The Regrettable Neglect of Affect: Comment on Karin Junefelt's paper

Abstract

The recent upsurge of attention to Vygotsky's writings in developmental psychology, with their welcome focus on the role of the adult, on interaction and on the connection between communication and cognition constitutes a healthy redress to the Piagetian focus on the autonomous child operating in a world of things and actions rather than a world of people and relationships. In light of the corrective potential of Vygotskian ideas, it is not surprising that they have been embraced widely. Unfortunately, despite the initial appeal of central Vygotskian notions like the zone of proximal development, the intraindividual recapitulation of interindividual processes and the use of language as mediational means, it is very hard to take these notions beyond the status of slogan to the status of explanatory concept. A valuable contribution made by Junefelt in her article “The zone of proximal development and communicative development” is to give concrete examples of how these Vygotskian notions can help us understand a particular domain of development — communication.