Over the course of his esteemed career, he has received funding for
hundreds of key studies in the US and abroad on normal and abnormal
infant and child development--including his Mutual Regulation Model and
Still-Face Paradigm, which revolutionized our understanding of infants'
emotional capacities and coping--all of which led to critical
contributions in the field. Much of his work serves as the benchmark for
how mental health clinicians think about biopsychosocial states of
consciousness, the process of meaning making, and how and why we engage
with others in the world.
Now, for the first time, Tronick has gathered together his most
influential writings in a single, essential volume. Organized into five
parts--(I) Neurobehavior, (II) Culture, (III) Infant Social-Emotional
Interaction, (IV) Perturbations: Natural and Experimental, and (V)
Dyadic Expansion of Consciousness and Meaning Making--this book
represents his major ideas and studies regarding infant-adult
interactions, developmental processes, and mutual regulation, carefully
addressing such questions as:
- What is a state of consciousness?
- What are the developing infant's capacities for neurobehavioral
self-organization?
- How are early infant-adult interactions organized?
- How can we understand the nature of normal versus abnormal
development?
- How do self and mutual regulation relate to developmental processes?
- Is meaning making purely a function of the brain, or is it in our
bodies as well?
As a bonus, the book includes a DVD-ROM, with video clips of Tronick's
Still-Face Paradigm, an invaluable teaching aid.