How an Infant and Child Develop a Sense of Agency - Essay Example

Discuss how an Infant and Child Develop a Sense of Agency, why this is Important, and what Factors Might Inhibit such a Capa Introduction: Agency literally means authority or a state of being in action or exerting power. In psychoanalysis, this is equivalent to having an awareness of self. It is very difficult to adequately define this term since there is very sparse agreement about its definition amongst theorists, and several different usages of this term. The self-awareness is not just a terminology, self awareness can be regarded as a process that organises and structures experiences in a particular way. The question is how that happens. It leads to development of a subjective sense that refers to observing, knowing, introspecting, and self-respecting self through the subject’s own perspective or viewpoint through the eye of mind. The experience of self or sense of agency develops essentially through maturation of fundamental psychological functions of the individual, and in this essay, this author shall explore the steps of development of agency in a child, its importance, and the factors that might hinder its development (de Vignemont , F. and Fourneret, P., 2004). The human development is a complex process. The early years of a child’s development is characterised by rapid and astonishing growths of the physique and psyche. It apparently happens as a smooth, natural, and spontaneous process in front of millions of eager watchers in the families, but to the neurobiologists, behavioural scientists, psychologists, and psychotherapists, it has remained an enigma, and as a result, major advances in research have imparted to understanding of the conditions promoting a normal or abnormal development of such an agency. This understanding is important from the therapeutic point of view since this sense of agency determines whether a child will get off to a promising or devastating start in life that will have major implications in the future psychological health of the individual (Bertalanffy, L. V., 1968). It is an established fact that psychological phenomena originate anatomically and physiologically in the brain, and the human psychological and developmental milestones are actually the result of maturation of neuronal circuits. This has transitions from one stage to another, hence psychological development will also have similar transitions. However, there is another factor that interacts with the expression of these transitions. This is experience across families or cultures. These guarantee that these transitions will not occur at identical age in all children. The psychological development corresponds to growth spurt in neurons and dendrites, increased neural connectivity, and appearance of neurotransmitters and neuromodulators. Researchers have tried to understand the complexity of interactions between the infant and the environment with the goal to comprehend how the mind of an infant emerges from these interactions. Developmental researches have found that capturing of the complexity and fluidity of developmental and clinical processes was not possible with linear stage theories; and system theories would just provide vocabularies for describing and understanding the process of emergence of a child’s mind. As the mind moves from simplicity to complexity, the component systems unfold in modular increments, but the total system is fluid with no sharp demarcation between stages. To add to this, the actual complexity arises from the facts that within a component element system , there is a sequencing of modular unfolding, plus there is intersystem interaction among elements and environmental components. It would not be hard to know that the developmental impact as a resultant of these interactions may be quite difficult to generalize as a process and as a result, to understand (Kagan, J., 2005). Cohesions may be present within interacting systems, and they tend to produce a particular pattern, and it is this pattern, which we experience. This pattern perceived consciously or unconsciously forms a state of mind, and this is known as sense of self or sense of agency. This is not an isolated phenomenon, rather the result of continuous assimilation and integration of old state or psyche with that of evolving state of mind. Human psychological development is the story of perpetual evolution of new states, and some aspects of the old state, although not duplicated, will merge with or influence with the new and emergent state. The more matured and integrated state of self with or without awareness, hence, carry the continuity “genes” from the past state of self that undergoes cohesion with the emerging sense of new self (Bauer, P. J., Schwade, J. A., Wewerka, S. S., & Delaney, K., 1999). To summarise, human development is the resultant of dynamic and continuous synthesis of senses derived from biology, experience, and culture, and infants and children actively participate in their own development along individual pathways of self- regulations with their own drives that not only points towards mastering over one’s environment but also is shaped by a continuous interaction between trajectories of vulnerabilities and resiliencies. The young brain is biologically prepared to perceive and to create representation of events in all environments. At 8 to 12 weeks of age, the cortical control starts to mature, and it starts to influence the brainstem. This transition is marked by obvious reduction in crying. Psychologically, this happens due to increase in face to face communication. The second transition happens between 7 to 12 months. The main development is that of cognitive functions. Cognitive functions originate