Dynamic skill theory an integrative theory of psychological development

Mascolo Merrimack College This chapter contains an elaboration of dynamic skill theory Fischer, 1980; Fischer & Bidell, 1998, 2006; Mascolo & Fischer, 2015 as an example of an integrativ

Mascolo, M F (2020) Dynamic skill theory: An integrative model of psychological development In M F

Mascolo & T Bidell (Eds.) Handbook of Integrative Psychological Development (91-135) Routledge/Taylor &

Francis

DYNAMIC SKILL THEORY:

AN INTEGRATIVE MODEL OF PSYCHOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENT

Michael F Mascolo Merrimack College

This chapter contains an elaboration of dynamic skill theory (Fischer, 1980; Fischer & Bidell, 1998, 2006; Mascolo & Fischer, 2015) as an example of an integrative model of

psychological development As an integrative model, dynamic skill theory covers a great deal of

ground The core of the theory is (a) the concept of skill as the capacity to control thinking,

feeling and action within particular contexts and domains of action, and (b) a framework for tracking the dynamic structure of skilled actions through 13 developmental levels These basic ideas provide the foundation for the integrative elaboration of a variety of principles, derived from theory and evidence, that have broad extension for understanding the structures and processes of psychological development In what follows, I elaborate and illustrate these

principles and their extensions In so doing, I do my best both to describe the progression of these principles over the years, and to show how the various tenets of the model come

together to provide an integrative theoretical and empirical framework

Foundations: The Concept of Skill

The foundational concept of skill is itself an integrative concept As elaborated by

Fischer (1980), a skill refers to the capacity to control elements of acting, thinking and feeling within particular contexts and psychological domains Fischer proposed the concept of skill in

order to solve a particular set of conceptual problems In so doing, it draws upon ideas from Piaget, Skinner (1938) and Bandura

Piagetian Foundations

During the mid to latter part of the 20th

century, research in developmental psychology was dominated by the Piagetian tradition As is well known, Piaget advanced a theory of

intellectual development organized around the structuralist idea of the scheme or cognitive structure (Piaget, 1983) For Piaget, thinking and acting are structured processes A scheme

refers to a pattern of thought or action For Piaget, intellectual development consists of the

process by which forms of thinking and action undergo structural change over time Piaget

proposed that structures of thought develop in four broad stages or periods For Piaget,

thinking is a type of activity – an organized process involving the manipulation of symbolic

representations in real time As a type of activity, the capacity for thought builds upon

sensorimotor forms of action that develop during the first two years of life (Piaget, 1952) During the sensorimotor period, infants are capable of acting on their worlds but are not yet capable of forming symbolic representations of those worlds

For Piaget, the capacity for thought emerges at the end of the second year of life with

onset of the semiotic function During the pre-operational period, which occurs between the

ages of two and about seven years, the child is able to construct symbols (e.g., images) and signs (e.g., words) in the absence of the objects and events to which those representations refer The capacity to form symbolic representations – to make one thing stand for another –

develops as a form of abbreviated action Images are formed as the sensorimotor capacity to

act on objects in the world “goes underground” (Piaget, 1962) The capacity for imagery

emerges as children are able to do internally what they could previously perform in

sensorimotor action on objects For example, the capacity to imagine drinking milk from a bottle develops as a child is increasingly able to abbreviate the sensory and motoric aspects of

these acts – of reaching and lifting the bottle to the lips; of accepting the liquid into the mouth;

of tasting and swallowing the milk until the child is able to produce a fully internalized form of

the activity in the absence of the sensorimotor act itself As a result, the internalized imagining

of the act of drinking functions a symbolic representation – it “stands for” the act of drinking The capacity for symbolism underlies the capacities for language, symbolic play, deferred

imitation, and related abilities (Piaget, 1951, 1952)

While the preoperational child can construct and symbolic representations, he is limited

in the capacity to manipulate those representations in a systematic way They tend to fail to perform logical tasks conservation, seriation, class inclusion, etc until about five to seven years-of-age For Piaget, children are able to solve such task through their capacity to form

concrete operations logical and reversible systems of thought Children solve logical tasks

through their capacity to coordinate and reverse mental actions (Piaget & Inhelder, 1958) This occurs, for example, when children understand that pouring liquid from a tall-and-thin

container into a short-and-fat one (A à B) can be reversed by the act of pouring the same liquid back again (A ß B) Nonetheless, despite their logical abilities, concrete operational reasoning is limited to problems with concrete and tangible content It is not until the stage of

formal operations (Piaget, 1971) that teens and young adults are able to manipulate abstract forms rather than concrete content (e.g., algebra; abstract scientific thinking)

During the 1960s and 1970s, researchers began to report studies whose findings were inconsistent with many of the tenets considered to be definitive of Piagetian theory (Gelman & Baillargeon, 1983; Brainerd, 1978) Research began to show that the age at which children particular Piagetian tasks could be accelerated if children were provided with training or if the tasks were presented in simplified forms (Bryant & Trabasso, 1971; Trabasso et al., 1978; Keller

& Hunter, 1973) Research showed that predicted sequences of development postulated by Piaget were sometimes violated (Williams 1976), and that logical tasks predicted be solvable around the same age would often be solved at dramatically different ages, even by the same children (Gelman & Baillergeon, 1983) This body of work challenged central Piagetian

principles, namely the idea that cognitive abilities developed as structures d’ensemble –

broad-based but tightly-knit structures of logical abilities with wide applicability to a variety of

similarly structured tasks

This research posed deep challenge to the very concept of development as structural change If the ability to solve similarly structured tasks develops at different times under

different circumstances even in the same children – how is it possible to speak of general stages of development? To address this problem, Fischer (1980; Fischer et al., 1993) proposed

the concept of skill as a local rather than general structure A skill is a type of local control structure – the capacity to regulate particular elements of thinking and acting within particular contexts, task domains and even tasks From this view, a skill is no longer regarded as property

of the individual person Instead, it is a property of the person-in-context A change in context

can produce significant changes in the task to be performed, and thus in what an individual

must do in order to perform the task Performing a conservation task in the context of training

is different from performing such a task anew Running on a rubberized track is different from running on a grass surface, which itself differs from running on a sandy beach

Similarly, a skill is not a general ability with broad-based application Skills are tied to

particular conceptual domains: conservation skills are different from class inclusion skills which are different still from transitivity skills Even within a particular skill area, skills are tied to local content: conservation of volume is different from conservation of mass which is different still from conservation of number Still further, skills are often tied to the particular objects on which they operate Skills for typing on one’s own computer often fail to generalize to the use of

a different computer, despite the similarity in the keyboards and operating systems Skills are

not global structures that generalize spontaneously; an active period of adjustment is typically required in order to adapt skills from one area, domain, task or object to another (Fischer et al., 1993)

Skinnerian Contributions

As used by Fischer, the concept of skill also owes a debt to ideas culled from

behaviorism, most particularly Skinner’s (1938) notion of operant and Bandura’s (1976)

approach to social learning through modeling and imitation Skinner proposed the concept of

operant as a way to avoid the invocation of “mentalistic” explanations in psychology For

