A Dynamic Duo: Emotion and Development (Commentary on M.D. Lewis, A Dynamic Systems Approach to Emotion)

A dynamic systems (DS) approach uncovers important connections between emotion and neurophysiology. It is critical, however, to include a developmental perspective. Strides in the understanding of emotional development, as well as the present use of DS in developmental science, add significantly to the study of emotion. Examples include stranger fear during infancy, intermodal perception of emotion, and development of individual emotional systems. Lewis presents a dynamic systems approach to emotion with an emphasis on self-organization of small neurological units and larger social wholes. As is typical of self-organizing systems, he proposes that large complex emotion systems arise from oscillating interactions among smaller and often simpler forms that may have emotional potential. We also have argued that the study of emotion must not veer into a barren, reductionist landscape in which a set of boxes fixed in a linearly organized fashion sit waiting to be opened. We wish only to add some examples from our work that expand Lewis’s call and also reintroduce the critical need to include development in any study of emotion, and especially in a dynamic systems (DS) approach to emotion (see also Lewis 2000b). Some of the most outstanding research on emotion is developmental (Izard et al. 1995; Malatesta & Izard 1984; Nwokah and Fogel 1993; Witherington et al. 2001), as is some of the best work using DS principles (Magai & Haviland-Jones 2002; Thelen & Smith 1994). This is no accident: During particular age periods of rapid change (e.g., infancy), one can observe the coaction of a number of systems in real time within a reasonable research time frame. However, across a life span the DS principles are applicable. A decade ago, we proposed a multicomponent systems approach for understanding the origins and development of emotion (Haviland & Walker-Andrews 1992). Our primary focus was on the socialization of emotion, and our primary example was the emergence of fear of strangers. We argued that stranger fear was not an additive growth function built with “more” cognition, but, in DS terminology, a phase. Further, stranger fear is expressed (or not) due to a number of initial conditions, including the typical infant-caregiver communication patterns that have emerged over time. Since that first article we have added other examples that could both benefit from a DS perspective and contribute support to DS principles. One example arises from research on infants and their self-organizing patterns of emotion perception. The environment is replete with multimodal and co-occurring information for objects, events, and personal experience. An observer moving through the world sees occluding surfaces, hears transient sounds, may touch rigid objects, and smell and taste various substances concurrently. Information for emotion is available multimodally as well. An angry person may scowl, raise his voice, gesture abruptly, and tense his muscles. The perception of the emotional expression is not merely the sum of each of these components. Rather, the observer perceives a unified multimodal pattern that has unique communicative affordances. Moreover, the presence of multimodal information may facilitate the perception of an event (Bahrick & Lickliter 2000; Walker-Andrews & Lennon 1991). The detection of meaning in an expression develops as the observer’s perceptual skills develop, as she gains experience, as she becomes more familiar with a particular person and eliciting situations. Consequently, an adult may recognize that someone is angry by observing gestures alone or attending to the situation, but the young infant appears to need the redundant, extended information. Similarly, the experience of emotion is multifaceted, including kinesthetic, somatosensory, and other modality-specific information. According to Stern (1985), such experience may provide for infants a feeling of deja vue that allows the infant to develop a sense of self as an extended emotional agent. The perception of multimodal information for emotions of the self and of others is an example of how “individual elements or groups of elements lose their independence and become embedded in a larger regime” (sect. 3.2.3 of the target article). In a second example, fractal patterns have emerged in studies of life-span emotional development (Magai & Haviland-Jones 2002). The social-cognitive emotion system at a point in time shows features of fractal geometry or self-similarity of emotion pattern replicated at lower and higher orders of magnification. Individuals reproduce their unique emotion organizations psychologically. Without examining long-term development of individual change, as is required by DS, such fractal structures would not become apparent. Once established, the fractal patterns tend to organize new sensory information to form a “growing” system that Commentary/Lewis: Bridging emotion theory and neurobiology through dynamic systems modeling BEHAVIORAL AND BRAIN SCIENCES (2005) 28:2 221 is subject to phase shifts. This newer work on individual development of emotion systems is related to the model described above (Haviland & Walker-Andrews 1992) and a more mathematical visualization of emotion patterns emerging from small and potentially chaotic events – dependent also on initial neurological conditions (Haviland-Jones et al. 2001). Given our work and that of many others, Lewis may have overstated the case for social emotions systems to be linear rather than self-organizing or dynamic. It is certainly true that, historically, approaches to research on emotion are linear and normative, but developmental theory even in its own infancy dating from Vygotsky or Piaget has been built upon the emerging principles of individual change and self-organization. Dynamics of cognition-emotion interface: Coherence breeds familiarity and liking, and does it fast Piotr Winkielmana and Andrzej Nowakb aDepartment of Psychology, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093-0109; bDepartment of Psychology, University of Warsaw, 00-183 Warszawa, Poland, and Department of Psychology, Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton, FL 33431-0991. [email protected] http://psy.ucsd.edu/~pwinkiel [email protected] http://www.iss.uw.edu.pl/osrodki/obuz/iss_en/people.html Abstract: We present a dynamical model of interaction between recogniWe present a dynamical model of interaction between recognition memory and affect, focusing on the phenomenon of “warm glow of familiarity.” In our model, both familiarity and affect reflect quick monitoring of coherence in an attractor neural network. This model parsimoniously explains a variety of empirical phenomena, including mere-exposure and beauty-in-averages effects, and the speed of familiarity and affect