The Origins of Attachment, Beebe and Lachmann (2014)
Procedure
Brief Overview
Beatrice Beebe and Frank Lachmann invited 84 mothers and their 4-month-old infants to their laboratory and filmed them interacting face-to-face. A team of doctoral students then took 2½ minutes of film from each mother-infant dyad and coded their behaviors second-by-second. Eight months later, the dyads returned and participated in the Ainsworth Strange Situation.
Contingency. A contingency is the relationship between a behavior and the consequences of that behavior. A contingency can be stated as an If-then proposition, e.g,. “If I perform Action X, then there will be Consequence Y.” If there is a high degree of contingency, then there is more stability, less frequent change, more predictability. For example, if there’s a high degree of contingency between Action X and Consequence Y, then if I see you perform Action X, then I know it is very likely that there will be consequence Y.
Interactive contingency is the relationship between either (1) your behavior that affects me and the consequences of that behavior or (b) my behavior that affects you and the consequences of that behavior. If there is a high degree of interactive contingency, then I know, for example, that when I smile, you are most likely going to smile too.
Self-contingency is the relationship between my behavior that only affects me and the consequences of that behavior. Put differently, self-contingency refers to an action I take that was correlated with a previous action I took. If there’s a high degree of self-contingency of baby self-touch, for example, then I know that I observed that undisturbed baby and predict with a high degree of accuracy how often he is going to touch himself.
A midrange level of interactive contingency predicted secure attachment. Interactive contingency that’s too high can predict insecure attachment, e.g., “the future resistant infant’s vigilant coordination with maternal visual-facial engagement.” Interactive contingency that’s too low can also predict insecure attachment, e.g., “the future resistant infant’s withdrawn, ‘turned-out’ coordination with maternal touch.” (Jaffe et al., 2001; Beebe et al., 2010.)
The following behaviors in secure dyads were most striking.
Self-Contingency. Both mothers and infants had high rates of self-contingency. Such “predictable rhythms facilitate predictability within each partner’s individual experience, and ‘readability’ of each individual for the partner.”
Gaze — Interactive Contingency. Both mothers and infants followed the direction of each other’s gaze as they look at one another and look away from one another.
Facial and Vocal Affect — Interactive Contingency. There was a high level of mirroring, as “mothers facially follow the direction of infant facial and vocal affect as it becomes more or less positive, and more or less negative,” and infants “follow the direction of maternal facial affect with their own facial and vocal affect.”
Touch — Interactive Contingency (Mothers). These mothers coordinated their touch with infant touch and infant vocal affect. That is, when infant vocal affect became more positive, maternal touch became more affectionate (and vice versa), and when infants touched more, maternal touch also became more affectionate (and vice versa).
Facial-Visual Engagement. Mothers followed “infant direction of engagement as infants became more or less engaged.” However, infants did not follow their mothers’ facial-visual patterns.
Finding #1: Resistant infants can generally expect affective mirroring.
Finding #2: However, these infants can also expect “maternal tactile and spacial impingement, which is compounded by its relative unpredictability.”
Regarding tactile impingement, as the session progressed, these mothers engaged in progressively less affectionate and more active touch, an indication that these mothers had an increasing need for their infants to stay with them. Infants consequently could not gain the expectancy that they could use maternal touch to regulate their own unpleasant states of arousal; instead, they gained the expectancy “that they must manage mother’s touch by tuning it out.” At 12 months, these infants were found to be upset but passive, not using maternal touch to ameliorate their distress.
Regarding spatial impingement, these dyads were more likely to engage in chase and dodge. This interaction might begin if the infant looks away from the mother, The mother will then case, or move in (i.e., go from sitting upright to leaning forward to looming). The infant then dodges, or moves further away from the mother.) The infant finds the mother’s chase unpredictable. The infant looks away to down-regulate his arousal, but the mother is preventing him from regulating his arousal, thus creating the expectancy that he “cannot rely on mother’s help” when he needs to calm down.
In the Strange Situation, these mothers are often hesitant to leave the room, “activating the child’s request that the mother stay, perhaps an effort to be sure they are needed.” At 4 months, when their infants “go away” (i.e., look or orient away), these mothers might “feel abandoned or unimportant,” as further evidenced when they said things like the following: “What are you looking at?” “Where are you going?” “Hey, look at me.”
Knowing and Being Known
Nonverbal Communication Matters
“Because nonverbal communication is remarkably similar across the lifespan, adult face-to-face communication is informed by mother-infant communication.” In time, “language is in the foreground, and the procedural dimension recedes into the background. Nevertheless, the procedural dimension remains extremely powerful in the co-creation of relatedness across the lifespan. For example, if the therapist’s rhythm of speaking is out of sync with that of the patient, of if the therapist is too fast or too slow on the uptake as she takes her turn, the therapist’s words might not be ‘useable.’” In treatment, we need both modes of understanding, “the symbolized, explicit mode, and the procedural, implicit mode.”
“The therapist’s use of non-verbal action-dialogue emerges through spontaneous changes in bodily arousal, somatic sensations, and affective reactions” (Bucci 2011, .pdf). These processes allow us to enter into our patient’s experience.
Mothers relate to their infants “through the procedural action-dialogue constructed through gaze, face, voice, orientation, and touch.” We can relate to our patients “through the procedural action-dialogue of facial expression, head orientation shifts, postural tonus [muscle contraction], breathing rhythms, self-soothing, shifts in the chair, as well as the narrative dialogue.”