Skinner, organisms operate on their environments Operations “reinforced” by environmental

contingencies are selected, while those that are not are extinguished The concept of operant

or operation provided a way to address the problem of Piagetian decalage – the staggering and

variability in the developmental ordering of abilities over time (Jamison, 1977) Instead of thinking of children’s developing capacities in terms of general competencies, it was better to understand them as local operations that function in particular contexts Under this

interpretation, there would be no necessary reason to believe that skills for performing even similarly structured tasks would develop at the same time

A second way in which Skinner’s thinking informed skill theory involved the use of

dispositional and “mentalistic” thinking For Skinner, because “mental” events such as goals, beliefs, expectations and the like could not be directly observed, the use of mentalistic

constructs could at best be considered unscientific and at worst reflected an invocation of

fictional entities For example, Skinner (1957) regarded what others would call thinking as a form of covert behavior Without rejecting appeals to experiential states, Fischer adopted the view that psychological processes are forms of doing During the period in which cognitive

developmental theory was dominant, studies often sought to track changes in “the child’s understanding” of this or that area of the world Such studies tended to treat “understandings”

as static dispositional structures that lay behind and explain children’s actions in the world For Fischer, there is no “the child’s understanding” that lies behind action; a child’s

“understanding” is both a product and a form of action that emerges and takes shape within

contexts and conceptual domains

Despite these influences, Fischer’s concept of skill nonetheless differs substantially from the concept of operant Unlike Skinner, Fischer’s theory seeks to explain psychological

processes He does so by adopting the Piagetian concept of action Action is not a mere

synonym for behavior An action consists of a goal-directed and experience-mediated

operation1

on the world (Mascolo, Basseches & el-Hashem, 2014) For both Piaget (1952) and

Fischer (Fischer, 1980), the first actions consist of reflexes – innate sensorimotor operations that require direct stimulation for their evocation Such reflexes include sucking an object placed in the mouth; grasping an object placed in the palm of the hand; looking at an object or face

positioned within the infant’s gaze (Fischer & Hogan, 1989) While innate, such reflexes are not mere mechanistic reactions like knee-jerks or eye-blinks For Piaget, the sensorial and motoric components of action provide the experiential bases from which higher-order patterns of action and thought are built (Fischer & Hencke, 1996) Fischer would further draw out the role

of perceptual, socio-emotional and motivational processes as part of this sensorimotor

foundation (Bidell & Fischer, 1992) Symbolic forms of thought arise from the higher-order

coordination of sensorimotor actions In this way, thinking is an experience-mediated doing – a form of representational action that may or may not be accompanied by motoric processes

(Mascolo & Fischer, 1998)

A second difference between the concepts of skill and operant has to do with the

concept of control In referring to the role of environmental contingencies in “shaping” an

organism’s operations on the environment, Skinner invoked the idea of “stimulus control” (Morse & Skinner, 1958) – the control of behavior by the contingencies of reinforcement Freed from the Skinnerian injunction against the use of psychological predicates, Fischer was

able to invoke the concept of action as a kind of control structure (Bidell & Fischer, 2000;

Mascolo, Neimeyer & Fischer, 1999) It became possible to think of a skill as an operation that is under the joint control of individual and context (see Patsenko & Altmann, 2010)

Contributions from Social Learning Theory

A third influence on Fischer’s concept of skill came from Bandura’s social learning model

of social and personality development In their famous Bobo doll study, Bandura, Ross and Ross (1963) showed that children who observed adults beating an inflatable clown (called

1

The operation refers to any goal-directed process that functions to transform some aspect of the world

or one’s representation of the world The term operation is sufficiently general to encompass all forms

of action – reflexes, sensori-motor actions, representational acts, actions mediated by abstract

concepts; discursive activity and emotional action tendencies From this perspective, the Piagetian concepts of pre-operations and concrete operations consist of but one type of operation – namely representational activity with certain logico-mathematical properties.

Bobo) acted more aggressively toward the doll than those who did not witness such behavior from adults This finding – so obvious to us today – was among many studies that challenged the prevailing belief that reinforcements were necessary conditions for learning

For Fischer, the concepts of modeling and imitation could not only help explain how

individuals acquire new skills, they also cast light on the processes by which skills could be assessed The finding that children imitate novel forms of modelled action suggests that

modeling and imitation could function as a way to assess children’s capabilities in a given

context Fischer introduced the modeling-and-imitation technique for assessing level of

children’s developing skills (Fischer & Pipp, 1984a; Fischer, Pipp & Bullock, 1984) Fischer asked children to imitate tasks of varying levels of complexity that were modeled by another person For example, children were asked to re-tell stories about various types of social interactions that were modelled by an adult (Fischer & Hencke, 2001) Fischer found that when asked to tell any story that they wished, children’s stories were less complex than they were when asked to imitate more complex stories (Fischer et al., 1993; Fischer & Lamborn, 1989) Children are only able to imitate modelled behavior up to their highest level of capability in a given context Thus,

by asking children to imitate multiple tasks modelled at different levels of complexity, it is possible to identify the highest level of complexity that children can perform in that task and

context (Watson & Fischer, 1980; Fischer et al., 1993)

Using the modeling and imitation procedure, Fischer and his colleagues demonstrated

that, in any given task domain, children are able to perform at higher levels of complexity in

contexts that provide high levels of support than in contexts that provide lower levels of

support or in everyday situations in which children are acting spontaneously (Kennedy &

Fischer, 1997; Kitchener, Lynch, Fischer, & Wood, 1993; Rappolt-Schlichtmann, Tenenbaum, Koepke & Fischer, 2007; Watson & Fischer, 1980) This phenomenon, which Fischer et al (1993)

refer to as the developmental range, is shown in Figure 1 The developmental range refers to the difference between the level of complexity that individuals can master under high and low

support conditions respectively Under high levels of support – for example, when children are asked to imitate a complex story within their capability – they tend to function at their highest

or optimal levels In the absence of such support, individuals tend to operate at their everyday functional levels, which tends to be significantly lower than their optimal levels (Fischer, Hand,

Watson, van Parys & Tucker, 1984)

Figure 1: The Developmental Range The Importance of Emotion

The concept of skill provides the foundation for Fischer’s model of development At its inception, skill theory was often understood as a theory of cognitive development However,

from the start, Fischer was aware of the limitations of the concept of skill as a complete unit of psychological functioning While the concept of skill provided a way to understand the structure

of action and thought, it could not explain what motivates human action, what makes some goals matter more than others, or the role of feeling in psychological functioning and

development Drawing on Freud and others, Fischer sought to incorporate into his theory a model of how conscious action is motivated and organized by emotion processes – and

especially emotional processes as they occur as parts of social relationships (Fischer & Pipp, 1984b; Fischer & Watson, 1981; Watson & Getz, 1990)

