reasoning, empathy, and relational capacities but also the brain-body systems upon which these capacities rely, including emotional brain circuitry and neuroendocrine systems. Morality is influenced by all sorts of physiological systems, most of the time without our awareness. Their misdevelopment influences moral conceptions and the types of societies we adults create.
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with clarity of heart and mind, individuals and societies have the freedom to develop cultures that promote well-being, aiming to fulfill our human essence collectively.
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The social embedding of the self in turn shapes individual moral meaning-making that feeds into the cultural milieu. Morality, then, includes human systems of any kind, such as family, community, cultural, and government structures. But every human system begins with the mother-child dyad and from there iteratively builds the roots of individual and cultural virtue. The personal aspect of morality means developing one’s essence through lived social experience. Each individual constructs a moral universe based on experience, particularly in early life when the foundations for implicit or tacit knowledge begin. Early-life experience influences at first the implicit, then the explicit, answers a person has to questions like these: Who am I? Who are we? What is the sense of my/our life? What is my/our role in the universe? What are my/our responsibilities? How am I/are we connected and to what? What must I/we nurture? What must I/we avoid doing? What is good, what is bad?
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Babies are not yet autonomous. So in early life, parents choose the foundations for the child’s desires by the quality of their attention, the guidance they provide, and the types of activities and environments in which they place the child.
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Experience during sensitive periods such as early life shapes the cognitive structures and personalities of individuals. These include attachment patterns that dictate habits for broader social life later on. Structures and personalities built in childhood are brought into adulthood as default assumptions for the lifescape (Wexler, 2006). Culture is also influential. The culture in which one is immersed influences how one behaves toward others on all levels: as an individual toward another individual, as a member of a group toward members of another group, as an individual or group member toward institutionalized social will. Implicit default assumptions about others influence individual and cultural worldviews and habits, which in turn shape the culture of childrearing that adults provide for children, influencing the next generation, and so on.
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Humans have been around for more than 2 million years. The last 11,000 years or so, approximating the beginning of settled societies, represents less than 1 percent of human genus history. The other 99 percent was lived out primarily in immediate-return, small-band hunter-gatherer communities (SBHG) of 5 to 30 individuals on average (Fry, 2006).
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Despite physical hardships, on average SBHG societies live peacefully and happily in a companionship culture of shared activities with a premium on autonomy (i.e., no one is coerced to do anything, not even children, except not hurt others). The individual exists in a cooperative web of nurturing and egalitarian relations within the natural world; all lifeforms fall into the moral universe of these communities.
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Through epigenetics and developmental plasticity, early experience shapes not only how well the body works but also how our social capacities function.
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A society can intentionally foster greater capacities in its citizens. Through the beliefs we select, the institutions we design, and the practices we embody, we can choose to cultivate a more empathic and communal mindset—fulfilling our human essence.
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more to human evolution than natural selection. Developmental systems theory (DST) challenges the prevailing dichotomous account of human heritage—that genes stand alone against everything else. Instead, in DST, genes are treated as one of many inheritances that have evolved; they constitute only one aspect of organismic adaptation.
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The complexity of human heredity is becoming more and more apparent.13 Inheritances beyond genes have been identified, such as epigenetics (heritable effects on an organism other than genes) and culture but also much more.
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Sixth, cultural inheritance encompasses multiple levels of effects, including beliefs about human nature and human purpose and what it means to be a good person. Such beliefs influence how a parent treats a child and in turn become ingrained in the body and psyche of the developing child. I suggest that humans have cultural inheritances that can undermine their biological inheritances.
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The characteristics of the moral sense are largely malleable, epigenetic, and initially dependent on cultural supports.
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In short, whom a person becomes is a coconstruction of genes, gene expression from environmental effects, developmental plasticity, the ecological and cultural surroundings, the gifts of evolution, and the nature of care received.
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once self-conscious autonomy is possible, no matter what the past, an individual has the opportunity to remake the self intentionally. This gift of autopoiesis or self-creation may represent the greatest “biology of freedom,” and this book will end up there
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Genes virtually never work independently or uniquely, but are influenced by other genes, hormones, nerve impulses, and environmental stimuli as “part of highly regulated and orchestrated cascades of expression and interaction”
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Fetal developmental is highly influenced by the nutrients and toxins transmitted from the mother, all of which interact with evolved developmental maturational sequences. Over time, the child increases her influence on gene expression and developmental trajectory through her choice of activities.
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Among individuals with a history of childhood abuse, those with low MAOA activity are more likely to become violent criminals, whereas those with high MAOA activity do not show an increased risk
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arguments about genes versus environment are biologically implausible (Gottlieb, 1991, 1997). The organism grows and changes, making the environmental influence on the individual a constantly shifting interaction. In fact, genes are turned off and on throughout the day based on states and behaviors
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genes do not interact with environments; organisms do
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Genes leave so much room for necessary experience that one could say that the individual is “genetically determined not to be genetically determined”
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In short, genes coding proteins cannot “act” without a supporting cast. Astonishingly, what has been attributed to genes may often turn out to be something else—characteristics shaped by experience (the focus of this book). Epigenetic influences can occur in the womb, be experienced early in life, or be inherited from experience-based changes in recent ancestors.