Facial Expression. Automatic facial mimicry is the unconscious phenomenon in which one person making a facial expression tends to evoke a similar expression in that person’s partner (Dimberg, Thunberg, Elmehed, 2000, .pdf). As partners “match each other’s affective patterns, each recreates a psychophsiological state in the self which is similar to that of the partner,” and this in turn helps them to understand the other’s emotions. Since the mother in disorganized dyads does not match the facial distress of her infant, she does not become fully aware of her infant’s emotional state.
Embodied Simulation. “During social interactions, usually out of awareness, people tend to mimic the behavior of others, such as gestures, body postures, and facial expressions.” Research suggests that mimicking the action of a partner enhances our understand of that partner’s experience. Oberman et al. found that asking subjects to bite a pen, and thus impairing their ability to make facial expressions, impaired their ability to identify emotions in others. (Niedenthal, Mermillod,Maringer, and Hess, The Simulation of Smiles (SIMS) model: Embodied simulation and the meaning of facial expression, 2010; Oberman, Winkielman, and Ramachandran, Face to face: blocking facial mimicry can selectively impair recognition of emotional expressions, 2007.
Analogies Between Infant Research and Therapy
Gaze. One person might look away in an unpredictable way, causing the other to wonder where their attention has gone and whether their emotional connection is secure. If one person looks away for a long period of time, the other might feel that they’re not been seen.
Affect. One person might be distressed; one person might not follow the other’s facial and vocal affect, causing the feeling that they’re not been empathized with; one person might make a closed up, inscrutable face, making the other feel that they’re not being acknowledged or that they’re being stonewalled.
Depending on the situation, the therapist might respond by expressing affect with her face or by showing a neutral face so long as the neutral face is “kindley,” that is, “alert, interested, attentive, with a hint of positive expressiveness.” The neutral face is often appropriate as long as it is accompanied by “head nods synchronized with the rhythm of the partner’s speech.”
Sometimes people “manifest discrepant positive and negative affect in the same second, or in rapid succession.” Sometimes one partner expresses distress, and the other partner “shows surprise, or smiles, generating in the individual a feeling of being mocked, humiliated, or derogated.”
Touch. One person might not be able to soothe herself through touch, “which may generate a feeling of helplessness to calm one’s arousal.” Or the person “may be very involved in soothing through touch, generating in the partner a sense of the individual’s vulnerability.”
Distress
One of our most important tasks as therapists is entering into the distressed states of our clients. The important “procedural modes of entering the patient’s distress are following and joining increments of facial distress, and joining and elaborating rhythms and cadences of vocal distress.”
Beebe had a patient, Paulina, who only felt genuine when crying and spent their sessions crying. “Any direct questions or comments on my part disturbed her ability to cry. The focus was on her ability, and mine, to go into and tolerate agonizing levels of distress. I began a form of vocal rhythm coordination with her distress sounds, a loose matching or elaboration of the rhythm and the cadence of her sounds. My face was also sad as I echoed some of her cry sounds.”
Beebe later realized that she had learned to do this “when attempting to interact with distressed infants. Particularly when infants do not look, joining their sounds is often an effective way to reach them.” Beebe’s “vocal rhythm coordination and her crying soon constituted a bi-directional exchange. My sounds facilitated her crying, and her sounds in turn influenced the timing, cadence, and intensity of my vocal rhythms. In this process we both felt close to each other, and we tolerated her intense distress, which so often verged on being intolerable.
Beebe started to enter Palina’s sadness. “At times I felt myself tearing up. I made a bodily ‘decision,’ only vaguely in awareness, not to inhibit my tears. In this process I came to feel her distress acutely, and to feel closer to her. The ways that I found to join her distress proved to be very powerful for Paulina.”
Dissociation
Some research suggests that disorganized attachment in infancy predicts dissociation in young adulthood. One team of researchers defined “self as the integration and organization of diverse aspects of one’s experience,” and they defined dissociation “as difficulties in the integration of one’s experience.”
Beebe and Lachman conjecture that dissociation results from failures of maternal recognition. Failures of recognition include “failures to join the infant’s positive as well as negative feelings, to empathize with the infant’s distress, to provide the infant a predictable feeling of being seen, to protect the infant from looming infringements, and to meet the infant’s increasing use of touch with more tender and affectionate forms of touch.” These failures of recognition “set a trajectory in development that may lead to an inability to integrate experience.”
Bucci (2011) wrote that “the purpose of dissociation is to turn the person’s attention away from the source of the threat.” The therapist must understand that many common modes of therapeutic action — e.g., silence, asking for free associations, “not answering questions, or turning questions back to the patient” — might be experienced by some patients as a form of withdrawal similar to “a parent who had an inscrutable face, who looked away unpredictably, who did not join [the patient’s] positive or negative states.” Philip Bromberg wrote that “the developmental trauma of non-recognition is so enormous that it is continually dreaded, like the shadow of a tsunami.”
Brief Overview
Beatrice Beebe and Frank Lachmann invited 84 mothers and their 4-month-old infants to their laboratory and filmed them interacting face-to-face. A team of doctoral students then took 2½ minutes of film from each mother-infant dyad and coded their behaviors second-by-second. Eight months later, the dyads returned and participated in the Ainsworth Strange Situation.
Microanalysis
Beebe, Lachmann, and their assistants measured five different communication modalities: (1) gazing, (2) facial affect, (3) vocal affect, (4) orientation, (5) touch. To measure how each partner of a dyad affected one another, the authors measured contingency.