from the frontal lobe and its connections with other brain areas. This is a complex procedure, but observations suggest that after 7 months, infants can retrieve experiences of the past events and restore it to assemble these into the current perceptions and can compare the recent events with the retrieved past. This enhancement in working memory can be correlated with the growth and differentiation in pyramidal and inhibitory interneurons in the prefrontal cortex (Bauer, P. J., Wiebe, S. A., Carver, L. J., Waters, J. M., & Nelson, C. A., (2003). In this stage, the infant demonstrates fear of novelty. This is a state of uncertainty when the infant fails to assimilate an unfamiliar event, hence can demonstrate no certain coping response. This is the first sign of agency. It has been observed that in an unexpected event, they hesitate to approach it if they are uncertain whether they will be able to control it, whereas if they think they have an appropriate response to it, they will approach it. The same psychological event may be expressed as stranger anxiety or separation anxiety even in the very familiar home environment (Blass, E. M., & Camp, C. A., (2001). Another aspect of the developmental transition in this age group is sensory-motor adjustment to attain a goal. Despite the structural similarities in the brain, these behavioural characteristics and their expression differ in different children. They differ in motor activity, irritability, ease of regulating distress, smiling, laughter, and intensities of fear responses to unfamiliar situations. Mostly, these variations are due to biologic differences like genetic and parental links rather than experiential, and this is called temperamental. This distinct custom-made temperament appears at infancy or early childhood. The best predictors of affects related to dysphoria are guilt and anxiety. It has been found that temperamental changes at 2 years of age expresses itself at 7 years of age (Stams, Juffer, and IJ, zendoorn, 2002). Temperament can again vary with the quality of attachment provided by the caretaker. The psychological consequences of emotional reactions to face, voice, smell, actions, presence of the caretaker can relieve the distress of an infant. While doing so, the caretaking adult provides moments of pleasure, and that can protect the infant from a fear state. This is known as attachment theory. In this relation, it would not be impertinent to explore the effects of attachment on a developing child’s psyche, which will eventually generate the sense of agency. It has been observed that the caretaker who nurtures the baby is better able to soothe the baby in distress, and distressed infants will approach the caretaker at the times of distress. The infants show less fear to a discrepant event in presence of the caretaker. The caretaker actions affect the psychological states of the infant by, probably, through influence on the sensory- motor structures (Campos, J. J., Bertenthal, B. I., & Kermoian, R., 1992). Armed by the growing senses as the first year ends, the child is now ready to explore his environment. They demonstrate coordinated reaching, ability to retrieve old schemata, and if its does not fit to the experience, respond with fear and restraint. With the beginning of the second year, the child begins to gain a set of psychological acumens to categorise experiences in an altogether different manner to be able to interpret them. This set of psychological characteristics is termed as sense of agency. To understand the sense of agency or the sense that relates to awareness of self, it is important to understand self. One can understand the role of experiencing the environment, may be it be self and others, is important in maturation of fundamental psychological functions. This leads to an increasingly complex organization and structural configuration of psychological functions pertinent to self. These include initial comprehension and expression of speech that is meaningful, the capability to interpret and infer selectively the mental states and feelings in others, understanding of actions that are either permitted and prohibited by adults, knowing the implications of good, bad, wrong, or right, and most importantly, the conscious awareness of some of the ‘self’ feelings and intentions. They usually develop in a span of 12 to 24 months. According to Daniel Stern, in the early stage, these are associated with development of four ‘senses of self’, in which he meant by the term sense as ‘simple awareness’. Stern describes existence of two senses of agency that come inherent in the newborn right from the foetal life. These have been shown to emerge in first 6 months of life. Thus, the sense of emergent self and the sense of domain of objects in relation to this emergent self is present with birth and can be demonstrated in the first 2 months of life. Developed on this, the sense of core self emerges (Fonagy, P., Gergely, G., Jurist, E., & Target, M. 2002). This sense of core self, likewise, is related to sense of core domain relatedness. This usually develops from months 2-6. The sense of core self is felt as a sense of self as a separate distinct entity that is bounded by physical elements with a sense of ownership that “I am I”. Naturally, the affects are expressed, and it is not an isolated phenomenon; it demonstrates continuity in the dimension of time. The next sense of agency to develop is the agency that involves the sense of subjective self. As this develops in the time span of 6 to 18 months, the child also develops the sense to understand the domain of intersubjective relatedness. This signifies that at this stage, the child can sense his own mind and also that of the others around. Derived from