8 Childhood: 2-12 Years

Sometimes, when the light strikes at odd angles and pulls you back into childhood

and you are passing a crumbling mansion
completely hidden behind old willows

or an empty convent guarded by hemlocks
and giant firs standing hip to hip,

you know again that behind that wall,
under the uncut hair of the willows

something secret is going on,
so marvelous and dangerous

that if you crawled through and saw,
you would die, or be happy forever.

– Lisel Mueller (“Sometimes, When the Light”; 1924-2020; National Book Award, 1981; Pulitzer Prize, 1997)

TABLE OF CONTENTS (TOC)

• Mind and culture: Luria, Vygotsky, and Piaget
• The emergence of the creative mind: The role of metaphorical thought (i.e., thinking of one thing in terms of another)
• The centrality of schooling
• Emotions and interactions with others
• Lessons from developmental cognitive neuroscience: Is there evidence for unconscious repression of unpleasant and traumatic memories in infancy and early childhood?
• Childhood trauma versus attachment
• Psychological resilience

Introduction

One school of psychology associated with the pioneering work of Alexander Luria demonstrated that human nature was the result of social and cultural processes. Luria (1902-1977) was the founder of the field of neuropsychology and placed emphasis on multiculturalism, which seeped into the evolving field of cross-cultural psychology. Whereas cross-cultural psychology looks at the similarities of humans across cultures worldwide, an even newer field, cultural psychology, looks at how culture shapes our psychology and belief systems and how this varies across the world.

Of course, cultural knowledge changes over time and Luria argued that we must examine cognitive processes (“thinking”) in particular historical periods or cultural contexts.

Luria was heavily influenced by one of his instructors, Lev Vygotsky (1896-1934), barely his senior. Vygotsky believed that thinking was shaped by language and various cultural “tools.” Thought, according to Vygotsky, was a creation of mediated activity and occurs through both interpersonal interaction with others as well as interaction with objects (such as a pen and paper). Literacy–whether numerical or linguistic–can be said to “mediate” culture because such mediation is a key to human development and occurs in bringing the outside (culture) to the inside (mind/brain).

Vygotsky introduced the concept of the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) which refers to the gap between a child’s current level of development and the level they are capable of reaching with tools provided by adults. He viewed play as a crucial aspect of children’s development in which the child learns about mediated tools (such as sand, a pail, and a scoop).

Nonetheless, there is no evidence that literacy creates the capacity for abstract thought and reasoning, in and of itself. For instance, writing leads rather to certain forms of “context-dependent thought” such as textual understanding, written logic, and writing and the ability to distinguish what is said, from what is meant.

By the 1930s, Alexander Luria began to study peasant families in Central Asia during the midst of a cultural revolution in the USSR, which had as its goals the elimination of illiteracy, the restructuring of the economy, and the industrialization of the country.

His overarching claim was that cognition (“thinking”) depends upon the dominant modes of activity within a culture. So, for instance, in traditional societies, practical thinking–the physical manipulation of objects–will dominate. In technological societies, however, schooling will engender what is known as “decontextualized knowledge” or the ability to think even when the context is removed from the knowledge.

In Luria’s experiments, his subjects consisted of illiterate peasants with no education and workers living on a collective farm with 1-2 years of formal schooling. The materials were syllogisms based on factual premises or syllogisms devoid of practical content.

A syllogism is a kind of logical argument in deductive reasoning in order to arrive at a conclusion based on two propositions that are asserted.

For example, knowing that all men are mortal (major premise) and that Socrates is a man (minor premise), we may validly conclude that Socrates is mortal.

• Major premise: All men are mortal.
• Minor premise: Socrates is a man.
• Logical conclusion: Therefore, Socrates is mortal.

Subjects were asked to give explanations for their answers. Interestingly, the peasants refused to make deductions from non-factual premises, but the schooled workers were able to answer and explain most syllogisms whether factually based or not.

So, what’s going on here? Illiterate peasants didn’t understand the task demands because of cultural constraints whereas only through school instruction does theoretical activity begin to develop.

However, in African traditional thought, people use theoretical entities to link natural effects in the visible, tangible world with their natural causes. This is also true of Western science. It must be the nature of those theoretical entities and the activity that accompanies them that is crucial.

According to the cross-cultural psychologist, Sylvia Scribner, illiterate peasants fail to reduce the syllogism to the logical interrelations of the sentences alone. That is, not what they do or do not refer to in the real world. Instead, they evaluate it on their own terms.

Thus, unschooled peoples are incapable of applying the logical genre because the experimental context has not provided the appropriate cues to elicit the desired performance. But such tasks simply reflect school-type tasks.

In another experiment, schooled and unschooled Wolof tribe children in Senegal, West Africa, and urban and rural children in France were compared.

Materials consisted of a Piagetian task, conservation of liquid quantity. Conservation refers to a logical thinking ability that allows a person to determine that a certain quantity will remain the same despite adjustment of the container, shape, or apparent size, according to the psychologist Jean Piaget (1896 – 1980). His theory proposes that this ability is not present in children during the preoperational stage, ages 2 – 7,  but develops in the concrete operational stage from ages 7 – 11.

Nonetheless, there is actually a wider gap between schooled and unschooled groups than between rural and urban groups. For instance, unschooled Wolofs are “perceptually seduced” by the experimenter’s actions. They lack experience in handling the physical aspects of the task and the cultural relevance of these activities. But this effect is suppressed with schooling. Schooled Wolofs encode the relations symbolically whereas unschooled Wolofs encode the relations enactively. Enactivism is an approach in cognitive science that argues that cognition arises through a dynamic interaction between an acting organism and its environment, that is, through mediated engagement as we discussed above.

In a similar manner, while individualist cultures (“particle” or “independent” cultures such as the US and Western Europe) stress individuality, self-sufficiency, control of the environment, and the emotion of guilt, communitarian cultures (“field” or “interdependent” cultures such as in East Asia) stress community, sympathy and compassion for others, transcendence, and the emotion of shame. Likewise, African-Americans stress orality (i.e., storytelling, preaching, and song), time, improvisation (i.e., problem-solving in difficult circumstances), rhythm, and spirituality in their culture.

