The Still Face Paradigm experiment.
Credit: Dr. Edward Tronick
In 1978, developmental psychologist Edward Tronick and his colleagues published a paper in the Journal of the American Academy of Child Psychiatry that demonstrated the psychological importance of the earliest interactions between a mother and her baby. The interactions of interest involved the playful, animated, and reciprocal mirroring of each other’s facial expressions. Tronick’s experimental design was simple: A mother was asked to play naturally in this way with her 6-month-old infant. The mother was then instructed to suddenly make her facial expression flat and neutral—completely “still,” in other words–and to do so for three minutes, regardless of her baby’s activity. Mothers were then told to resume normal play. The design came to be called the “still face paradigm.”
When mothers stopped their facial responses to their babies, when their faces were “still,” babies first anxiously strove to reconnect with their mothers. When the mothers’ faces remained neutral and still, the babies quickly showed ever-greater signs of confusion and […]
Spot on. Indeed, I believe this intelligence was used by the forces that won. A stark difference between right and left is that the right, or the country folk this time, see institutions as still faced. The left ignores this part and views them as ‘well intentioned’ and good…. having not dealt with them. Of course this is a vast generalization, and there are good organizations and bad ones. But this alienation is generative.
Anyway, much of that can be automated now….. says the still faced ‘happy’ robot. Much of that can be automated now.
“The failure of our institutions to empathize with the plight of the middle and working classes, to recognize their sacrifice and reward their hard work is traumatic. It is the same type of trauma that children experience when their caretakers are preoccupied or rejecting. The trauma erodes trust. “… from the article
It creates feelings of being devalued, feelings of despair and we are shocked with the frequency of mass shootings and do not connect the dots. This is not a counseling problem, it is a crazy making problem, and neither the Hillary nor the Donald have the answer. Even the Bernie did not address this. Millennials now can only imagine living in tiny houses. All this alienation is connected. Zero vision, only problem solving. There is life beyond commercial work….. but on what planet?
So as not to be a total bummer at this solstice time… the UBI may be the answer, but I am flummoxed as to how this might be presented to Americans.