Commentary

Human Development 2003;46:233–246

DOI: 10.1159/000070372

Infant Psychology Is an Evolving Culture

C. Trevarthen
The University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK

Key Words
Companionship ` Group awareness ` Infant psychology, methods `
Intersubjectivity ` Language foundations

‘Infants in Groups: A Paradigm for the Study of Early Social

Experience’, Human Development 2003;46:197–221

This beautifully crafted paper is both informative and provocative, and I be-
lieve it does excellent work for the science of human development in both respects.
It is presented modestly as a pioneering study of a handful of infants, but the situa-
tion in which these subjects were recorded is new, the method of interpretation is
rich and carefully thought out, and the analysis is detailed and revealing. I believe
some of the more provocative claims, while acting like a salutary ‘wake-up’ call,
reveal a political under-text that we have a right to question, but the main purpose
has been to show how restricted the established methods of research on infant so-
cial intelligence have become, and how much has been missed. The argument is so
erudite and tight and the evidence so enchantingly presented that I have difficulty
choosing my comments.
Why do we need this lesson in infant communitarianism? First we must accept
that the academic science, the teaching and the marketing of infant psychology
needs to be challenged where theories and methods fail to grasp essential qualities
of everyday human experience – how a person acts from birth, and how under-
standing and skill develop.
Contemporary research gives value to replicable facts about pre-defined be-
haviors that constitute measurable acts of intelligence or temperament. Psychologi-
cal subjects are usually tested for their perceptions, what they remember about cer-
tain recurring events, how they ‘think’ about limited propositions or operations, or
how they react emotionally to imposed stimuli. This fact-seeking is always selec-
tive in highly artificial ways, always tending to make ‘discoveries’ that depend
upon looking at subjects in a far from the ‘common sense’, sympathetic way we
look upon one another in ordinary life. It requires balancing by more sensitive and
comprehensive methods of enquiry that can appreciate what the unsophisticated

Ó2003 S. Karger AG, Basel Colwyn Trevarthen

0018–716X/03/0464–0233$19.50/0 Department of Psychology, The University of Edinburgh
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infant mind is trying to be and do in normal circumstances. And it is clearly not
possible to appreciate natural sociability fully by looking only at individuals, or at
dyads.
If our wish is to understand the efforts that a child’s mind makes to become
socialized – how it adapts to life with all sorts of responsive human company, ne-
gotiating meanings – then we should look at what can be shared in every normal
sort of company. The idea of seeing what infants can, and want to do together when
they have no adult help is obviously a good one. It is really surprising how this
paradigm has been neglected. Human beings are the most communal of animals,
with an extraordinary ability to share purposes, experiences and feelings about what
happens. All our efforts to keep children emotionally well and to educate them de-
pend on what we think they are capable of sharing socially, without the benefit of
words and other elaborate conventions.
Jane Selby and Ben Sylvester Bradley claim that babies are born with a
‘general relational capacity’ besides the ‘dyadic program’ that generates attach-
ments. They propose that research on infants’ communication with peers is the best
route to understanding the shared meanings that inform language acquisition.
Thirdly, and perhaps most interesting of all their points, they say that understanding
‘nonbasic’ moral emotions requires we discover whether babies can elaborate
‘context-specific meanings’ for admirable or undesirable behaviors in communica-
tion. Each of these claims requires careful examination. But, first let me reflect on
what I see as their important achievement in relation to what might be called the
‘main stream’ of infancy research.

What Laboratory Tests of Infant Perception Have Looked for, and

What Has Really Been Going on

Motives are manifested in the ways infants’ move their whole bodies, not only
to perceive selectively and learn, but also to attain predicted outcomes when they
act on objects, or toward people. Above all, infants act as if they want to get into
habits of communication with other persons, and not just to perceive and recognize
them as either familiar or strange events. Nevertheless, since Robert Fantz [Fantz &
Nevis, 1967] proved, to philosophical sceptics, that newborn infants had surprising
and useful perceptual preferences for visual patterns that define 3-D objects remote
from their bodies, and that they distinguish human faces as particularly fascinating
objects, cognitive theory tends to draw researchers toward a physicalistic account
that restricts the field of enquiry about infant perception and recognition, as well as
limiting options open to experimental subjects captive in their infant seats. The
babies mainly just turn their heads. But even that simple orientation has a social
potential; and, though they may not see it that way, this sharable subjectivity is
what the experimenters are exploiting.
Perceiving is voluntary – cognition in the service of moving [von Hofsten,
2001]. The inquisitive activity of the infant consciousness was, of course, Piaget’s
discovery, but his philosophy and method led the way to an objective and rational-
istic epistemology – of the ‘little scientist’ in the crib. What Hanus Papousek
[1967] and Richard Held [Held et al., 1980], as well as Robert Fantz, observed in
their particular experiments with very young subjects would never have been re-

