The right brain is critical to survival functions like allocation of attention, positive and negative affect, regulating stress and the ability to read other’s emotions intuitively in an empathic way (Schore, 2019a). Across the lifespan the right-lateralised prefrontal regions are responsible for the ‘most complex regulation of stress and affect’ (p.244). The right frontal cortex, which is most in touch with the body and emotion is the most ‘sophisticated, extensive and highly evolved part of the brain’ (p.245). Self-awareness and empathy depend on the right hemisphere, which is also central to resolving conflict. The right brain is affected by later emotional attachments, including deep friendships.
Neuroscientists and social scientists are outlining the adaptive functions of the right brain (Schore, 2019). It is involved in ‘interpersonal competence’ – the capacity to interact and communicate, to share views and understand the emotions and opinions of others, as well as to resolve conflict. It supports trust, affiliation, fairness, empathy and gratitude – all of these, says Schore, are manifestations of mutual love created in the attachment relationship. The right brain ‘integrated self’ is characterised by emotional connectedness, broad attention, unconscious generation and regulation of emotion, integration of negative experiences, extended resilience and basic trust (which develops in the first months through interaction with the caregiver). These functions are activated in all intimate relationships. The right brain is ‘steeped in affiliation drives’ (Schore and Marks-Tarlow, in Schore, 2019). The social, emotional, relational right brain is ‘the cradle for a healthy brain’. If the infant is cherished, soothed, stimulated and receives attuned responses in the first two years their right brain, grounded in the body and relationships, becomes a healthy regulator for the individualistic power orientation of the left brain.
The right hemisphere specialises in implicit learning and implicit relational knowing (Schore, 2019). Implicit learning involves extracting patterns from the environment and holding information from past experience (memory). This can occur outside of awareness – in fact many functions that were traditionally thought to be conscious are now understood to occur non-consciously like social and affect perception. Each hemisphere has its own memory system, one verbal the other nonverbal. The human brain and mind are a dual system with the unconscious located in the right hemisphere. The unconscious is constantly active and is a hierarchical, self-organising ‘implicit-procedural regulatory system’ located in the right-brain. Not only thoughts but also affects can be unconscious and modern trauma theory shows that affects can be dissociated as well as repressed. The unconscious is brain/mind/body system with bodily-based hormonal and autonomic systems including stress and sex hormones operating beneath conscious awareness. The attachment relationship structuralises the developing right-brain unconscious for better or worse through the “implicit intergenerational transmission of resilience against or vulnerability to, later psychiatric, personality and developmental disorders” (Schore, 2019, p.23).
During critical periods of development of the deep unconscious ‘resonant and amplified and therefore intense emotional energy’ is shared within the attachment dyad that structuralises the infant’s right brain (Schore, 2019). In this atmosphere the developing unconscious gains ‘structural coherence’ and ‘functional complexity’. In affective moments of mutual love at all later stages, two deep unconscious systems are synchronising, resonating, regulating and communicating with each other. The social and emotional right brain has been shown in a large body of studies to be centrally involved in affect and stress regulation as well as empathy, intuition, creativity, imagery, symbolic thought, play, humour, music, compassion, morality and love. These findings alter previous conceptions of the ‘lower’ and less evolved unconscious. Right-brain ‘fast-acting implicit functions’ mediate the deeper mechanisms of the invisible unconscious.
Schore challenges traditional conceptions of the unconscious mind by highlight its regulatory, prosocial and adaptive functions. Resilience against and vulnerability to developmental disorders are also dependant upon the growth of the right brain unconscious mind. He also highlights the right brains connection with biological systems throughout the body highlighting the importance of an optimally functioning right hemisphere in physical health. Therefore, in seeking to prevent negative developmental outcomes we are seeking to create environments that facilitate the optimal development of the right, not the left hemisphere. This is important not just for personal health but also for social health as the right hemisphere is centrally involved in ‘interpersonal competence’. Schore (2012) quotes McGilChrist who describes how the right hemisphere ‘yields’ a world of ‘interconnected, implicit, incarnate, living beings within the context of a lived world…and to this world it exists in a relationship of care’ (p.398). Schore describes how this ‘essential’ right brain capacity optimally evolves in “the interpersonal context of a secure relationship bond, ‘a relationships of care’” (p.398). This notion of existing in a ‘relationship of care’ (with self, other and the world) provides a fitting vision of social health.