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Experience acts on the gene, influencing whether or not and, if so, how much a gene is expressed. This is epigenetics
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While the genome represents a set of inherited genes, the epigenome represents the switchboard of genes that have been turned on or off in gradations from environmental signals, usually at critical points in development but also from other experiences. Technically speaking, epigenetics refers to the “nongenetic cellular memory, which records developmental and environmental cues” (Riddough & Zahn, 2010). Strictly speaking, epigenetics is the study of the heritable modification of gene expression wherein DNA sequences remain intact,
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the epigenetic tag differences between twins increase with age and appear to be the key factor behind differential outcomes for disease and even death. Twins die on average ten years apart
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Scientists are realizing that epigenetic changes can persist for multiple generations even without continued exposure to the regulator or instigator of the change
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The epigenetic changes remained in the offspring cells every time they divided. Thus, Skinner and colleagues demonstrated epigenetic effects that were not reversed after the environment was clean of the toxin.
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Epigenetic findings extend to psychosocial development. Isabelle Mansuy and colleagues studied the effects of separation from mother and maternal stress during early postnatal life in mice (Franklin, Linder, Russig, Thöny, & Mansuy, 2011). When the offspring were adults, they exhibited social anxiety (impaired signaling of serotonin). These changes persisted across generations.
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As humans evolved to become bipedal with smaller pelvises but bigger brains, human neonates became even more dependent and helpless than other social mammals, as they needed to exit the womb relatively early due to head size. Parenting intensified, extending breastfeeding, holding, and responsive care (Trevathan, 2011). One can see from the chart that the human brain is the least developed at birth. So it is not a surprise that humans need more postnatal care than the already extensive care other apes receive. Moreover, the human brain is about three times larger than would be expected for a primate of our size (Trevathan, 2011). Neural tissue requires a lot of energy to grow and maintain itself (perhaps 25 percent of energy intake), so it is an expensive adaptation.
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Humans may be the most developmentally plastic neonates on the planet, in part because of how early we are born. Because of our large heads, we leave the womb extremely early. About 75 percent of the brain (in terms of size) develops after birth, coconstructed by caregivers.
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when needs and care match up, the evolved plasticity leads to species-typical outcomes.
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The idea of developmental plasticity overlaps with epigenesis as it is broadly conceived, but plasticity is conceptualized more broadly than epigenetics. Developmental plasticity emphasizes the general malleability of an individual’s brain and body on multiple levels beyond the turning on and off of genes, the focus of most epigenetics.
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differences and similarities among animals of the same species occur not only because of genes but also “because they share or lack similar developmental systems”
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Thus, the type of environment we provide children can greatly affect who they become.
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Connections among neurons are modified by experience in structural and functional ways, making the brain a highly dynamic organ, constantly balancing external and internal worlds
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Developmental plasticity in the microphysiological sense means that the physical and social environment can affect cellular structure and information exchange during gestation and the postnatal period. This leads to a multiplicity of phenotypes from the same genotype (genetic blueprint). Whereas epigenetics by strict definition involves gene expression that can be shifted back when circumstances change, developmental plasticity during sensitive periods conduces to developmental changes that form foundations for future growth. These are not easily modified, if changeable at all, because developmental timing matters, as subsystems mature at different time points and build on one another.
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During gestation, there is rapid development according to a timed, inherited sequence of maturational events. The unfolding of development follows an evolutionary pattern. Postnatal development coincides with a particular expected environment corresponding to evolved parenting practices that emerged with the social mammals over 30 million years ago (Konner, 2005, 2010). Common early-life experiences documented among small-band hunter-gatherers reflect only slight variation from these practices. (Table 2.4 summarizes the list of practices.) These practices include (a) soothing perinatal experiences; (b) responsiveness to the needs of the infant and prevention of distress; (c) extensive touch and physical presence, with no physical or emotional isolation; (d) extensive infant-initiated breastfeeding; (e) a community of warm, responsive caregivers; (f) a positive climate and social support; and (g) creative free play with companions of multiple ages. These early-life experiences constitute an extragenetic “evolved developmental niche” that fosters optimal development (Narvaez, Gleason, et al., 2013; Narvaez, Wang, et al., 2013). 26 Interestingly, these practices appear to foster a similar moral personality in societies that provide them. They may represent a “cultural commons” for a shared human moral nature.
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how we behave is very closely tied to our physiology. A person is not born honest or deceitful, compassionate or selfish, but prenatal and postnatal epigenetics and developmental programming influence our capacity for moral functioning (e.g., self-regulation) and can make it harder or easier to be virtuous. Prenatal and postnatal support (e.g., food, hormones) leads to a body (and brain) that functions more optimally.