The Emergence of the Creative Mind

PowerPoint Presentation: The Origins of Creative Thought

Creative Thought

I elaborate on the contribution of the body to creative thought building on my own theory of the development of early creative (metaphoric) abilities in infants and young children. I argue that creativity emerges out of a matrix of activities of the mind, brain, and body.

What does creativity have to do with metaphor? Metaphor is now believed to be an essential cognitive process in the human mind/brain, not just an aspect of figurative language. Metaphorical thought is seeing one thing in terms of another. Let’s look at the development of metaphorical thought in childhood and the emergence of the creative mind.

Perceptual Metaphor

It has been amply documented that, early on, very young children at the beginning of the third year of life are able to exploit the perceptual features of shape, color, texture, and size in making metaphorical associations in renaming single objects or pictures. For instance, a preschool child may refer to a plate of spaghetti as a “bunch of worms” or a vehicular caution sign as a “lemon ice cream cone.” They can note these correspondences both in language as well as in match-to-sample tasks and similar nonverbal formats in which they must choose an analogous object from an array of pictorial or non-verbal choices.

Enactive Metaphor

Correspondingly, young children can make use of movement and motion information—that is, exploit enactive components of metaphor—in both categorizing moving objects and in making metaphorical associations. For example, a preschool child can note the metaphorical similarity between a spinning top and a dancing ballerina in a match-to-sample or similar non-verbal (filmed) format. Likewise, infants eighteen to twenty-four months can note the enactive similarity between a paper crayon cover that has slipped off and the putting on of an article of clothing, “I am putting your clothes on crayon.”

Cross-Modal (Synesthetic) Metaphor

Infants and young children can also perceive likeness in different sensory modalities. An instance of such a synesthetic or cross-modal association would be a three-month-old infant that dishabituates or shows interest in the synchrony between a toy monkey and its complementary sound, a three-year-old that applies the polar adjectives light/dark to an object (sandpaper) felt while blindfolded or a preschooler who indicates that red is a warm or hot color. The distinguished art historian, Ernest Gombrich, has long observed that such natural metaphors—bright sounds or cool colors—arise spontaneously in perception because they are part of our innate constitution.

Physiognomic Metaphor

During the very early preschool years, rudimentary physiognomic experiences or the attribution of affective properties to visually perceived objects and other sensory experiences gain prominence. Examples include identifying the front grille of an automobile as a “smiling face” or a piece of music as “cheerful.”

In one large study, child and adult responses to physiognomically suggestive visual metaphors were examined in photographs. Preschoolers, 3 and 4 years of age, normal and high IQ children, 6 and 8 years of age, and adults were shown 10 photographs of cars, rocks, plants, and other inanimate objects, and their responses were categorized by type of metaphor. Preschool and 6-year-old children demonstrated significant levels of physiognomic responding, although high IQ, older children, and adults showed even higher levels of physiognomic responding presumably as a result of more advanced narrative abilities. All groups displayed high consistency in physiognomic object responses across photographs. It, therefore, appears that physiognomic metaphor is a robust phenomenon across the lifespan, originating in the very early childhood years, at least as early as the second half of the third year of life.

But that is just beginning of our story with regard to the incredible cognitive and affective abilities of modern humans, you and

Let’s digress a bit and look at the two major systems of thought.

There are two major “systems of thought” in humans,  a (1) pattern-based extraction system known as “pareidolia” and a (2) rule-based system — that is a combinatorial/componential, hierarchical, and recursive system — informed by rules or “algorithms.” I’ll explain as we go along.

Dr. Temple Grandin, an autistic adult, believes that there one can further subdivide these into three major kinds of thinking in humans: Photo-realistic visual thinking, pattern thinking, and word-fact thought. So, she gives equal weight to “visual thinking” or visuospatial intelligence.

On the other hand, Daniel Kahneman, a behavioral economist, distinguishes between something which he calls System 1 thinking, which is intuitive and immediate, and System 2 thinking, which is deliberate and logical.

However, his model doesn’t capture the kind of pattern recognition aspects of thought that organic beings are particularly good at (and, more recently, digital computers) as well as the myriad types of thought processes employed by humans and other animals of which Dr. Grandin speaks.

What Professor Kahneman is calling an intuitive and immediate, that is, an elemental cognitive and affective process, may actually be an instinctual response or an ancestral memory of a highly plastic learned response to the environment that was sculpted into an instinct by way of evolution.

Intuition doesn’t tell us anything useful because intuition itself is poorly understood and might actually be quite different from how it is generally defined as “reaching conclusions based on nonconscious processes of reasoning.” But “plasticity-first models” may help explain the expeditious evolution of behavioral and anatomical changes in higher-order primates and other animals.

If you’re interested in reading further, please see my book, “Mind Embodied,” for a discussion of “plasticity-first models.”

Moreover, just because something is immediate doesn’t mean it isn’t deliberative because we often don’t know, understand or recognize in ourselves or others the history of thinking behind a topic or thing that we have been thinking about, or about to think about, as the end stage of some reasoning process.

C. S. Pierce, the American logician, maintained that “intuition” was actually a mirage because all mental action derives from inference and there is no cognitive stage that precedes all others. Since thinking is always thinking in signs (i.e., symbols) according to Pierce, a thought can only be interpreted in what came before it and in what came after it or otherwise it is bereft of any meaning or semantic content.

Indeed, Pierce even had a different take on “introspection” as it is not merely an internal soliloquy with ourselves, but an inference from external, objective knowledge or what he called, “abductive inference,” and in this case, inferences about ourselves and who and what we are.

Second, these two systems—pattern-based and rule-based—are spread across multiple “noetic forms” or groupings of complex cognitive abilities including language, number, visuospatial understanding and “image-making,” music, instrumental or physical intelligence, and emotional expression and social understanding.

