Alan Fogel

University of Utah | UOU · Department of Psychology

Touch is a central component of mothers' and infants' everyday interactions and the formation of a healthy mother-infant relationship. Twelve mothers and their full-term infants from the Midwest, USA participated in the present study, which examined the quality and quantity of their touching behaviors longitudinally at 1-, 3-, 5-, 7-, and 9-months...

words, terms not referring to here and now, are acquired slowly in infancy. They are difficult to acquire as they are more detached from sensory modalities than concrete words. Recent theories propose that, because of their complexity, other people are pivotal for abstract concepts’ acquisition and use. Eight children (4 girls) and their mothers we...

Restorative embodiment is a state of being that involves a sense of peace, safety, connection, oneness, and being completely in the present moment. Most of us could use some of this as we begin to recover from the pandemic and the global social, political, and economic upheaval it triggered. In RESTORATIVE EMBODIMENT AND RESILIENCE: A GUIDE TO DISR...

This coding system is based on a view of communication as a creative relational process, rather than an exchange of discrete packages of information between individuals. In this perspective, information (meaning) is viewed as emerging spontaneously between continuously active communication partners. Communication that is both continuously coordinat...

The first abstract words, terms not referring to here and now, are acquired slowly in infancy. They are difficult to acquire as they are more detached from sensory modalities than concrete words. Recent theories propose that, because of their complexity, other people are pivotal for abstract concepts’ acquisition and use. Eight children (4 girls) a...

This article is based on a keynote lecture from the European Association of Body Psychotherapy, Berlin, 2018. I review research and clinical evidence for three distinct states of embodied self-awareness (restorative, modulated, and dysregulated), each with distinct qualities of felt experience, thought process, autonomic nervous system activation,...

This document is a collection of ALL of the segments from the Practitioner post-session notes that could be classified as Restorative, Modulated, or Dysregulated Embodied Self-Awareness. The segments included in this document comprise about 90% of the total content of the Practitioner notes. The remaining 10%, not included here, are practitioner re...

This research report establishes evidence for three distinct states or ways of experiencing Embodied Self-Awareness (Restorative, Modulated, and Dysregulated), each with distinctly different qualities of client behavior, thought and felt experience. The research is based on post-session notes of observations of client behavior made by their Rosen M...

One goal of Part 2 of this research report is to present a summary of practitioner observations of their own feelings and thoughts as recorded in the same post-session notes used in Part 1. Another goal is to see if practitioner feelings and thoughts correspond in some way to the practitioners' observations of the client's state of ESA. The methods...

The science and practice of feeling our movements, sensations, and emotions. When we are first born, before we can speak or use language to express ourselves, we use our physical sensations, our “body sense,” to guide us toward what makes us feel safe and fulfilled and away from what makes us feel bad. As we develop into adults, it becomes easy to...

Fluctuations of good days and bad days-in physical symptoms and emotional states-are common for individuals with chronic illness. This pilot study examines these fluctuations during bodywork treatment. We analyzed changes in daily self-reports over a period of five months for five individuals who received weekly treatments of Rosen Method Bodywork...

Aims: This project aims to analyze and describe an individual’s changing sense of self in the contexts of changing and chronic pulmonary illness, Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM) and conventional care. Background: Idiopathic Pulmonary Fibrosis (IPF) is a type of interstitial pneumonia and is characterized by a relentlessly deteriorati...

A microgenetic research design with a multiple case study method and a combination of quantitative and qualitative analyses was used to investigate interdyad differences in real-time dynamics and developmental change processes in mother-infant face-to-face communication over the first 3 months of life. Weekly observations of 24 mother-infant dyads...

ABSTRACT The aim of the present study was to examine the contextual effects of social games on prelinguistic vocalizations. The two main goals were to (1) investigate the functions of vocalizations as symptoms of affective arousal and symbols of social understanding, and (2) explore form-function (de)coupling relations between vocalization types an...

Dialogical Self Theory, co-regulation, and foundational movement analysis are used to present a description of the development of the dialogical self during the first five months of life using observations of two mother-infant dyads. Susan and her mother illustrate normative emergence of the dialogical self. Susan's I-positions emerge through posit...

