tively cool cognitions. Thus the individual is able to think in a well-ordered
way about aspects of experience and reality that are emotionally salient, in-
cluding emotions themselves. However, in contrast to the facilitative effect of
slight levels of arousal, when arousal rises to extremely high levels, it tends to
render complex, cool cognitions and behavior dysfunctional and poorly inte-
grated. Instead, automated, non-conscious schemas take over—presumably,
because they are less susceptible to disruption by high levels of arousal (Nor-
man, 1976). Thus, automatic mechanisms assert themselves that aim to main-
tain affect balance in a sufficiently positive range.
The principle of dynamic integration is one of the reasons that development
ideally proceeds in a context of relatively low and well-regulated arousal or
activation. Thus, experience needs to be assimilable if the individual is to ex-
plore and tolerate the disequilibrium such exploration implies. Yet, if the in-
dividual is able to accept a degree of disequilibration and engage in the kinds
of exploratory, deviation amplifying strategies Piaget (1980) described, then
new schemas can develop as the individual achieves a new level of equilibrium.
These more complex schemas, in turn, expand the range of what is familiar and
allow the individual to maintain relatively cool cognitions in contexts that
would be extremely disruptive for the individual that does not have available
similarly highly developed cognitive-affective schemas.
The principle of dynamic integration assumes, then, that an individual’s
ability to integrate new experience is constrained by a particular currently real-
ized level of integrative ability or cognitive resources. As this level increases, ac-
tivation previously experienced as disruptive no longer is experienced as dis-
ruptive. The effect of such increases in cognitive-affective complexity can be
depicted by expanding the simple law described in Fig. 9.1. Figure 9.2 adds to
Fig. 9.1 the assumption that individuals, over the course of their development
or as a result of some other variable, may differ in such resources as the cogni-
tive-affective structures they have available. This figure shows the degree to
which cognition becomes disorganized or degraded for individuals low, me-
dium, and high in resources. Thus at an equal level of emotional activation,
this figure suggests that high resource individuals not only are overall more in-
tegrated, but also degrade their behavior–cognitions more gradually than
those of medium and low resources. We turn to a discussion of the effects of
degradation in the next section of this chapter, but before we do so, we first dis-
cuss what constitutes progression in cognitive-affective development.
Since the principle of dynamic integration suggests that a critical demand
in the gradual expansion of cognitive-affective schemas is that arousal be reg-
ulated within levels that are not disruptive, it is critical that the development
of these schemas be embedded in systems that provide appropriate levels of
emotion modulation that the growing individual himself or herself cannot
provide. This critical regulatory function of containment is provided, on one
hand, by the graduation of experience typical of educational settings. How-
248 LABOUVIE-VIEF AND GONZÁLEZ