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Maternal behaviors during gestation affect the environment of the child and her future preferences and propensities. For example, a child’s flavor preferences are highly influenced by what flavors she encountered during gestation and lactation
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Maternal physiological characteristics also matter epigenetically. For example, children of mothers who were obese when pregnant are more likely to be obese than siblings born when their mother was not obese
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remarkable thing about mammals is that they are “metagenomic,” meaning that they carry more genes than their own (Ley et al., 2008). In fact, at most one-tenth of the cells in a human body are human. The human body cannot function without the trillions of other organisms that conduct a host of symbiotic functions that keep it alive. By one estimation, there are at least 100 trillion nonhuman genes in a human body, far more than the 10 million human genes generally carried (Dunn, 2011). When in balance, these organisms keep us healthy. When they are out of balance, we become ill. In fact, our gut, where most of our companion organisms live, governs much of our immune system and may be the primary source for the inflammatory response that underlies much of disease
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recent evidence suggests that the baby’s biogenome is jumpstarted in the womb
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Breast milk not only contains the building blocks for the child’s immune system (all the immunoglobulins) but also coats the digestive system with a film that protects the child from infectious diseases lurking in the vicinity (M. Walker, 1993). Mother’s touch conveys the local probacteria, preparing the child for a healthful life in the community. In fact, part of the work of evolved parenting practices (i.e., vaginal birth and skin-to-skin contact through breastfeeding, touch, and caregiving from multiple family members; see Table 2.4) may be to populate the neonate with hundreds of types of health-promoting bacteria. Population of the child’s body with bioflora continues through early development and is facilitated by the child’s putting her hand and various objects in her mouth during play, collecting local organisms.
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In one study (Bercik et al., 2011), the gut bacteria from a gentle strain of mice were switched with the gut bacteria from an aggressive strain of mice. The temperaments of the mice switched too, and brain analyses showed that the brains had also changed, altering brain-derived neurotrophic factor. (BDNF mediates neural function and plasticity, which are critical for long-term memory; Bekinschtein et al., 2008).
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Socially-transmitted symbolic inheritance—shared understandings and beliefs that influence behavior, or culture—may be one of the most influential inheritances that can be more or less adaptive in all senses of the
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The standard assumption is that the expected environment and the organisms’ growth and adaptation are fairly stable. However, unlike other animals, humans, specifically through their cultures, have condoned or even encouraged a purposeful thwarting of the meeting of their species’ needs (Edgerton, 1992). The evolved developmental niche (Table 2.4) in its totality is a rarity for children in developed nations.
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Although early influences may have profound effects, the development of human organisms is ultimately internally driven. One result of evolution is that organisms are not static but develop. In fact, across biological and social sciences, scholars are converging on the view of organisms as autopoietic (Fogel, King, & Shanker, 2008; Maturana & Varela, 1998). That is, organisms not only develop; they self-develop. Evolutionary developmental biology (evo-devo) has brought the focus to purposeful organization within the organism itself (Sansom & Brandon, 2007). Organisms are “genetically primed to pursue goals,” as goal-directedness is a “property of biomatter” (Bogdan, 1994, p. 3). On multiple levels down to cellular biology, organisms self-assemble, following evolved lawful patterns of organization and development (Kauffman, 1993). They have motives—they aim for growth and adaptation and these goals are intertwined with the genetic goals of survival, reproduction, and dispersal. Without growth and adaptation, there is no survival.
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Organisms are learning entities; they adapt in the face of adversity to meet goals of survival and reproduction, just as “weeds” and bacteria adapt into forms that resist what killed them in the past. In many ways, nature is teleological. Natural selection is the outcome that indicates which goal pursuits were adaptive.
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Self-authorship is part of the package that shapes who a person becomes and how she maintains who she is. So even if there is a poor beginning, adolescents and adults can take steps to remediate early effects. They can shift their attention, habits, and personalities. After all, a human being is always in a plastic state of becoming, no matter what the past, able to modify gene expression and brain function through selected activities. We will note however, that human autopoeisis is socially embedded.
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Emotions organize and coordinate action. In fact, throughout the human brain, emotional systems are placed centrally so as to dynamically interact with more evolved cognitive structures and lower-level physiological and motor outputs.
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Although culture influences every level, it is most apparent in the tertiary processes, which incorporate the cultural narratives and understandings that we use to interpret our experiences.
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despite analyses that emphasize their separation, emotion and cognition often overlap throughout the brain.
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In fact, in the cortex at the neuronal level, there is no distinction between cognition and emotion.
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take the view that emotion and cognition form a functional unity, each groundless without the other because on every level an integrated response ensues (M. D. Lewis, 2005). Two sides of the same coin, “interacting emotion components tend toward coherence in service of an integrated response to the world [and] appraisal components tend toward coherence in service of an integrated interpretation of the world” (M. D. Lewis, 2005, p. 182).
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emotions, cognitions, and behaviors are linked.
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Caregiver responses influence the infant’s subjective experience of sensations and affects as well as his growing intelligence. Subtle caregiver reading of and responses to infant cues help the infant refine both his emotional and physiological experience, increasing his social capacities. Over time, perception and action are uncoupled, leading to symbolic thought. Nevertheless, these symbols, born first with the coupling of sensation and emotion, bear emotional flavoring. Emotion or affect forms “the source of symbols, the architect of intelligence, the integrator of processing capacities, and the psychological foundation of society” (Greenspan & Shanker, 2004, p. 46). Yet even more, emotions and symbols are integrated with purpose and interest at the psychological but also neurobiological level. Babies are prepared for playful relationships, and such relationships, from the beginning of life, best guide neurobiological development (Trevarthen & Aitken, 2003). How and how well cognitive and emotion systems work together are highly influenced by the dynamics of early and ongoing experience.