The degree to which infants’ current actions are influenced by previous action is fundamental to our understanding of early social and cognitive competence. In this study, we found that infant gazing manifested notable temporal dependencies during interaction with mother even when controlling for mother behaviors. The durations of infant gazes at m...

Abstract— This article discusses some of the ways in which dynamic systems approaches have been applied to developmental science. Dynamic systems thinking suggests that (a) there is always change within stability at the level of real-time (microscopic) behavior, and (b) microlevel change provides the seeds for developmental (macroscopic) change. It...

Abstract— This article offers the concept of embodied self-awareness (ESA) as a contrast to parental embodied mentalizing, which is presumed to be implicit and outside awareness. ESA, which consists of awareness of both sensorimotor and emotional states, is essential for all forms of human development and self-regulation and is learned via mutual e...

The face-to-face interactions of infants and their parents are a model system in which critical communicative abilities emerge. We apply machine learning methods to explore the predictability of infant and mother behavior during interaction with an eye to understanding the preconditions of infant intentionality. Overall, developmental changes were...

Prehistory of Infancy: 1.6 Million to 10,000 Years AgoEarly Civilizations: 8,000 BCE–300 CEMiddle Ages and Renaissance: Third Century to Sixteenth CenturyThe Enlightenment: Seventeenth Century to Nineteenth CenturyThe Recent Past: Twentieth CenturyThe Twenty-First Century and BeyondReferences

The types of touch used by 12 mothers with their 1-, 3- and 5.5-month-old infants were examined longitudinally during two different interaction contexts lasting 5 min each. Changes in maternal touching as a function of infants' age and interaction context were revealed.

How do human beings develop and function in relation to the human and natural world? The science of dynamic systems focuses on connections and relationships between people rather than on individual actions alone. This collection of engaging, non-technical essays, written by dynamic systems scientists in psychology, biology, anthropology, education,...

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This paper presents a qualitative case study of emotional development in the context of early mother-infant communication. Emotions and communi- cation are conceptualized as an integral part of a dynamic developmental system. The fundamental design principle employed is to isolate a key devel- opmental transition and then to closely examine micro-...

When Susan was one-and-one-half years old, she had been playing the "lion game" with her mother for the past few months. With a lion puppet on her hand, Susan's mother made the lion roar, tickle, bite, and tease Susan, who seemed delighted to be aroused and frightened. Susan and her mother first concocted this curious blend of happiness and fear, a...

The dynamic systems approach is an emerging interdisciplinary set of principles used by a diverse collection of scientists to help understand the complex world in which we live. The main insight that unites these scientists, despite wide differences in methods and concepts, is a focus on connections and relationships. A relationship between a parti...

Each of the chapters in this book points to expanding our understanding of the multiple and complex relationships that surround development through the lifespan. In this chapter, we as the organizing committee of the Council for Human Development give a brief description and overview of the science of dynamic systems that is exemplified in the othe...

The dynamic systems approach is an emerging interdisciplinary set of principles used by a diverse collection of scientists to help understand the complex world in which we live. The main insight that unites these scientists, despite wide differences in methods and concepts, is a focus on connections and relationships. A relationship between a parti...

Yoshiko wouldn't reveal her son's name, because of fears that her neighbors in a suburb of Tokyo might find out. Three years ago, a classmate taunted her seventeen-year-old son with anonymous hate letters and abusive graffiti about him in the schoolyard. After that, he went into the family's kitchen, shut the door, and refused to leave and he hasn'...

IntroductionPrehistory of Infancy: 1.6 Million to 10,000 Years AgoEarly Civilizations: 8000 bce–300 aceMiddle Ages and Renaissance: Third to Sixteenth CenturiesThe Enlightenment: Seventeenth to Nineteenth CenturiesThe Recent Past: The Twentieth CenturyThe Future

This up-to-date overview of the fast-moving field of infant development covers all the major areas of interest in terms of research, applications and policy. Provides an up-to-date overview of progress on important developmental questions relating to infancy. Balances North American and European perspective. Written by leading international researc...