Cognition and action mutually organize each other in human action This is illustrated in

a recent interaction that occurred between a physician and patient The patient visited his doctor complaining of a series of minor ailments that seemed to arise together all at once When asked the reason for his visit, the patient said, “I’m a mess! I have a bunch of problems.” The physician replied “Okay, let’s wait on that Let’s start with the problems.” The patient enumerated the issues, each of which was addressed in turn As the visit was ending, the

physician sat down, looked the patient in the eye, and said, “So, what’s this about you having

MS?” The physician had misheard the patient’s opening complaint as “I have MS” multiple sclerosis rather than “I’m a mess!” The physician was equipped not only with expert

knowledge about human disease, but also an appreciation of the seriousness of diseases

Attuned with the emotional concerns of the patient, the physician’s cognitive system was emotionally biased by his sense of the seriousness of MS The physician’s mishearing thereupon

framed how he structured the visit sensitively guiding the patient through less troublesome concerns before addressing the seriousness of what he took to be the primary complaint

Figure 2 shows a model of the emotion process initially proposed by Fischer, Shaver & Carnochan (1990) and revised and updated in subsequent decades (Daley, Willett & Fischer, 2014; Li & Fischer, 2007; Mascolo, Li & Fischer, 2003; Mascolo & Fischer, 2010, 2015; Tangney

& Fischer, 1995) According to this model, the emotion process consists of several component

processes It begins with the detection of some change in the relation between individual and environment These changes undergo appraisal, which consists of the evaluation of the

significance of changes for a person’s goals, motives and concerns (Frijda, 1980) and

assessments of the one’s current to cope with the appraised changes in question Appraisals thereupon generate emotion-typical action tendencies and concomitant patterns of

physiological activity, which, in any given context, are manifested in terms of actions and

expressions that serve adaptive functions relative to a person’s goals, motives and concerns

The phenomenal experience of emotion is a product of feedback from a person’s

action-tendencies and patterns of physiological responsiveness Although the experience of emotion is

immediate, the conscious classification of emotion requires acts of reflection in terms of

available categories and knowledge representations

A central principle in the emotion process is the mutual influence of motive-relevant

appraisals and the production of affect (Brown, 1994; Lewis & Granic, 1999) As assessments of relations between events and a person’s motives, the appraisals that modulate feeling operate primarily outside of conscious awareness As event appraisals produce and modify feeling,

affective processes function to select those same unconsciously-appraised events for conscious awareness In this way, feeling amplifies the importance of appraised events for the

experiencing organisms and organizes representations of those events in consciousness to

support adaptive action (Lewis & Granic, 1999; Mascolo, Li & Fischer, 2003) This occurs as

emotional action tendencies that have already been triggered by ongoing appraisal and affect

produce fast-acting responses and expressions that serve adaptive functions for the organism

Figure 2:

The Emotion Process (Fischer, Shaver & Carnochan, 1990)

For example, waiting for a ride to an appointment, unconscious appraisal activity

monitors the passage of time relative to the time of the meeting As meeting time approaches, unconscious appraisal processes produce emotional states of anxiety for fear These states

thereupon select the evolving appraisal – “I may be late for my appointment” – for conscious

awareness The appraisal, now operative in consciousness and amplified in importance by anxiety, organizes immediate (e.g., increased vigilance) and deliberate action (e.g., thinking about the appointment, looking at one’s watch, calling a friend), until some resolution of the event occurs In this way, emotion plays a central role in the organization of all action –

intentional or otherwise Emotion and cognition operate together in the production of skilled action Feeling is an inextricable part of the process of acting, and a central organizer of the development of action In what follows, we examine Fischer’s model of the development of skilled action A more complete analysis of both the development of emotion and its role of psychological development will occur in a later section in the paper

The Developmental of Structures of Action and Thought

As a developmental theory of action and thought, skill theory built upon Piaget’s theory

of intellectual development In so doing, Fischer (1980) accepted core tenets of Piaget’s

developmental theory, while modifying others Table 1 shows the principles that skill theory appropriated from Piaget’s model, and those that were revised

Table 1: Fischer’s Modification of Piagetian Theory

Structures d’ensemble Structures of

action and thought consist of broad

competencies that develop in a series of

holistic stages (structures d’ensemble)

Local skills in context Structures of action and

thought develop through a series of levels within particular psychological domains, tasks and contexts

Stages of development Development

moves through four broad stages, each

of which consist of various substages

Levels of skilled action As skills develop, they can

do so through a series of 13 levels and an indeterminant number of intermediate steps

Universal sequence Stages of thought

and action develop in a universal

sequence Stages form a hierarchical

progression, which later stages building

upon earlier stages

Universal yardstick, individual trajectories While

the abstract sequence of levels of development is universal (the yardstick), individual skills develop along different trajectories in different domains,

cultures, tasks and children

Qualitative transformation Stages of

intellectual development reflect

primarily qualitative transformations in

the nature of thinking and acting

Qualitative transformation, growth, and

quantitative change Levels of skill development

involve qualitative changes across different tiers of development, quantitative changes within tiers, and patterns of growth within and between tiers

Development through differentiation,

integration and hierarchic integration

General patterns of thought develop

through the differentiation, integration

and hierarchic integration of

lower-order stage structures

Higher order skills develop through the

coordination of lower-order acts Individual skill

structures develop through a series of change

processes, including (a) differentiation, (b) focus, (c) compounding, (d) substitution, (e) generalization, and (f) intercoordination

shift-of-At its most basic, the developmental component of skill theory is based upon the

principle that higher-level structures of action and thought are constructed through the

differentiation and coordination of lower-level actions and representations Skill theory

maintains that skills develop through four broad tiers of development: Skills in the reflex tier

consist innate actions that require direct physical or socio-emotional stimulation for their

evocation In the sensorimotor tier, which begins to emerge around 3 ½ to 4 months of age in

contexts that support their development, infants are capable of performing controlled actions

on objects and people in the absence of direct stimulation The representational tier begins to

emerge, in supportive contexts, around 18-24 months of age with the development of the capacity for concrete acts involving symbolism Within the representational tier, using actions, images, words and other means, children can begin to make one thing stand for another The

abstract tier of development begins to emerge around 10-11 years of age, in supportive

contexts and interactions, with the capacity to generalize across concrete ideas and create intangible, hypothetical and abstract concepts

Within each developmental tier, skills move through four levels

Each tier begins with a single set – for example, a single reflex,

sensorimotor act, representation, or abstraction This is

indicated in Figure 3 in terms of a single point Over time, each

higher level is created through the coordination of lower-level

elements Mappings emerge as individuals gain the capacity to

coordinate or bring into correspondence two single sets This is

indicated in Figure 3 in terms of a straight line connecting two

single sets As shown in Figure 2, systems emerge through the

coordination of at least two mapping structures Finally,

systems of systems arise through the intercoordination of two of

more system level structures Importantly, as shown in Figure 3,

a system of systems is the emergent equivalent of the first level

of the next broad tier of development That is, a system of

systems in one developmental tier (e.g., sensorimotor actions)

is the equivalent of a first-order single set within the next broad

tier of development (e.g., representations) The result of this

iterative process is a model that identifies 13 distinct levels of

developing skills and an indefinite number of transitional steps

Figure 3:

