While we all come equipped to life with the same emotional ‘hardware’, the ‘software’ of our emotional development follows a unique individual path starting with our early experiences in life. According to Sue Gerhardt, the foundations of a human life are laid down during pregnancy and the first two years of life. During this time the ‘social brain’ is shaped, a period in which the emotional style and resources of an individual are developed. The social brain is the part of the brain that learns how to manage feelings and relate with others. The stress and immune responses also develop during this time and impact the future emotional life of the individual. Emotional systems are shaped by early parenting, but also by the wider culture and society in which this parenting happens. When these influences are less than optimal, social and emotional problems can arise later in life.
The period from conception through the first two years is probably the most important period of development, writes Gerhardt. This is roughly 1000 days in which the nervous system is being shaped by experience. How the parents relate to the child during this period has as much impact as genes on how the child will develop. The way the parents respond will teach the baby about her own emotions and how best to manage them. How we learn to deal with our feelings will impact how our behaviour and thinking capacities develop later. The impact of these early years are not forgotten. As William Faulkner once wrote, ‘The past is not dead. It is not even past’. These experiences stay present with us, forming the background to our adult lives. The constitute the core of the self. As the poet Wordsworth said, ‘The child is father to the man’.
We all begin life a part of another person. As such we have been involved in every experience of their life. Our mother’s subjective life – her moods and emotions are passed onto us through her hormonal responses. These hormones, as Thomas Armstrong says, set the thermostat on our ‘emotional climate control’. We experience the inner version of sunny days and thunderstorms.
Attachment and affect regulation
Susan Hart writes that the most important evolutionary function of the human attachment system is to help develop a self-regulating control system within the child. Through interactive affect regulation with the caregiver, the infant learns to self-regulate. This capacity helps the child both to be themselves and to be in touch with the other in relationship. Genes create capacities that enable change or growth but without an environment to support these changes they will fail to take place or move in a maladaptive course.
Each cell in our body has around 30,000 genes, writes Gerhardt. Only a small amount of these are active at any time. These genes are stimulated into action by the environment – they do not express themselves in a vacuum. Even having ‘really good genes’ does not determine how successful we will be or what we will be good at. A set of genes has a number of potential futures and which ones get ‘turned on’ depends on what happens in the environment. For example, a diet of one type of food will stimulate one set of genes while a different diet will activate others. Our social and emotional experiences arouse biochemical processes that activate genes in determining who we become.
The infant comes ready to partake in communicative transactions, according to Hart. However, these abilities are only acquired through practicing these interactions. The attachment between mother and child makes use of the same hormones that are involved in romantic love. Both types of attachment suppress negative emotions partly because the amygdala, the centre for fear and aggression is de-activated. The mother’s communication with the infant helps the infant to define themselves through the structure of the relationship. Through attachment interactions the infant develops relational strategies that become a prototype for handling future relationships.
Steve Sumoi’s laboratory has shown that Rhesus monkeys that were maternally deprived grow up to be socially anxious in nature and develop reactive temperaments – a tendency to become aggressive, impulsive, fearful and over-aroused. They also tend to go to the bottom of the dominance hierarchies and develop abnormal neuro-endocrine functioning. These monkeys consumed larger amounts of alcohol and develop quicker tolerance to it. The experience of an inadequate environment triggers the expression of genetic vulnerabilities, but these vulnerabilities are not activated if the early attachment experience was good.
Attunement and affect tolerance
In the first year of life visual experiences play a key role in social and emotional development. The infant’s gaze evokes the mother’s gaze, forming a dyadic system of mutual influence. Mutual gaze interactions are intense interpersonal communications in which the mother must be psychobiologically attuned to the emotional state of the infant.
The caregiver attunes to and resonates with the infant’s state. As this state becomes activated, she fine tunes and corrects the intensity and duration of the affective stimulation she provides the child in order to maintain the positive state of the infant. Both mother and infant become synchronised as the mother attunes to the infant during social engagement, then allowing the infant to recover quietly as he disengages. These interactions are the building blocks of the infant’s affective development.
In synchronised gaze, the dyad creates a regulatory system which moves from a neutral state and low arousal to higher arousal and positive affect. The mother’s face reflects back her baby’s aliveness. This result in a transformation of state and the emergence of vitality affects. A major task of the first year is affect tolerance for higher levels of arousal. This is facilitated by the mother modulating the infant’s states of high stimulation.
Positive affect and attunement
Allan Schore writes that psychobiological attunement is thought to be the mechanism that facilitates the formation of the attachment bond. The infant attaches to the caregiver who enables the infant to enter states of positive affect, while reducing states of negative affect. Interest and pleasure are the positive emotions that indicate affect attunement. Affect motivates attachment. The main adaptive function of the attachment dyad is to create and maintain pleasurable states of ‘interest-excitement’ and ‘enjoyment-joy’. These states also motivate the formation of the bond.