Indeed, we can get a better sense of these two systems by taking an evolutionary point of view with regard to the origin of these abilities.

Initially, when Animalia first evolved in the sea and on land, a “sensory manifold” emerged with multiple sensory receptors. That is, a collective sensorium of external sensory receptors such as vision, touch, taste, smell, and sound, among others.

To put it another way, to capture all of this information, a sensorium evolved principally around light (electromagnetic radiation), odor (volatile chemical compounds), sound (vibrations propagating as audible waves of pressure through a medium such as a gas or liquid), touch (changes on the surface of the body that are perceived by a system of receptors), and taste (substances that react chemically with receptor cells in the oral cavity).

That being so, in the larger biological world there are many other kinds of sensory receptors such as biosonar, electroreception, ectohormones, and biological compasses.

Nevertheless, what quickly followed in evolutionary time was a second dual circuit to segregate internal sensation from our sensory receptors, which had fortuitous and interesting consequences. That is, the emergence in an internal mind/brain that could sequence, organize, and possess memory of the past. To be sure, this mind/brain became “embodied” and evolved to reflect similar qualities of the external world, a central feature of biological systems.

“Supramodular” systems then followed. That is, “cross-modal perception” emerged and connected these independent sensory systems to one another. Here’s an example: “The smell of her perfume was like bright sunshine.” We connect in our minds a odor with a visual sensation.

To be sure, sensory systems do not operate completely independently, but rather sensory information is commingled in the brain and body, a process referred to as cross-modal perception or “synesthesia.”

This supramodular system has four defining features:

1. The ability to relate sensory qualities across different sensory modalities.

2. The ability to link an inanimate object to an emotion.

3. The ability to associate a sensory quality to an abstract property.

4. The ability to transform or relate one movement or action to another.

Subsequently, about 520 million years ago, “perceptual consciousness” appeared. It was eminently useful as it became essentially a prediction device about how to best proceed in an animal’s daily life.

“Conceptual primitives,” as we discussed earlier, then appeared involving an incipient understanding of number, objects (“naive” or folk physics), geometric forms and navigation (geometry of the environment), instrumental actions of agents, and commonsense or “folk psychology” in which social beings are understood as engaging in actions to reach social goals, forming and attending to coalitions, and categorizing oneself and others into groups.

Coevally, memory (mnemonic) systems began to differentiate into semantic (facts), episodic (events), prospective (future), social, collective (group memory), emotional, numerical, verbal, visuospatial, kinesthetic (movement), and musical memory, further underpinning these noetic forms.

Then, about 350 million years ago, “affective consciousness” appeared in tetrapods (i.e., reptiles, birds, mammals) when early Animalia began to consciously experience affective states.

Biological rhythms, the bedrock of many bodily and nervous system activities, became linked with sound as they were prerequisites for nonverbal behaviors such as aesthetic—”dance-like”—movement as well as music. I have argued elsewhere that the first aesthetic impulse originated in movement.

Organizational and planning abilities emerged enabling animals to anticipate and plan for the future around changing environments and fluctuating climates.

The emergence of full-blown embodied thought followed. Manual dexterity, as well as “tool use” and technology rapidly evolved. Oral and vocal dexterity laid the foundation for complex syntactical speech.

In a similar manner, self-awareness (secondary consciousness) emerged in a subset of mammals and primates, along with the capacity for cognitive and behavioral self-monitoring, enabling robust working memory (what you are currently thinking about right now), metacognition (the ability to reflect on your own thoughts), and metalinguistic awareness or the ability to reflect on your use of words and their meanings.

“Paradigmatic thought” or categorization of the natural world arose first in the ability to detect patterns (pareidolia) and was one of the essential ways that organisms gained information and acquired knowledge about physical reality.

Much later it became the core of image-making or visuospatial thinking that goes back in modern human history to, at least, 120 thousand years ago based on recent discoveries of human artifacts (“art-like”) in sub-Saharan Africa.

Yet, paradigmatic thought first appeared in the ability to extract statistical regularities from the environment, to extract and parse information into meaningful wholes, as well as predict and generalize from a subset of external stimuli relying on similarity and temporal and spatial contiguity. That is, things that are similar and appear close together in time and space.

his latter associative system—temporal and spatial contiguity—would be useful in unknown and constantly changing environments where humans and other animals could use distorted, degraded, and incomplete information to extract those regularities. To be sure, early pareidolia became a very useful ability in procuring food and tracking other animals, among other things.

Its symbolic precursors—that is, precursors to symbolic thought—included “indices,” or some physical connection to an object such as animal tracks in the snow, as well as “icons” or some likeness or semblance to an object such as a human face in the clouds. Moreover, pattern-seeking or pareidolia was a precursor to image-making and eventually full-blown symbol use.

On the other hand, syntagmatic or narrative thought or the conveyance and telling of stories, arose first in gesture and then was mapped onto sounds and later accompanied the complex architecture of speech.

Creative thought, however, first emerged on the back of the supramodular system. This was the underpinned by supramodular or metaphoric thought, that is, the ability to think of one thing in terms of another. Thus, one might argue that metaphor is the kernel of creative thought. And full-blown creativity emerges out of a matrix of complex activities of the mind, brain, and body (Please see chapter 5, “Thought,” in my book, “Mind Embodied,” for an extended discussion of metaphoric thought).

We call it “metaphorical” or “supramodular” thought because it involves cross-modal and other kinds of correspondences such as comparing a visual shape or color to an emotion or a balletic movement to a spinning top.

Later, the default and salience networks evolved for the detection of novelty in the environment—and important aspect of creative thought; the empathy and amygdala circuits for the detection of, and the ability to, respond to feelings; the underlying cerebral architecture for theory of mind—the ability to understand what someone else may be thinking or feeling—as well as further embodiment of thought itself.