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Although the child is born with a particular set of genes, how and if genes are expressed is influenced by the internal and external environment.
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Early mother–child right hemisphere coconnection occurs when the mother cradles the infant on the left side of the body, which is a common tendency among humans that “facilitates the flow of affective information from the infant via the left ear and eye to the center of emotional decoding, that is, the right hemisphere of the mother” (Manning et al., 1997, p. 327). The right hemisphere is centrally involved in implicit learning and unconscious processes throughout life (Hugdahl, 1995).
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Indeed, at birth infants are ready for intersubjectivity, which develops into the capacity for joint attention by about ten months (Trevarthen, 2005b). The right hemisphere houses the controls for the autonomic system. “The language of mother and infant consists of signals produced by the autonomic, involuntary nervous system in both parties” (Basch, 1976, p. 766). These signals promote a “relational unconscious” that includes the dynamism of “multiple levels of consciousness and unconsciousness” where “past experience infuses the present and present experience evokes state-dependent memories of formative interactive representations” (Davies, 1996, p. 197). We carry lived experience forward, in our bodies.
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Thus, caregiving modulates neurohormones in the infant by facilitating the development of the infant’s capacity to control central and peripheral responses (autonomic, physiological, stress) with his OFC (Schore, 1996). Repeated, positive synchronized caregiver–child interactions organize the infant’s capacities for self-regulation through proper functioning of the OFC, mesocortical, and mesolimbic pathways (Feldman, 2007a, 2007b). (For more details, see Schore, 1996; A. M. Weber, Harrison, & Steward, 2012.) In Chapter 5, we return to the functions of the OFC.
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The foundations for social capacities are formed during this time, including mentalizing, empathy, self-regulation, eye gaze and facial expression, the experiencing of social pleasure, sensitivity to distress in others, and free attention.
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What do we know about the impact of responsiveness in early life? Just when the brain is forming its emotional circuitry and structure, responsive caregiving trains the infant brain for self-regulation across sensory systems (e.g., tactile, olfactory), establishing habitual patterns
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responsive care with coregulated communication patterns is related to good vagal tone (a well-functioning vagus nerve) (see Chapter 4) which is critical for multiple systems (digestive, cardiac, respiratory, stress, immune emotional)
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Extensive bouts of feeling stressed in early childhood can lead to a propensity for clinical depression or anxiety
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In fact, caregiver responsiveness is more predictive of subsequent child adjustment and mental health than infant attachment per se (National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, 2006). Mothers require community support for optimal mothering (Hrdy, 2009). Mothers who report less support (emotional and physical) in their childrearing roles have children who demonstrate more resistant, avoidant, and anxious attachment styles in comparison to mothers who report more assistance (Crockenberg, 1981). (See Chapter 4 for a discussion of attachment.)
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In reaction to nonresponsive care, tthe baby may shut down emotion expression, making it seem as if he is fine when cortisol readings indicate he is not
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Attuned adults are able to establish limbic resonance (T. Lewis et al., 2000) with infants and children, a key to empathic understanding and optimal emotional and social development
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active states of agency, emotions can be apprehended from facial and body expressions and are “mirrored” by the perceiver (Trevarthen, 2005b). In this manner, responsivity constructs the self, and the initial social world of the child. One of the major drawbacks of having a depressed mother is that she is asynchronous with the baby’s positive emotions and often synchronous with the negative ones, with long-term effects on cognition and social emotion
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Equating positive synchrony with the experience of love in our bodies, Fredrickson (2013) suggests that we are missing love when we are not in positive synchrony with others, even though we may feel bonded intellectually. Without positive synchrony, “your body is loveless” (p. 36). In this view, those who never learn the intersubjective “dance” with others may never feel love.
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Wise adults know to respond to a baby promptly before things get out of hand.32 Sensitive to gestures and body signals, adults can meet the needs of the child before the child becomes distressed, supporting the development of a calm personality. Responsivity means respecting the dignity of the child as a separate “subject,” not a product or object to be used for one’s own ends. Inexperienced, distracted, or irresponsible caregivers demonstrate fewer skills and may not be motivated to figure out or provide what the child needs; perhaps this is why community childrearing evolved (“cooperative breeding,” Hrdy, 2009). Having a nonresponsive caregiver in early life is like having a novice homebuilder build a house: The framing may be crooked and the joists off kilter, affecting the strength and quality of the rest of the house (the life trajectory of the child). As a dynamic system, a child’s early beginnings shape the parameters for the life ahead.
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Mother and child establish a dance, or interpersonal musicality, with each other from the beginning of their relationship (Papousek and Papousek, 1981). Sensitive, responsive care interacts with the dynamism of the child’s becoming.
