Edward Tronick is a very famous researcher in the field of emotional adjustment research. One of the leading exponents of Infant Research, he developed the experimental paradigm of still face in the 1970s. He devoted much of his life to studying mother-child interaction, began to study face-to-face interactions: with the help of a video camera, he began to film and analyze the various moments of interaction, trying to grasp not only verbal communication, but also all the implication that through the game, the unspoken, gestures, could come out. And Tronick wanted to understand, through the face to face procedure, the functioning of the development of the human personality.
He soon realized that communication does not happen in a one-way way, even when the child is a newborn: the exchange always takes place, the newborn is active during interactions and is co-responsible for the emotional tone of communication. Ed Tronick then develops another search tool: still face. The procedure consists of filming a normal mother-child interaction in which a mother cognitively and affectively plays with her child. But what happens if the mother suddenly “disappears” affectively? What happens if his face suddenly remains immobile, impassive and inexpressive, thus interrupting communication with the little one? The aim of the research is to understand if and what a child is doing to regain the mother’s gaze, to recover her mother and the emotional exchange she had with her until a few minutes before and what emotional processes open the way to the development of one type of personality rather than another.
When a child suddenly finds himself with a motionless and impassive mother, first of all he puts in place mechanisms of self consolation which, not enough to compensate for the frustration, are immediately followed by attempts to recover the mother. The child tries to return there where the relationship has been interrupted, tries to repair misunderstanding, misunderstanding in communication, tries to repair failure in the relationship of the dyad. When the child’s self succeeds in repairing the relationship, then it also succeeds in investing in it, but when the repair of the misunderstanding does not happen, the risk is a deep withdrawal of self, an autistic withdrawal in self consolatory mechanisms.
