Development Sense of Self

Differentiating Implicit-Explicit Emotion

Emotion can best be understood as being either implicit or explicit. Implicit emotional memory, as referenced in the Traumatic Stress section of this web site, is memory that is out of awareness and can become trapped within early LTM consolidation processes, when the original memory was perceived as traumatic and overwhelming. Traumatic memory is emotionally disturbing negative memory that is perceived as painful. When chronically excluded from attention and insufficiently processed and retrieved, easily forgotten. (Read more)

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Differentiating Social Motivations

Satiation of certain social motivational needs produces positive emotion; need frustration induces negative emotion.… Abraham Maslow identified four, of many, motivations that with expression and satiation contribute toward personal self-esteem and quality of life. He noted that humans strive to belong and fulfill affection and love needs, to achieve, to master, to be competent, and to experience a sense of capability and adequacy, to dominate and experience a sense of safety and control over one’s environment, and to experience relative satisfaction with life. (Read more)

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Self-Other Differentiation

For self-recognition to develop, the young child needs to differentiate the self from other. Michael Lewis had developed a model for conceptualizing the progression of self-other differentiation and the concomitant development of self-recognition. During the first period, birth and three months, the infant learns to differentiate or identify the unique qualities of the significant other providing care (mother) and to assess how to behave to generate certain outcomes for need satiation and elimination of discomfort caused by hunger, thirst, wetness, social isolation, insecurity, etc. (Read more)

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