The influence of vitality forms on action perception and motor response

During the interaction with others, action, speech, and touches can communicate positive, neutral, or negative attitudes. Offering an apple can be gentle or rude, a caress can be kind or rushed. These subtle aspects of social communication have been named vitality forms by Daniel Stern. Although they characterize all human interactions, to date it is not clear whether vitality forms expressed by an agent may affect the action perception and the motor response of the receiver. To this purpose, we carried out a psychophysics study aiming to investigate how perceiving different vitality forms can influence cognitive and motor tasks performed by participants. In particular, participants were stimulated with requests made through a physical contact or vocally and conveying rude or gentle vitality forms, and then they were asked to estimate the end of a passing action observed in a monitor (action estimation task) or to perform an action in front of it (action execution task) with the intention to pass an object to the other person presented in the video. Results of the action estimation task indicated that the perception of a gentle request increased the duration of a rude action subsequently observed, while the perception of a rude request decreased the duration of the same action performed gently. Additionally, during the action execution task, accordingly with the perceived vitality form, participants modulated their motor response.

Film és gyerekjáték

A tanulmány Jean-Pierre Meunier gyerekjátékokra tett rövid utalásaiból indul ki, majd arra kérdez rá, hogy mit taníthatnak a gyerekjátékok Meunier filmes azonosulással foglalkozó modelljéről. Meunier magyarázata szerint a filmes azonosulás a „szinkretikus szociabilitásból”, valamint abból kikülönülve alakul ki. A szinkretikus társas hajlam az „anonim kollektivitás” állapota, amely a csecsemőkorra és a kora gyermekkorra jellemző, és felnőttkorban sem tűnik el teljesen. Azt vizsgálva, amit Daniel Stern „vitalitásformáknak” nevezett, pontosabb képet alkothatunk arról, hogyan történik meg a váltás a Meunier-féle „elsődleges interszubjektivitás” és a „privát interszubjektivitás” között. A vitalitásformák továbbá kiegészítik Meunier árnyalt leírását a nézők, a karakterek és a film közötti affektív kapcsolatról, mivel általuk fókuszba kerülnek az esztétikai mozzanatok, amelyek révén ez a kapcsolat létrejön.

Gestalt-Terapia e Daniel Stern: Dialogando sobre a Relevância da Corporeidade e da Dimensão Afetiva na Psicoterapia

This paper discusses the importance of the corporal and implicit dimension of the experience for the theory and practice of Gestalt-Therapy psychotherapy. We believe in a model of clinical practice that leans on this affective dimension. We start with a brief exploration of the notion of self as a process of contact, emphasizing the pre-contact and the id function of the self as the moment of the common dimension of the experience we share with the world and with the other. As we understand it, the id function is predominantly sensory, based on corporeality, being configured as a fundamental support for the experience of the difference and the novelty. From this, we propose a dialogue with Daniel Stern, exploring his concepts of vitality affect and affective attunement to affirm that our communication with the other is established not only by the way of speech, by formal thought, explicit and reflective, but also by an affective and vital dimension. From these notions, we discuss the concept of Gestalt-Therapy's awareness, differentiating it from the notion of reflective consciousness and considering it a kind of "bodily knowledge" and implicit experience, apprehended when relating to otherness. Finally, we conclude that psychotherapeutic work and dialogue constitute a relationship of coaffectation that generates deviations, "dis-centerment", and transformations. Palavras-chave : Gestalt-Therapy; Corporeity; Id Function; Awareness; Psychotherapy.

The moment of play and movement: A qualitative study of children’s playful shared movements

The aim of this article is to investigate children’s playful shared movements on the preschool playground and to understand their doings when they perform apparently new and unexpected movements in these meetings. Video observations and field notes from two preschools constitute the empirical material, and we have analyzed three situations from the video observations to investigate the research question. The findings indicate that children in playful movement interactions use their habits to create moments that introduce something new and unexpected, what Daniel Stern (2007) conceptualizes as critical now moments. These now moments are opened up by imaginings, transformations, and excitement. In these moments, children can be creative and curious, leading to opportunities to experience growth in how they use their body and the place. Whether now moments led to creativity, growth and development, seemed to depend on the emotional attunement between the participants.