this information, one can infer that at this stage, the child’s mind can be shared with that of others, or there is probability of a psychic interaction from both ends. From about 18 months, the fourth sense of self emerges. This is described as sense or verbal or objective self. This is again associated with development of a domain of verbal relatedness (Damasio, A. R., 1992). Applied in the social sphere, this can be translated into social agency, since at this time, the symbolic functioning is pretty apparent by symbolic play and use of language. The symbolic activity is pretty immature at this stage. Subsequently, this gets organised and differentiated into subjective sense of self. Interpersonally visualised, this generates a primordial social interaction to begin with the caretaker and the child, and this has implications from the point of view of attachment. Early attachments play a very crucial role in the developmental processes of self since this experience will behave as a representative system in future social relations (Fonagy, P., Gergely, G., Jurist, E., & Target, M. 2002). All living systems move like a pendulum between order and disorder, and organisationally, there would be instability and self-regulating process restoring stability. This process always aims towards equilibrium. The loss of equilibrium on the other hand may be brought about by new inputs with further development or by conflicts. These conflicts may have various resources. We will examine the role of sense of agency in generating or resolving these conflicts. These may actually arise from component systems, states of agency, or struggle between agency and environment. This disequilibrium is expressed as various states of affect, such as, distress, anxiety, and guilt. If self is inner organisation of attitudes, beliefs, and values, then these affects will generate the primary activity of endogenous initiatives that will lead to self correction, self organisation, and self regulation in an attempt to restore equilibrium out of the conflict. Therefore, sense of agency or sense of being the owner of one’s own actions involves a perception of action that will have some cognitive and neural mechanisms leading to action generation, action simulation, action recognition, and action imitation. The developmental role of imitation serves as the foundation of emergence of sense of agency. Neurobiologically, this can be defined as a state of mind, a pattern of activation of neural systems (Ledoux, J. 2002). This neurobiology determines the perceptions and its bias, decides the emotional tone, regulates the emotion, initiates the memory process, clarifies the mental representations, and directs the behavioural response patterns. The degree of awareness of self in this context is the major motive force that contributes to the state of the mind in order to arrive at some compromise between self and environment to generate any or many of the following responses, correction of self, reorganise disorganised self, safeguard self, or regulate self, all to restore equilibrium. Organisation, from this perspective can be defined as coherence within the system and its capability to correct and regulate itself or self (Meissner, W.W. 1993). These apparently complicated theoretical discussions will be clear with these findings. The initial component of self-awareness represents achievement of a psychological competence. Two-year-old children act as if they are aware of their intentions, feelings, and abilities. Children often give a smile known as mastery smile. Following accomplishment of a difficult task, they give this mastery smile. Apart from this, they can direct adults in particular ways; they show distress, retreat, or defeat. They have been observed to lower their heads when they fail to imitate the behaviour of others. They can literally describe what they are doing as they are doing it (Kagan, J., 2005). There are other proofs that a child develops self awareness as he grows. A classic example is seen when a mother puts rouge on the child’s nose and asks him to stand in front of a mirror. Most children older than 18 months will touch their nose indicating that the children could recognise their reflections in the mirror as themselves. Many older children would sort out their photographs from a mixture of different unfamiliar photographs (Easterbrook, M. A., Kisilevsky, B. S., Muir, D. W., & Laplante, D. P., 1999). The second sign is longer duration of play episode in the second year of age. This happens due to the fact that the child now has a conscious goal-directed action plan, and the child does not forget the goal he decided to pursue. Another sign is expression of distress over actual or potential failure to perform a task. Since sense of awareness involves development of a moral sense, this distress happens due to the fact that the child assumes a moral obligation to mimic and perform the adult’s tasks, and the child is aware that he could not accomplish that. When the child attains a goal through effort, it generates a smile. This mastery smile happens due to the fact that the child recognises that he has attained a goal following investment of effort. The smile indicates an awareness that self has reached a previously imagined goal. The lowering of head previously mentioned indicates that the child is aware that the effort has failed or the effort has a potential for failure and the awareness that others might be evaluating the child in undesirable terms. Another sign is emergence of behaviours that reflect that self has enough agency to influence others’ behaviours (Fogel, A., & Melson, G. F., 1988). They can attempt to change the behaviour of the parents or may ask for some help with expectations