Gaze. Interactive contingency of gaze: how predictably each partner follows the other’s gaze. Self-contingency of gaze: how predictably one looks and looks away from the other’s face. Facial and Vocal Affect. Interactive contingency of affect: how predictably that partners mirror one another’s facial affect and vocal affect. Self-contingency of affect: how predictably an individual changes their facial and vocal affect.
Touch. Interactive contingency of touch: how predictably the quantity and quality of one partner’s touch affects the quantity and quality of her partner’s touch. Self-contingency of maternal touch: how predictably the mother’s touch changes from being affectionate to being intrusive. Self-contingency of infant touch: how predictably the infant changes from touching nothing to touching either herself, her mother, or an object.
Orientation. Interactive contingency of maternal spatial orientation and infant head orientation: how predictably one partner approaching or withdrawing from the other is followed by the other partner approaching or withdrawing. Self-contingency of maternal spatial orientation: “how predictably mothers shift across the continuum from sitting upright, to leaning forward, to looming in.” Self-contingency of infant head orientation: “how predictably infants shift across the continuum from en face to degrees of orienting away, toward 90-degree aversion, to the extreme of arching away.”
Facial-Visual Engagement. This is “a composite measure of visual attention and facial affect.” Infant engagement: gaze, head orientation, and facial and vocal affect. Mother engagement: gaze and facial affect. Interactive contingency of facial-visual engagement: how predictably “each partner follows the other’s visual attention as well as affective direction.” Self-contingency facial-visual engagement: how predictably “the individual’s tendency to look at the partner as well as to show positive affect; or to look away from the partner and show dampened or negative affect.”
Contingency. A contingency is the relationship between a behavior and the consequences of that behavior. A contingency can be stated as an If-then proposition, e.g,. “If I perform Action X, then there will be Consequence Y.” If there is a high degree of contingency, then there is more stability, less frequent change, more predictability. For example, if there’s a high degree of contingency between Action X and Consequence Y, then if I see you perform Action X, then I know it is very likely that there will be consequence Y.
Interactive contingency is the relationship between either (1) your behavior that affects me and the consequences of that behavior or (b) my behavior that affects you and the consequences of that behavior. If there is a high degree of interactive contingency, then I know, for example, that when I smile, you are most likely going to smile too.
Self-contingency is the relationship between my behavior that only affects me and the consequences of that behavior. Put differently, self-contingency refers to an action I take that was correlated with a previous action I took. If there’s a high degree of self-contingency of baby self-touch, for example, then I know that I observed that undisturbed baby and predict with a high degree of accuracy how often he is going to touch himself.
Strange Situation
In the experiment, the following events happen in 3-minute intervals: mother and infant enter room; stranger enters and mother leaves; mother returns and stranger leaves; mother leaves; stranger enters; mother enters. The scoring depends on the infant’s behavior in the reunion episodes.
Secure Dyad #2: Disruption and Repair
Disorganized Dyad
The infant simultaneously smiles and whimpers (an example of discrepant affect, both positive and negative affect at the same time). The mother then fails to acknowledge the infant’s distress, smiling and asking, “Are you happy?” The infant whimpers and looks away. The mother then acknowledges the infant’s distress with her words (“What’s wrong?”) and tone, but she touches him roughly. Shen then pretends to be surprised to see the infant distressed, and the infant responds by simultaneously smiling and whimpering.
In sum, this mother “is perceiving and responding to the infant’s changes of behavior, noting every change. Thus, the difficulty is not a sheer absence of responsiveness.” The problem is that the mother “does not seem to be able to respond empathically to the infant’s distress. Often, she over-rides the infant’s distress, trying to distract him, or to ‘ride negative into positive.’”
In general, in disorganized dyads, there is “mismatch between the infant and the mother.” “Maternal surprise or smile faces to infant distress seem to be an emotional ‘denial’ of infant distress. They seem to be an active maternal emotional inability or refusal to ‘go with’ her infant, to join her infant’s distress, disturbing her infant’s ability to feel sensed.” Often when such infants grow distressed, the mother’s face goes blank as though she’s dissociating.
Expectancies
Infants develop expectancies of social interactions.
When there is facial mirroring (as in the first secure dyad), we can imagine the dyad thinking: “What we feel, and what we do, shows up in the other in a resonant way: we do not have to be vigilant; we do not have to be withdrawn.” And we can imagine the infant feeling: “”I feel secure because I am with you. I feel sensed and joined by you.”
When there is disruption and repair (as in the second secure dyad), we can imagine the infant thinking: “You sense how I feel. If I become distressed, I can expect you to honor my distress, to join me in my movement of hesitation or worry. I know that you will wait for a moment while I re-regulate myself at my own pace. You are right there, ready to join me bit by bit, as I gradually come back to engage with you. Then I can anticipate that we will find each other’s faces, and move incrementally bit by bit back up into mutually joyous smiles.” And we can imagine the mother thinking: “If you look away, and become distressed, I know how to help you. I can slow down, and wait for you to come back. I can find you again by reaching for your hands, making contact through our hands, and I can trust that gradually you will come back to me. We can find each other’s faces again, and we can return to our mutually joyous smiles.”