Sociality exploded including such key features as social hierarchies, dominance relations, social roles and relations, social understanding, as well as Machiavellian intelligence—the ability to manipulate and influence others—in early hominid (archaic human) cultures.

A full rule-based system followed involving manipulations on relations among symbols. That is, that is a combinatorial/componential, hierarchical, and recursive system.

Symbols like language can be combined in infinite ways, ordered into complex hierarchies (e.g., word, phrase, sentence, paragraph, chapter), and used recursively. Of the latter, take two syntactic units (read, books), recombine them as one (“Susan reads books”), and recursively combine them again to create hierarchically structured sentences (“Susan reads books that make her smart”).

At a minimum, this rule-based system included:

• General algorithms or rules
• Cognitive strategies or “heuristics”
• Deductive, inductive, and abductive reasoning
• Causal reasoning including protoconditional inferences (if p, then q), protonegation (if not p, then not q), and the incipient ability to comprehend disjunctive syllogisms (if either p or q is true, and p is false, then q is true)
• Conditional and pragmatic (practical) reasoning
• Categorical and conceptual inference
• Decision-making
• Reasoning by analogy
• Schemas and scripts for obtaining information about the world and using this information to influence that very world. For example, a child who first learns how to order food in a restaurant.
• Local and global planning
• Insight and creative thought
• Wisdom
• Serial understanding to achieve a pre-defined end or praxis

Yet, it was not because of any specific ecological niche that humans exploited, but the effect of many complex environments and interactions among archaic and modern humans, not the least of which was the ratcheting effect of rapidly evolving cognitive and affective streams in evolution culminating in complex communal living and the amazing cognitive, creative, and affective skills and abilities of modern humans.

The Centrality of Schooling

Altricial species, like humans, are those in which the young are underdeveloped at the time of birth, but with the aid of their parents mature after birth. Precocial species are those in which the young are relatively mature and mobile from the moment of birth.

Human infants and young children need to acquire complex social skills, including language, empathy, morality, theory of mind, the ability to read and write, as well as compute with numbers. Successful development of these skills depends on information and tutoring from adults. Evolution has conveniently outsourced the necessary skills and information to parents. Moreover, prolonged altricial development may give species the ability to adapt to changing or new environments,

Formal schooling is a prime example as we’ll see below.

In 1994, a major international cross-cultural study of education was published by the University of Michigan. The results were startling.

• Asian children: Learn from errors
• American children: Avoid errors

Stereotypes of Asian Families and Schools

1. Asian children are under great stress. But, not evident in preschool and elementary years; pressure builds during high school years.
2. Asian children are innately docile. No, lively and assertive students.
3. Asian teaching stresses rote learning. No, just exaggerates levels of American creative abilities.
4. Asian parents push children at a very young age. No pressure on young children.

What the study did demonstrate was the need for a vast expansion of early childhood education in the US to increase readiness for the first-grade curriculum.

And noteworthy was the finding that in Asian schools, recesses punctuate the Asian elementary school day and occur after every 40-45” period of teaching. Not surprisingly, American children have more difficulty paying attention.

Mathematics Education

The study compared students in Sendai (Japan), Taipei (Taiwan), Beijing (China), Chicago, and Minneapolis.

American students from the 1st to the 5th grade slip significantly behind Asian students in mathematics.

The following computational skills were evaluated.

• Understanding of basic mathematical operations
• Ability to apply knowledge to meaningful problems
• Facility with number concepts
• Comprehension of information in graphs and tables
• Skills in estimation and measurement
• Spatial reasoning abilities

Results of the study

Americans were poorer in all areas. They were poorer even in kindergarten. Thus, the results can’t be due solely to schooling but involve the children’s homes and parents.

Reading Education

American children do not display exceptional problems in reading achievement. They are, however, overrepresented among poor readers. Unfortunately, 17% of 17-year-olds in the US are functionally illiterate, that is, the inability to read on a fourth-grade reading level or above.

Psychometric Intelligence (“IQ”)

Psychometric intelligence (as measured by standardized intelligence tests) did not vary across Japan, Taiwan, and the US when corrected for the location of residence (urban/rural) and socioeconomic status (SES).

Science and Geography

American students have fared badly in international studies of achievement in science.

Children’s Lives

Asian Homes and Classrooms

Asian teachers assign large amounts of homework, but workbooks are more frequently assigned for home use in Asian schools. That being so, studying hard may accentuate feelings of accomplishment, self-image, and self-mastery.

In Asian homes, homework takes precedence over television viewing and children do fewer chores. Indeed, there are newspapers written especially for children and, as a result, children come to value reading and newspapers.

Children are taught basic skills for success in school during the elementary school years. Children learn to move from one activity to another. How to arrange the content of their desks. How to pay attention. How to follow directions. How to speak loudly and clearly and classroom discipline shared with children.

Intelligence is distributed in the classroom in groups so that each child has something to contribute, an important insight.

American Homes and Classrooms

For instance, lack of group participation leads to more loneliness in American children. They tend to seek other children for after-school play, talk inappropriately in class to other children, and school is not perceived to be a special pleasant place.

Comparison between American and Asian Classrooms

Schoolwork is the responsibility of teachers and students in American classrooms but in Japanese and Chinese schools, each child carries a small notebook back and forth between school and home. Schoolwork is the responsibility of teachers, students, and parents.

Why? There are different cultural assumptions about the role of parents in Asian and American classrooms, but it is not the result of 2-parent earners or the breakdown of the nuclear family in US society.

Unlike American classrooms, in Asian cultures, children are confronted with tier upon tier of models (not just sports and entertainment figures). Also, social shame is an important social emotion in Asian cultures. Within the classroom, the performance of all children becomes the responsibility of each member of the group.

In Asian cultures, teachers act as guides (“scaffolding” each individual student) typically asking children to come up with their own solutions and calling on other children to evaluate their accuracy or relevance. Peer acceptance and approval is a powerful motivator.

Moreover, Asian teachers explicitly teach component skills.