that he can influence the action of others. The next sign is self-descriptive utterance, the verbal description of action when he is involved in one. The child will say ‘climb’ when he climbs up on a chair or say ‘down’ when he gets down from the top of a box. This indicates the child’s awareness about the ability to perform certain tasks or awareness of capacity of certain behaviours. This novel experience will serve as an incentive for the description. The speech of the child will provide direct evidence for self- awareness or agency. The speech will contain terms like ‘I’, ‘mine’, ‘me’. Psychoanalysts state that this happens not due to accumulation of new vocabularies; rather it is the result of experience of a discrepant state of conscious awareness and surprise that he is able to perform something, which the adults do and he is able to perform that. The child often will substitute a toy for the self in pretentious play situations. As the second year ends, the child will often be seen to place a toy telephone in a toy’s ear rather that his own. This implies that the child has a script of his own in this play sequence, and he is playing the role of a director. The word play here means a state of mind with a voluntary initiation of behaviour. Neurologically, this happens due to enhanced connections between the right and the left hemispheres of brain (Fitzgerald, M., 1991). The body of the child grows in a parallel fashion along with language, inference, and moral sense that enable the sense of agency. The moment to moment change in the physique is often subtle, and during the second year, the child becomes aware of changes in feeling tone. It has been suggested that the coordination of visceral schemata for the self’s feeling tone are represented by orbitofrontal prefrontal cortex of the right hemisphere, and the semantic properties of self is represented by association areas in the left hemisphere. These together contribute to the phenomena of self awareness. These changes in the internal feeling can be expressed as “I feel therefore I am” or “I think, therefore I am” (Freedman, D. G., 1976). The sense of agency, hence, emerges in the form where self assumes responsibility as the chief executive officer of the system, and like the CEO of an organization, self needs to be effective and competent. To be able to do that, self must analyse the experiences of inner organisation, must be cohesive, must demonstrate stability over time, and should be able to regulate itself from any disorganising event (Hala, S., & Russell, J., 2001). To the developing child, the world is a representational entity, and self has a categorical representation in it, however small it be. Self awareness has, thus, two aspects, ‘me’ and ‘I’. Psychoanalysis regards the ‘me’ part of this knowledge. However, the ‘I’ part refers to the active part and the senses associated with this. ‘I’, therefore, is associated with actions, and the self-knowledge envisages ‘I’ as the designer, creator, organiser, manager, and regulator of the action settings. Fonagy et al. summarises that sense of agency involves an awareness that self can convert will to action, an awareness that self can perform that action, and an awareness that actions initiated and executed by self can bring about change. Therefore, self is a mental phenomenon, which possesses intentions for action, and the individual in question becomes aware that there is something called mind where thoughts and feelings are generated. As a corollary of this event, the developing child has the ability to reflect on thoughts and feelings. That, which Fonagy calls reflective function or mentalisation, is essentially awareness that others in the representational world will have thoughts and feelings, desires and beliefs (Fonagy, P. & Target, M. 1996). This theory regards a child with sense of agency as intentional mental being. An intentional mental being is aware of the fact that actions are deliberate with a goal and has inherent intent to make a change. A child with sense of agency will also understand that deliberate actions are linked with feelings, that is, specific feelings can originate from particular actions, and one has the liberty of feelings only without acting. This concept can give rise to another stratum of awareness, sense of self-responsibility. As mastery can be felt out of successful accomplishment of certain tasks, this indicates an ownership of the action. The executive should have equal share of failure and guilt as much as he is privy to the pleasure of mastery, that is, self becomes accountable for all thoughts, actions, desires, and feelings. This means awareness that owning up something also involves admission of one’s own guilt or negative feelings, such as, angry, hateful, destructive, greedy, murderous, and shameful feelings as one’s own, not others’ (Fonagy, P. & Target, M., 1998). Summarised, this may mean, generation of feeling of uncertainty provoked by unexpected parental reactions to certain acts; accumulation of such experiences leading to schematic concepts of prohibited actions and ideal situations; a sensation of readiness to feel uncertain when the ideal is violated; generation of a motive to inhibit the prohibited acts; therefore awareness that adults may disapprove certain acts by inferring the thoughts, feelings, and expression of adults; awareness of others’ feelings and thoughts; and acquisition of concepts like good or bad and awareness of the implications of these concepts on self, events, people, and actions. It is likely that different aspects of this awareness is mediated by distinct brain circuits that are responsible for sensory inputs, intentions to act, thoughts involved in problem solving, and networks