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vealed to them such remarkable perceptual skills, and habituation to boring repeti-
tions, if the babies were not curious and hopeful. Held once said that researchers
would be sunk if the infant’s eyes and ears were not organs of eager investigators.
There was a more self-consciously purposeful and emotional element in this studi-
ousness that Piaget and many of his followers have overlooked.
Moreover, conscious acts with feeling [Freeman, 2000; Panksepp, 2000]. An
infant’s acts of orientation or prehension are commitments made with some pas-
sion. Hanus Papousek [1967] noted that in learning to be an operator who is trying
to control effects of his or her head turns, a baby a few months old expresses glad-
ness when successful, and disappointment or irritation at failure. Papousek said that
babies mastered instrumental learning in ‘a human way’. These infants were poten-
tial actors in society, displaying their feelings about what happened. As my col-
league Margaret Donaldson [1991] puts it, babies show to us that they experience
‘purposes and concerns’, not just knowledge. Their problem solving is one sign of
their living in a hopeful future, seeking good sense that ‘feels right’. Their behavior
indicates that they expect to share it. The many experiments to analyze infants’
perceptions that, in 30 years, have transformed the philosophical foundations of
developmental psychology are also demonstrations of the kind of world infants
anticipate – a world that is humanly sociable and creative of meaning. The people’s
awareness of infants may have been in the background of the path-finding studies
of infant cognition, but it was there.
Anthony DeCasper [DeCasper & Carstens, 1981; DeCasper & Fifer, 1980]
used instrumental conditioning to test newborns’ special interest in the human
voice, and he concluded, from its persistence, that the babies’ sucking to choose
speech was ‘intentional’ – i.e., seeking responsive company. Patricia Kuhl [2001],
Peter Juszyck [2001] and others have used preferential orienting to show that in-
fants under 6 months have a sensitivity to nuances of voicing and articulation in an
affectionate mother’s speech, and that an interest in words as labels for sharable
experiences, or meanings, develops in the first year. Anne Fernald [1989] demon-
strated the special sensitivity to the prosody or ‘music’ of a mother’s affectionate
speech, and with Mechthild and Hanus Papousek she underlined the complemen-
tary melodious adaptations of ‘intuitive parenting’ that lead affectionate adults ev-
erywhere to talk in ways that target the infants predilections and sensitivity for
transients in emotion [Fernald, 1992; Fernald et al., 1989; Papousek & Papousek,
1987]. Sandra Trehub [1990] and Lauren Trainor [1996] also exploited the method
of tracking infants’ selective listening for sounds by turning their heads, and
showed that, around 6 months at least, the infants have a ‘connoisseur’s’ sensibility
to a comprehensive range of musical features in sounds, be they of the human
friendly or singing voice, or of a pitched musical instrument. Babies are aware of
dynamic features of music that are characteristic of all musics in every culture, and
they have musical preferences like those of untrained adults [Trevarthen, 1999].
This appreciation of natural melodies, like the special awareness of a mother’s talk
as carrier of a particular language tradition, must be an innate talent that is polished
up and elaborated by highly motivated learning of fine distinctions in the art of
musical culture. Stephen Malloch [1999] calls the gift we all have for music
‘communicative musicality’, and he has defined its universal parameters of ‘pulse’,
‘quality’ and ‘narrative’ – all expressive of the ‘intrinsic motive pulse’ or IMP of
human action and awareness [Trevarthen, 1999].

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2003;46:233–246
 The richest, most attractive sounds and sights and touch experiences in the
young infant’s world are those that come from other persons’ bodies moving, and
the infants are specially sensitive to dynamics – to the rhythms of repeated acting,
and to the timing of others’ reactions to the infant’s own discrete expressions of
sociability, to what Stern [1985/2000, 1999] calls the ‘dynamic narrative enve-
lopes’ of ‘relational emotions’ seeking interpersonal ‘attunement’ and ‘flow’. This
is an expressivity an infant can soon share with anybody, including another infant.
That is what the infant cognitivists have missed [see Custodero & Fenichel, 2002,
and also Trevarthen, 2002].