To better understand the form and recognizability of neonatal smiling, 32 newborns (14 girls; M = 25.6 hr) were videorecorded in the behavioral states of alertness, drowsiness, active sleep, and quiet sleep. Baby Facial Action Coding System coding of both lip corner raising (simple or non-Duchenne) and lip corner raising with cheek raising (Duchenn...

ABSTRACT. The present paper is grounded on the premise that emotions are an essential component of self development as they simultaneously foster a sense of connection with and differentiation from others. Emotions are viewed as holistic as they dynamically involve the whole body and emerge in dialogical contexts. Emotions involve feelings of being...

The purpose of this paper is to propose a theoretical model, based on a dynamic systems perspective and the metaphor of aliveness in communication. Traditional concepts and methods for the study of communication are relatively static and based on the metaphor of signal and response. These traditional methods lend themselves to relatively simplified...

Infant smiles emerge even in the absence of visual feedback, but their interactive development and intensification appear to be dependent on experiences of visually mediated interaction. Although neonatal smiling has no clear emotional content, social smiling emerges out of attentive engagement with an interactive caregiver. This process illustrate...

To explore the relational-historical processes by which infants may develop an intersubjective sense of self in a relational context, one mother-infant dyad was observed weekly across the 9-month developmental transition, using a microgenetic research de- sign. Qualitative research methods were used to study the developmental changes in the dynamic...

Different types of smiling varying in amplitude of lip corner retraction were investigated during 2 mother-infant games--peekaboo and tickle--at 6 and 12 months and during normally occurring and perturbed games. Using Facial Action Coding System (FACS), infant smiles were coded as simple (lip corner retraction only), Duchenne (simple plus cheek rai...

This paper presents a dynamic systems methodology for the study of interindi- vidual communication in social systems. Since dynamic social systems are fluid, changing, emergent, developing, and yield created information in a meaning-making process, it fol- lows that dynamic systems research best serves scientific discovery by substantiating these s...

Just as each person develops from infancy to adulthood, all interpersonal relationships have a life history that encompasses the changes in how people communicate with each other. This book is about how a relationship transforms itself from one pattern of communication to another. The authors present a unique research method called 'relational-hist...

In this paper, we will discuss the problem of hikikomori, in which an individual remains at home, typically isolated in the bedroom, with limited contact to the outside world. Hikikomori has been discussed primarily from a psychological perspective in Japan. In this paper, we take dynamic systems perspective, incorporating historical and cultural p...

Weekly observations documented developmental changes in mother-infant face-to-face communication between birth and 3 months. Developmental trajectories for each dyad of the duration of infant facial expressions showed a change from the dominance of Simple Attention (without other emotion expressions) to active and emotionally positive forms of atte...

This study investigated the social regulatory function of infant nondistress vocalization in modulating maternal response. Thirteen infants and their mothers were observed weekly in a face-to-face interaction situation from 4 to 24 weeks. After the occurrences and the speech quality of infant nondistress vocalization were identified, maternal conti...

In this study the authors attempted to unravel the relational, dynamical, and historical nature of mother-infant communication during the first 6 months. Thirteen mothers and their infants were videotaped weekly from 4 to 24 weeks during face-to-face interactions. Three distinct patterns of mother-infant communication were identified: symmetrical,...

Between 10 and 24 months of age, children progress from communicating through conventional signals to communicating through symbols in a variety of situations. The present study investigates this transition analysing mother–child communication frames and the child's communicative acts, and tracing the developmental changes in both frames and commun...

Dynamic systems theory is a way of describing the patterns that emerge from relationships in the universe. In the study of interpersonal relationships, within and between species, the scientist is an active and engaged participant in those relationships. Separation between self and other, scientist and subject, runs counter to systems thinking and...

As technology improves, the possibilities for new ways of conducting research emerge. This article focuses on the use of Adobe Premiere video editing software in qualitative research. Examples from our studies of mother-infant relationships will be used to highlight some of the advantages and disadvantages of this new tool in observational, qualita...

This study documented the growth of the earliest form of face-to-face communication in 16 mother-infant dyads, videotaped weekly during a naturalistic face-to-face interaction, between 1 and 14 weeks, in 2 conditions: with the infant in the mother's arms and with the infant semi-reclined on a sofa. Results showed a curvilinear development of early...