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As social mammals, humans have access to cues that reveal the intended movements of others, such as mirror neurons
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In a dynamic system, once the system is stabilized around a particular interpretation, expectancies are formed for future pattern recognition and action. Thus, if early life is unwelcoming, the child can take a bracing attitude toward life. A behavior at any given point in time is a function of the interaction of person with context, with its history and trajectory
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The child who never experience play may have no repertoire for or interest in it. Instead, the unpredictability of play may evoke fear, keeping the child from even attempting to play.
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Part of the purpose of the intensive caregiving among social mammals, especially humans, is the training up of emotions, the source of our practical intelligence (à la Greenspan & Shanker, 2004). When raised well, the individual exists in a flow of emotional-cognitive meanings that guide action.
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Motivated for social interaction, infants are born with capacities to communicate feeling and intention. When parents are receptive, these capacities develop quickly through intersubjective, reciprocal protocommunications (Trevarthen, 2006, 2009). The primary aim of the infant is to to “be with” caregivers in creative play. The infant expects responsive, affectionate, and playful being-with.
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Physical, visceral energy is “chanelled and enhanced” by the playful teasing between parent and child (Trevarthen & Delafield-Butt, 2013, p. 178). Parents and babies co-build customs, making up patterned stories, games of rhythmic musicality, expressing intention nonverbally throughout (Trevarthen & Delafield-Butt, 2013). Infant trust develops through this type of “mutual, reciprocal adjustment of actions and feelings in live engagements” (Trevarthen, 2011, p. 404). Optimal development emerges from collaborative and imaginative care, which allows trustful relations to unfold, making it possible for the individual to ground the self in deep companionship. Good care lets one enjoy being active, imaginative, and social (C. Trevarthen, personal communication, 2013).
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When properly developed, emotions facilitate adaptation to the environment, generating a sense of well-being, a sense of competence in the face of threats to survival, and a secure attachment, all of which contribute to thriving and the development of a coherent self
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The development of the early self is informed by biologically inherited motives for social embeddedness and shaped by emotionally available caregivers (Emde, Biringen, Clyman, & Oppenheim, 1991). The self is “an organizing mental process and regulator of experience (where this includes an individual’s sense of continuity, confidence, competence, mastery, and, later in age, esteem)” (p. 252). This requires “knowledge of one’s active, purposeful existence”—of what is and is not one’s own body and one’s own activity (p. 252). The self-system involves a sense of coherence, agency, and control, maintaining stability in the midst of active engagement with the world and its perturbations.
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Being knows itself only in relation to others. In the presence of a loving mother, “the infant knows it is and deserves to be … Being-in-relationship allows [the infant] to develop a sense of being-in-itself, a coherent and continuous sense of being with self-reflective ability” that no longer requires constant empathic reflection from another (Sills, 2009, p. 40). The self of a human, like that of other animals, is revealed when the environment is safe. Safe birthing and safe early hours, days, and years of life allow the child to blossom, revealing an innate affinity for exploration, investigation, and companionship. By two months postnatally, infant are ready to build stories with their caregivers. Many loving mothers become best friends and playmates of their children
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The “mammalian brain” has evolved to develop properly through the pleasurable experiences of caring, nonpunitive parenting, breastfeeding, and extensive close physical contact (i.e., holding and carrying), plus the fun of acting and knowing together (Konner, 2010).
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In an impairing context, caregivers go to one extreme or the other—being nonresponsive or overly attuned to the infant’s emotions so much that they take on the child’s emotions for themselves, indicating poor mentalizing abilities in the caregiver. In either case, the infant’s ability to mentalize is impaired, which can lead to borderline or narcissistic personality disorder. The infant fails “to find himself in the mother’s mind” and “finds the mother instead,” an alien self (Fonagy et al., 2004, p. 11). Over the long term self-development is undermined, as well as self-esteem, self-agency and being true to self.
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Some differences (activity level, sociability) can be measured in the womb (Piontelli, 1992). But do these represent innate genetic temperaments? Among gene-based proposals, neither gestational experience nor epigenetic inheritance is typically accounted for (Harper, 2005). As noted in Chapter 2 multiple external factors, such as maternal diet, can have an effect on fetuses. For example, maternal hunger induces movements in the fetus that appear anxious (Piontelli, 2010). We can speculate that chronic conditions (e.g., maternal stress or inadequate nutrition) establish chronic states that may become traits in the fetus.
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Another critique of “temperament is innate” views is the implicit assumption that the parent and child are separable elements when it is the relationship that matters most.
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Thus, although temperament is often discussed as if it represents inherited differences, I believe that most underlying brain chemistry differences are not acquired by genetic inheritance but from experience, perhaps beginning from conception or with epigenetic inheritance from parents and other ancestors. Differences in brain chemistry and in the neuronal ensembles include (a) greater or lesser secretions of a neurotransmitter or modulator, (b) more or fewer receptors for a particular molecule, (c) more or fewer projections to neurons that secrete a particular molecule, and (d) inhibition or disinhibition by another ensemble. Although some have pointed out that a subset of these influences are inherited (see Placidi et al., 2001), we can find examples of epigenesis and experiential effects for all of these features. Thus, I feel that it makes little sense to emphasize genetics instead of epigenetics and plasticity in explaining temperament and behavior.