• Underlining
• Outlining
• Organizing
• Summarizing

Americans emphasize innate ability whereas Asians emphasize effort.

Achievement consists in never giving up. If there is no dark and dogged will, there will be no shining accomplishment. If there is no dull and determined effort, there will be no brilliant achievement.

Hsun Tzu (310 B.C.E. – 238 B.C.E., Chinese philosopher)

The effort model emphasizes that learning is gradual and incremental. Errors are seen as a natural part of the learning process. Not an aberration. And persistence is central.

Moreover, in Asian classrooms, all levels of skill are represented in each group, but in American classrooms.

• Slow learners are identified
• Then, placed in slower tracks (called “tracking” or “ability grouping”)
• Teachers thus have lower expectations
• Students buy into lower expectations
• Drop out of school

Special education settings, however, estrange students from peers, discourage motivation to succeed, and encourage stigmatization. Self-esteem is built on managing a challenging task. Tracking is not done in Asian schools, nor is there special education. Children are most likely to learn from each other if all levels of ability are represented in the group.

In American classrooms, educators believe native ability limits academic achievement. American mothers tend to have lower standards than Chinese or Japanese mothers. Most children are recorded as doing quite well because standards are so low including parental expectations.

Training of Teachers in Asian Cultures

Teachers receive a liberal arts education, study within a discipline, have extensive training after college, and teach no more than 4 hours a day.

American Classrooms

Textbooks are overwhelming in size, the format is distractive, and the material is redundant from year to year. And American classrooms overemphasize time spent alone studying.

The “Hidden Curriculum”

• Schools are only minimally concerned with the transmission of knowledge.
• Rather, schools are socializing agents that inculcate obedience, conformity, and compliance.
• There is a premium placed on certain styles of dress and behavior.
• There is an overemphasis on grades and tests.
• Dictate certain forms of knowledge.
• Elite tools for manipulating oppressed groups.
• Result: More parents are sending their children to private and parochial schools as well as homeschooling.

Emotions and Interactions with Others

Individuation (autonomy) begins to emerge during the end of infancy and the beginning of early childhood. The integrity of the parent-child relationship and strong support from parents of the child’s emerging developmental challenges are key. The child’s emotional temperament becomes more pronounced expressing their reserved or aggressive, cooperating or friendly ways of interacting with others.

As pretend (symbolic) play kicks in around 18-24 months–feeding breakfast to a doll or talking on a toy phone to an imaginary friend–young children are often not directly playing with another child but playing in parallel or what is known as parallel play. Nonetheless, cooperative play has not emerged yet. The young child may imitate other child’s play and even look at what s/he is up to in play, but the young child cannot yet play in a cooperative, imaginative way with another child. During preschool years, the young child learns to manipulate his subjective emotions into more socially accepted gestures. For example, she may use a “poker face” and exaggerate or minimize emotions her emotions for social effects. So, she might say “thank you: for a present, she didn’t like. The young child begins to refer to herself as “I” or “me” and uses possessive nouns such as “mine” and negatives, such as “no.”

To be sure, play has the following emerging characteristics.

In sensorimotor play, in the first two years of life, the infant masters motor skills and uses his or her sensory modalities via repeated actions with and on objects, known as “circular reactions.” But in the third year of life, symbolic (pretend) play abets the young child’s ability to encode the world into symbols. For example, pretending a broom handle is a horse. Indeed, 10-17% of play is pretend play in preschool years but by kindergarten (5 years), 33% of play is pretend play. But once the child enters the school setting, games with rules emerge as the child begins to acquire the knowledge of basic social concepts of competition and cooperation. Likewise, ritual play, an intimate social situation providing a framework for continued interaction (i.e., repetition & repetition + variation) emerges, such as “ring-around-the-roses.”

Between 30 and 54 months, impulse control, gender roles, and peer relationship issues emerge. A caregiver plays a major role in helping preschoolers define values and learn flexible self-control. What behaviors are acceptable and how much autonomy may they exert? The child’s sense of initiative and concerns with anxiety from loss of control are fostered by thoughtful parenting that helps the child make intelligent choices.

Play scenarios become more complex with themes and storylines by three years-of-age. The young child engages more in interactive play, begins to master aggressive urges, and learns cooperation and sharing. By this point, the child can play with 1 or 2 peers and engage in turn-taking play and joint goals. More advanced symbolic plays schools emerge such as imaginative and fantasy play: Pretending to be a cat. Role-play skills also develop. The child, however, cannot yet distinguish between reality and imagination and it is common to be afraid of imaginary things. They master this skill to differentiate between real and imaginary around 4 years of age. They enjoy playing tricks on others and are worried about being tricked themselves. Imaginary scenarios and play skills are developing and becoming more complex. At this point, they can play with 3 to 4 peers and inject more complex themes and pretend skills.

By 5- and 6-years of age, the child can follow simple rules and directions. They are beginning to learn adult social skills like giving praise and apologizing for unintentional mistakes. But they also like to spend more time with peers. Imaginative play becomes more complex.

By 7- and 8 years of age, the child fully understands rules and regulations in games and interactions with others. The child shows a deeper understanding of relationships and responsibilities and, as a result, can complete simple chores. Moral development also grows and the child learns more complex coping skills. The child begins to explore new ideas and activities and peers may test his beliefs. At this age, children identify more with children of similar gender and often seek out a best friend.

By 9- and 10 years of age, peer groups take precedence over family. Children at this age will show increasing independent decision-making and a growing need for independence from family. Setting up a reasonable balance between independence and house rules builds self-confidence and self-assurance in children of this age. Promoting supportive adult relationships and increasing opportunities to take part in positive community activities increases resilience.

Greater independence and commitment to peer groups drive the transition to adolescence. This will include indulging in risky behavior to explore uncertain emotions and impress peer groups. Social interactions include complex relationships, disagreements, breakups, new friendships, and long-lasting relationships. Normally the adolescent will learn to cope with these stresses with healthy adult relationships and guidance to make independent decisions. As young adulthood approaches, school success and work-related activities become important. For a healthy transition to adulthood, positive and supportive adult guidance and opportunities to take part constructively in the community play a pivotal role.

