TY - JOUR
T1 - Bio-behavioral synchrony promotes the development of conceptualized emotions
AU - Atzil, Shir
AU - Gendron, Maria
N1 - Funding Information: Preparation of this manuscript was supported by a grant from National Institute of Child Health and Human Development ( R21HD076164 ) awarded to SA and a National Institute of Mental Health NRSA fellowship ( 5F32MH105052 ) awarded to MG. Publisher Copyright: © 2017 Elsevier Ltd
PY - 2017/10
Y1 - 2017/10
N2 - As adults, we have structured conceptual representations of our emotions that help us to make sense of and regulate our ongoing affective experience. The ability to use emotion concepts is critical to make predictions about the world and choose appropriate action, such as ‘I am afraid, and going to run away’ or ‘I am hungry and going to eat’. Thus, emotion concepts have an important role in helping us maintain our ongoing physiological balance, or allostasis. We will suggest here that infants can learn emotion concepts for the purpose of allostasis regulation, and that conceptualization is key component in emotional development. Moreover, we will suggest that social dyads facilitate concept learning because of a robust evolutionary feature seen in newborns of social species: they cannot survive alone and depend on conspecifics for allostasis regulation. Such social dependency creates a robust driving force for social learning of emotion concepts, and makes the social dyad, which is designed to regulate the infant's allostasis, an optimal medium for concept learning. In line with that, we will review evidence showing that the neural reference space for emotion overlaps with neural circuits that support allostasis (striatum, amygdala, and hypothalamus) and conceptualization (medial prefrontal cortex, posterior cingulate cortex), and that their developmental trajectories are interrelated, and depend on synchronous social care.
AB - As adults, we have structured conceptual representations of our emotions that help us to make sense of and regulate our ongoing affective experience. The ability to use emotion concepts is critical to make predictions about the world and choose appropriate action, such as ‘I am afraid, and going to run away’ or ‘I am hungry and going to eat’. Thus, emotion concepts have an important role in helping us maintain our ongoing physiological balance, or allostasis. We will suggest here that infants can learn emotion concepts for the purpose of allostasis regulation, and that conceptualization is key component in emotional development. Moreover, we will suggest that social dyads facilitate concept learning because of a robust evolutionary feature seen in newborns of social species: they cannot survive alone and depend on conspecifics for allostasis regulation. Such social dependency creates a robust driving force for social learning of emotion concepts, and makes the social dyad, which is designed to regulate the infant's allostasis, an optimal medium for concept learning. In line with that, we will review evidence showing that the neural reference space for emotion overlaps with neural circuits that support allostasis (striatum, amygdala, and hypothalamus) and conceptualization (medial prefrontal cortex, posterior cingulate cortex), and that their developmental trajectories are interrelated, and depend on synchronous social care.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85026365089&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2017.07.009
DO - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2017.07.009
M3 - Review article
C2 - 28843112
SN - 2352-250X
VL - 17
SP - 162
EP - 169
JO - Current Opinion in Psychology
JF - Current Opinion in Psychology
ER -