The Nature and Scope of Infant Intersubjectivity:

Both Love and Companionship in Action

In the 1960s, as Selby and Sylvester Bradley report, microanalytic film studies
exposed intricately timed and emotionally qualified behaviors in infant-adult inter-
actions, contact-seeking behaviors that could not be explained as responses to sign
stimuli, or learned reactions. Here I have a small correction to make to their ac-
count. While one group was discovering this at Harvard [Bruner, 1968; Trevarthen,
1998], two other projects, in New York [Stern, 1971] and in Cambridge, Mass. at
MIT [Bateson, 1979], were making crucial and quite independent observations of
infants’ playful ‘interpersonal world’ and ‘protoconversational’ abilities, respec-
tively. This was not one group emerging under Jerome Bruner’s guidance in Har-
vard, but a kind of Zeitgeist or awakening, a response of an educational psycholo-
gist, biologists, a pediatrician, a psychiatrist and a linguist-anthropologist to a
growing awareness that infants have many talents that science may not know.
Infants are actors with expressive and receptive sociability, a sociability that
goes beyond what a young animal needs for protection and nurturance, one that
seeks friendship in the discovery of interesting experiences in a peculiar human
way [Trevarthen, 2003]. Though slow to develop independent mobility compared to
other mammals, and correspondingly more dependent on a mother for getting to
comfort, support, food and drink, a baby begins ready for more than care. The new-
born already shows signs of a unique playful conviviality or ‘chattiness’ by means
of facial, vocal and gestural expressions of inner motive states, including emotional
narratives of being alive and inquisitive in a ‘mind time’ that has expectant
rhythms, phrases and developing story-lines. In intimate contact, a newborn can
instantly respond to a wide range of expressions from the other person’s moving,
detecting their contingent responsiveness. Mothering has its special motivations,
and whether male or female, related or not, a sympathetic human, child or adult, is
inspired with tenderness and joy by proximity to a young infant, a state that is ex-
pressed in the special rhythms and accents of body movement and voicing. Infant
and other seek ‘intersubjective’ engagement, by which I mean engagement of the
intentions, attentions and feelings that define the consciousness of an animal crea-
ture [Trevarthen, 1979].
It is important to note that human expressive movements and sensibilities are
richer than those of other primates, and infants are born with mastery of their essen-
tial characteristics and uses. Thus, engagement even with a newborn is specifically
human in its intensity and narrative power. It is ‘protoconversational’, anticipating

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a cultural learning mediated by arbitrary rituals and practical activities and experi-
ences to be categorized and given fixed meaning in relationships. Thus is language
made possible. Dissanayake [2000] makes the case that such engagement of pleas-
ures in creating made all the arts possible and necessary, too.

Readiness for the Group, and for Sharing Habits and Knowledge
with Older Teachers, and with Peers