The first aim of this paper is to present a theory of development of the dialogical self in which change originates in creative innovations during intrapersonal and interpersonal dialogues that highlight the self (Fogel, 1993, 2001b). Dialogues form into regularly recurring routines, called frames, that are either creative (changing, developing) or...

Infants over one month of age tend to produce two types of smiling during especially positive social interactions, Duchenne smiles involving cheek raising and open-mouth smiles. Little is known, however, about the prevalence, frequency, duration and organization of these smiles among neonates. Twenty-five full-term, healthy neonates (12 female) wer...

This study documented the growth of the earliest form of face-to-face communication in 16 mother–infant dyads, videotaped weekly during a naturalistic face-to-face interaction, between 1 and 14 weeks, in 2 conditions: with the infant in the mother's arms and with the infant semi-reclined on a sofa. Results showed a curvilinear development of early...

Weekly laboratory observations of free play for 13 middle-income mother–infant dyads, from 1 to 6 months of age, were used to study the synchronization of developmental trajectories between infant postural position and gaze direction. Mothers sat in a straight-backed chair while holding infants on their laps and were free to adjust the infant’s pos...

Disagreement as to whether all smiling or specific types of smiling index positive emotion early in life was addressed by examining when infants produced different types of smiling and other facial expressions. Thirteen infants were observed weekly from 1 to 6 months of age. Smiling alone--without cheek raising or mouth opening--was relatively more...

Recent ideas concerning the development of self and identity have stressed the importance of moving away from an approach which is mainly concerned with outcomes, to one which focuses instead on processes of development and, more specifically, on a relational perspective on these processes. Identity and Emotion, first published in 2001, focuses on...

This study investigated the associations of the quantity and quality of infant nondistress vocalization with maternal and infant social actions (smiling and gazing) during dyadic interaction. Thirteen infants and their mothers were observed weekly in a face-to-face interaction situation from 4 to 24 weeks. Results showed that the quantity (rate per...

This study is an investigation of the development of infant vocalization in a changing and dynamic mother-infant communication system. Thirteen infants and their moth- ers were observed weekly from 4 to 24 weeks of age in a face-to-face interaction situa- tion. Three patterns of mother-infant communication dynamics were classified: sym- metrical (m...

Different types of infant smiles in the family of positive emotions were investigated during two mother-infant games: peekaboo and tickle. There were 27 6-month-old infants and 28 12-month-olds. Infant smiles were coded as simple (lip corner retraction only), Duchenne (simple plus cheek raising), play (simple plus jaw drop), and duplay (simple plus...

My relationship with dynamic systems theory and attachment theory goes back to the early 1970s. As a doctoral student interested in mother-infant communication and development I read Bowlby’s Attachment and Loss, vol. 1 [1969], and Ainsworth’s Infancy in Uganda [1967]. At more or less the same time, I read von Bertalanffy’s General System Theory [1...

Multiple case study developmental pathway research is needed to substantiate the theoretical propositions of the target article.

The early development of infant non-distress vocalizations was investigated in this study. Thirteen infants, from 4 to 24 weeks of age, and their mothers were observed weekly in a face-to-face interaction situation. The speech quality (syllabic versus vocalic) and melodic complexity (simple versus complex) of infant vocal- izations were coded indep...

Este é um comentário baseado nos artigos deste Número Especial. Uma leitura desses artigos sugere que eles se unem em torno dos seguintes temas gerais: orientação relacional (em oposição a foco em indivíduos, corporificação sensual do self (em contraste com concepção mentalista de self), visão de desenvolvimento como co-construção histórica que é c...

Laughter in infant-directed speech was examined in 13 mother-infant pairs to investigate the possible co-occurrence of speech and laughter. Contrary to previous findings in adult-adult social interaction, all mothers produced speech simultaneously with laughter in up to 50% of laughs. In most of these speech-laughs the onset of laugh and speech was...

Laughter in infant-directed speech was examined in 13 mother-infant pairs to investigate the possible co-occurrence of speech and laughter. Contrary to previous findings in adult-adult social interaction, all mothers produced speech simultaneously with laughter in up to 50% of laughs. In most of these speech-laughs the onset of laugh and speech was...

