Colwyn Trevarthen

University of Edinburgh | UoE · Department of Psychology

The aim of this study is to analyse the development of communication and cooperation in three different kinds of dyads: a western human dyad, a chimpanzee dyad, and a dyad composed of a human and a baby chimpanzee. These three different kinds of dyads participated in this research. We observed them for 12.37 h, 9 h, and 10.6 h, respectively, using...

Edizioni Frenis Zero, Collana "Confini della Psicoanalisi", pagg. 276, ISBN 978-88-97479-38-3 Presentazione: Questa prima edizione italiana viene pubblicata dopo la morte di Arnold Modell, a cui questo libro è dedicato insieme a tre dei pionieri del dialogo tra psicoanalisi ed infant research: Daniel Stern, Berry Brazelton e Jeremy Nahum. Il libro...

Mothers and infants co-regulate their distance from one another at home. Continuous, naturalistic home observations of the changes in mother-infant distance were carried out in Japan and Scotland during infant ages of 0-1, 6-7, and 12-13 months. This study examined mutual distance-increasing and distance-reducing behaviours, referred to as parent-i...

Consciousness directs the actions of the agent for its own purposive gains. It re-organises a stimulus-response linear causality to deliver generative, creative agent action that evaluates the subsequent experience prospectively. This inversion of causality affords special properties of control that are not accounted for in integrated information t...

This article offers a neuroscientific explanation of the experience of autism as a disruption to the embodied experience of the Core Self. It recognizes human experience is integrative by nature. Attending to the insights of Penelope Dunbar (Pum), who has lived with autism for decades, we explore an affective neuroscience understanding of autistic...

In this study, we evaluate mothers’ subjective experience of speaking and singing to their infants while they are in their incubators. We also discuss the relevance of the theoretical framework of Communicative Musicality for identifying the underlying mechanisms that may help explain its beneficial effects, both for parents and infants. Nineteen m...

This paper offers a neuroscientific explanation of life with autism which recognizes that human behavior and experience is by nature both personal and interpersonal. With a focus on insights of Penelope Dunbar (Pum) who has lived with autism for decades, we explore an affective neuroscience understanding of autistic experience and how to work creat...

This paper offers a neuroscientific explanation of life with autism which recognises that human behaviour and experience is by nature both personal and interpersonal. With a focus on insights of Penelope Dunbar (Pum) who has lived with autism for decades, we explore an affective neuroscience understanding of autistic experience and how to work crea...

Human learning is inspired with the purposes and feelings of individuals who seek conscious, in-the-moment cooperation. It is social and co-created through mutual attunement of the movements of body and mind. In school, the interested learner needs to be encouraged by a skilled teacher sensitive to the rhythms of the child’s friendly, open vitality...

A young child moves with her own agency or initiative, using a dexterous body to create experiences she enjoys and learns, enabling early development of a ‘sensorimotor intelligence’ for her own benefit. She is also born with ‘affectionate social intelligence’, wanting to share discoveries of experience and to build their meaning with parents and p...

This is a book about kindness in care for young children and about how we need to share the inventions of our liveliness in close relationships to help with the unhappiness of emotional disorders. When we want to help a baby or toddler who is expressing sadness, or anger, or confusion and distress and who acts as if they want to be alone, we must k...

In the 1960s, partly a result of the availability of television for micro-analysis of life in spontaneous communication with infants, there was a revolution in the scientific understanding of how the human mind grows. The inquisitive and responsive way a healthy baby moves shows that humans are born for intimate sharing of interests and feelings th...

Jaswal & Akhtar's outstanding target article identifies the necessary social nature of the human mind, even in autism. We agree with the authors and present significant contributory origins of this autistic isolation in disruption of purposeful movement made social from infancy. Timing differences in expression can be misunderstood in embodied enga...

Jaswal and Akhtar identify the necessary social nature of the human mind, even in autism. We agree with the authors and present significant contributory origins of this autistic isolation in disruption of purposeful movement made social from infancy. Timing differences in expression can be misunderstood in embodied engagement, and social intention...

This book has the hard task to cover an interdisciplinary area in which psychoanalysis has to deal with infant research. The development of infant research methodologies is illustrated in the present book by the contribution written by Beatrice Beebe, whose ‘journey’ leads us through the ‘creating’ of a discipline with its creators, her traveling c...

Music is at the centre of what it means to be human – it is the sounds of human bodies and minds moving in creative, story-making ways. We argue that music comes from the way in which knowing bodies (Merleau-Ponty) prospectively explore the environment using habitual ‘patterns of action,’ which we have identified as our innate ‘communicative musica...

Consciousness begins as a part of imagined ‘projects’ for moving intentionally from the present moment step by step in measured time. This term ‘project’ holds to its original Latin sense -- as an imaginative activity, a “throwing forward of movement for realization of a purpose”. It is not only the abstract or symbolic representations of such inte...

This paper examines evidence for a disorder of the intrinsic motive processes of the purposeful self in autism spectrum disorder (ASD), which leads to weakening of shared experience in early childhood. Changed motor and affective regulations that identify autism are traced to faults in neurogenesis in the core brainstem systems of the fetus. These...