When the dyad is disorganized, we can imagine the infant thinking: “I feel so upset and you’re not helping me. I feel confused about what you feel and what I feel. You seem happy or surprised when I am upset. I don’t understand you. You don’t get me. You stonewall me in my distress. I feel helpless to influence you. I feel frantic.” And we can imagine the mother thinking: “Your distress makes me feel anxious and inadequate. I can’t let myself be too affected by you; I’m not going to let myself be controlled by you or your moods. I just need you to smile and be happy; I won’t hear of anything else.”
The authors put words to the infant’s feelings in a specific interaction in a disorganized dyad: (1) “I am feeling distressed, and yet my mother is surprised. What can I make of that? I feel confused about what I feel.” (2) “My mother is smiling while I’m distressed. I don’t want to look at her. She does not recognize my distress or sympathize with me. I am lonely in my distress.” (3) “I am feeling distressed, and yet my mother looks away from me. Where is she? I feel so alone.” (4) “I’m feeling distressed, and my mother is looking at me, but she does not seem to really see me. Her face doesn’t move. And I’m getting more and more upset. But her face doesn’t move. I don’t know where she is. She really doesn’t get me. There’s something wrong.”
The Organization of Relational Experience in Early Infancy
These procedural expectancies can be understood as presymbolic forms of representation. “Symbolic forms of representation do not begin to emerge until the end of the first year.” Her procedural expectancies can also be understood as internal models of how interactions occur.
Depending on the infant’s interactions, she will develop certain internal models or expectancies of human relationships. (1) Facial and vocal mirroring produces “an expectation of matching and being matched,” being able to enter into my partner’s affective state, resulting in the feeling of being known. (2) State transforming produces the expectation that interacting with my partner can transform my state of arousal. (3) Disruption and repair produces the expectation that my partner and I can work together to make a repair following a facial-visual mismatch. (4) Chase and dodge produces the expectation that a mismatch of spatial-orientation patterns will not result in a repair (e.g., “As I move in, you move away; as I move away, you move in”). (5) Self- and interactive-contingency produces the expectation that you can predict your own and your partner’s moves.
The secure infant uses the mother as both a safe haven, receiving comfort when distressed, and a secure base, returning to play once receiving comfort. The insecure-avoidant infant “shows little distress at separation, avoids the mother at reunion, and continues to play on his own.” The insecure-resistant infant “is very distressed at separation, but cannot be comforted by the mother’s return and does not easily return to play.” The disorganized infant “simultaneously approaches and avoids the mother.”
Three Examples
Secure Dyad #1: Facial Mirroring
This dyad illustrates mutual facial mirroring. The film begins with the mother and infant gazing at one another, the mother singing to the infant, the infant holding her mother’s swinging finger. It is only in the microanalysis that we see “[t]he extraordinary synchronization of movements of head up and mouth opening, as the pair moves incrementally into increasing levels of display of positive affects.”
This dyad illustrates mutual facial mirroring. The film begins with the mother and infant gazing at one another, the mother singing to the infant, the infant holding her mother’s swinging finger. It is only in the microanalysis that we see “[t]he extraordinary synchronization of movements of head up and mouth opening, as the pair moves incrementally into increasing levels of display of positive affects.”
Secure Dyad #2: Disruption and Repair
This mother is smiling at her infant and saying “hi.” The mother at one point moves her head close to the infant’s and then back out, causing the infant to become distressed and move his head back. The infant then looks away and whimpers, and the mother responds by moving her head back and matching the infant’s look of distress. The infant notices this, and they both, at the same moment, reach for one another. Their hands join, and the mother smiles, and the infant then smiles.
The moment of repair is “not visible in the real-time video” but is “the key to this interaction. They both participate in the repair, reaching for each other.” This is an example of “maternal management of infant distress by ‘joining the infant’s distress.’” In adult treatment, the therapist might do something similar: entering briefly into a distressed patient’s state “by matching or echoing the patient’s distressed facial expression with a similar one of her own.”
The moment of repair is “not visible in the real-time video” but is “the key to this interaction. They both participate in the repair, reaching for each other.” This is an example of “maternal management of infant distress by ‘joining the infant’s distress.’” In adult treatment, the therapist might do something similar: entering briefly into a distressed patient’s state “by matching or echoing the patient’s distressed facial expression with a similar one of her own.”
Disorganized Dyad
The infant simultaneously smiles and whimpers (an example of discrepant affect, both positive and negative affect at the same time). The mother then fails to acknowledge the infant’s distress, smiling and asking, “Are you happy?” The infant whimpers and looks away. The mother then acknowledges the infant’s distress with her words (“What’s wrong?”) and tone, but she touches him roughly. Shen then pretends to be surprised to see the infant distressed, and the infant responds by simultaneously smiling and whimpering.
In sum, this mother “is perceiving and responding to the infant’s changes of behavior, noting every change. Thus, the difficulty is not a sheer absence of responsiveness.” The problem is that the mother “does not seem to be able to respond empathically to the infant’s distress. Often, she over-rides the infant’s distress, trying to distract him, or to ‘ride negative into positive.’”
In general, in disorganized dyads, there is “mismatch between the infant and the mother.” “Maternal surprise or smile faces to infant distress seem to be an emotional ‘denial’ of infant distress. They seem to be an active maternal emotional inability or refusal to ‘go with’ her infant, to join her infant’s distress, disturbing her infant’s ability to feel sensed.” Often when such infants grow distressed, the mother’s face goes blank as though she’s dissociating.
Expectancies
Infants develop expectancies of social interactions.