Lessons from developmental cognitive neuroscience: Is there evidence for unconscious repression of unpleasant and traumatic memories in infancy and early childhood?

PowerPoint Presentation: Unconscious Repression

Children do appear to forget serious instances of abuse in childhood only for the memory to return in adulthood. But what is the evidence for a special repression mechanism? That is, an unconscious process that suppresses unpleasant or traumatic experiences.

In contrast to the prevailing psychoanalytic viewpoint, the contemporary cognitive and neurosciences paint a very different picture based on more recent cognitive and neuroscience evidence.

*One piece of evidence against the claim of repression is that adults anecdotally report that as abused children they deliberately and consciously suppressed experiences and memories that they found particularly painful. That is, an active, conscious suppression of memories.

The above piece of evidence of conscious suppression suggests that memories are consciously inhibited or suppressed so as to avoid the cause of the pain that an individual experienced. And it is known as cognitive avoidance. That is, the suppressed unpleasant or traumatic experience is available in memory but not easily accessible. But is the difficulty in accessing these memories a result of their conscious suppression or is there a need for more sensitive measures to reveal their existence?

Moreover, there may be intervening interference from other memories and experiences that (a) cause the erasure of older memories or (b) make it harder to retrieve them. In the case of (b) retrieval-induced forgetting, competing memories (pleasant or unpleasant) may be inhibiting them so as to make them more difficult to retrieve. That is, when we retrieve an item from memory there is inhibition of competing memories from previously stored memories.

The *second piece of evidence is the case of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in which the ability to suppress traumatic memories and experiences is severely reduced. To be sure, this is the opposite effect of what is proposed in both conscious suppression and unconscious repression. Could the phenomena of PTSD be due to “errant” memory reconsolidation of painful experiences through ongoing successive retrieval of those very same traumatic memories that are continually being re-strengthened?

A *third piece of evidence is that there is retrospective or hindsight bias (the past looks different in light of our current experiences) and source confusion (known as misattribution) where an individual will reputedly remember an unpleasant experience but distort the context in which it occurred as well as the insertion of misinformation from conversations and other experiences with others as well as and interactions with third-party sources.

A *fourth piece of evidence is that there are emotional effects on memory that are highly determinative. Emotions can affect many different aspects of an unpleasant or traumatic experience interfering or enhancing different elements of the memory depending on the intensity of the emotion experienced at the time(s) of the unpleasant or traumatic experience as well as state-dependent effects (state-dependent memory). That is, individuals tend to remember more information if their bodily or mental state is the same at both the time of encoding and at the time of recall.

Infantile or childhood amnesia (0-6 years) is marked by a paucity of autobiographical memory.

Autobiographical memories relate to events that happened to oneself, events in which one participated, and about which one had emotions, thoughts, reactions, and reflections.

Thus, autobiographical memories tend to be (a) unique events that happened at specific time or place; (b) entail a sense of conscious, autonoetic awareness that one is actually re-experiencing an event that happened at some point in the past; (c) are expressed verbally; (d) are long-lasting; and are (e) veridical.

Indeed, the temporal distribution of thousands of memories recalled by hundreds of participants demonstrated that very few occurred between the ages of 2–6 years-of-age (childhood amnesia), and that none occurred prior to the age of 2 (infantile amnesia).

Infantile amnesia can be explained by an absence of an episodic-like memory system during infancy. Childhood amnesia, however, is characterized by the rapid forgetting of early memories during early childhood. Early episodic memories are often rapidly forgotten because the hippocampus—where memories are initially processed—is too immature and undeveloped to efficiently form, store, and recall them.

Encoding (coding, recoding), storage (organization, rehearsal), and retrieval are the major operational processes of memory consolidation and reconstruction.

But memory is thoroughly a reconstructive process, not mere retrieval of an indelible memory stamped on the brain as Aristotle thought (De Anima, 350 B.C.E). This explicit point—reconstruction—was made by Frederic Bartlett of Cambridge University in his book Remembering (1932), in a series of novel experiments in which he demonstrated that memory was a thoroughly reconstructive process and influenced by experience, knowledge, culture, and expectations.

Memory as reconstruction: In one experiment, Bartlett asked participants to read the Native American folk story, “War of the Ghosts.” Bartlett found that at longer intervals between reading the story and remembering it, participants became less accurate about key points in the story. But where elements of the story failed to fit into the schemata (plural of schema; also referred to as ‘schemas’) of the listener, those elements were either omitted or transformed into more familiar elements native to the participant’s culture as well as his or her knowledge base.

To be sure, a schema is a pattern of thought or behavior that organizes categories of information and the relationships among them. That is, individuals are more likely to notice things that fit into their schema, while re-interpreting contradictions as exceptions and distorting them to fit into their original schema or understanding.

Bartlett used a similar approach in studying cognition in his Thinking: An Experimental and Social Study (1958) where he argued that schemas organize our past experience leading to constructive category formation (e.g., a pug is a dog and member of the category of canines).

What is memory consolidation? Some time is required to consolidate or strengthen a memory trace after it is initially encoded and there are two kinds of consolidation: (1) cellular or synaptic consolidation (strengthening synaptic connections between neurons) and (2) systems consolidation (memories are further strengthened through reconsolidation of existing memories through successive retrieval), as well as (3) consolidation during sleep, one of sleep’s major functions.

Our long-term memories

Damage to the hippocampus [it associate events with contexts] seems to affect episodic memory (memory for events) more than semantic memory (memory for facts).

A schema, as we indicated above, is a knowledge structure formed in the mind/brain that is based on a set of similar past experiences; it captures the common features of these experiences (such as a yearly birthday party).