Cultural learning has only recently become recognized as a naturally different

life activity, evident though limited in scope in apes, and pervasive and infinitely
elaborated in human groups [Tomasello et al., 1993]. Human minds need to live in
and feed on a collective wisdom of words, ideas, knowledge and skilled actions
invented and shared by others, most of whom lived in the past [Donald, 2000].
Patient observation of how a baby becomes a culture- and language-hungry
toddler has revealed that the process of cultural learning is something that grows in
the child as a need, as well as something acquired through instruction [Bråten,
1992; Trevarthen, 2003]. Infants and toddlers imitate purposefully, wanting to
share and show in exchange of interests and actions with trusted others. Their imi-
tating facilitates the intentions of a parent or teacher to ‘socialize’ and educate. It
has both moral and intellectual aspects in its motivation and in its benefits
[Foreman & Kochanska, 2001]. If the child’s need is not met by interested partici-
pation, a feeling of depressed sadness or anger can result. This kind of adult-child
relationship is certainly not the same at attachment for protection and care, and I
have distinguished it as ‘companionship’ [Trevarthen, 2001a]. It goes beyond the
bodily needs of the infant to satisfy investigative curiosity and artistic invention. It
has an implicit reference to knowledge or an ‘aboutness’, even in a protoconversa-
tion with a 2-month-old. Hobson [2002] calls it ‘The Cradle of Thought’. And, we
must agree it has rich potential for extended sociability with others who are not
necessarily bigger, stronger, more mobile, cleverer, kind and giving of milk. This is
the aspect of human sociability brought amusingly and vividly to life in the testi-
mony that Selby and Sylvester-Bradley draw from their videos of infant trios.
But the babies observed here are quite old. They are well past the initial inward,
dreamy being-in-the-present state of a half-awake newborn infant, who may be ur-
gently moved by hunger, other bodily discomfort or fear of an unsupported loneli-
ness. Six-month olds are adventurous, theatrical, curious, quick to shift attentions and
aware of their ‘image’ as actors in others’ eyes and ears [Trevarthen, 2002]. Their
communication with their mothers and fathers is often casual or even dismissive,
quick to slip off to find, explore and manipulate something in the world that can sat-
isfy an individual interest that can be called ‘cognitive’ or ‘rational’ – unless, that is,
the parent is skilfully seducing participation in a lively and humorous game or song.
Babies of this age also show off, sulk, challenge, mock, protest, flirt and show a
proud indulgent love for a good act of friendship, and shame when their efforts to
share are rebuffed or misconstrued [Draghi-Lorenz et al., 2001; Reddy, 2000, 2001,
2003; Trevarthen, 2002]. And they appreciate expressions of such states of moral
involvement from boys and girls their same age. This is the key message of this pa-
per, and it cannot be used to dismiss the special needs of a younger or distressed in-
fant who cannot possibly have needs satisfied by a peer, or by any young child.

Infant Psychology Is an Evolving Culture Human Development 237

2003;46:233–246
 Dr. Alessandra Piontelli, an expert on the development of identical twins and
on their communication [Piontelli, 2002], is firm in her conviction that, under 3
months, twins, who have the closest possible relationships favoring intimate com-
munication, do not deliberately engage in reciprocal ‘body-language’ communica-
tion, by touch, vocalization and gesture, as older infants certainly do. She observes
that an adult can support richer and more coherent communication at this first
stage. This is the adult serving a complementary or ‘scaffolding’ role to the infant’s
social tendencies, for which the infant and the adult seem adapted. After 3 months
twins may communicate well with each other, negotiating increasingly complex
intentions and mutual interest. I am sure triads of infants 4 months old and younger
will be very different from those over 6 months old, though probably aware of the
company, nonetheless. This is open for research. And it must be admitted that even
among adults, a three-way engagement may not favor intimacy.
There are significant developments in sociability in the first 6 months, along
with other age-related changes in motives for moving the body and for using and
perceiving objects [Trevarthen & Aitken, 2003]. Nevertheless, a newborn already
has a capacity for dialogic engagement that serves conversation and participation in
intermental narratives of feeling and experiencing, rather than transactions of care
[Trevarthen, 1999]. Indeed, Dissanayake has offered evidence that all our impulses
to participate in the arts have their origin in the special intimacy of parent-infant
engagements for mutual pleasure [Dissanayake, 2000]. Imitations also show this
richer potential.
Imitation is a way of being sociable. Socially reciprocated, imitations are an
essential way to share experience, and to test the motives of the other [Uzgiris,
1991], and perhaps his or her identity, as Meltzoff and Moore [1994] have pro-
posed. Neonatal imitation, long disbelieved, is now proven by studies in France,
Greece, Sweden, the UK, the US, Hungary and rural Nepal [see Heimann, 2001;
Kugiumutzakis, 1999; Meltzoff & Moore, 1992; Trevarthen et al., 1999]. Babies
imitate face expressions, hand gestures, shifts of the head and looking or closing of
the eyes and simple vocal sounds within hours of birth. In experimental demonstra-
tions imitating is elicited by exaggerated ‘modelling’ behavior of an adult and in-
terrupted by waiting for a reaction from the infant. Observed in more natural en-
counters it is clearly communication, made with emotions of pleasure, interest, sur-
prise, etc. as the baby intently watches and listens [Kugiumutzakis, 1999; Tre-
varthen et al., 1999], and an infant a few months will use imitations to set up com-
munication with a peer [Fiamenghi, 1997].
This potential of imitation for reciprocity of purely expressive and arbitrary
intentions is brilliantly shown by a study made by Dr. Emese Nagy in Szeged, Hun-
gary with newborn infants. They [Nagy & Molnár, 1994] have examined the pur-
posefulness of this imitation with babies less than 2 days old. Having acted as the
partner who has called for and received an imitation, they paused and watched the
baby patiently. After sometimes 2 min of confrontation, the newborn worked hard
at making the right movement and eventually generated the imitative response
again. This was interpreted as a ‘provocation’, an invitation to continue the ex-
change. Heart-rate measures showed that the newborn was becoming excited and
prepared for action just before imitating (the heart beat accelerated), but became
attentive for the effect of an act provocation (the heart slowed before the gesture of
request). This is an important demonstration of the human readiness for negotiation