Four Levels within Individual Tiers

Figure 4 identifies the full sequence of levels in the development of individual skills The skill levels described in Figure 4 provide a universal yardstick for assessing developmental changes

in the structure of thinking, feeling and acting The levels can be used to assess developmental levels and sequences in virtually any domain of skill functioning

Figure 4: Levels of Developing Skills Postulated by Skill Theory

A detailed set of illustrations of the structure of skills at each of the 13 levels of functioning specified by skill theory is provided in Appendix A

Emergent Pathways: The Developmental Web

Skill theory is not so much a theory of the development of children or adults, but instead

a theory of the development of psychological structures It is not a child or individual who operates at any particular level of development; it is the particular skill as it operates within a

particular context (Bidell & Fischer, 1992) It follows that at any given moment in time,

individual persons create particular skilled actions in order to meet particular adaptive

challenges and environmental demands As a result, although, at any given point in

development, there are limits to the highest level of skill that an individual can construct, it

makes no sense say that skills operate at any single level – even within individual persons and

domains of action The level of skill produced by an individual can change from moment to moment, as illustrated by the developmental range shown in Figure 5 Both across and within particular domains of functioning, the level of skill that an individual creates changes as a

function of the demands of the environment, and individual’s physical or emotional state, the level of support available, the novelty of the skill or context in question, and so forth

Against this backdrop, it makes little sense to think of development as a kind of

unidirectional ladder or fixed staircase It is preferable to conceptualize development as a kind

of web, with multiple connecting and diverging strands (Ayoub & Fischer, 2006; Fischer & Bidell, 2006; Fischer & Rose, 2001) A representation of the developmental web is provided in Figure

5 Each strand in the web represents a different developmental pathway The pathways in the web can represent developmental changes in different skills or skill domains within the same individuals or in groups of individuals Within the web, development can move in multiple directions, converging or diverging from its current trajectory at any given point in time

Questions about the pathways that development actually takes in particular individuals, groups,

skill domains and contexts are empirical one, and cannot be presumed beforehand through logical analysis alone or on the basis of the assumed structure of any particular skill developing

at any particular time

As indicated in Figure 5, as they undergo development, individual skills operate at

different levels of control and support Automatized skills are overlearned operations that

require little or no attention or awareness for their execution Automatic skills are often

elicited automatically without intention or attention (e.g., daily routines; driving along familiar routes; Charlton & Starkey, 2011; Ocampo, Al-Janabi & Finkbeiner, 2015) For example, in the Stroop task, when participants attempt to identify the ink color in which color names are

Figure 5: The Developmental Web

printed, they cannot help but to read color words – even when doing so interferes with task performance (Augustinova & Ferrand, 2014) Automatized skills are indicated in Figure 5 using

bolded lines The functional level of a given skill is the level at which skills operate for everyday

tasks While such tasks typically require effort and conscious participation – for example,

cooking a familiar meal; reading a newspaper; driving in moderate traffic they do not

challenge the upper limits of a person’s capacities Skills that function at a person’s optimal

level are those that a person can execute for him or herself, but in contexts that provide high

levels of support for producing higher-level performance People function at their optimal level when they cook a novel meal with the support of a recipe; read complex textbook after

receiving a relevant lecture; navigate a route with the help of a map Functional levels of

performance are indicated in Figure 5 using straight lines; optimal levels are indicated using

long dashed lines

Note that in situations involving high contextual support, a person is able to control all aspects of the task in question for herself; various forms of support facilitate performance at

higher levels The situation is different under conditions of scaffolded support (Wood, Bruner &

Ross, 1991) In scaffolding, conditions external to the individual herself provide actual

assistance to the individual, in the sense that they perform part of the task for the person

(Mermelshtine, 2017; Llyod & Fernyhough, 1999; Mascolo, 2005) By participating in activities that provide scaffolding, learners are able to engage in tasks that they could not otherwise perform

on their own Scaffolding thus has the effect of raising an individual’s performance beyond the level that she can sustain while acting alone – with or without high levels of contextual support

(Fischer et al., 1993; Vygotsky, 1978)

There are many forms of scaffolding (Mascolo, 2005) Social scaffolding occurs when another person directs a child’s actions when putting together a puzzle (e.g., “put that piece into that slot there”); when another person performs part of a task so that a learner can

perform the rest (e.g., holding a jack-in-the-box so that a young child can turn the crank) To the extent that aspects of the context or the task itself exert control over the task beyond that of the learner himself, they also function as scaffolds For example, a digital environment that adjust itself to the level of student progress functions as a scaffold that improves task

performance (Molenaar, Roda, van Boxtel & Sleegers, 2012) When playing the game of Scrabble, the act of physically moving lettered tiles in different sequences produces novel combinations of letters that suggests possible words to put into play (Kirsh & Maglio, 1993) Scaffolded aspects

of developmental pathways are indicated in Figure 5 as densely dotted lines

Under conditions of scaffolded support, development occurs as individuals coordinate for themselves, in similar or novel ways, higher-order structures that have been co-created in scaffolded activity that occurs between learners and the individuals (and processes) that

scaffold them (Mascolo & Fischer, 2015) As Vygtotsky (1978) maintained, learning occurs

within the child’s zone of proximal development – the difference between the level of

functioning that a child can sustain alone, and the level of functioning that arises in guided interactions that occur with more accomplished others Development occurs as proximal levels

of structured action, formed in relations between teacher and learner, are appropriated and

coordinated by individual learners over time (Mascolo & Fischer, 2015; Rogoff, 1993)

The zone of proximal development is indicated in Figure 5 in the shaded boxes along particular strands of development The developmental range – the difference between the

child’s function and optimal levels of functioning – is indicated by the darker boxes located

within the boxes representing the zone of proximal development The difference between the developmental range and the zone of proximal development lies in the degree of control that

the individual learner has over contextualized action in the course of acting, learning and

development (Medeiros-Ward, Cooper & Strayer, 2014) The developmental range identifies

the range of skill elements that an individual can control for herself within in various contexts;

the zone of proximal development identifies the difference between what an individual can

control for herself within various contexts, and what the individual can co-construct with others who assist the learner by exerting direct control over the construction of novel skill elements

Figure 6: Development under High, Low and Scaffolded Support

Drawing upon on a large number of studies, research suggests that development

assumes different shapes depending upon the contexts in which skills are constructed and

assessed As shown in Figure 6, for any given skill, (1) functional levels of development – the

levels that people exhibit in the absence of contextual support – develop slowly and gradually

over time, and typically operate several levels below (2) optimal and (3) scaffolded levels of

performance Optimal level performance – the highest level a person is capable of performing under high support conditions – shows a scalloped developmental curve When assessing optimal performance, novel levels of development tend to emerge in discontinuous spurts, followed by a leveling off after their emergence, and slow growth prior to the next

discontinuous spurt of development Scaffolded levels operate above optimal levels, and exhibit idiosyncratic patterns depending upon the nature of skill and scaffolding provided