Schemas are therefore mental structures consisting of a system for organizing categories of information. Thus, schemas are, in essence, slot-fillers categories. Slot-filler categories refer to grouping of concepts within the same slot-filler that share common functions bounded by a specific event. For instance, cereal, eggs, and milk are foods that one often eats for breakfast; they can be easily substituted within that specific category.

In young children, significantly better memory and organization was achieved on slot-filler tasks than on either “taxonomic” (see below) or “complementary” tasks (rabbits and carrots complement each other in memory), suggesting that slot-filler categories are one of the most readily accessible facts in semantic memory (memory for facts). Moreover, slot-filler categories facilitate a transition from schema-based (see above) to conventional superordinate (taxonomic) organization (e.g., Siamese cats are a type of Asian cat in a much larger grouping of felines) as children reach school age.

Conclusions

So, the evidence is weak that individuals unconsciously repress unpleasant or traumatic memories from childhood.

And much better explained by current knowledge of how memory actually functions in infants, children, and adults.

Childhood Trauma

Trauma and Recovery

Trauma can result from a wide range of experiences which expose humans to one or more physical, emotional, or relational dangers.

Physical: Physical injury, brain injury, assault, crime, natural disaster, war, pain, and situational harm like vehicle or industrial accidents.

Relational (adult): Interpersonal trauma, domestic violence, intimate partner violence, controlling behavior and coercive control, betrayal, gaslighting, traumatic bonding, and intense emotional experiences such as shame and humiliation.

Relational (child): It can involve childhood trauma, adverse childhood experiences (ACE), separation distress, and negative attachment experience (controlling, dismissive, inconsistent, harsh, or harmful caregiving environments).

Social/structural: Social and political events, structural violence, racism, poverty, religious discrimination, various forms of slavery, and the contribution of the cultural environment.

PTSD: Non-complex or complex post-traumatic stress disorder and continuous traumatic stress.

Psychological and pharmacological: Psychological harm, mental distress, drug addiction, isolation, and solitary confinement.

Secondary trauma: Vicarious or secondary exposure to other’s trauma.

Trauma-informed care (TIC) is a framework for relating to and helping people who have experienced negative consequences after exposure to dangerous experiences. There is no one single TIC framework, or model, and some go by slightly different names, including Trauma- (TIC) and Violence-Informed Care (TVIC).

Judith Herman, MD (psychiatry, Harvard Medical School): Focuses on incest and traumatic stress including father-daughter incest and sexual violence.

She discusses single incident events (Type I traumas) such as PTSD; and complex or repeated traumas (Type II traumas) such as complex post-traumatic stress disorder (CPTSD).

Suggested reading:

Herman, Judith Lewis (1992). Trauma and recovery: The aftermath of violence – from domestic abuse to political terror. New York: Basic Books (paperback: $14.49).

Her work is considered a foundational text on understanding trauma and trauma survivors. Dr. Herman argues that psychological trauma is inseparable from its social and political context.

Drawing on her own research on father-daughter incest—as well as a vast literature on combat veterans and victims of political terror—she demonstrates surprising parallels between private horrors like child abuse and public horrors like war.

• “One of the most important psychiatric works to be published since Freud.”―New York Times
• Published “Trauma and Recovery” (1992) and “Truth and Repair” (2024).
• “A stunning achievement … a classic for our generation.”―Bessel van der Kolk, M.D.

Bessel Van der Kolk, MD (psychiatry, Boston University School of Medicine) describes trauma as a response to exposure to one or more overwhelming dangers which causes harm to neurobiological functioning leaving a person with impaired ability to identify and manage dangers. Might it be an instance of “anosognosia,” that is, a condition in which a person is cognitively unaware of their impaired ability due to damage to underlying brain structures, typically the frontal-temporal-parietal network?

He has focused on how trauma has differential effects depending on the developmental stage when it occurs and the security of the attachment system, known as developmental psychopathology.

In his major work (below), he focuses on the central role of the attachment system and the social environment to protect against developing trauma related disorders and explores a large variety of interventions to recover from the impact of traumatic experiences.

He calls these “developmental trauma disorders,” because they involve a complex range of psychological and biological reactions to trauma over the course of human development and are known as complex post-traumatic stress disorders (CPTSD).

Suggested reading:

Van der Kolk, B. A. (2014). The body keeps the score: Brain, mind, and body in the healing of
trauma. NY: Viking (paperback: $10).

“Psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk argues that severe trauma is ‘encoded in the viscera’ and demands tailored approaches that enable people to experience deep relief from rage and helplessness. In a narrative packed with decades of findings and case studies, he traces the evolution of treatments from the ‘chemical coshes’ of the 1970s to neurofeedback, mindfulness and other nuanced techniques.” —Nature

“Encoded in the viscera” is a reference to the notion that the mind, brain, and body are intimately related.

For instance, somatic psychology is a form of treatment that focuses on somatic experience—incorporating therapeutic approaches to the body—and seeks to ameliorate mental and physical injury and trauma through body awareness and movement. Thus, it theorizes that ”trauma” is stored in the body.

What does that mean? Anxiety, depression and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) can be triggered by daily stress responses of the mind-brain-body.

Freud postulated that unconscious memories of sexual and physical abuse in early childhood—that is, repressed in the unconscious—were a necessary precondition for psychoneuroses. But there is no scientific evidence that individuals “repress” early experiences in memory (i.e., the brain).

But somatic experiencing focuses on the interoceptive, kinesthetic or proprioceptive senses, which may help resolve symptoms of chronic and traumatic stress. This bottom-up approach attempts to target the neurobiological consequences of traumatic events and recalibrate the dysregulation of bodily responses.

One of the most effective ways to relieve stress, irrational thoughts, and negative feelings—as well as alleviate many kinds of medical conditions—is making use of so-called “body therapies.” Sports and dance are the most common examples, but there are many others. Instructed therapies such as the Alexander technique, the Feldenkrais method of body awareness, and Pilates all work the body systematically through the mind-brain-body matrix. So, does the many varieties of therapeutic massage and Yoga as well as other Eastern practices such as Tai chi and buteyko or the use of breathing exercises. I examined these various natural body therapies relying on published reviews from the Cochrane Reviews and the Australian Government Department of Health Review of Natural Therapies (Seitz, 2019).

