THE SOCIAL BIOFEEDBACK THEORY OF PARENTAL AFFECT-MIRRORING - THE DEVELOPMENT OF EMOTIONAL SELF-AWARENESS AND SELF-CONTROL IN INFANCY

The authors present a new theory of parental affect-mirroring and its role in the development of emotional self-awareness and control in inf ancy. It is proposed that infants first become sensitised to their cat egorical emotion-states through a natural social biofeedback process p rovided by the parent's 'marked' reflections of the baby's emotion dis plays during affect-regulative interactions. They argue that this sens itisation process is mediated (similarly to that of adult biofeedback training) by the mechanism of contingency-detection and maximising. Ap art from sensitisation, affect-mirroring serves three further developm ental functions: (1) it contributes to the infant's state-regulation; (2) it leads to the establishment of secondary representations that be come associated with the infant's primary procedural affect-states pro viding the cognitive means for accessing and attributing emotions to t he self (3) it results in the development of a generalised communicati ve code of 'marked' expressions characterised by the representational functions of referential decoupling, anchoring and suspension of reali stic consequences. They consider the clinical implications of our theo ry, relating it to current psychodynamic approaches to the functions o f parental affect-mirroring. Using their model they identify various t ypes of deviant mirroring styles and speculate about their development al consequences. Finally, they discuss what role their social biofeedb ack model may play as a mediating mechanism in the therapeutic process .