Ignoring the effect of context, individual skills show (4) non-linear development, fluctuating

between higher and lower levels as a function of context, task demands, emotional and physical state, and so forth

Developmental Change Processes: The Dynamics of Self-Organization in Medias Res

The movement from skill theory to dynamic skill theory builds upon the elaboration and

incorporation of systems (Weiss, 1962), dynamic systems (Thelen & Smith, 1994; van der Maas & Molenaar, 1992; van Geert, 1991, 1998) and epigenetic (Gottlieb, 2004; Waddington, 1942) approaches in Fischer’s model to development Traditional approaches tended to portray development as a product of maturation and learning conceived as separate and distinct forces (Rabinowitz, 1987) Dynamic systems approaches provided conceptual and empirical tools for

understanding how complex patterns of behavior emerge in real and developmental time

(Witherington, 2011) Instead of thinking of action or development as processes governed by separable process – genes versus environment or cognition versus emotion it was more

helpful to understand them as products of the self-organization of multiple processes as they mutually influence each other over time (Lewis & Granic, 1999; Van Geert, 2009) Instead of

thinking of development as a linear process of universal or stage-like development, it became

possible to understand the non-linear origins of complexity and variability as well as structure and order in thinking, feeling and acting over time (Molenaar & Raijmakers, 2000)

Drawing on ideas from dynamic and epigenetic systems thinking, Fischer adopted the

idea that structures of acting emerge in medias res – in the middle of things (Fischer & Steward,

1999) A person is not a disembodied or rational agent set off apart from the world; the person

is an embodied and emotive actor whose actions are embedded in the world This transition to dynamic skill theory occurred with the publication of “The Dynamics of Competence: How Context Contributes Directly to Skill” (Fischer et al., 1993) In this paper, Fischer et a (1993)

argued against the idea that cognition could be understood as kind of fixed inner competence

No fixed competences exist within the individual; structures of action and though emerge dynamically through the mutual interplay between person and context, cognition and emotion,

biology and culture, and so forth

In this regard, it is helpful to think of developmental change processes in terms of

vertical and horizontal coactions that occur within multiply-embedded epigenetic systems

(Bidell & Fischer, 1997; Gottlieb, 2004) We can think of epigenetic systems as organized both horizontally and vertically Vertical coactions occur between embedded “levels” of the

epigenetic system (e.g., gene-cell; cell-organ; organ-organ system; family;

person-culture) Horizontal coactions occur within individual “levels” of system functioning (e.g., gene; organ-organ; cognition-emotion; person-person) From an epigenetic or systems

gene-perspective, the processes that organize development are not separate and distinct forces, but instead mutually influencing systems that produce both stability and order as well as flux and variation (Molenaar, 2015; Rose & Fischer, 2011) Ultimately, within such a view, the distinction between process and structure begins to erode (Giordano, 2017) There are not processes that operate on structures; there are only dynamically emergent systems structured processes that mutually regulate each other over time (Sawyer, 2002)

For our purposes, is helpful to classify vertically embedded systems at the bio-genetic, personal-relational and socio-cultural levels of functioning In what follows, we examine how

structures of acting, thinking and feeling emerge dynamically from coactions that occur both within and between multiply-nested epigenetic systems (Gottlieb, 2004; Lickliter & Honeycutt, this volume)

Brain-Behavior Relations in Development

Fischer (1987, 1994, 2008) suggested that brain growth and development was a

necessary but not sufficient condition the developmental coordination of higher-order

psychological structures In a series of papers, Fischer (1987, 1994, 2008; Fischer & Bidell, 2006; Fischer & Rose, 1994, 1996; Fischer, Rose & Rose, 2007; Fischer & Van Geert, 2014) Drawing

on the concept of the developmental range, Fischer showed that developmental changes in the optimal level of skills moved in terms of a series of scalloped discontinuities (see Figure 7) That

is, after a period of relatively gradual change, in contrast to functional level skills, optimal level showed abrupt, discontinuous change at a series of particular time periods Fischer theorized that such discontinuities occur as a result of systematic spurts in brain growth around the same age periods Fischer found support for this hypothesis in the form of studies assessing the growth of electrical activity in the brain as measured by electroencephalogram (EEG) (Matousek

and Petersén, 1973) The assessment of relative power – a measure of the amount of energy in

electrical waves in the brain – provides the most robust evidence of developmental change in brain activity Relative power is calculated for particular brain regions and wave bands by

dividing the energy for those regions and wave bands by other relevant measures of energy (e.g., the total energy in the EEG)

Figure 7:

Relation between EEG Relative Power and Level of Optimal Level Skills over Time

Data from a several studies showed that spurts of brain growth correspond closely with the ages for emergence of each optimal level between 1 and 21 years In infancy,

discontinuities in EEG relative power appear at ages similar to those for optimal skill

development— approximately 3 to 4, 6 to 8, 11 to 13 months, and 2 years (Hagne, Persson, Magnusson, & Petersen, 1973) For example, in a study of relative power for occipital EEG in Japanese infants, Mizuno et al (1970) reported spurts in relative power at approximately 4, 8, and 12 months Over the course of childhood and adolescence, discontinuities arise at

approximately 2, 4, 7, 11, 15, and 20 years (Somsen, van Klooster, van der Molen, van Leeuwen,

& Licht, 1997; Thatcher, 1994) Figure 7 shows developmental changes in EEG relative power from a Swedish study, which reported spurts at approximately 2, 4, 8, 12, 15, and 19 years (Hudspeth & Pribram, 1992; John, 1977; Matousek & Petersén, 1973)

Other sources of evidence for the correspondence between brain growth and

psychological change come from studies assessing changes in head size, synaptic density and cortical activity (Fischer & Rose, 1994; Thatcher, 1994) Research assessing EEG coherence across different brain regions suggests a cycle pattern of connectivity across brain regions at various levels of skill development The connections typically begin with the formation of long distance connections between the frontal cortex and the occipital regions for both

hemispheres Thereafter, growth moves systematically around the cortex from the right

hemisphere through the left For the right hemisphere, the growth cycle starts with global, long-distance connections before closing in on more local patterns of connection In contrast, in the left hemisphere, growth begins by first establishing more local connections and then

moving outward to from more distant ones Growth moves systematically through cortical areas until it establishes networks throughout the cortex

Although brain development is necessary for the construction of higher-order

structures, it is by no means sufficient Brains do not develop in a vacuum The fact that brains exhibit plasticity in their development is well understood, as is the idea that experience is necessary to channelize that activity What is less clear is how differentiation of brain processes and functions actually arises through bio-experiential coactions between organism and world

In a non-reductionist psychology, to the extent that brain development is coactively

channelized by experience, it follows that the emergent processes that arise at

socio-psychological levels of functioning are just as real and important as those that occur at the biological level of brain and bodily action