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of expressive ‘statements’ and ‘questioning’, or ‘assertion’ and ‘apprehension’, in
face-to-face dialogue. As Nagy and Molnár [2003] describe it, ‘Searching for the
mechanism of neonatal imitation resulted in the discovery of a neonatal initiative
capacity, called ‘‘provocation”. Newborns spontaneously produced previously imi-
tated gestures while waiting for the experimenter’s response.’
The further development of imitations – of expressions, mannerisms, actions,
roles and tasks, as well as utterances, beliefs and opinions – prove their social and
cultural importance, and the ways they can be used in each relationship
[Trevarthen, et al., 1999]. In infancy imitations are part of the regulation first of
protoconversations, and then of the sharing of tasks. In a teaching situation with a
parent, a toddler uses imitation as a way of negotiating social or interpersonal/
emotional transactions as well as acquiring intellectual/practical activities. Thus
both the moral and cognitive aspects of ‘socialization’ are served by the person
sense manifest in imitations [Forman & Kochanska, 2001].

The Primary Relational Capacity

The research on infant’s capacities for protoconversation, for ‘communicative

musicality’, and for taking initiative even immediately after birth in an imitative
exchange of arbitrary expressions or gestures, has convinced me that there is an
innate motivation in humans for making communicative contact that is not for re-
ceiving comfort and care, but for true intersubjectivity [Trevarthen, 1998]. The
developments charted through the first year in the ways infants and mothers exploit
communication and games to share conventions of performance, knowledge and
skills, and especially the age-related changes in the infant’s motivations that lead to
the transition to Secondary Intersubjectivity or shared task performance and
‘protolanguage’ around 9 months [Trevarthen & Hubley, 1978], convince me that
this motivation is the driver of cultural learning, and that it is an attribute of the
infant, matched by the motives to share creativity and teach in the adult. These mo-
tives in the child operate through mirroring of motive states made apparent in body
movement and gesture, and they are regulated by emotions that define the values
and power of contacts and relationships [Trevarthen, 1993]. Throughout the devel-
opment there is a curiosity not just about human-made ‘events’, but about
‘narrative sequences’ or ‘dramas’ of action and participation. These, too, are regu-
lated by emotions that unfold over time and that relate the protagonists of narrative
in complementary ‘roles’ and ‘fates’, colouring their identity. I have claimed that
‘pride’ in a social identity is manifested in the triumph of a 6-month-old showing
off a musical play routine that has been admired by the infant’s family friends, and
also in the complementary ‘shame’ with which the unsympathetic or uncompre-
hending responses of a stranger are greeted [Trevarthen, 2002].
Clearly, I am in very strong accord with the hypothesis that infants have a
‘relational capacity’, and, even though my evidence is primarily from mother-infant
encounters, the motivation for ‘companionship’ that I have described is not the
same as that which Bowlby [1958], quite rightly, gave crucial importance as the
system of motives that animate ‘attachment’ for protection and care. The
‘attachment system’ is a very intricate and powerful one, with special importance in
the regulation of infant health and development. Babies ‘cannot care for each

