The still-face is an experimental paradigm of ‘traumatic abuse, specifically neglect’ (Schore, 2012). The infant is exposed to a ‘severe relational stressor’ – the mother holds eye contact but inhibits vocalisation and spontaneous emotional facial expressiveness or gesture. This is a loss of dyadic regulation which triggers an increase in interactive behaviour and arousal in the infant. Tronick argues that infants who experience chronic breaks in connection show an ‘extremely pathological state’, of emotional apathy, similar to Spitz hospitalism effects and Romanian orphans who do not grow and develop. This represents chronic pathological dissociation. Direct gaze can mediate loving but also powerful, aggressive messages. In trauma, the infant is presented with an aggressive face and this image and the ‘chaotic alterations’ in the infant’s bodily state are ‘indelibly imprinted’ into limbic circuits as ‘flashbulb memory’ which is stored in ‘imagistic proceduaral memory’ in the ‘implicit right hemisphere’.
In traumatic episodes the infant is faced with another overwhelming facial expression – fear-terror, often with the mother withdrawing from the infant as if he were the source of alarm (Schore, 2012). These mothers have suffered trauma and their dysregulated states are ‘downloaded’ as ‘programmes of psychopathogenesis’, the context of the intergenerational transmission of trauma. Young infants show joy with a loving parent and immediate distress if that contact is perturbed or insensitive (Trevarthen in Aquarone et al, 2019).
Acquarone, S., & Taylor & Francis Group. (2019). Surviving the early years: The importance of early intervention with babies at risk. Routledge.
Schore, A. N. (2012). The science of the art of psychotherapy (Norton series on interpersonal neurobiology). W. W. Norton & Company.