The Individual-Social Nexus

Persons are simultaneously biological, psychological and social beings Psychological processes are necessarily emergent forms of complexly-organized biological systems As

emergent forms, the properties of psychological processes cannot contradict those of their biological constituents (Mascolo & Kallio, in press) Nonetheless, as emergent forms,

psychological processes require explanation at a psychological level of analysis At the psychological level of functioning, persons act Actions are forms of doing According to

socio-dynamic skill theory, higher-order skills develop through the coordination of lower-level forms

of action and meaning To contribute to their own development, individuals must perform effortful acts of coordination that bring novel, higher-order skills into existence Fischer (1980;

Fischer & Pipp, 1994) proposed a series of transformation rules that describe how higher-order

psychological forms of skilled action are constructed from the coordination of lower-order skills and their components These transformation rules are provided Table 2 These rules describe

what individuals must do in order to construct higher-order skills from lower-level actions

Table 2

Transformation Rules and Developmental Change Processes

Differentiation Creating new

skills or skill elements by making

distinctions or discriminations in

existing skills Modifying or

separating the components of

one skill to produce a second skill

After reading the word “cat”

in a picture book, a old comes across the word

6-year-“bat” Applying the skill to read the word “cat”, the child differentiates two skills where there was once one

Substitution Extending a skill to

objects (real or symbolic) to novel

objects beyond its original or

habitual range of application

Two-year-old who can pretend to make a teddy bear walk applies this skill to acts of pretending that a doll or block can walk

Shift-of-Focus Shifting between

or juxtaposing two or more skills

in sequence without integrating

them Shifting focus of attention

from one skill to another

A 2 ½-year-old asked to imitate complex story breaks it down into two simpler one and tells them

by shifting from one to other

Compounding Adding skills or

skill within a single

developmental level in order to

make more complex skills at that

level

Using representational mappings, a 4 ½ year-old tells a complex story by adding many events at the same developmental level

Generalization Extending the

range of application of a skill

beyond its current domain;

abstracting across multiple skills

or representations to produce a

concept with broad application

A woman in psychotherapy abstracts across what is common to several descriptions of herself to construct a more

generalized description

Intercoordination The mutual

integration of two more skills at

one developmental level to

produce skills at a higher

developmental level

Able to coordinate two representational mappings into a representational system, an 8-year-old sees that when he is an adult, his mother will still be older

Individuals learn what they do, and particularly what they do with others Social

interaction – especially exchanges that are scaffolded with more accomplished others has the effect of raising an individual’s performance to levels beyond that which can be sustained while working alone (Mascolo, 2005) In social interaction, the acts of the other have a direct role in structuring the actions of the self This is possible because the actions of partners in social interaction are never independent of each other Social partners are not isolated individuals who take turns sending and receiving information back and forth in a series of discrete

messages Instead, face-to-face communication is a continuous process in where social partners act as both “senders” and “receivers” simultaneously In so doing, interlocutors continuously

adjust their thoughts, feelings and actions to the ongoing and anticipated actions of their social partners As a speaker “sends” a message, she simultaneously “receives” continuous nonverbal (and verbal) feedback that always has the potential to modify the meanings that evolve

continuously between individuals

In this way, in face-to-face communication, neither individual is in full control of her

actions; instead, interlocutors co-regulate each other’s action over time (Fogel, 1993) As a

result, social partners are capable of constructing novel forms of meaning that neither partner could have created alone This is especially the case in language-based exchanges, where partners are able to communicate using words that represent historically-shaped and socially-shared meanings Language use is a deeply generative medium; given a finite number of basic elements, it is possible to create an infinite number of novel meanings Thus, in sign-based interaction, the number of novel meanings that can be created between people is enormous The actual meanings constructed are subject to the constraints of the existing knowledge and skills of the participants, cultural and material resources, shared goals and problems, and so forth (Baerveldt & Cresswell, 2015)

The processes by which individual children coordinate novel structures of thinking, feeling and action within coactive exchanges with others can be illustrated through an analysis

of micro-developmental changes that occur in a 4 ½-year-old boy as he learned to add single digit numbers The boy was filmed as a male interviewer asked the boy to perform a series of addition problems in a naturalistic setting No constraints were put on the teacher and learner’s actions A detailed analysis of the structure of the child’s actions as they unfold within the particular social context illustrates the ways in which adding skills emerged in richly structured representational activity that was distributed between the child, the interviewer and the use of sensorimotor action as a tool for mediating the process the developmental process

In the first exchange, the child was asked to add “2 + 1” The dynamic construction of the child’s actions over time can be tracked as follows:

Figure 8:

Relational-Temporal Structure of Adding “2 + 1”

The teacher’s question “What is 2 + 1?” operates at the level of complex

(compounded) representational mappings (Rp2+) To perform the symbolic task independently,

a child must be able to coordinate or map one concrete quantitative representation (a number) onto another in order to produce a novel quantity To perform the task, the child first raised two fingers of his left hand and then one finger of his right hand After a pause, the interviewer prompted the child to continue At this point, the child looked at his hands, and without

hesitation produced the correct response (3) It would be tempting to conclude that because

the interviewer’s question functions at the level of representational mappings, the child’s

correct response also functions at this level However, this would be a mistake A detailed

analysis of the structure of the child’s actions reveals that they are organized at both

representational and sensorimotor levels of functioning At the representational level, the first

part of the child’s performance functions at the level of compounded single representations (Rp1+) The child was able to use separate representations of “2” and “1” to control separate acts of raising two fingers on one hand and one finger on the other and to juxtapose them next

to each other

For this child, the sensorimotor acts raising and looking at his fingers are part of the

process of performing the task; the task could not have been performed without them Even though the child used his existing representational knowledge of “2” and “1” to control the sensorimotor acts of raising and looking at his fingers, the embodied act of looking at the raised fingers plays a direct role in organizing the representational aspects of the task This is shown in the second part of the task After interviewer, responding to the child’s pause, prompted the

child to continue, the child looked at his fingers and immediately produced the correct

response The response was not produced through acts of adding, but instead through an act

akin to subitizing or immediately apprehending the quantity of the fingers at which he was

looking Thus, the second part of the child’s actions – apprehending the quantity by looking at

his raised fingers operated at the level of compounded single representations (Rp1+) Thus, in

this context, the child’s performance was not mediated by a “mental” act of adding Control

over the problem-solving activity was distributed between the child, the adult, and the

sensorimotor acts of raising and looking at his fingers

Compare this distributed strategy to a the more integrated and independently deployed structure performed in response to the sixth problem in the sequence (“How much is 5 +1?”) The process of adding “5 + 1” in this child is indicated as follows:

Figure 9:

