Evolutionary Emotional Development
Most people are instinctively trusting of others, not quick to rush to judgement, willing enough to give others the opportunity to display their own trust in response. This is what makes us social creatures, our ability and willingness to give others some latitude in expressing themselves, in proffering the hand of friendship however tentatively. We relate easily to one another as though in acknowledgment that at the most basic level of instinctual response, we are more alike than different in our emotions and needs.Now, it would appear, new research seems to confirm just that. A research team from Yale University has recently published a paper in the journal Nature affirming our biological evolutionary traits which enable us at an age young enough to preclude the effects of social nurturing, to evaluate others on the basis of potential helpfulness. A type of instinctual cognitive-visual processing that enables pre-language infants to assess an adult's character. Whereby a child will instinctively isolate a potential friend from a disinterested neutral.
That's pretty amazing. And, in a sense, encouraging. Since, if the ability to distinguish character types - those who are sensitive to the needs of others from those who express indifference and non-interference - exists at such an early stage of mental development, can we then not infer that most humans are capable of offering friendship and understanding to one another. And doesn't our own personal experience as adults inform us that this is so?
The surprising thing being that it is not only a conclusion arrived at by life's experiences, but one which we are geared by a kind of collective instinct to direct ourselves toward, accordingly. Most people, when approaching a stranger can offer the warmth of a casual greeting; two individuals passing through the often-mundane minutiae of life. Perhaps never to meet again, but in the brief exchange affirming our humanity.
Babies exhibiting an instinctual capacity to deliberately identify the potential of helpfulness and interest in another individual as opposed to other individuals whom they are able to discern lacks those attributes. And toward whom, as a result, they shrink from contact, while willing to absorb attention from the open-hearted others. Doesn't this represent an eminently practical value, in being able to discriminate between the two?
Of course nothing is that simple. And matters become rather complicated when, for example, young children succumb to troubling situations with strangers or even trusted friends when their judgements turn out to be incorrect. Placing them in dangerous situations where someone can readily prevail upon a child's instincts for trust, then betraying that trust through abuse or neglect or lack of emotional support.
Which produces another effect entirely, a pathology of judgemental impairment. And further, a self-doubt in the child's value to himself, to others, to society. Betraying a child's trust leading to denial, self-loathing, sociopathic tendencies. Likely most of us are born with the right stuff, the emotional well-being that makes us vulnerable to disappointment and rejection.
It is when our personal history lacks timely and urgent emotional supports that we become incapable of offering the same. It is the happenstance of nurturing or lack of it, of emotional support and critical encouragement or lack of it, that completes and complicates the transition from emotional security to emotional wasteland.
Just thinking. Just rambling on. Just trying to focus on what it is exactly that makes us so relatively well-adjusted socially. Or, on the other hand, completely bereft of empathy for others.
Labels: Human Fallibility, Realities, That's Life
posted by Pieface @ Thursday, November 22, 2007
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