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other’, and they also cannot teach advanced skills that have been acquired through
generations of practice and invention. Bowlby changed medical practice around
birth and in hospital or orphanage care of infants by increasing awareness of the
infant’s humanity. He did not prepare us for understanding how healthy happy in-
fants exploit comradeship in adventure – the notion of a ‘secure base’ is not
enough. I agree with the authors that ‘the infant’s capacity to form such relation-
ships cannot be of the same kind as the basis for infant-adult attachments’. Mothers
generally are the main caregivers of young babies, and powerfully motivated to be
so, even in the modern world where maternal help from someone else can be more
easily bought and public social ambitions tend to undervalue being committed to
children. But happily, most mothers are also ‘friends’ with their infants, as are their
male partners, and their other children. It is so obvious that a happy infant is a con-
vivial creature appreciating any sympathetic and playful company that it seems odd
there should be any doubt.
But I do not accept that we have to set up one kind of relationship as primary
and the ‘foundation’ of the other, in either a phylogenetic (evolutionary) or an
ontogenetic (developmental) sense. I do not see the evidence that an infant’s brain
needs a ‘clan’ of about 30 people to develop. I believe infants are born with a
range of motives for seeking and using human company, and that these motives
develop of themselves, as well as in response to how intimate and more casual
social events unfold and relationships are formed and tested emotionally. I think
motives for ‘clannishness’ or swimming in the group are strong in children, at
least after the first year, and there is good evidence that 6-month-olds understand a
lot of what their peers are up to, and that they can have their well-being supported
by peer friendships, properly mentored by adults. They can also learn from each
other, in many fantastical and practical ways. If they do not get the people to share
this with, they may invent and grow up for a time with ‘an imaginary friend’.
Long ago, Comenius emphasized how children learn together, from one another,
and stressed that the learning should not be too pressured before the sixth year:
‘When they talk or play together, they sharpen each other more effectually; for the
one does not surpass the other in depth of invention, and there is among them no
assumption of superiority of the one over the other, only love, candour, free
questionings and answers.’ [John Amos Comenius (1592–1671) The School of
Infancy. Translated by D. Benham. London, 1858. Quoted by Quick, 1910, pp. 143
& 144.]
After all, primates generally have a very active period of peer play in which
many social experiences grow and develop. In fact, human mothers are more like
peer playmates in the way they treat their babies than are monkey or ape mothers,
whose offspring will never have to go to school and receive formal instruction. We
cannot deny that asymmetric adult-young dyadic or other relations are of great im-
portance for transmission of culture. Even at University the learning cannot be
taken over by the peer group. In response to Habermas and his rational individualist
philosophy of political relationships, I would say his acknowledgement of intersub-
jective dynamics is great, but he does not appreciate how much value there can be
in the very differences that make relationships less than ‘perfect’. I think Barry
Barnes has a more natural theory of how shared intentions work in the emotionally
regulated pragmatics of larger society.

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 The work of Nash [1995] and others helps us understand how well infants, at
least those of more than a few months old, can form multiple relationships with
people of both sexes and different ages. The value of this paper is to clarify how
much we can gain in understanding of relationships, communication and emotions
by study of that sociability, and to the management of engagement with more than
one other. Equally, I have doubts that a ‘maternal precursor hypothesis’ has much
credibility. On the other hand, I do feel that Ellen Dissanayake’s identification of
maternal companionship and infant interest in intimate maternal displays of play-
fulness may have a strong relationship with the motives of art. There is room for
both intimacy and conviviality in human affairs [Dissanayake, 2000].
I have problems with the explanations of the ‘physiological basis’ of infant
sociability and the, ‘proven developmental importance of relations with peers – as
well as with care givers, in day care centers’, and I do not see that, ‘this view con-
trasts with the idea that the maternal relationship is in essence different, or essen-
tially discontinuous from relations with others’. The work showing that socio-
emotional health of infants and monkeys can benefit from peer support when ma-
ternal support has been absent of poor cannot gainsay the great deal of work on
many species of mammal, as well as humans, that maternal external regulation of
the infant cerebral state and growth is both natural and of great significance. Poor
maternal care does produce consequences in neuro-humoral, emotional, social and
cognitive development [Schore, 1994]. The infant’s brain is certainly adapted to
sympathetic maternal mirroring and regulation, and this can only be substituted by
care that resembles it closely. No peer can do that. Harlow’s deprived monkeys
showed signs that their social motives were abnormal even with peer support. The
new physiology of ‘mirror neurons’ helps give scientific detail to the obvious abil-
ity of monkeys and humans to see one another as intentional agents, and to swap
purposes as these are manifested in body movements or vocalisations, and there is
lots of evidence, too, that brain growth depends on the emotional transfer that goes
on in intersubjective traffic [Trevarthen, 2001b].
In the account of research on the mother-infant dyad, including my own, it is
rather unfairly implied that the laboratory recordings were insensitively carried out
with ‘demand characteristics’ that intensify the mother’s attempts to interest her
baby. We, and others, have taken pains, and succeeded, to invite the mother and set
up a situation where, as much as possible, the baby leads. Almost always the
mother is a very pleased and willing follower. She ‘enjoys’ her infant, not ‘cares
for’ it. Using this approach we have documented a great richness of infant expres-
sions, of mother-infant mutuality and the infant’s sensitivity for appropriateness
and ‘contingency’ in the mother’s response. This adds up to evidence for an inter-
subjectivity attentive to primary and universal features of a sympathetic/interested
human response, and the evidence is that this much is universal in human families,
not culturally negotiable.
The Vygotskian expert-novice model of the cultural transmission process has
distorted some interpretations of adult infant interactions, and not really helped
understanding of the pupil’s active contribution to teaching/learning with older
pupils. In contrast to Piaget, Vygotsky gave primary value to social experience in
cognitive development of the young child, ‘What children can do with the assis-
tance of others might be in some sense even more indicative of their mental devel-
opment than what they can do alone.’ [Vygotsky, 1978]. The research on infant