The painting ‘Nighthawks’ (1942) shows three people sitting at the counter of a city diner. It must be late at night because no one is on the street except the viewers. We look into the diner at the subjects, incased in plate glass tinted green and yellow. It was one of many paintings in which Edward Hopper probed human loneliness and alienation in...

In positive social contexts, both adults and older infants show more Duchenne smiling (which involves high cheek raising) than non-Duchenne smiling (which does not). This study compared Duchenne and non-Duchenne smiles in early infancy for clues to their emotional significance. Infants (N = 13) from 1 to 6 months of age were videotaped weekly for 5...

To understand the development of nonverbal communication, the manual gestures of 11 infants between 9 and 15 months of age were observed while they played with their mothers several times a month. Infants were more likely than their mothers to request objects and less likely to respond to requests for objects, suggesting a relatively acquisitive st...

This chapter examines the definition of emotion and how emotions develop. Although many researchers speak of the development of emotion, there is neither consensus about what emotions are nor what it means to say that they develop. These issues have been the focus of an ongoing debate between differential (Izard, 1994; Izard & Malatesta, 1987), cog...

This study examined the relationship between smile type and play type during parent-infant interactions in the home. Thirty-six mother-infant and father-infant dyads were videotaped playing for 10 min. Smile type (basic, Duchenne, and duplay smiles) and play type (object, physical, vocal, and book reading) were coded. Results of loglinear analysis...

This study examined the relationship between smile type and play type during parent-infant interactions in the home. Thirty-six mother-infant and father-infant dyads were videotaped playing for 10 min. Smile type (basic, Duchenne, and duplay smiles) and play type (object, physical, vocal, and book reading) were coded. Results of loglinear analysis...

In this chapter we present a summary of our recent work examining emotional development in infancy from a dynamic systems perspective. Our goal is to describe the studies that have evolved from our research group and to explain how these studies have been informed by dynamic systems thinking. We open this chapter with a theoretical overview, foll...

This reference work provides broad and up-to-date coverage of the major perspectives - ethological, neurobehavioral, developmental, dynamic systems, componential - on facial expression. It reviews Darwin's legacy in the theories of Izard and Tomkins and in Fridlund's recently proposed Behavioral Ecology theory. It explores continuing controversies...

This book is designed to report not only the facts about infants but also to convey the vitality of infants as developing human beings. This is accomplished by taking a chronological approach to infant development. The goal in each chapter is to construct a multifaceted picture of babies in a particular age period. Similar topics are covered in eac...

This is a study of differences in physical contact and tactile interpersonal behaviours between Hispanic and Anglo mothers and infants living in the United States. Infants were 9 months old and 52 mother–infant dyads, 26 Hispanic and 26 Anglo, were videotaped during free play without toys in a university laboratory playroom. Coders judged the inter...

To test hypotheses derived from a specificity model of the development of children's nurturance, parents of preschool, second-grade and fifth-grade children (n=707) reported the frequency of their children's play with and care of pets as well as play and care directed to younger siblings, non-family babies, and elderly persons. Parents also reporte...

The ontogeny of referential offers was examined in a longitudinal, within dyad case study of two mother–infant pairs. A combination of microanalytic and qualitative methodologies was employed in describing the functions and morphology of this gesture, as well as its temporal and sequential organization with a number of infant and maternal behaviour...

Laughter occurs in contexts of social interaction where coactive vocalizing is a common mode of exchange. This study looked at the timing parameters—mean duration of laugh, rate per minute of laughter and proportion of session laughed, and temporal sequence patterns—isolated, self-repetitive, reciprocal, and coactive in mothers and infants over the...

Recordings were obtained of the laughter vocalizations of four 3-year-old children during three sessions of spontaneous free-play between mother and child in a laboratory playroom. Acoustic analysis was used to determine laughter durations, laughter events, F0, and harmonic characteristics, and to suggest a taxonomy of laughter types. Melodic conto...

Weekly observations of thirteen mother-infant dyads, from one to five months of age, were used to examine whether the type and timing of maternal changes in infant postural position were related to infant gaze, facial expression and reaching. Results show that mothers changed the infant's position more frequently when the infant was gazing away fro...