When there is facial mirroring (as in the first secure dyad), we can imagine the dyad thinking: “What we feel, and what we do, shows up in the other in a resonant way: we do not have to be vigilant; we do not have to be withdrawn.” And we can imagine the infant feeling: “”I feel secure because I am with you. I feel sensed and joined by you.”
When there is disruption and repair (as in the second secure dyad), we can imagine the infant thinking: “You sense how I feel. If I become distressed, I can expect you to honor my distress, to join me in my movement of hesitation or worry. I know that you will wait for a moment while I re-regulate myself at my own pace. You are right there, ready to join me bit by bit, as I gradually come back to engage with you. Then I can anticipate that we will find each other’s faces, and move incrementally bit by bit back up into mutually joyous smiles.” And we can imagine the mother thinking: “If you look away, and become distressed, I know how to help you. I can slow down, and wait for you to come back. I can find you again by reaching for your hands, making contact through our hands, and I can trust that gradually you will come back to me. We can find each other’s faces again, and we can return to our mutually joyous smiles.”
When the dyad is disorganized, we can imagine the infant thinking: “I feel so upset and you’re not helping me. I feel confused about what you feel and what I feel. You seem happy or surprised when I am upset. I don’t understand you. You don’t get me. You stonewall me in my distress. I feel helpless to influence you. I feel frantic.” And we can imagine the mother thinking: “Your distress makes me feel anxious and inadequate. I can’t let myself be too affected by you; I’m not going to let myself be controlled by you or your moods. I just need you to smile and be happy; I won’t hear of anything else.”
The authors put words to the infant’s feelings in a specific interaction in a disorganized dyad: (1) “I am feeling distressed, and yet my mother is surprised. What can I make of that? I feel confused about what I feel.” (2) “My mother is smiling while I’m distressed. I don’t want to look at her. She does not recognize my distress or sympathize with me. I am lonely in my distress.” (3) “I am feeling distressed, and yet my mother looks away from me. Where is she? I feel so alone.” (4) “I’m feeling distressed, and my mother is looking at me, but she does not seem to really see me. Her face doesn’t move. And I’m getting more and more upset. But her face doesn’t move. I don’t know where she is. She really doesn’t get me. There’s something wrong.”
The Organization of Relational Experience in Early Infancy
Proposition #1: The infant detects correspondences between herself and others.
Example #1: Detecting Facial Correspondences. Andrew Meltzoff and M. Keith Moore discovered that infants are born with the ability to detect correspondences between what they see on other people’s faces and what they feel on their own faces. In one study, they found that when just 42 minutes old the infant can imitate the gestures of others. In their study, the experimenter would make a gesture like opening his mouth or sticking out his tongue, and the infant would then make the same gesture. In a second study, they found that at just 6 weeks the infant can observe someone make a gesture one day, and when seeing the person 24 hours later, she will at first stare at the person and then gradually make the gesture she saw the day before. (For a summary, see Beebe et al., 2005, Forms of Intersubjectivity in Infant Research and Adult Treatment.)
The infant is able to accomplish this feat through the mechanisms of cross-modal matching. In the above example, the infant is able to take what she sees, make a mental representation of what she sees, and match that mental representation with what she feels proprioceptively in her own body. For example, the infant sees the experimenter open his mouth, makes a mental image of him opening her mouth, and then matches that image with the feeling she gets when she opens her mouth. In so doing, she’s also able to sense the inner state of the experimenter.
Example: #2: Affect Attunement. Affect attunement is also made possible when two partners detect correspondences between one another. Daniel Stern writes that affect attunement involves “cross-modal correspondences in intensity, timing, and ‘shape’ of behavior,” shape meaning “the contour of behavior, such as rising or falling tones. These correspondences are based on dynamic micro-momentary shifts over time, perceived as patterns of change that are similar in self and other.”
“Affect attunements are ‘automatic,’ with relative lack of awareness, an aspect of implicit, procedural knowledge.” Affect attunement allows each partner to know if a feeling state is acknowledged by the other. (Stern, The Interpersonal World of the Infant, 1985; The Motherhood Constellation, 1995).
Proposition #2: By detecting correspondences, the infant develops a sense of relatedness.
The infant is able to accomplish this feat through the mechanisms of cross-modal matching. In the above example, the infant is able to take what she sees, make a mental representation of what she sees, and match that mental representation with what she feels proprioceptively in her own body. For example, the infant sees the experimenter open his mouth, makes a mental image of him opening her mouth, and then matches that image with the feeling she gets when she opens her mouth. In so doing, she’s also able to sense the inner state of the experimenter.
Example: #2: Affect Attunement. Affect attunement is also made possible when two partners detect correspondences between one another. Daniel Stern writes that affect attunement involves “cross-modal correspondences in intensity, timing, and ‘shape’ of behavior,” shape meaning “the contour of behavior, such as rising or falling tones. These correspondences are based on dynamic micro-momentary shifts over time, perceived as patterns of change that are similar in self and other.”
“Affect attunements are ‘automatic,’ with relative lack of awareness, an aspect of implicit, procedural knowledge.” Affect attunement allows each partner to know if a feeling state is acknowledged by the other. (Stern, The Interpersonal World of the Infant, 1985; The Motherhood Constellation, 1995).
Proposition #2: By detecting correspondences, the infant develops a sense of relatedness.
That is to say, the infant realizes that others are like her.
Proposition #3: The infant detects contingencies.
The infant is a contingency detector, figuring out how her actions affect others.
The infant is a contingency detector, figuring out how her actions affect others.
Proposition #4: By detecting contingencies, the infant develops procedural expectancies.
