Re: [xmca] Polls are closed: Manfred Holodynsk's article is choice

[Andy Blunden <ablunden@mira.net>]

The article by Joscha Kärtner et al deals with the issue of mirroring of 
emotional expression by care-givers at somewhat greater length and 
concludes:

In this article we have argued that socio-emotional development can only 
be understood in the context of social practice and underlying 
ethnotheories of caregivers that give significance to infants’ emotional 
expressions. In doing so, we have focused on a specific aspect of early 
socio-emotional development, namely the emergence of social smiling 
during infancy. Synthesizing empirical findings from autonomous and 
relational, especially rural Nso, cultural milieus, we showed how 
dominant ethnotheories and associated behavioral routines concerning 
emotional development vary systematically across cultural milieus and 
influence infants’ emotional expressivity and experience. Concerning the 
development of social smiling, future studies should focus on assessing 
ethnotheories concerning infant smiling and adequate reactions more 
explicitly (instead of inferring ethnotheories from behavioral routines 
or from what was not said if compared to other cultural milieus). 
Furthermore, future studies should also consider other relevant 
caregivers, especially sibling caretakers, and their function for 
emotional development (e.g., Lamm, 2008). Finally, future studies should 
take a closer look at the dynamics of mother-infant interaction around 
positive emotions and how these dynamics develop longitudinally across 
the first year of life.

From a sociocultural perspective, ethnotheories and social practices 
around affect mirroring and infant smiling are an interesting phenomenon 
because they have important implications for the emergence and further 
development of infants’ self-awareness. Mirroring infant smiles leads to 
an increasing awareness of subjective emotional states in infants. Thus, 
infants become subjectively aware of their inner psychological states in 
the sense of feelings organized by increasingly distinctive and 
conventionalized expression signs that are experiences as distinctive 
emotion states (Gergely & Watson, 1999; Holodynski & Friedlmeier, 2006, 
2012).

Thus, culture-specific differences in affect mirroring and infant 
smiling lay the ground for differences in infants’ self-awareness, which 
has implications for the further development of the self-concept in 
different cultural milieus. For instance, Kärtner and colleagues (2012) 
have shown that, during the second year, cultural contexts differ 
greatly regarding the age at which toddlers develop mirror 
self-recognition. More specifically, the ability to identify one’s 
mirror image develops earlier in urban middle-class contexts that 
emphasize the development of autonomy as compared to relational cultural 
milieus. The authors of this study argue that mirror self-recognition 
reflects a specific representation, namely the representation of the 
self as an autonomous intentional agent that is based on subjective 
self-awareness. Thus, not only do toddlers need to possess the ability 
for secondary representation but they also need a specific object or 
state to represent, in this case their own mental states (intentional 
and emotional). In this sense, it is not necessarily toddlers’ general 
representational capacity that differs across cultures but toddlers’ 
awareness of themselves, especially self-awareness of their internal 
states.

This specific type of self-awareness seems to be the result of social 
interaction, which enables toddlers to conceive of themselves as selves 
in the minds of others (Rochat & Zahavi, 2011). What seems to be 
critical in this regard is the degree to which caregivers direct their 
infants’ attention to their own internal states. During the first months 
of life, this is primarily realized through caregivers’ affect 
mirroring, which sensitizes toddlers to their intentional and emotional 
self-states, which they consequently become increasingly aware of.

Thus, culture-specific ethnotheories and social practices regarding 
infant smiling have substantial developmental consequences that go 
beyond culture-specific developmental trajectories of infant smiling in 
that they may constitute and lay the ground for infants’ self-awareness 
and conception of the self.


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