The readiness of children to imitate adults and each other is of course
well known as an attribute of sociability and,ultimately,educability
(Bruner 1972).Imitation in adults also has a bonding effect (Bavelas et
al.1987);inviting a partner to imitative behavior by starting some action
oneself or using imitation to express accord and thus readiness for group
play is a principle of many bonding rituals.Doing things together con-
firms a sense of unity (Eibl-Eibesfeldt 1989:510).Addendum:A “Grammar” of the Emotions?
The arts of humans,like language and thought,are based on presymbolic
and prelinguistic dynamic states and analogically perceived and
processed communicative signals that are suffused with emotional
salience derived from their primitive origin in infancy when they were,
through sympathetic communion with others,one’s principal means of
connection with the world.In speech and symbolic thinking,these states
and signals become overlaid with more or less precisely fixed terms or
meanings assigned by cultures and used by them to encapsulate their
communal truths.
Mother-infant dialogue seems to be the prototype for a kind of fun-
damental emotional narrative that adult music,dance movement,and
poetic language can grow out of,build upon,exemplify,and sustain.In
early interactions,sensitivities to rhythmic and dynamic change are
manipulated to coordinate the pair emotionally and express their accord,
thereby reinforcing it.By means of a kind of emotional grammar (to
which adults remain sensitive) such as slight expansions and contractions
of intensity in space and time (e.g.,of speed,force,and duration of vocal
and kinesic movement),mother and infant convey to each other and
share the anticipation and fulfillment of beginnings and endings,impli-
cations and realizations,antecedents and consequents,qualifications and
subordinations;of entailment,contrast,redirection,opposition,turntak-
ing,pacing,and release.These grammatical abstractions can also describe
affective (not only linguistic) responses to adults’ verbal and nonverbal
interactions with other people and to encounters with the various arts.
Could we begin to describe their behavioral and neural manifestations
and correlates?Notes
1.Daly and Wilson (1995:1273) suggested that selection favors discriminative mechanisms
of parental psychology that allocate “parental investment”in infants.They noted (p.1282)
that the newborn’s precocious social response may be an adaptation for “advertising quality
and eliciting maternal commitment.”Their “three-stage theory of maternal bonding”does
not,however,include or refer to cocreated mechanisms of communicative interaction and404 Ellen Dissanayake