The Temporal Structure of Adding 5 + 1

The child approached this problem in much the same way as he did the first problem He used his already existing knowledge (i.e., “a hand has five fingers”) to direct the act of immediately raising five fingers on his left hand and one finger on the right hand In contrast to his

performance on the first trial, the child did not pause, but instead proceeded to direct his attention to a second phase of the task in which he counted, starting on the left hand and moving to the right, the digits raised on both hands In stating the correct answer, the child’s

skill operated at the level of representational mappings (Rp2) Specifically, the child was able to

represent the correct response (6) as equivalent to the act of combining the two addends (5 and 1) Although this skill functions at a higher level than that produced in the first trial, it still cannot be counted as an act of “mental adding” The child still lacks an internalized

understanding of the logic or procedure of psychologically combining two addends

In this session, the child’s highest level of functioning occurred on the 21st

and last trial Again, despite its sophistication, close analysis indicates how control over the task was

distributed between the child, adult and sensorimotor action The microgenetic construction of these structured operations is indicated as follows:

Figure 10: The Temporal Construction of Adding “5 + 4” through “5+5”

To understand the nuanced structure of the child’s skill, it is necessary to begin the analysis with the 20th

trial, where the child was asked to add “5 + 5” In response to this question, similar to structure of the sixth trial, the child used separate representations to hold up five fingers on one hand and five on the other Recognizing immediately the 10 raised fingers from both hands, the child produced the correct answer At this point, the adult asked: “How much is

5 + 4?” The child lifted five fingers on the left hand, and, more slowly, lifted four on the right

Looking at his hands, and without counting, the child said “nine” In previous trials, the child

had used the strategy of counting his raised fingers to solve problems with addends greater than 2 or 3 In this circumstance, his immediate response raised the possibility that he was comparing number of fingers raised on the 21st

trial to the memory of the 10 fingers raised on the previous trial The immediacy of the child’s response suggested he performed the task through a form of “subitized subtraction” Because the child was representing a small number (1), it was possible for him to apprehend that the fingers he saw before him on the 21st

trial

were one fewer than the number of fingers that he already knew were contained on two raised

hands, and that he had just seen moments before

Individual psychological structures are thus constructed at the nexus of individual and social functioning In social interaction, novel structures of thinking, feeling and acting are

coactively constructed between persons but personally coordinated by individual learners

Scaffolding in the zone of proximal development raises a child’s performance beyond what can

be sustained while working alone, the coactive production of novelty is insufficient For

development to occur, individual learners must actively coordinate for themselves meanings, actions and regulatory processes that are coactively constructed between people Thus, in development, while learners must perform acts of coordination for themselves, they do not typically perform those acts by themselves

The Cultural Organization of Development

It is not sufficient to say that individuals construct psychological structures through their relations to other people Individual and social processes operate within larger cultural systems

that are necessary for the constitution of persons and relationships One might define culture as

a system of meanings, values and practices distributed throughout a social group or linguistic community (Mascolo, 2004) Humans enter the world incomplete; it is through their

participation in the cultural activities that they move toward completion, even if completion is never truly immanent nor even completely definable One window into understanding how culture organizes development is to compare trajectories of skill development across different cultures2

Based upon Jin Li’s work while she was a graduate student at Harvard University (see Li, this volume), Li, Wang and Fischer (2004) reported the results of a study examining differences

in the structure of shame concepts between the United States and China In their study, when asked to list various terms for shame, Chinese participants produced 113 different words Using

a cluster analysis, the investigators identified six basic categories of terms: (1) fear of losing face; (2) feelings of losing face; (3) guilt; (4) disgrace; (5) shamelessness and its condemnation and (6) embarrassment The Chinese lexicon for shame far surpasses that of Western and

European cultures, and reflects the importance of Confucian values in (e.g., filial piety, honor, moral virtue, shame, etc.) in both traditional and contemporary Chinese culture Differences between fundamental beliefs that structure Chinese and European-American cultures are profound They produce forms of practice, behavior and moral belief that are often difficult to reconcile across cultures A more detailed analysis of how cultural differences produce

divergent forms of socio-emotional life is provided below

The Socio-Emotional Dynamics of Development

The analysis of emotional processes plays an important role in the elaboration of skill theory as an integrative model of psychological development Attention to emotional processes extends the explanatory power of the theory in several ways It provides a framework for

understanding how emotion and cognition mutually regulate each other in the real-time

construction of action It provides a framework for tracking how emotional states and

experiences undergo change in development Finally, it provides a way to understand and analyze the role that socio-emotional processes play in organizing the process and shapes of

development itself

Developmental Changes in the Structure of Emotional Experience

Emotions consist of felt patterns of motive-relevant engagement with the world They are embodied appraisals of the relation between events and a person’s adaptive concerns To the extent that emotions are organized by patterns of appraisal, experience, action and

regulation, it follows that emotions themselves undergo developmental change as their

component processes develop in relation to each other over time Skill theory has been used as

a framework for mapping out trajectories in the development of a variety of different

emotions, including anger, joy, as well as self-evaluative emotions such as pride, shame and guilt (Fischer & Tangney, 1995; Mascolo & Griffin, 1998; Mascolo, Li & Fischer, 2003; Mascolo & Fischer, 1995, 2015) Tables 3 and 4 provides illustrative analyses of developmental changes in the structure of two forms of emotional experience: anger in Western culture, and the

experience of shame/guilt in traditional Chinese culture The tables describe forms of

appraisals, action tendencies, expressive acts and self-control procedures at five selected levels

of development The examples provided at each level describe the structures of particular

cultural processes orient development in different societies does not render those processes any less cultural; it merely makes them more difficult to identify as cultural process

Table 3

Illustrative Developmental Changes in the Prototypical Structure of Anger in Western Culture

Appraisal/Antecedents Action and Expressive Acts Self-Control Procedures Structure of Experience

Adulthood: Violation of Complex Moral

Identifications (Ab3, 18+ yrs) Something

or someone violates conditions that a

person asserts ought to exist Other

experienced as blameworthy Events are

appraised as illegitimate, or contrary to

the way in which they are supposed to be

The person experiences a

strengthening of the will to move against the violator, to protest, fight

or retaliate, and thereby restore the moral order (justice, freedom, care,

the legitimate demands of relationships, etc.)

Suppression, invoking cultural display rules; reframing/re- construing the moral meaning

of the violation; invoking compassion; mindful regulation

of emotion; conflict management

Adolescence: Violation of Abstract

Socio-Moral Identifications (Ab1/10-11 yrs)

Violation of emergent social

identifications, desires, or attempts to

secure status, autonomy, responsibility,

independence or other normative criteria

of adolescent identity

Verbal attack, protest, retaliation and discursive justification of violations in terms of shared criteria for adolescence and incipient adulthood

Capacity for complex enactments, e.g., passive/indirect aggression

Assessment of power differentials and capacity to choose effective protests

Internalization strategies (e.g., brooding); emerging capacity to reframe moral violations

Middle Childhood: Violations of Desires

and Discursively Constructed Moral

Goods (Rp3/6-7 yrs) Violations of wishes,

expectations and desires represented and

justified with reference to shared,

concrete and, discursively constructed

“moral goods”

Verbal attack, protest, retaliation and discursive justification of violations in terms of shared “moral goods”

Actions organized around concrete expectations of what one deserves

Regulation of action in terms of concrete display rules

Increasingly self-regulated soothing; acting on basis of initial assessment of coping potential and power