The Risks of Affect

This chapter dwells on axiological and existential tensions raised by the concept of ecological attunement. First, it distinguishes this concept from Heidegger’s well-known discussion of attunement and world. Then, it places Whiteheadean/Deleuzean concepts of affect and feeling in dialogue with the affect theory of Sylvan Tompkins and Daniel Stern, arguing that the “vitality affects” of the latter are ontologically prior to constituted worlds in a phenomenological sense. It considers how attention to affective tertiary qualities are shaped by inheritance of affective patterns and attentive choices of the past while also oriented towards a potentially open future. In this way, selection (from inherited qualities) and orientation (towards future projection) become the two sides of ecological attuning as an existential ideal. This double-sided structure is considered in relation to Whitehead’s discussion of “evil” and Deleuze’s emphasis on willing the event and counter-actualisation.

Vitality form expression in autism

The notion of “vitality form” has been coined by Daniel Stern to describe the basic features of action, which may reflect the mood or affective state of an agent. There is general consensus that vitality forms substantiate social interactions in children as well in adults. Previous studies have explored children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD)’s ability in copying and recognizing the vitality forms of actions performed by others. In this paper we investigated, for the first time, how children with ASD express different vitality forms when acting themselves. We recorded the kinematics of ASD and typically developing (TD) children while performing three different types of action with two different vitality forms. There were two conditions. In the what condition we contrasted the three different types of action performed with a same vitality form, while in the how condition we contrasted the same type of action performed with two different vitality forms. The results showed a clear difference between ASD children and TD children in the how, but not in the what, condition. Indeed, while TD children distinguished the vitality forms to be expressed by mostly varying a specific spatiotemporal parameter (i.e. movement time), no significant variation in this parameter was found in ASD children. As they are not prone to express vitality forms as neurotypical individuals do, individuals with ASD’s interactions with neurotypical peers could therefore be difficult to achieve successfully, with cascading effects on their propensity to be tuned to their surrounding social world, or so we conjecture. If this conjecture would turn out to be correct, our findings could have promising implication for theoretical and clinical research in the context of ASD.

A CORPOREIDADE E A ANÁLISE FUNCIONAL DO CORPO NO MOVIMENTO DANÇADO EM DIÁLOGO COM OUTRAS PRÁTICAS CORPORAIS

Este texto traz a Análise Funcional do Corpo no Movimento Dançado em diálogo com as práticas corporais de Angel Vianna, Klauss Vianna e a Eutonia de Gerda Alexander, articulada ao conceito de corporeidade com as estruturas lançadas por Hubert Godard – somática, perceptiva, coordenativa e simbólica, apoiada em Christine Roquet. O texto ainda apresenta o tema do funcionamento quiasmático – intrasensorial, intersensorial, parasensorial e inter-corporeidade de Michel Bernad aliado ao pensamento de José Gil com o conceito de sensório-motor, contato improvisação e de Daniel Stern com o conceito de percepção amodal e afetos de vitalidade.

Vitality from Experiences in Nature and Contact with Animals—A Way to Develop Joint Attention and Social Engagement in Children with Autism?

Animals are increasingly included in treatment for children with autism, and research has shown positive effects, such as increased social initiatives, decreased typical autistic behaviors, and decreased stress. However, there are still knowledge gaps, for example, on underlying mechanisms and effects from longer treatment duration. The purpose of this study is to contribute to these gaps and ask questions about the ways in which animals and nature can improve conditions for psychological development through support from therapists. The method is based on grounded theory. Data comes from a treatment model (duration 1½ years, a total of nine children), from environmental psychology and developmental psychology, both typical and atypical as in autism. The results consist of three key categories; reduce stress and instill calm, arouse curiosity and interest, and attract attention spontaneously. These three key categories are related to an underlying core variable, vitality forms, which was described by Daniel Stern and, according to him, is important in forming overall experiences. The starting point is the brain’s way of encoding many internal and external events based on movement perception. Here it is argued that the vitality forms from nature and animals are particularly favorable for effecting development-promoting interactions with a therapist.

Emerson Attuning: Issues in Attachment and Intersubjectivity

This essay reads Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essays in light of attachment theory, in particular the work of Daniel Stern. After providing an overview of attachment theory, it focuses on Stern’s argument that infants begin life in a relational state, gradually organizing a sense of embodied selfhood out of experiences of attuned interactions with other people. This image of subjectivity is presented as a corrective to the dominant conception of subjectivity in critical theory. The essay then uses Stern to argue that Emerson’s work elucidates an experience of early attachment trauma, driving a charged search for intersubjective contact and embodied presence in his work. This search informs Emerson’s response to the nineteenth-century logic of race: he understands race as a term for infinite connection at the level of biology, and responds to it with articulations of a different form of connection found at the level of the individual experience of the body within intersubjective relation. Subjectively oriented and embodied interdependency, visible in both Stern and Emerson, constitute a mode of interconnection crucially different from that which is the focus of actor-network-theory and critical work influenced by it.