Identifying with others and intersubjective processes are largely dependant on the resources of the right hemisphere which are first to develop (Schore, 2019). In adults the right hemisphere is dominant for holistic processing of social interactions. The right hemisphere has an advantage over the left in mediating social intelligence, understanding others and their intentions, awareness of social dynamics and being able to handle social interactions successfully. The right hemisphere is central to ‘implicit affiliation motivation’ which is understood as the tendency to establish, maintain or recover affectively positive relationships’ with others and is rooted in parental care and social relationships (p.42). Socioemotional competence is an outcome of secure attachment a capacity for which the right hemisphere is dominant. The attuned mother responds promptly in appropriate ways to emotional expressions of the need for attachment repair. These events scaffold and ‘invisibly support’ the development of the ‘right brain regulatory coping capacities’ of the child and emphasise the principle that “secure attachment is the primary defense against trauma-induced psychopathology” (p.42).
The right hemisphere is dominant for social interactions as for maintaining a coherent sense of one’s body, for attention and pain processing (Schore, 2019). Dissociation is right-brain deficit in the corporeal self and in sustaining a unified, continuous, coherent sense of self. In dissociation there is an inability to process external stimuli and integrate them with internal stimuli. This failure of integration creates a collapse in subjectivity and intersubjectivity. A constricted self is created that is unable to integrate experience. While effective in the short-term in the long-term it prevents exposure right brain socioemotional learning experiences in intersubjective contexts that are essential for emotional growth. For some, intimacy becomes an experience of overwhelming arousal. The end point in dissociation is an impairment of survival functions – the inability to take defensive action, act on one’s own behalf, the inability to experience affect, all of which are critical to survival. Dissociation, the defense against affect, is central to reactive attachment disorder and paediatric maltreatment disorder, as well as autism, psychotic disorders, DID, PTSD, eating disorders, substance abuse and alcoholism, somatoform disorders and BPD. Dissociative defenses block the possibility of interactive regulation and the organisation of more complex right brain stress regulatory strategies.
Ruth Feldman describes ‘intense moments’ of ‘interaction synchrony’ created between 3-month-olds and their mothers (Schore, 2021). These face-to-face exchanges are short in duration and are ‘purely social’ involving high levels of positive arousal and social coordination compared to feeding or caregiving. The brevity and intensity of these episodes seem to create ‘biological concordance’ between heart rhythms. Schore notes that these ‘synchronised ordered patterns of energy transmissions’ – directed flows of energy – are the ‘fundamental core’ right brain systems of communication and regulation. In dynamic systems, synchrony is complex, emergent and indeterminate. Dynamic systems theory holds that a flow of energy at critical moments facilitates a self-organising system to become more interconnected. This is how ‘organismic form’ is constructed in the developmental process. As the relationships between components of a self-organising system establish greater interconnection and become more well-ordered, that system becomes capable of maintaining coherence in the face changes in the environment. Schore notes this applies to the cortical-subcortical connections of the developing right brain self-system. Right-lateralised interbrain synchronisation in an energised intersubjective field generates dynamic vitality affects. This synchronisation also creates metabolic energy that fuels the growth and development of the organisation of the infant’s right brain. The emotion-processing right brain is a dynamic system – a ‘cohesively organised self-regulating integrated whole’. Schore here presents the concept of interbrain synchrony as the experience which fuels the optimal development of the right brain. We will return to this central mechanism of brain growth later.