Early Childhood: Violation of Concrete

Symbolic Standards (Rp1/18-24m)

Violation of concrete wish, expectation or

desire Representation of the other as

causal agent of violation

Verbal and sometimes physical attack; temper tantrums Furrowed brows, square mouth, raised voice

Responsive regulation to calming directives of others

Seeking correction from authority figures

Infancy: Sensorimotor goal blockage

(Sm3/2 months) Blockage of

goal-directed sensorimotor action

Increased vigor in performing thwarted action; angry facial expression; looking toward source of violation

Gaze aversion, self-soothing, looking toward others to invite help

Note Diagrams indicate the integrative structure of emotional experiences The structure provided in brackets indicates the organization of motive-relevant

appraisals The statement that appears in the shaded ellipse indicates the action tendency dominant in the situation, while the terms below the ellipse indicate forms of voluntary and involuntary acts and expressions The bolded material that appears above the skill structure indicates self-control procedures

experiences as they arise in the types of contexts specified – they do not reflect broad-based stages of emotional functioning As is the case for all skills, the level and form of emotional experience varies as a function of context, adaptive challenges, the goals and motives that structure the experience, physical and social resources, and so forth

Among adults, anger is a moral emotion Among adults, anger is the experience of

seeking to remove violations to what a person asserts ought to exist The idea of ought or ought not is central to the adult experience of emotion Anger occurs when we make appraisals that blameworthy others have acted in ways that they should not have; events are contrary to the way they are supposed to be Anger involves a strengthening of the will to move against the

source of the violation in order to remove it and reestablish the moral order In anger, we experience ourselves as “strong”, “hot”, “expanding”, “boiling” or “ready to explode” (see de Rivera, 1991; Mascolo & Harkins, 1998) The development is a story of how challenges to an individual’s goals, motives and desires come to be increasingly experienced as embodied socio-moral violations that must be opposed

As shown in Table 3, the capacity for anger begins to develop in early infancy in the form

of blocked goals In studies in which infants learn to pull a string in order to produce an

interesting audio-visual display, Lewis, Sullivan and their colleagues have shown that olds exhibit angry facial components (e.g., furrowed brows) and increase the vigor of their arm pulling when the contingency between arm-pulling and the onset of the audio-visual display is disrupted (Lewis, Alessandri, & Sullivan, 1990) By 7-8 months of age, infants being to direct their gaze toward others in such circumstances, as if seeking assistance to restore the

2-month-contingency (Stenberg, Campos & Emde, 1983) Frustrated personal and social goals provide the foundation for the development of anger Beginning in the latter half of the second year of life, anger increasingly becomes mediated by the capacity to construct symbolic

representations of expectations, desires and the various “moral goods” of one’s local

community, as well as by the ability to communicate, negotiate and justify socio-moral claims made in anger

Forms of action and expression made in anger change dramatically in development The uncontrolled outbursts in infancy become transformed and even replaced by increasingly

symbolic, verbal forms, indirect and negotiated forms of protest and resistance, which can occur on both interpersonal and collective levels The capacity for self-control develops

gradually over time and becomes increasingly constitutive of the experience itself Forms of emotional regulation have their origins in the infant’s capacity to divert their gaze during anger-inducing engagements with the world For better and for worse, infants and children are highly sensitive to parental actions that function to distract, limit or even encourage angry outbursts Under conditions of effortful control and deliberate instruction, both adults and children can learn to regulate their anger using mindfulness strategies, by re-construing and re-framing the violations that precipitate anger, through acts of forgiveness and reconciliation, and through the use modes of engagement involving conflict management

While the progression of anger experiences described in Table 4 is likely to be

recognizable to members of European-American cultures, forms of shame that develop in Chinese culture may be much less so The beliefs that structure traditional Confucian cultures differ profoundly from those that undergird Western societies Whereas European-American

Table 4

Developmental Changes in the Prototypical Structure of Guilt/Shame in Traditional Chinese Culture

Appraisal/Antecedents Action and Expressive Acts Self-Control Structure of Experience Adulthood: Socially-Extended Dishonor (Ab3: 18 yrs+)

Adult identifies self with continuous cultivation of

social-moral virtues (piety, mianzi, lian, etc) embraced by parents,

extended family, ancestors, social groups, and nation as a

whole Transgressions bring burden of dishonor to self and

to extended socio-moral system of which one is part

Failures to uphold public virtue brings forth declarations of shame, apologies, responsibility and intentions to transform oneself in the future accompanied

by public displays of emotion

Adult endures difficult task of accepting dishonor and seeking social reinstatement through discipline and moral self-cultivation

Early Adolescence: Dishonored Social Identity (Ab1: 10-11

yrs) Able to construct and identify with abstract and

generalized representations of how persons are expected

to embody shared socio-moral virtues, young adolescents

are able to begin represent failure to uphold virtues as

having brought dishonor onto self and one’s elders (e.g.,

parents, extended family, teachers, ancestors)

Adolescent is motivated to restore honor and approval of parents and the extend social group Adolescent resolves to cultivate virtues (e.g., filial piety, persistence, etc.) in order to bring honor to self and family

Adolescent accepts/

endures disapproval;

hides feelings and remains quiet; may withdraw when able;

remove shame by improvement

Middle Childhood: Failure to Cultivate Stable Honored

Characteristics in Eyes of Others (Rp3: 6/7 yrs) Child is able

to represent stable characteristics of self as currently

unworthy or as bringing dishonor to self and others (e.g.,

My mother is angry and embarrassed that I have been a

disobedient son To be obedient, I need to practice more.)

Child is motivated to improve self

in order to avoid parental disapproval, anger and embarrassment Looks down, may show distress

Stoically endures parental disapproval, punishment or shaming Listens quietly Hides feelings;

may externalize

Early Childhood: Awareness of Being Devalued in Eyes of

Others (Rp1: 18-24 m) Using single representations of

simple standards for performance, given disapproval, child

is aware other’s evaluation of self as currently unworthy or

in need of improvement (e.g., Grandma thinks I’m

“buguai’”; “Mother wants me to sing right”)

Child is motivated to avoid disapproval or gain and restore approval of the parent Child may cry or show distress or run and hide

Child looks down or away Hiding feelings, child remains quiet and complies with request, or affiliate to regain affection

Infancy: Early Social Shaming (Sm3: 13-14 m) Child fails to

honor performance expectations (e.g., fails to give relative

toy when asked) Adults express disapproval, often with

embarrassment over child’s act or currently unworthy self

Child is motivated to remove or avoid adult disapproval May cry, show signs of distress and seek to assuage adult

Gaze aversion;

attempts to affiliate to remove disapproval

Note Diagrams indicate the integrative structure of emotional experiences The structure provided in brackets indicates the organization of motive-relevant

appraisals The statement that appears in the shaded ellipse indicates the action tendency dominant in the situation, while the terms below the ellipse indicate forms of voluntary and involuntary acts and expressions The bolded material that appears above the skill structure indicates self-control procedures