A mother talking and playing with her infant a few weeks old shares delicate patterns of movement with her child, matching rhythms and expressions of emotion. The infant is an active, sensitive, and creative partner, often taking the lead. The dynamics and affections or emotions of their relating depend on innate adaptations for moving the human bo...

Forty years ago, Tony DeCasper developed a new psychology of childhood, which would transform scientific understanding of motives we share. By adapting an operant method to study the initiative of the infant seeking experience, he clarified how human actions are generated in measures of time in the mind. His method offered the newborn the opportuni...

We review evidence that, from birth, infants have purposeful consciousness of rhythmic whole-body movement, with multi-modal perception of objects outside their body, and self-related emotional appraisal of experiences. Newborns also exhibit a special human awareness of the vitality of company in actions and feelings, and a capacity to use imitatio...

This chapter presents the child as a creature born with the spirit of an inquisitive and creative human being, seeking understanding of what to do with body and mind in a world of invented possibilities. He or she is intuitively sociable, seeking affectionate relations with companions who are willing to share the pleasure and adventure of doing and...

Eleven infant-mother dyads in Crete were videod during spontaneous interactions at home, from the second to the sixth month of life. Micro-analysis was used to investigate'coordination'and 'non-matching' of facial expressions of emotion. 'Emotional coordination' was evaluated with four measures: matching of facial expressions, completion when one r...

Research on the timing of spontaneous actions made from birth—for self-sensing of the infant’s own body posture and movements, for perceptual apprehension of objects or events in the outside world, and for intimate communication with a parent—proves that innate measures of time regulate prospective control of body actions of a coherent human Self....

A newborn infant displays self–other-awareness, searching in its own imaginative space-time of body movement for exciting sights and sounds, and ready to engage impulses and emotions in intimacy with other persons. Soon rhythmic proto-conversations and games invent propositional narratives of aliveness with joyful ‘communicative musicality’. By mon...

Research on the consequences of complete section of the forebrain commissures in cats and monkeys, and in human patients operated to control epilepsy, has clarified how the brain mediates perception, learning, memory, and the control of movements, and has raised many questions. No single process of consciousness and no simple localization of ‘modul...

In half a century, micro-analysis with the aid of film and television, of how infants move their many parts with grace and intelligence from birth, especially how a baby displays and directs their movements to “attune” with the movements of the mother as a human companion, so that intentions, interests and feelings may be shared, has led psychologi...

This article outlines a theory of the social psychobiology of movement that recognises humans have a special, body-based talent for sharing in the imaginative creation of emotionally coloured life stories. Microanalysis of natural mother–infant play demonstrates an innate preparedness for whole-bodied, synchronous participation in social life. We d...

All human culture, and all forms of knowledge and of narratives we make about “reality” grow from the unique organs and abilities we are born with. Our innate motor intelligence, with sensory and motor organs adapted for self-regulation and for perceptual engagement of intentions and emotions with objects, is also uniquely animated for creative com...

Narrative, the creation of imaginative projects and experiences displayed in expressions of movement and voice, is how human cooperative understanding grows. Human understanding places the character and qualities of objects and events of interest within stories that portray intentions, feelings, and ambitions, and how one cares about them. Understa...

I study the biological foundations of human cultural intelligence, and how they are supported. I observe the development of human motives for agency, the emotions that evaluate what is discovered, and the ways interests and discoveries and feelings may be shared with others. Ed Tronick and I have been privileged to study infants closely over severa...

Imitation is essential for cultural learning, language and conventional reasoning, but its development been controversial for millennia, and remains problematic. Many psychologists deny newborns imitate, believing that months of learning will need a self-awareness to construct representations of mental states for perceiving others' intentions and e...

The paradox which wrecks so many promising theories of education is that the training which produces skill is so very apt to stifle imaginative zest. Skill demands repetition, and imaginative zest is tinged with impulse. Up to a certain point each gain in skill opens new paths for imagination. But in each individual formal training has its limits o...

This paper presents the child as a creature born with the spirit of an inquisitive and creative human being, seeking understanding of what to do with body and mind in a world of invented possibilities. He or she is intuitively sociable, seeking affectionate relations with companions who are willing to share the pleasure and adventure of doing and k...

This article recalls how Dr. Berry Brazelton, in the past 50 years, has transformed pediatrics and childcare and supported parents' understanding of their young children. Berry's work as a pediatrician and basic research in the psychobiology of childbirth and infant communication and care have proved to be richly complementary. Brazelton and the au...

We review evidence that autistic spectrum disorders have their origin in early prenatal failure of development in systems that program timing, serial coordination and prospective control of movements, and that regulate affective evaluations of experiences. There are effects in early infancy, before medical diagnosis, especially in motor sequencing,...

Dr Daniel N. Stern worked for 50 years as psychiatrist, psychotherapist and child psychologist. His sensitive researches have transformed our conception of the infant Self, and how from birth we strive to grow our understanding and skills in intimate connection with the affective life of others, creating narratives of dynamic imagination in movemen...