As the neonate figures how people respond in different situations, she develops procedural expectancies. “Procedural memory refers to the skills or action sequences that are encoded nonsymbolically, become quasi-automatic with repeated practice, and influence the organizational processes which guide behavior.” Verbalized (semantic) memory, on the other hand, “refers to symbolically organized recall for information and events.” (Lyons-Ruth 1998; Lyons-Ruth 1999; Boston Change Process Study Group 2005; Boston Change Process Study Group 2007.)
These procedural expectancies can be understood as presymbolic forms of representation. “Symbolic forms of representation do not begin to emerge until the end of the first year.” Her procedural expectancies can also be understood as internal models of how interactions occur.
Depending on the infant’s interactions, she will develop certain internal models or expectancies of human relationships. (1) Facial and vocal mirroring produces “an expectation of matching and being matched,” being able to enter into my partner’s affective state, resulting in the feeling of being known. (2) State transforming produces the expectation that interacting with my partner can transform my state of arousal. (3) Disruption and repair produces the expectation that my partner and I can work together to make a repair following a facial-visual mismatch. (4) Chase and dodge produces the expectation that a mismatch of spatial-orientation patterns will not result in a repair (e.g., “As I move in, you move away; as I move away, you move in”). (5) Self- and interactive-contingency produces the expectation that you can predict your own and your partner’s moves.
Proposition #5: The infant’s communications and expectancies are co-created with her partners.
The authors give this example: As an individual speaks, “her hands often gesture at moments in a rhythm synchronized with her speech rhythm. This rhythm is organized within the individual, with a distinctive degree of predictability of the durations of sounds and silences. However, this rhythm is also organized in part by interactive processes, here the partner’s responsiveness. If the partner occasionally nods his head in rhythm with the individual’s speech and hand rhythm, the individual will most likely feel understood and keep going in a characteristic way. But if the partner shows no rhythms which synchronize and thus acknowledge the individual, most likely the individual will change her rhythm of speaking as well as the nature of her verbal content, in an effort to be understood.” In other words, the way I speak affects the way you respond, and the way you respond in turn affects the way I speak.
The authors give this example: As an individual speaks, “her hands often gesture at moments in a rhythm synchronized with her speech rhythm. This rhythm is organized within the individual, with a distinctive degree of predictability of the durations of sounds and silences. However, this rhythm is also organized in part by interactive processes, here the partner’s responsiveness. If the partner occasionally nods his head in rhythm with the individual’s speech and hand rhythm, the individual will most likely feel understood and keep going in a characteristic way. But if the partner shows no rhythms which synchronize and thus acknowledge the individual, most likely the individual will change her rhythm of speaking as well as the nature of her verbal content, in an effort to be understood.” In other words, the way I speak affects the way you respond, and the way you respond in turn affects the way I speak.
Secure Infants
Self-Contingency. Both mothers and infants had high rates of self-contingency. Such “predictable rhythms facilitate predictability within each partner’s individual experience, and ‘readability’ of each individual for the partner.”
Gaze — Interactive Contingency. Both mothers and infants followed the direction of each other’s gaze as they look at one another and look away from one another.
Facial and Vocal Affect — Interactive Contingency. There was a high level of mirroring, as “mothers facially follow the direction of infant facial and vocal affect as it becomes more or less positive, and more or less negative,” and infants “follow the direction of maternal facial affect with their own facial and vocal affect.”
Touch — Interactive Contingency (Mothers). These mothers coordinated their touch with infant touch and infant vocal affect. That is, when infant vocal affect became more positive, maternal touch became more affectionate (and vice versa), and when infants touched more, maternal touch also became more affectionate (and vice versa).
Facial-Visual Engagement. Mothers followed “infant direction of engagement as infants became more or less engaged.” However, infants did not follow their mothers’ facial-visual patterns.
Disorganized Infants
In the Strange Situation, disorganized infants may “show incomplete movements and expressions, confusion and apprehension, and momentary behavioral still.” During reunion episodes, “the infant may freeze as the mother enters, then start to move to greet her, but then fall down and curl into a ball. Or the infant may cling to the mother, but cry with face averted.” The infants are not able to deal with the stress of the mother leaving, and this distress remains once she returns. “Unlike the secure infant, the disorganized infant does not return to exploring the environment and toys.”
A large number of these mothers had traumatic histories, and it is likely that infant distress triggers their own traumatic states, causing them to enter into a dissociative state, thus shutting down “their own emotional processing” and preventing them from hearing their infant’s communication.
Behaviors
Compared to secure dyads, disorganized dyads displayed the following behaviors.
Gaze — Interactive Contingency. These mothers looked away from their infant's face excessively and did so “in a less predictable fashion.” Consequently, their infants probably do not “feel reliably seen by their mothers.”
Affect — Self-Contingency (Infants). These infants “showed more vocal and facial distress.” They also showed more discrepant affect (e.g., smiling and whimpering at the same time). This discrepant affect implies that they feel confused about their affective state. These infants also showed lower “self-predictability for facial-visual engagement,” as they seemed harder for them to “sense their own next engagement ‘move.’”
Affect — Interactive Contingency (Mother). These mothers were less likely to mirror their infants: when their infants became facially or vocally positive, they were less likely to become facially positive; and when their their infants became facially or vocally distressed, they were less likely “to dampen their facial affect toward interest, neutral, or ‘woe face’” and were more likely to smile or make a surprised face. Additionally, these mothers were more likely to have “still-face,” causing their infants to “feel ‘stonewalled’ and unable to read their mother.” These infants did not feel “emotionally joined by mother” and did not feel “that their mothers sense[d] and acknowledge[d] their distress.”