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communication since the 1960s leads us to a third point of view that acknowledges
the young person’s ‘dispostion’ to learn meanings and skills of the ancestral com-
munity, as part of that community [Bruner, 1996].

Language Acquisition Is Founded on Pre-Verbal Conversation

about Shared Meanings

I definitely agree that language is founded on conversational abilities such as

those found between infants and adults, or between infants, as in the triads de-
scribed. I think the interpretation of language as a sharing of referential acts with
evaluations attached to them by the manner of reference, and by the interpersonal
dynamics, is profoundly important. We get hold of meanings in ‘fully acted out
scenarios’, or stories about such acting. The semantics of words depends upon the
semiosis of mutual involvement in life. I would add that the capacity for such tem-
poral arts as dance, music and miming to engage the narrative awareness of people
is a vital pointer to the metaphoric and ‘literary’ nature of language, often not per-
ceived as such by grammarians and analysts of the structure and logic of the sta-
tionary language of text out of interpersonal context, and out of the time and
‘embodiment’ of its creation. In this I am one with Mark Turner [1996] and Merlin
Donald [2000], and in significant disaccord with Steven Pinker [1994].
However, I cannot accept that communication between peers should be ‘the
best route’ to understanding the shared meanings that inform language acquisition,
better than talk between the child and well-known and trusted adults. In the earliest
stages of learning to speak and understand speech this is not likely. It may become
true later. Adults give support to toddlers using language simply by bating them in
talk, as well as by inviting them to ‘word’ their interests, discoveries and actions in
joint and mutual attention. The getting of one’s name in the first year is like getting
the gist of a memorable nursery song. Both utter the sign of something that gives
pleasure in a shared ritual. Testing word use with a peer may be a very good way
for a toddler to make language work in imagination, especially as a peer may be
better at fantastic invention and rather absurd analogies than an adult. But the use-
fulness of a more expert teacher is far from over at University.
In my paper on ‘musicality’ and the Intrinsic Motive Pulse as a foundation for
shared narratives of action and emotion [Trevarthen, 1999], I noted the importance
of a phrase in time – about 3–5 s –, and how phrases are chained in emotionally
loaded forms to make narratives. This ‘phrase time’ comes up again in the discus-
sion here about identifying a Socially Directed Behavior, such as an ‘initiation’ or a
‘reply’. Well, conversational analysis has found that Coordinated Interpersonal
Timing is critical throughout the development of human dialogue, and that it is also
the frame for emotion, offering information on the quality of that relating between
adult and carer that may have long-term significance for socio-emotional and cog-
nitive development [Jaffe et al., 2001]. I think that the ‘lack of any clear methodol-
ogy for elucidating the construction of such semantic envelopes is crucial obstacle
for the study and acceptance of “non-basic” emotions in the first year of life’ could
be remedied best by bringing in accurate tracing of interpersonal timing. I have
added emphasis here to two words the authors use that may introduce confusion.
The ‘envelopes’ in question are not constructed arbitrarily, but express innate mo-

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tive processes, specifically ‘time in the mind’, and the meaning is not semantic in
any verbal sense, but more semiotic, offering a sign or symptom of motives in the
expressive individual, and their adjustment in the group.

