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Background Emotions, Proximity and Distributed Emotion Regulation

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Abstract

In this paper, we draw on developmental findings to provide a nuanced understanding of background emotions, particularly those in depression. We demonstrate how they reflect our basic proximity (feeling of interpersonal connectedness) to others and defend both a phenomenological and a functional claim. First, we substantiate a conjecture by Fonagy & Target (International Journal of Psychoanalysis 88(4):917–937, 2007) that an important phenomenological aspect of depression is the experiential recreation of the infantile loss of proximity to significant others. Second, we argue that proximity has a particular cognitive function that allows individuals to morph into a cohesive dyadic system able to carry out distributed emotion regulation. We show that elevated levels of psychological suffering connected to depressive background emotions may be explained not only in terms of a psychological loss, but also as the felt inability to enter into dyadic regulatory relations with others—an experiential constraint that decreases the individual’s ability to adapt to demanding situations.

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Notes

  1. Some additional sustaining evidence can be found in the work of Lakoff and Johnson (1999; also Johnson 1987) who suggest that emotional experiences are usually expressed by employing bodily and spatial metaphors.

  2. “Die Möglichkeit anderer Wege der Erschliessung (…) kann jedes Subjekt insofern nur als realisiert durch andere denken, die ihn selbst in ihere Verfassung gleichen.” (Henrich 2007, 148)

  3. This intersubjective and intermodal interpretation of infant imitation is not universally accepted. See Jones (2009) and Ray and Heyes (2011) for dissenting views.

  4. For Rochat, co-awareness is behaviourally manifest in early face-to-face interaction via socially elicited smiling, which occurs about 6 weeks or so after birth (Rochat 2004, 7). This expression is the first public signal linked with association and not mere satiation (i.e., the reception of basic physical care from caregivers).

  5. This is further illustrated, for example, by two month-olds’ frustrated emotional reaction toward the adult who adopts an emotionally unresponsive “still face” after having first initiated an interaction (Tronick et al. 1978; Murray and Trevarthen 1985). Moreover, prior to developing a conceptualization of the self (i.e., around 18 months), infants display “self-other-conscious affects” that perform both a regulatory and a constitutive role in interpersonal interactions (Reddy 2008: 145). They show embarrassment when praised, coyness when greeted, pleasure in interaction, and pride in overcoming obstacles. These affective states are the medium through which the infant becomes aware of herself in relation to another, that is, as an object of another’s attention (Reddy 2008: 145; cf.). Co-awareness is thus essentially affective.

  6. For example, Murray and Trevarthen (1985) have showed that when the infant and the caretaker interact via a double TV monitor, the baby becomes distressed when the live footage of the mother is replaced with a recording of her behaviour earlier in the same interaction. The lack of an ongoing open-ended engagement carrying a sense of contingency is what disturbs the baby (also Fonagy and Target 2007).

  7. This characterization of EF is admittedly quite broad; moreover, there is no universally accepted definition of EF or its subcomponents (Martin and Failows 2010). Although EF is generally thought to emerge near the end of the first year (Zelazo and Müller 2010), the rudiments of EF are nevertheless present the first moments that infants and caregivers interact (Vygotsky 1997, p.153).

  8. Like breastfeeding, merely holding and gently rocking a distressed infant to help them achieve a quiet state is another instance of external affect regulation. These physical interventions are often accompanied by the singing of lullabies, which can serve as yet another kind of environmental scaffolding helping to organize infant emotions. Infants entrain their gestural, respiratory, and affective responses to their rhythmic and melodic structure (Trehub and Trainor 1993, 1998; see also Krueger 2011).

  9. Tronick (1998; 2002) has argued that in synchronous interactions and mutual regulation of emotion infant and caretaker enter into dyadic states of consciousness, in which both experience an expansion of their own state of consciousness and together form a new, shared state.

  10. Interestingly, there is virtually no way to accurately differentiate between depressive background emotions and affective states connected to bereavement. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV) criteria for a diagnosis of major depression excludes individuals with recent loss (bereavement exclusion) (Miller 2011).

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  1. Department of Philosophy, University of Memphis, 327 Clement Hall, Memphis, TN, 38152, USA

    Somogy Varga

  2. Department of Philosophy, Durham University, 50 Old Elvet, Durham, DH1 3HN, UK

    Joel Krueger

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Varga, S., Krueger, J. Background Emotions, Proximity and Distributed Emotion Regulation. Rev.Phil.Psych. 4, 271–292 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-013-0134-7

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