The Neurobehavioral and Social-Emotional Development of Infants


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Book is ‘tour de force’ of infant and child psychology
(April 2008 Issue)

“The Neurobehavioral and Social-Emotional Development of Infants and Children”
By Ed Tronick, Ph.D.
W. W. Norton & Company
New York, NY, 2007

By Paul Efthim, Ph.D.

Ed Tronick is a stellar example of the mythical "scientist-practitioner" - a researcher who tackles big questions in the lab while also staying close to the real world of psychology practice.

Tronick, a developmental and clinical psychologist, holds multiple academic appointments, including positions at Harvard Medical School, Children's Hospital Boston, UMass-Boston and the Fielding Graduate University. He has collected his most influential writings in a single volume, "The Neurobehavioral and Social-Emotional Development of Infants and Children."

The book is a tour de force of infant and child psychology. Weighing in at a hefty 571 pages, the volume is divided into five parts. The first section, "Neurobehavior" presents Tronick's research on neonatal assessment and the impact of environmental agents (e.g., cocaine) on newborns' functioning.

Part Two shifts from neurology to culture, presenting several fascinating ethnographic studies on infant care giving practices in remote areas of Peru and Kenya. The author discusses some of the challenges of understanding the role of culture in brain organization and points the direction for future research in this exciting area.

Part Three reviews what is known about social-emotional communication in infants. Tronick shows how infants, when faced with interactive ruptures, activate a number of predictable strategies designed to repair the mismatch or, failing that, to cope with the failure via self-soothing or withdrawal. He presents his Mutual Recognition Model, which suggests that mothers and infants form a dyadic system in which they jointly and actively regulate their interactions by responding to each other's affective and behavioral displays." This model assumes that the goal of infant-caregiver interaction is to achieve a satisfying interpersonal-emotional state, such as connectedness, intimacy, oneness, love, synchrony, mutual delight and so forth.

Tronick presents his famous Still-Face Paradigm, in which mothers are instructed to sit face-to-face with their babies but to remain expressionless and unresponsive. He and his research team videotape infants' responses to this stressful situation at ages three, six and nine months. The video footage is subjected to microscopic analysis, frame by frame. Tronick reports a variety of links between early coping behaviors in the Still-Face situation and later attachment styles as seen in Ainsworth's strange situation at one year. As the author notes, "coping with an interpersonal stress is an important adaptive task for normal infants during the first year and ... such coping may have a predictive relationship to later measures of social competency."

The fourth section presents studies on the impact of maternal psychiatric illness, particularly depression, on infant socioemotional development. One of Tronick's most interesting findings is a pattern of gender difference: depressed mothers as a group were seen to be more negative toward their sons than their daughters. Infant sons of depressed mothers appeared more dysregulated by maternal behavior than did infant daughters. The author speculates on how this may presage later gender differences in externalizing versus internalizing patterns of behavior.

The final part of the book focuses on Tronick's most recent work on the origin of consciousness in early parent-infant dyads and the process of meaning-making. He then draws on this work to present new ways of understanding psychopathology and psychotherapy. Both therapy and infant-adult interaction are "messy, sloppy" processes of making new meaning and increasing each participant's coherence and complexity. Tronick and his colleagues in the Boston Change Process Study Group are currently working to develop these ideas further and make them more psychologically meaningful and technically useful for the psychotherapy setting.

A bonus feature is a CD-ROM (uncredited in the book itself) that presents two video clips of Tronick's research paradigms in action.

Tronick's ability to integrate the realms of developmental, neurobiological and psychoanalytic psychology is nothing short of astonishing. This is an essential textbook for students and scholars of infant development and a valuable resource for clinical practitioners at all levels.

Paul Efthim, Ph.D. is a licensed psychologist in full-time practice in Brookline, Mass. He holds faculty appointments at the Massachusetts School of Professional Psychology and the Boston Institute for Psychotherapy.