Non-Basic Emotions Require Elaboration of Context-Specific

Meanings

I believe, with Draghi-Lorenz et al. [2001], that the intricate moral aspects of
shared experience and the powerful motives for acquiring knowledge and skills
require ‘relational emotions’ that appraise immediately the standing one has vis-à-
vis the receiving other, and that track changes in that standing. These emotions
must be innate in human beings awareness of one another, and I see clear evidence
from infant behaviors as they learn and display skills that this is so [Trevarthen,
2002]. The so-called basic emotions which set the vocabulary for most psychologi-
cal research on emotional reactions in individuals, do not account for the com-
plexes and changes that actually govern our contacts and relationships. I remember
that Paul Ekman found that photographic composites or ‘blends’ between his emo-
tional Fixed Action Patterns actually made more poignant and morally significant
impressions. But even these were static pictures, and the power of moral encounters
depends on their vitality and its timing, which adds narrative significance to mix-
tures of expressive forms.
I am not quite sure about the elaboration of ‘context specific meanings’, be-
cause I do not see emotions of pride, shame, jealousy and the like as entirely ac-
quired by experience of social contexts, though social situations must condition
their strength and confidence, molding the impulses that come spontaneously with a
naive social awareness. In the descriptions of these infants’ messages these is abun-
dant evidence for the arising in the individuals of states of relating that shape the
discourse, as they weigh up each others’ contributions, not vice versa. So, I am not
easy with the statement that, ‘the physiological significance of particular behaviors
is defined by the shared meaning that they help constitute, not vice versa.’ I believe
that some of the values expressed in engagement are transparent, or instantly inter-
pretable, by a sympathetic/responsive participant/observer as states of the mind/
body. Even with infants, attitudes and moral responsibilities are effective as well as
emergent with meaning acquired in the recollected narrative.
In the delightful soap opera between Mona, Joe and Ann there are recogniz-
able elements in favor of the idea that the infants bring causes that contribute to
what is caused in the history of their encounters. Mona is younger, and she seems
less apt at the social maneuvers, and she gets help from Joe because he seems to
recognize that and acts affably to make her feel more accepted, which miffs Ann.
The elder ones transform Mona’s crying (because she misses her mother!) into the
cat’s chorus. Were the looking patterns influenced by the sex (not gender) of the
infants, since Fiamenghi found clear differences at this age in sociability between
boys and girls in pushchair dyads. There are many questions for further study.
On that ‘rude’ gesture, by the way, isn’t it difficult to know what was intended
and what was felt? I feel sure the posture, gesture and facial grimace is expressive
of a coordinated state of discomfort/avoidance and a clear social message, but did
she ‘intend’ an insult, or was she just so embarrassed that awkwardness overcame

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2003;46:233–246
her. It doesn’t really matter, because in either case such a pattern of moving surely
will have a message for her companions, and they may not care about her
‘declarative’ responsibility for what she did. I think being caught between inner and
outer forces is very much at the heart of conscious and purposeful life. Recently I
and Ken Aitken have attempted to explain age-related changes in communicative
and object-directed behaviors in infants in terms of a dynamic equilibrium between
environment challenging ad venturous states and self-regulating or nurturing states
[Trevarthen & Aitken, 2003]. There is good evidence from physiology and brain
science for such a balance in the regulation of behavior and experience.

A Small Provocation for the Authors

This research seeks to capture and make sense of the spirit of narratives in
triad action, treating the infants as intentional and aware of intentions in each
other’s behavior. First a ‘thick description’ is written in terms of meanings and
feelings, and then a ‘fine grain analysis’ leads to a final ‘inevitably provisional’
interpretation in terms of the weight of ‘best available evidence’. The meaning is
taken to ‘come about’ in the social history of the group, as each infant finds out
what the others are interested in and wanting to show and share. They gained per-
suasive evidence that the infants are clever communicators, making complex emo-
tional evaluations of one another’s acts.
They conclude, ‘In being able to recognize infants as group members, we are
better able to think how to enhance the quality of their group living, to value their
pleasure and struggles in groups and to continue with social and cultural processes
which provide a theoretically sound basis for enabling women looking after the
very young to access companionship.’ (Emphasis added by me.) I hope the discov-
ery of the evolution of meaning and companionship among these infants does not
simply support a feminist position that mothers need liberating from care of infants,
that infants would benefit greatly from out-of-home care in groups, and that infants
need freeing from the oppression of attachment to their mothers. Our social obliga-
tions should not become the judges of our intimacies.

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