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Neural Darwinism is a theory of neuronal group selection driven by the competing value systems within the brain. Each releasing different neuromodulators under particular conditions. Neuronal circuitry is formed by what is activated most frequently based on experience—“continual selection.” In other words, signaling from axon to dendrite is strengthened or weakened by experience, resulting in the favoring of some neural circuits (value systems) over others.These
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behavior. Early life sets up neuronal value systems—that is, which emotion systems will dominate personality and social interaction. Will it be relational attunement or self-protection?
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Morality, too, develops before the capacity for reflective self-awareness, largely comprising procedural knowledge (Emde et al., 1991, p. 251). “The early self is a moral one,” built on the trust (or mistrust) and social commitment (or lack thereof) learned procedurally in early life.
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Infants are endowed with the ‘set-goal’ of staying close to mother, a characteristic that evolved to increase infant survival by motivating them to remain close to their primary source of safety.
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the same time, infants are equipped with a motivation to use the mother as a “secure base” for exploration, quickly returning to her when becoming scared (Bowlby, 1988).
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attachment is viewed as an external social facilitation of the individual’s internal milieu (homeostasis),
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When the caregiver is consistently warm and responsive and the child does not experience trauma, a secure attachment develops. The child has learned that the world is a predictable and friendly place. Needs are satisfied through the reliable and supportive care received, including the synchrony of caregiver emotional signaling, verbal communication, and behavior. The communicative value of interpersonal signals, both cognitive and affective, is understood. The child’s needs are satisfied, including her need for the soothing of distress, through the attachment figure. As a result of the secure, reliable relationship, the child develops a repertoire of social communication and social behaviors appropriate for the cultural context—healthy baselines for the life to come. Over time, the child learns to self-soothe—to restore homeostasis—with mental representations of the caregiver. Physiologically, the responsive caregiver comforts the child’s distressed immature reflexive systems, including the vagus nerve, conditioning these systems to be calm.
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The infant’s brain develops from an “interpersonal neurobiology,” that is, collaborative, reciprocal communication that allows the child to connect to others, regulate emotions, establish a self-story, engage the world with vitality, and reflect on mental states
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A baby whose early signals are not received appropriately and attended to moves into a state of alarm, the resistance stage of pleading for help. The baby has no other recourse, as external help is needed to reach balance again. Learning to balance, establish set points, and maintain homeostasis are major tasks of early life that require skilled caregiver guidance. When external help still does not arrive, the child reaches an extreme state of mobilization that is difficult to calm. If help still does not arrive, the child moves into the appearance of exhaustion, sometimes called despair, withdrawing into a catatonic state. This represents the oldest vagal system that protects life through passive avoidance (Porges, 2011). The third stage may not represent physiological exhaustion, but certainly psychological exhaustion. The effects on the child’s brain and body depend on the timing, intensity, and duration of the inattention. Specific parenting practices such as sleep training, although seemingly helpful to parents, can be detrimental to an infant. Panic disorders in adults are linked to extensive bouts of separation anxiety in childhood—grief diminishes good feeling (e.g., opiod activity), which causes panic (Preter & Klein, 2008). Extensive patterns of distress can lead to insecure attachment.
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Crittenden (1998) and Fosha (2003) describe three psychological ways in which infants adapt over time to habitually nonresponsive caregivers: “feeling but not dealing,” “dealing but not feeling,” and “neither feeling nor dealing.”
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According to the mutual regulation model (Tronick, 2007), the infant and caregiver are each viewed as subsystems within a “larger dyadic regulatory system” (p. 9). The dyad is in a constant dance of match and mismatch of coordinating intersubjectivity. The infant’s experience of repairing communication mismatches with her coping strategies (also learned with the help of caregivers) is believed to lead to a sense of mastery and a positive affective core.
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The child develops a repertoire of responses to a variety of threatening situations (communicating needs clearly, expressing emotions appropriately, regulating expression in accordance with caregiver preferences, etc.). The secure child uses a flexible, context-sensitive set of skills for deployment when needed. As the child grows, she learns to seek out comfort from a variety of sources beyond the primary caregiver. In adulthood, mental representations of attachment figures become “symbolic sources of protection” with “symbolic proximity,” promoting self-soothing and self-regulation of distress (Mikulincer & Shaver, 2007, p. 13). The overall goal of the attachment behavior system is to maintain a sense of security (“felt security,” as Sroufe and Waters called it [1977b]).
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For those with an insecure attachment, the terrain is different from that of those with secure attachment in that the attachment system never reaches “felt security.” As a result, the habitual mode of functioning is focused on self-protection. Thus, those with insecure attachment are impaired in socioemotional processing, such as mentalizing (Fonagy & Target, 1997); they “display empathy disorders, the limited capacity to perceive the emotional states of others … an inability to read facial expressions … a misattribution of emotional states and a misinterpretation of the intentions of others” (Schore, 2003b, p. 47). They also exhibit “a limited capacity to modulate the intensity and duration of affects, especially biologically primate affects like shame, rage, excitement, elation, disgust, panic-terror, and hopelessness-despair” (p. 47). Under stress, they show chaotic states with overwhelmed somatic sensations. Stress necessarily enhances self-focus, impairing morality, as we examine ahead.
