Closing in on Intimacy and Emotions

Abstract

Jamieson, Lynn (1998). Intimacy: Personal Relationships in Modern Societies. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press and Blackwell Publishers Ltd.. 209 pp. Paper ISBN-0-7456-1574-0, price $00.00. Scheff, Thomas J. (1997). Emotions, the Social Bond, and Human Reality: Part/Whole Analysis. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. 249 pp. Paper ISBN-0-521-58545-7, price $19.95. Sroufe, L. Alan (1995). Emotional Development: The Organization of Emotional Life in the Early Years. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. 263 pp. Paper ISBN-0-52162992-6, price $19.95. Among the many sub-disciplines of the social and behavioral sciences, summarizing the strides each has accomplished in producing lasting understandings of emotional and intimate relations would be difficult. Theorists and empirical investigators have followed widely divergent, only occasionally complementary undertakings. Sorting through the best efforts leads one to believe that substantial progress is emerging: but observing the reinvention of the wheel in other works would temper this hope. The works of Jamieson (1998) and Scheff (1997) arrive from differing sociological viewpoints, while that of Sroufe (1995) embodies a developmental psychology providing an interesting synthesis of attachment and emotional development theories. Sroufe begins Emotional Development by asserting the need for observational studies of early emotional development. By focusing attention simultaneously on normative emotional development and individual differences, research on emotional development can bridge previously divergent theoretical formulations of developmental psychology. The author proposes studies of emotional development in the earliest years of life that revolve around the emergence of individual affect, the conditions that promote the infant's ability to modulate change in affective expression, and finally the caregiver-infant attachment context in which expressive development takes place. Particularly innovative in this attempt is the last element, included throughout the studies as an attempt to bridge the aforementioned divergent research. The specific caregiver-infant context allows substantive observation of individual differences as well as normative development of emotional expression, as Sroufe's work amply illustrates. Unnoticed by Sroufe is that this attachment context would also allow further extension of his empirical findings to other social scientific perspectives (e.g., social psychology and sociology). Because the caregiver-infant relationship is a critical feature of the social context under observation, its effects on infant evaluation and regulation of emotional expression are considerable. The developmental perspective Sroufe has developed over several decades involves examinations of the ways behavior is organized, how it functions for the individual, and how early behaviors build into a pattern of behavioral organization. Precursor behaviors are a crucial point of empirical observations made with infants, for they lend the earliest clues to the emergence, organization, and regulation (interchangeably termed modulation) of emotional expression. Determining the core features of the normative developmental process also allows interpretation of individual differences in regulatory capacities. In turn, this brings to bear the caregiver-infant attachment context in explaining individual variations. Four assumptions guide the empirical studies, according to Sroufe. First among these is the ontogenetic principle. Every behavior, even those assumed to be innate, develops over time in changing manifestations. To explain a behavior,s development, a process must be described that initially includes prototypes, or core features of what will later arise in a more elaborate form. We might think of these as outlines of later behavior: one instance is the earliest or non-social smile, occurring without human stimulation of the young infant. …