We consider evidence for innate motives for sharing rituals and symbols from animal semiotics, developmental neurobiology, physiology of prospective motor control, affective neuroscience and infant communication. Mastery of speech and language depends on polyrhythmic movements in narrative activities of many forms. Infants display intentional activ...

My aim is to shew, although this is not generally attended to, that the roots of all sciences and arts in every instance arise as early as in the tender age, and that on these foundations it is neither impossible nor difficult for the whole superstructure to be laid; provided always that we act reasonably with a reasonable creature." (John Amos Com...

This chapter introduces the argument that emotions are proactive in the human mind. It suggests that the evolution of the social functions of emotions and inter-subjective behaviours in infancy lead to cultural learning and language acquisition. Emotions associated with the three different orientations of the body to experiences - to the self, towa...

This chapter seeks the source of the self-creative process that makes music by asking: how can a newborn baby, possessed of powerful means of soliciting the care of its life from a mother, also have the power to create or recognize music-like behaviour, and to share it? It has been discovered recently that infants have a discriminating interest in...

The policies and administration of early education and support for social development constantly need re-defining, or re-inspiring, by taking into account the perspective of a young child. They must acknowledge the intuitive abilities and values, and growing initiatives that are present in the child from birth and that motivate learning. Innate imp...

As thinking adults depend upon years of practical experience, reasoning about facts and causes, and language to sustain their knowledge, beliefs and memories, and to understand one another, it seems quite absurd to suggest that a newborn infant has intersubjective mental capacities. But detailed research on how neonatal selves coordinate the rhythm...

The sections in this article are:

Conventional views of musicality involve sensitivity, knowledge or talent for music. One would therefore expect communicative musicality to involve the sharing of this sensitivity, knowledge or talent with others. For the editors of this volume, however, communicative musicality is consid-erably broader in scope. Malloch and Trevarthen define music...

Imitation in humans has been attributed to increased activation of the mirror neuron system, but there is no neural model to explain reciprocal communication. In this study, we investigated whether reciprocal, communicative, imitative exchanges activate the same neural system as imitation of simple movements, and whether the neural network subservi...

There appear to be two ways to understand or explain our minds scientifically, an introspective/analytical task not normally demanded of us in the activities of daily life. Theorising, estimating or ‘talking about’ the process of our experience leads to the two ways psychologists distinguish what is ‘real’ and what we ‘imagine’ to be so — how what...

Cultures depend on a ceaseless, highly creative learning process, which is not just an acquiring of information transmitted by instructing the young. It is motivated by an innate human talent for companionship in experience, which is mediated by an intersubjective transfer of intentions, interests, and feeling in conversations of rhythmic motor act...

Human beings move coherently as individual selves, body and mind adapted to perform complex activities with imagination, knowledge, and skill; perceiving the environment by engaging it with discrimination and care. Human beings live intersubjectively in communitiesl each with the rituals, beliefs, and language of a culture, along with a history of...

According to Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection, the existence of mental operations proves their usefulness. Darwin called himself a mental materialist. This is one scientific theory of consciousness. Human consciousness has three useful aspects: awareness, intentionality and sharing with others. All have simple equivalents in animal...

Infants, like adults and many animals, move with rhythmic gestures that express motive states and changes of emotion and mood. But the communications of babies have a special creativity and message power. Infants are ready at birth to take turns in a “dialogue” of movements with a loving parent. They are attracted to extended engagement with human...

This article draws on many years of research into the development of communication, play and cooperation in the first year of life to argue that, from their very earliest days, babies are highly motivated to learn, and are profoundly influenced in their learning by the interplay or ‘protoconversations’ between themselves and their parents and carer...

This chapter contains section titled:

This chapter presents a psychobiological model of early musical behaviours or ways of moving musically - one that accepts music as a natural behaviour essential to being human. At least in infancy and preschool years, an innate communicative musicality is inseparable from other ways children demonstrate a lively self-expression while acting in inte...

First Paragraph: Mirror Neurons to Empathy, pp. 281-302. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. CHAPTER 16 To Sing and Dance Together: From Infants to Jazz Benjaman Schögler and Colwyn Trevarthen Communicative Musicality Is Part of Us, The Way We Converse By Moving First Paragraph: Of all the ways we human beings share company, and communicate be...

This study examined whether pitch patterns of prelinguistic vocalizations could discriminate between social vocalizations, uttered apparently with the intention to communicate, and 'private' speech, related to solitary activities as an expression of 'thinking'. Four healthy ten month old English-speaking infants (2 boys and 2 girls) were simultaneo...

Roger Wolcott Sperry received the Nobel Prize for Physiology and Medicine in 1981. Famous for experiments on the embryology and regeneration of functional nerve connections, on perception and learning in split-brain cats and monkeys, and on hemispheric modes of consciousness in human beings following commissurotomy, his belief that awareness and me...

Survival depends upon two contrasting phenomena or processes, two ways of achieving adaptive action. Evolution must always, Januslike, face in two directions: inward towards the developmental regularities and physiology of the living creature and outward towards the vagaries and demands of the environment. These two necessary components of life con...