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At birth the child has a proliferation of neurons but few interconnections among them. Caregivers make all the difference. The interpersonal neurobiology of attachment forms from collaborative and contingent communication, which fosters the child’s ability to balance and regulate emotions, connect with others, develop an autobiographical story, and enter the world with vitality (Fonagy & Target 1997). Learning is the long-term potentiation of a set of synapses that carry information about past experience, adjudicating how energy will flow throughout the brain in the future (D. J. Siegel, 1999). The past affects the future through neural memory. Babies with poor attachment and no subsequent intervention are likely to turn into adults who are unable to experience intimate social pleasure with their own children—they don’t “re-call” it (Bowlby, 1969/1982). In fact, animal studies suggest that this is the case: Rhesus monkey females deprived of mother-care are unable to respond with appropriate mothering to their offspring and instead neglect or abuse them (Harlow, 1958; Suomi, 2006).
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Even human mothers with little emotional capacity or interest in an emotional relationship with an infant may nevertheless want their baby nearby. When the attachment figure provides a feeling of “like me” safety but with little affection (lacking a “warmth attachment”), the child may develop an insecure attachment (Leary, 1957; MacDonald, 1992). This can occur with a depressed mother who is unable to socially signal warmth and treats the child more like an object or property. However, unless other responsive caregivers mitigate the effects of an unresponsive mother, the mother’s treatment will stunt the child’s cognitive and emotional growth and foster an attitude of appeasement or hostility toward others (P. Gilbert, 2005; Trevarthen & Aitken, 2001; Zahn-Waxler, 2000).
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The vagus nerve is the tenth cranial nerve and the primary nerve of the parasympathetic nervous system, which is implicated in multiple biological systems. As a cholinergic inflammatory pathway, the vagus nerve monitors and communicates with all major systems in the body, including the spleen to control immune function (Kessler et al., 2006; Maier, Gleher, Fleshner, & Watkins, 1998). The vagus nerve regulates the parasympathetic system and when it functions poorly, a variety of detrimental health outcomes can take place (impairment of digestion [e.g., irritable bowel], neuronal communication [e.g., seizures], and mental health [e.g., depression] as well as inflammation, a backdrop for many diseases [Ghanem & Early, 2006; Groves & Brown, 2005; Rosas-Ballina et al., 2011]). When
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the ability to move the head, show emotion expression, and share eye gaze is part of a suite of social cuing capacities that are related to self-regulation, and specifically to proper vagal nerve function.
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If the action is not successful in restoring a sense of safety, then the third (oldest) system kicks in and the individual escapes through passive avoidance—dissociation.
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When caregivers are attuned to infant needs in a coregulated communication pattern (more responsive parenting), they foster good vagal tone. Infants who shared more mutual affect regulation with their mothers (dyads that demonstrated more matched affect and synchrony of affective states) were more effective in their physiological regulation across a stress-inducing still-face paradigm (Moore & Calkins, 2004).
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Moral functioning is related to vagal tone in that good vagal tone is related to prosocial response. Eisenberg & Eggum (2008) found that children with higher vagal tone were more cooperative and giving. In adults, activated vagal tone has been correlated with compassion and openheartedness toward others from different backgrounds (Keltner, 2009).
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Like filial imprinting in ducks, human mothers bond quickly to their infants after birth under natural conditions, facilitated initially by oxytocin and subsequently with opioids when the CARE system is in full swing (Panksepp, 1998). The infant gradually bonds as she is wooed by her mother, latching on emotionally to her familiar caregiver(s), which then keeps the child near the caregiver(s) for ongoing protection, influence, and the development of attachment.
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Self-regulation, broadly speaking, is the ability to manage the self within a healthy homeostatic range to achieve goals, including physiological processes but also intentional actions (Hoyle & Bradfield, 2010).
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Children cannot learn self-regulation on their own. For example, respiration, heart rate, and arousal are influenced by the presence of the mother, affecting well-being (Hofer, 1994).
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during early life, a hidden trauma can occur, resulting not from physical assault but from the emotional unavailability of a responsive attachment figure to comfort and regulate the stress of the fear-evoking events that are a daily part of the infant’s experience.
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The unavailability of caregiver comfort can lead to malorganized systems or even a disorganized personality. Thus, from the beginning, caregiver responsiveness is vital for a mutually responsive orientation from which the sense of self develops, the capacity for reciprocity is habituated, and emotion systems are optimally tuned, all of which contributes to self-regulation (Kochanska, 2002; Schore, 1994; D. J. Siegel, 1999; Stern, 1985; Tronick, 2007).
