Exquisite Reception

'Attunement reveals the receptive elaboration of the intensity, shape and timing of affective expressiveness, and occurs largely out of awareness and almost automatically, while empathy requires conscious cognitive mediation. Attunement involves emotional resonance which is recast into another form of expression - a distinct form of affective transaction in it's own right, which relates to the intensity, timing and shape of behaviour. Stern's lovely example is illustrative:

'A 9-month-old girl becomes very excited about a toy and reaches for it. As she grabs for it she lets out an exuberant 'aaah!' and looks at her mother. Her mother looks back and scrunches up her shoulders and performs a terrific shimmy with her upper body, like a go-go dancer. The shimmy lasts about as long as her daughter's 'aaah!' but is equally excited, joyful and intense'.

Many things are happening in this moment. The expressive tendrils of a child's bodily experiences are recognised, held in a sharing moment by another's body, in another register, and that transformed expression is returned to the child. This is contingency for beginners. Something of the child's experience, which is outside of words, has a material effect on the interpersonal world-her mother-and that reception is conveyed to the child in a different key. The child learns not merely 'What I do makes a difference' (behavioural contingency) but 'What I experience, express, am-for-a-moment makes a difference' (experiential, receptive contingency). And the proof of that is that not only its visible, expressive reception, but it's translation into another register, which permits the child to see it again, to see it in a new way, from another's perspective. [Italics mine]. This provides for the child a non-specular reflective experience of her own bodily experience. She has the opportunity to know the reality of her own bodily and mental experience intersubjectively as much by the senses of proprioception and kinaesthesia. The child in this moment has the possibility of realizing that her experience can be detected and received, of realizing there is a mutual mentality. Not to put too fine a point on it, perhaps this experience is an affective prototype of moving towards a theory of mind; the pleasure of other minds'.

Ref:

McIlwain, D. (2007). Rezoning Pleasure: Drives and Affects in Personality Theory, Theory & Personality, 17(4), 529-561.