Meares describes ‘protoconversations’ between mother and infant as an ‘interplay’ between two right brains (Schore, 2021). In optimal contexts these protoconversations continue into the second year when the toddler has a great need for novelty and a burgeoning playful imagination begins to develop. With increased right brain capacity, the intersubjective protoconversation takes the form of intersubjective imaginative games, internalised dialogs, and ‘conversational play’, a game the child plays alone based on their ability for make-believe. The right brain analogical or protosymbolic play is imbued with joy and pleasure. This play consists of the child telling a miniature story to themselves and to someone else who maintains a background presence. The child generates fantasies including fantasised interactions with other minds. Entering early childhood this imagination can be shared with others in the ‘intersubjective play of creative storytelling’. Mutual love, play and imagination emerge out of experiences of primary intersubjectivity and protoconversations (Schore, 2021). This passage highlights the developing child’s needs for intersubjectivity and the central role of play in this. Interestingly even ‘solitary play’ occurs in company. Optimal environments must facilitate the child’s intense needs for love and play. Stressed and busy adults, embedded with an a culture organised around productivity and achievement, can struggle to be present are unlikely to meet the child’s need in this respect.
Neuroscience supports the idea that ‘infant-directed’ speech, or motherese, is critical for the development of areas in the right hemisphere that process prosodic-emotional functions (Schore, 2021). What Darwin referred to as ‘the sweet music of the species’ is preferred over adult directed speech a few weeks after birth regardless of culture. Motherese is the vocal expression of emotion to infants has a higher pitch, a wider pitch range, and exaggerated pitch contours. It is also shorter, slower and contains longer pauses than adult speech. Studies emphasise the importance of the melody of the mother’s voice and whether she uses infant-directed speech, in particular in “arousal-reducing calming-soothing and arousal-amplifying playful contexts” (p.36). The mother’s voice, we might say, is the music that regulates the infant and it is interesting to note that music and prosodic voices have a regulating effect throughout the lifespan, (Porges, 2011, Machiodi, 2020) suggesting it is a basic mechanism of regulation. Touch appears to play a similar role.
Mother and infant create a ‘touch synchrony’ system that alters vagal tone and cortisol reactivity (Schore, 2021). Interpersonal touch is used as a communication system for regulating emotional information. Studies show that during breast-feeding there are high levels of tactile stimulation and activation in right cortical areas during this ‘intense somatosensory’ contact. This demonstrates the need for affectionate touch in infants for healthy right hemisphere development. The right hemisphere is more involved in mothering and emotional processing. There is a rightward asymmetry in limbic structures, meaning the right cerebral hemisphere is better at processing emotion. Russel Meares writes that the right brain self-system generates a ‘background sense of well-being’ which is the implicit sense of secure attachment. The right-lateralised system “stores a vocabulary of non-verbal affective facial expressions, prosody, and gestures” (p.39). Secure attachment histories are interactively regulated implicit procedural memories imprinted into developing cortical-subcortical circuits which generate internal working models that encode strategies of affect regulation that act as guides in interpersonal contexts and operate nonconsciously. From this we can deduce than an optimal environment is a ‘touch rich’ environment.
The right hemisphere continues to enter later growth spurts, particularly in adolescence and so ‘the right-lateralised synchronised intersubjective communication system’ evolves across the lifespan (Schore, 2021). These growth spurts are affected by socioemotional experiences (Schore, 2019a). Interpersonal synchrony acts as a basic interpersonal neurobiological mechanism in dyads, but also in all human groups, as well as in cultures (Schore, 2021). However, it is crucial that the ‘primordial critical period for intersubjectivity’ is protected properly. A lack of protection can have a long-term impact on the emotional health of the culture, particularly for males. Right brain deficits of intersubjectivity result in the inability to emotionally communicate and synchronise with another brain, particularly when under stress.
Malchiodi, C. A. (2020). Trauma and expressive arts therapy: Brain, body, and imagination in the healing process. Guilford Publications.
Porges, S. W. (2011). The Polyvagal theory: Neurophysiological foundations of emotions, attachment, communication, and self-regulation (Norton series on interpersonal neurobiology). W. W. Norton & Company.
Schore, A. N. (2019). Right brain psychotherapy (Norton series on interpersonal neurobiology). W. W. Norton & Company.
Schore, A. N. (2019). The development of the unconscious mind (Norton series on interpersonal neurobiology). W. W. Norton & Company.
Schore, A. N. (2021). The interpersonal neurobiology of intersubjectivity. Frontiers in Psychology, 12. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.648616