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Oxytocin increases attention to and accuracy regarding other people’s eyes, smiles, feelings, and positive emotions while downregulating the amygdala’s threat reactivity and upregulating its attention to positive social opportunity
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Intranasal oxytocin administration tends to make individuals less aggressive, more trusting (at least of the ingroup), and more confident in social life (MacDonald & MacDonald, 2010). It dampens the activity of the amygdala and upregulates neural circuitries that facilitate empathy and concern for others (e.g., inferior frontal gyrus, ventromedial prefrontal cortex, caudate nucleus) (for a review, see De Dreu, 2012). However, recent studies suggest that oxytocin targets social feeling toward the ingroup (at least in males) rather than necessarily expanding social feeling willy-nilly. That is, it tends to promote ingroup trust and outgroup mistrust (De Dreu, Greer, Van Kleef, Shalvi, & Handgraaf, 2011). So, cultural notions of what the ingroup is will matter.
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Plasma levels of oxytocin increase in parents when they touch and physically connect with their children a lot
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Converging evidence from animal models as well as human studies indicates that a baseline for oxytocin production may be established in early childhood by parenting behavior
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Human babies initially receive oxytocin through their mother’s milk, and touch increases oxytocin levels.
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Oxytocin counteracts the effects of stress by decreasing blood pressure and reducing activity in the sympathetic autonomic system
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Persistent stress appears to decrease the activity of the oxytocin system and the bonding that goes along with
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Prolactin is also implicated in nonmaternal infant care and may be a relational hormone whose levels fluctuate according to the quality of the relationship
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Meditation increases prolactin concentrations and may play a role in easing fear by promoting quiescence, which influences other metabolic and humoral processes, such as elevation of vasopressin concentrations and reduction of cortisol concentrations
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In other words, a relaxed state of meditation releases prolactin, which feeds back to reinforce the relaxed state.
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Interestingly, under normal conditions motherhood is addictive—it activates the same pathways as addictive drugs
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The social dependence that is part of human nature resembles opiate addiction; the withdrawal of an opiate drug results in the same symptoms as separation distress: psychic pain (loneliness), crying, loss of appetite, depression, sleeplessness, and irritability or aggressiveness (Panksepp, 1998). This suggests that the development of substance addictions may be related to a dearth of pleasure from social relations.
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Colwyn Trevarthen (2005b) contends that Bowlby’s warmth attachment is not enough for a child’s intellectual or optimal development. Companionship attachment goes further, emphasizing parent–child interactions of sharing intentions, interests, and affective appraisals. (Recall Figure 3.5.) They play together-with one another. As the child grows, the capacities and scope of shared imagination and action grow and change too. Building on Trevarthen’s term, I call this companionship care.
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Like intersubjectivity, companionship care begins in early life. Trevarthen’s (2005b) research demonstrates that babies discover relationship and meaning in collaborative communication from the first day of life. The child is born expecting a conversational partner. In fact, newborns not only imitate gestures (heart rate increasing) but also initiate action (heart rate decreasing) and wait for a response. Trevarthen (2005b) contends that human sociability, already evident in infants, “innately seeks to build meaning by sharing the narratives implicit in adventurous activity, and by playing with ways of acting and experiencing” (p. 63). Babies are motivated to find pleasure in dynamically responsive company, seeking “a place in a community of ‘common sense,’ not just security in attachments” (p. 55). “From birth, a child’s learning depends upon sharing his or her impulsive acting and thinking with other familiar persons, who themselves are experimenters, discoverers, and communicators, eager to share what they think and do” (p. 58). In fact, the child’s vitality is encouraged by intuitive parenting focused on play and meaningful communication. Children are instinctively playful companions who, like all social animals, learn to sensitively communicate immediate interests and impulses for action with ongoing interpersonal creativity. Expressive body signs develop before speech, from proto-conversations of “primary intersubjectivity” at two months (Trevarthen, 1979) to “secondary intersubjectivity” and “cooperative awareness” with protolanguage by the end of the first year (Trevarthen & Hubley, 1978; Hubley & Trevarthen, 1979). With their partners, babies exchange communication, conveying their feelings, intentions, and experiences, which prepares them for spoken language. These forms of collaborative learning facilitate intellectual development, coordinating and synchronizing different parts of the brain: “Large territories of the frontal and parieto-temporal cortex are implicated in the simple sympathy of a conversation, with its gestures, vocalizations, and facial expressions” (Trevarthen, 2005b, p. 73).
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Trevarthen contends that this type of companionship care fosters more than warmth attachment alone. It encourages a child’s natural investigative curiosity and a confident self-consciousness that eventually is able to take on independent acting and thinking, resulting in an intelligence displayed in active, interested activity.
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“Play only occurs when one is safe, secure and feeling good, which makes play an exceptionally sensitive measure for all things bad” (p. 355). On the other hand, play is robust: When young mammals are feeling well and have the opportunity to do so, they nearly always play.
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Dopamine, the energizing hormone indicating positive anticipation, is secreted during play, which perhaps shapes dopamine pathways in prosocial ways. Panksepp and Biven (2012) speculate that play elaborates prosocial neural pathways. Moreover, children diagnosed with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) without a clinically relevant brain disorder may actually be play starved or have a strong PLAY system that is undernourished (Panksepp, 2007).