Touch — Self-Contingency (Infant). These infants were less likely to touch themselves, their mothers, or objects. When distressed, these “infants thus have less access to self-comfort through touch, disturbing their agency, which may add to a sense of helplessness in their distress.”
Touch — Interactive Contingency (Mother). When infants “showed more touch efforts,” these mothers were less likely to respond with their own affectionate touch. Such infants “come to expect that their mothers will be unavailable to help modulate states of affective distress through maternal touch coordination with their own touch efforts.”
Orientation — Self-Contingency (Mother). These mothers loomed more and did so unpredictably, a loom involving the mother’s head and face moving very close to the infant’s face. Infants tend to find looms frightening, as they respond protectively, putting their hands in front of their faces and turning away their heads.
Knowing and Being Known
Disorganized infants have difficulty feeling known by their mothers: when he’s depressed, his mother smiles; his mother repeatedly and unpredictably looks away; his mother does not coordinate her facial-visual and her affectionate-to-intrusive touch patterns to his needs. Disorganized infants have difficulty knowing their mothers’ minds: he doesn’t understand her discrepancies, e.g., her smile when he’s distressed; he has difficulty predicting her actions (whether she will look or look away and for how long, whether she will sit up, lean forward, or loom); his difficulty influencing her with his facial-visual engagement. Disorganized infants have difficulty knowing themselves: his affects are often discrepant; “his own engagement self-contingency is lowered, making it more difficult to sense his own facial-visual action tendencies”; he has difficult touching (self, mother, object) and getting stuck in states of “no touch” “disturb his visceral feedback through touch, and disturbed his own agency in regulating distress through touch.”
Resistant dyads differed from secure dyads in terms of touch (maternal self-contingency), orientation (interactive contingency), and facial-visual engagement (interactive contingency).
Finding #1: Resistant infants can generally expect affective mirroring.
These mothers facially mirrored infant facial and vocal affect, allowing infants to generally feel that their mother understand their affective states and that they can “influence maternal behaviors so as to match his own direction of behavioral change.”
Regarding tactile impingement, as the session progressed, these mothers engaged in progressively less affectionate and more active touch, an indication that these mothers had an increasing need for their infants to stay with them. Infants consequently could not gain the expectancy that they could use maternal touch to regulate their own unpleasant states of arousal; instead, they gained the expectancy “that they must manage mother’s touch by tuning it out.” At 12 months, these infants were found to be upset but passive, not using maternal touch to ameliorate their distress.
Regarding spatial impingement, these dyads were more likely to engage in chase and dodge. This interaction might begin if the infant looks away from the mother, The mother will then case, or move in (i.e., go from sitting upright to leaning forward to looming). The infant then dodges, or moves further away from the mother.) The infant finds the mother’s chase unpredictable. The infant looks away to down-regulate his arousal, but the mother is preventing him from regulating his arousal, thus creating the expectancy that he “cannot rely on mother’s help” when he needs to calm down.
In the Strange Situation, these mothers are often hesitant to leave the room, “activating the child’s request that the mother stay, perhaps an effort to be sure they are needed.” At 4 months, when their infants “go away” (i.e., look or orient away), these mothers might “feel abandoned or unimportant,” as further evidenced when they said things like the following: “What are you looking at?” “Where are you going?” “Hey, look at me.”
Finding #3: These infants were highly attuned to their mothers, following their gaze and facial affect.
In other words, these infants were vigilant, a response to “maternal tactile and spatial intrusion.” In the Strange Situation, these infants “cannot count on their mother’s emotional availability,” so they feel the need to constantly make sure that mother is nearby
Finding #4: These infants were less likely to display facial/vocal distress when maternal touch became intrusive, and they were less likely to become positive when maternal touch became affectionate.
Finding #4: These infants were less likely to display facial/vocal distress when maternal touch became intrusive, and they were less likely to become positive when maternal touch became affectionate.
In other words, these infants favored connection with their mothers over meeting their own needs. As a consequence, such infants become less capable of articulating their own inner states. Moreover, they “learn to mask their distress, which may lead to a dissociative loss of awareness of distress.”
Knowing and Being Known
Being Known. The infant knows that the mother will respond to his affective changes. However, the infant will also have difficulty “feeling sensed and known by his mother in the arena of her spatial and tactile intrusion. Perhaps because of her own needs to feel needed,” his mother “does not seem to sense that her spatial and tactile intrusion may force her infant to withdraw emotionally from her touch.” Knowing Mother. This infant will “have difficulty knowing his mother’s mind as he has difficulty predicting what mother will do next spatially: sit upright, lean forward, loom in, or chase.” Knowing Self.
Adult Treatment
Nonverbal Communication Matters
“Because nonverbal communication is remarkably similar across the lifespan, adult face-to-face communication is informed by mother-infant communication.” In time, “language is in the foreground, and the procedural dimension recedes into the background. Nevertheless, the procedural dimension remains extremely powerful in the co-creation of relatedness across the lifespan. For example, if the therapist’s rhythm of speaking is out of sync with that of the patient, of if the therapist is too fast or too slow on the uptake as she takes her turn, the therapist’s words might not be ‘useable.’” In treatment, we need both modes of understanding, “the symbolized, explicit mode, and the procedural, implicit mode.”