representing self and others. Whatever may be the pathway for its expression, it is deemed to be the result of interaction of psyche with the world, maybe through imitation or social interaction (Herschkowitz, N., Kagan, J., & Zilles, K., 1999). When it talks about social interactions, the first representations of society to a developing child are his parents. The sense of agency should develop the ability to use emotions as a warning system, should help the individual to develop the sense of delay, self-control, and self-regulation. This creates the environment for the inner mental world to be organised, not chaotic. With the emergence of sense of agency, the developing child will gradually be able to label and think about emotions or reflect, and the main purpose of the sense of agency is to be able to recognise the links between actions, their consequences, and the feelings associated with those. Since it can control the emotional responses by inhibitions, it can control the affects. In contrast, when there is defective development of sense of agency, frustrations and failure may lead to preemptive responses, such as, rage, anxiety, fear, and panic to disrupt the affective equilibrium of the individual. Reflective functioning and mentalisation, as highlighted by Fonagy, serve as important elements in parent-child relationship, which better executed will create an environment for development of sense of agency. According to him, conscious, cognitive, and interpersonal aspects of mental function pay little attention to the conflicts in mind and obviously unconscious mind. These are important psychoanalytic tools to assess the past. Psychoanalytic principles, thus, based on the assessment of sense of agency can build the present on the backdrop of past (Friend, M., 1976). The parents thus can serve as the mirror of the affects of the children who has a developing sense of agency. The way the caretaker responds to the child shapes the way the child will experience and process the emotions and affects, and this will help the development of emotional self-awareness and ultimately regulation of emotions. The parents thus have an opportunity to empathise or criticise the child’s experiences and actions and respond. This would have impact on the development and representation of the self experience. Thus an intersubjective process may be engulfed and assimilated to lead to an intrapsychic response. Thus the primary attachment figures and their responses to the child’s actions may eventually turn out to be reactions of self, and self becomes self in relation to the others. Agency is a sense of responsibility, ownership and regulatory control over actions since action is generated by thoughts and feelings. The child who has developed agency will experience this as the will power that has capacity to initiate impulses or intents. The parents’ participation in this process will ensure independence and autonomy, but it will prevent it to be autocratic by inhibitions inherent in it, inhibitions of impulsive initiatives (Lyons-Ruth, K., 2003). The parents by dint of attachment can generate and imbibe mentalisation. Fonagy describes it as “ intersubjectively acquired abstract reflexive implicit awareness of mental state”. Mentalisation is the ability to reflect on own mental states, and this leads to emergence of objective sense of agency (Fonagy, P. & Target, M., 1996). Both Stern and Fonagy suggested that this starts to develop at the end of the first year of life and gets perfected and improvised through the ages of 5 to 6. This enables one to recognise, tolerate, and respond to mental states of own and others. This is mainly generated by the primary attachment figure and her ability to understand and reshape the thought process in a child who has conflicts due to developing sense of agency. Deficits in this will mother almost unguarded autonomy and free will of the developing child; the representations of thoughts, feelings, desires will all be chaotic. Traumatic experience on the other hand will distort the mental representations in such a way that those may be secondarily inhibited. Psychological trauma and ineffective guidance in this phase may result in multiple contradictory experiences, thereby resulting in improperly integrated primary representation of self and others. The child would not be able to appropriately differentiate between self and others. More importantly, the mind may become polarised in one track, the child considers everything either good or bad with no consideration for the gray areas. Thus deficiency of mentalisation prevents one to think about own mental state as well as others, hence socilisation of sense of agency does not happen. The result can be disastrous in terms of regulation of affect, control of impulses, monitoring and regulating self, the experience of sense of agency, and intersubjective implications of agency (Stern, D.N., 1974). To conclude, the sense of agency is the first sign of mind; nature has provided this weapon to the developing human being for purposes of coping to self, society, and environment. Unfortunately, like all weapons if it is not guided and redirected, this may destroy self. Psychoanalysis provides the tools to understand this, and a well-executed approach based on this understanding will prevent a lot of catastrophic events in many peoples’ lives who to start with had a proper sense of agency that went misregulated. Reference List Bauer, P. J., Schwade, J. A., Wewerka, S. S., & Delaney, K., (1999). Planning ahead: Goaldirected problem solving by 2year-olds. Developmental Psychology, 35, pp. 1321– 1337. Bauer, P. J., Wiebe, S. A., Carver, L. J., Waters, J. M., & Nelson, C. 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