John Bowlby noted that vision is central to the establishment of primary attachment and imprinting is the learning mechanism that creates this bond. Attachment is built into the nervous system as a result of the infant’s interaction with the mother. The baby’s brain requires the context of a positive affective relationship with the caregiver in order to grow. Older brains engage with awareness, emotion and interest in younger brains. The mother’s face is triggering high levels of opiates the growing child’s brain. These endorphins link pleasure with social interaction and attachment.
Separation distress
The pioneering affective neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp writes that although we are a resilient species our genetic heritage does not guarantee the development of affectively-balanced minds – this emerges from the ‘primal, inherited emotional forces’ interacting with environmental caregiving. As a result, parenting styles have lifelong consequences.
Much of what would be considered foetal development occurs outside the womb. This is the ‘fourth trimester’ during which parents take care of infants not yet ready to bond with them. For mothers to mother, a community of support is required which in our ancestral landscape led to aunts, uncles and extended family participating in childcare and protection. The major lesson from modern neuroscience is that children who experience emotional distress and social loss in early life are less likely to live happy, healthy lives. When parents offer care liberally, they bolster their growing child’s emotional resilience. Michael Meaney and his colleagues have repeatedly shown that early maternal care benefits rat pups across the lifetime, in terms of better regulation of their stress response.
The FEAR circuit evolved in the brain to help reduce pain and the possibility of destruction, according to Panksepp. This circuit initially promotes freezing at low levels, then fleeing. Chronic arousal of this system in early development can promote the development of anxiety disorders and depression. Through frequent activation this circuit can become sensitised, primed for future activation. When this occurs mindfulness practices or the imaginative power of traditional stories may help to redress this imbalance in children.
All young mammals are dependent upon parental – particularly maternal – care to ensure their survival. Young mammals have a powerful emotional system that acts as a resource to help them signal when they are in need of care. This manifests as the intense crying that emerges when infants are left alone or children become lost. These cries motivate the caregiver to seek out and attend to the needs of the infant. The emotional system that motivates social connection creates separation distress, a strong psychic pain that leads the mother and infant to seek each other. This system facilitates the construction of social bonds. The sudden arousal of this system may contribute towards panic attacks.
Inadequate social bonds are the main source of depression and negative affect in people’s lives, claims Panksepp. Over-arousal of the separation distress system leads to vulnerability to depression throughout life. Parents can strengthen social bonding and reduce this risk by giving comforting touch which releases opioids. Children’s emotional development may be improved by co-sleeping with parents. There is no evidence that supports the notion that co-sleeping leads to an increase in infant mortality through the mother accidentally smothering the infant during sleep.
Emotion schemes and emotional memories
Leslie Greenberg writes that we inherit emotional responses like fear of the dark, but on top of this, we learn to associate particular emotions with experiences which become emotional memories. These memories are organisations of lived emotional experiences that are formed into emotion schemes. These neural programmes react automatically to cues that were learned to be dangerous or safe from the past. These emotional schemes are rapid and automatic and form the foundation of the adult emotional response system.
Schemes are internal emotion memory structures that synthesise affective, motivational, cognitive and behavioural elements into unified organisations. Important life experiences become coded in emotion schematic memory. The emotion scheme represents the original situation and its emotional effect on the person, made up often of a wordless or imagistic script that forms a narrative. Being cuddled as an infant or being abused are encoded in procedural memory of what happened and how this felt. Emotion schematic learning means that emotions can either be adaptive processing systems or maladaptive.
Greenberg writes that an emotion scheme sets in motion an emotionally motivated mode of processing which occurs outside of awareness and influences conscious processing. The activation of a fear scheme motivates the search for threat – the conscious processing works in service of the affective goal of the scheme. In the case of fear, this becomes the search for safety. Emotion schemes can have a linguistic aspect but are often preverbal (Sensations, imagery, smell etc.). These schemes are oriented towards action to satisfy needs and goals.
Schemes are the basic story of lived experience held in neural networks. An example that Greenberg gives is a scheme of fear of failure that is formed from having failed a mother’s expectations. This scheme might hold the visual image of the mother’s face, different physiological and sensory elements, as well as the action tendency to withdraw, and possibly (although not necessarily) the belief held in language that the self is going to fail. In order to be processed, all of these elements must be brought into awareness.
Transforming emotion schemes
Leslie Greenberg writes that enduring emotional change occurs when two or more existing schemes are synthesised and the creation of higher-level schemes. In development, when opposing schemes are activated at the same time compatible elements from both schemes synthesise to form new higher-level schemes. Schemes of standing and falling can be brought together to create a new scheme for walking in a dialectical process. Schemes of different emotional states can be synthesised in the same way to form new integrations. A schematic emotional memory of fear and withdrawal from an experience of abuse can be synthesised with an empowering experience of anger in the present which motivates approach rather than withdrawal. This can create a new sense of confidence or assertion, according to Greenberg.