“The therapist’s use of non-verbal action-dialogue emerges through spontaneous changes in bodily arousal, somatic sensations, and affective reactions” (Bucci 2011, .pdf). These processes allow us to enter into our patient’s experience.
Mothers relate to their infants “through the procedural action-dialogue constructed through gaze, face, voice, orientation, and touch.” We can relate to our patients “through the procedural action-dialogue of facial expression, head orientation shifts, postural tonus [muscle contraction], breathing rhythms, self-soothing, shifts in the chair, as well as the narrative dialogue.”
Facial Expression. Automatic facial mimicry is the unconscious phenomenon in which one person making a facial expression tends to evoke a similar expression in that person’s partner (Dimberg, Thunberg, Elmehed, 2000, .pdf). As partners “match each other’s affective patterns, each recreates a psychophsiological state in the self which is similar to that of the partner,” and this in turn helps them to understand the other’s emotions. Since the mother in disorganized dyads does not match the facial distress of her infant, she does not become fully aware of her infant’s emotional state.
Embodied Simulation. “During social interactions, usually out of awareness, people tend to mimic the behavior of others, such as gestures, body postures, and facial expressions.” Research suggests that mimicking the action of a partner enhances our understand of that partner’s experience. Oberman et al. found that asking subjects to bite a pen, and thus impairing their ability to make facial expressions, impaired their ability to identify emotions in others. (Niedenthal, Mermillod,Maringer, and Hess, The Simulation of Smiles (SIMS) model: Embodied simulation and the meaning of facial expression, 2010; Oberman, Winkielman, and Ramachandran, Face to face: blocking facial mimicry can selectively impair recognition of emotional expressions, 2007.
Analogies Between Infant Research and Therapy
Gaze. One person might look away in an unpredictable way, causing the other to wonder where their attention has gone and whether their emotional connection is secure. If one person looks away for a long period of time, the other might feel that they’re not been seen.
Affect. One person might be distressed; one person might not follow the other’s facial and vocal affect, causing the feeling that they’re not been empathized with; one person might make a closed up, inscrutable face, making the other feel that they’re not being acknowledged or that they’re being stonewalled.
Depending on the situation, the therapist might respond by expressing affect with her face or by showing a neutral face so long as the neutral face is “kindley,” that is, “alert, interested, attentive, with a hint of positive expressiveness.” The neutral face is often appropriate as long as it is accompanied by “head nods synchronized with the rhythm of the partner’s speech.”
Sometimes people “manifest discrepant positive and negative affect in the same second, or in rapid succession.” Sometimes one partner expresses distress, and the other partner “shows surprise, or smiles, generating in the individual a feeling of being mocked, humiliated, or derogated.”
Touch. One person might not be able to soothe herself through touch, “which may generate a feeling of helplessness to calm one’s arousal.” Or the person “may be very involved in soothing through touch, generating in the partner a sense of the individual’s vulnerability.”
Distress
One of our most important tasks as therapists is entering into the distressed states of our clients. The important “procedural modes of entering the patient’s distress are following and joining increments of facial distress, and joining and elaborating rhythms and cadences of vocal distress.”
Beebe had a patient, Paulina, who only felt genuine when crying and spent their sessions crying. “Any direct questions or comments on my part disturbed her ability to cry. The focus was on her ability, and mine, to go into and tolerate agonizing levels of distress. I began a form of vocal rhythm coordination with her distress sounds, a loose matching or elaboration of the rhythm and the cadence of her sounds. My face was also sad as I echoed some of her cry sounds.”
Beebe later realized that she had learned to do this “when attempting to interact with distressed infants. Particularly when infants do not look, joining their sounds is often an effective way to reach them.” Beebe’s “vocal rhythm coordination and her crying soon constituted a bi-directional exchange. My sounds facilitated her crying, and her sounds in turn influenced the timing, cadence, and intensity of my vocal rhythms. In this process we both felt close to each other, and we tolerated her intense distress, which so often verged on being intolerable.
Beebe started to enter Palina’s sadness. “At times I felt myself tearing up. I made a bodily ‘decision,’ only vaguely in awareness, not to inhibit my tears. In this process I came to feel her distress acutely, and to feel closer to her. The ways that I found to join her distress proved to be very powerful for Paulina.”
Dissociation
Some research suggests that disorganized attachment in infancy predicts dissociation in young adulthood. One team of researchers defined “self as the integration and organization of diverse aspects of one’s experience,” and they defined dissociation “as difficulties in the integration of one’s experience.”
Beebe and Lachman conjecture that dissociation results from failures of maternal recognition. Failures of recognition include “failures to join the infant’s positive as well as negative feelings, to empathize with the infant’s distress, to provide the infant a predictable feeling of being seen, to protect the infant from looming infringements, and to meet the infant’s increasing use of touch with more tender and affectionate forms of touch.” These failures of recognition “set a trajectory in development that may lead to an inability to integrate experience.”
Bucci (2011) wrote that “the purpose of dissociation is to turn the person’s attention away from the source of the threat.” The therapist must understand that many common modes of therapeutic action — e.g., silence, asking for free associations, “not answering questions, or turning questions back to the patient” — might be experienced by some patients as a form of withdrawal similar to “a parent who had an inscrutable face, who looked away unpredictably, who did not join [the patient’s] positive or negative states.” Philip Bromberg wrote that “the developmental trauma of non-recognition is so enormous that it is continually dreaded, like the shadow of a tsunami.”
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