The Cochrane Library is a collection of databases in medicine and other healthcare specialties consisting of well-conducted controlled trials: Cochrane Library. The review of alternative healthcare modalities assessed the clinical effectiveness of various alternative therapies. Australian Government Department of Health and Aged Care: Australian Government Department of Health and Aged Care.

We don’t simply inhabit our bodies; we use them to think with. That is to say, thinking is an embodied activity. Although humans may be best characterized as symbol-using organisms, symbol use itself is structured by perceptual and action systems that occur in both artifactual contexts and natural environments.

Indeed, even human consciousness may arise not just from some novel feature of human brains, but by way of the body’s awareness of itself through its exteroceptive and proprioceptive senses. Or, to put it another way, the body structures thought as much as cognition shapes bodily experiences (Seitz, 2000).

What forms the basis of musical expressivity? The Swiss composer and music educator, Emile Jaques-Dalcroze, believed that bodily processes, rhythm, and physical motion were the basis of musical expressivity and music pedagogy. We can rephrase his emphasis on the synergy between bodily and musical processes into a question: How does the body contribute to thought and musical understanding, in particular? We review recent theory and research on the bodily and brain basis of musical expression and find ample support for his seminal views. It thus appears that Dalcroze was onto something essential to musical thought and expression (Seitz, 2005).

Traditionally, while human movement was accorded a central position in early learning, it has not been granted a major role in mind and thought until fairly recently. For instance, recent theorists have suggested that dance originates in a discrete bodily kinesthetic “intelligence”; that skilled movement is a form of thinking; or that movement is predominant in all forms of human intellective activity (Seitz, 2002).

The Difference Between “Attachment” and “Trauma”

Dr. Bessel van der Kolk – Excerpted from the NYTimes, 03.09.2021, “A Trauma Expert Puts the Meghan and Harry Interview in Context.” Harry and his wife were interviewed by Oprah Winfrey on CBS on March 7, 2021.

“The strict definition of childhood trauma does not include the loss of a mother or a father. Strictly speaking, a trauma is different from a rupture in one’s attachment system, though often the two of them go together, as they do in cases of physical or sexual abuse at the hands of one’s caregivers (DSM-5: Neglect, maltreatment, and abuse).

The attachment system is a different dimension from trauma. Trauma is an event that blows your mind and leaves you helpless and terrified. The attachment system defines who we belong to, who is there for us, who sees and cherishes us.

Losing your mother as a boy (e.g., Prince Harry) certainly shapes your identity because a central relationship is ruptured, and your core sense of security is affected.

Exposure to long periods of parental discord forces a child to take sides and often makes children overprotective of an injured parent. When their parents are distressed, children often feel responsible to manage their parental relationship as well as they can.

A little boy seeing his mom being hurt or humiliated may well develop a deep sense of caring, protection, and possibly a deep sense of guilt for not having been able to do more.

But the terror of being assaulted is quite different from not being seen or noticed — to being made to feel you don’t belong. Feeling unwanted and despised creates a deep sense of feeling godforsaken and tends to make you feel that you may as well be dead.

Sexual and physical abuse tends to put you on guard. You automatically recoil from being involved with others; you may feel a deep sense of threat when you get close to other people. It’s very hard to give up that hyper-alertness. It makes a person extremely cagey, careful not to be caught in the same situation ever again. However, after repeated trauma, some people develop a sense that being used is all they are good for, causing them to become compliant with their abusers (Stockholm Syndrome?).

People have very different impulses, very different reactions to the same kinds of challenges. But your attachment system — who you belong to, who knows you, who loves, who you play with — this is more fundamental than trauma. As long as people feel safe with the people in their immediate environment, in their families, tribes or troops, they are amazingly resilient.”

Why are some children unusually resilient?

Psychological resilience is an individual’s ability to adapt in the face of adverse conditions and growing up with the benefit of a strong attachment environment (i.e., parents and immediate and extended family and friends) is critical.

Numerous factors influence an individual’s level of resilience including personal or internal characteristics such as self-esteem, self-regulatory abilities, and a positive outlook on life (e.g., “positive psychology”). Whereas external factors such as one’s social support systems—relationships with family, friends, and community as well as access to resources and opportunities—can also make a huge difference.

Trauma and Recovery Academic Concentration

Suggested courses

Trauma and Recovery (3 credits)
Herman, Judith Lewis (1992). Trauma and recovery: The aftermath of violence – from domestic abuse to political terror. New York: Basic Books (paperback: $14.49).

Trauma-Informed Care (3 credits)
Van der Kolk, B. A. (2014). The body keeps the score: Brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma. NY: Viking (paperback: $10).

Attachment Theory (3 credits) – Bowlby, Ainsworth, Brazelton…
O’Shaughnessy, R. et al. (2023). Attachment theory (the basics), UK: Routledge (paperback: $18.98).

Abnormal Psychology (3 credits) with an emphasis on “maladaptive behaviors.” A valid mental disorder exists when some internal psychological system is unable to function as it is designed to function and when this dysfunction is inappropriate in a particular social context (Alan Horwitz, Creating Mental Illness, 2002).

Health Psychology (3 credits) – How do psychological, behavioral, and cultural factors contribute to physical health and illness?

Biopsychology (3 credits) – The study of the neurobiological, genetic, and developmental mechanisms that give rise to mind (cognition, affect) and behavior. Seitz, J. (2019, 1st ed.). Mind embodied: The evolutionary origins of complex cognitive abilities in modern humans. NY: Peter Lang (targeted readings).

Practicum – Externship (6 credits) – Aristotle wrote in the Nicomachean Ethics (350 B.C.E): “For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them” or what is now known as experiential learning.