Chapter 5: Infant’s Early Voice can be Found in Their Emotions

This chapter argues that emotions are a crucial and integral component of self development in infancy. We view emotions as dialogical experiences lived in bodies—bodies that co-exist in relation to other bodies, bodies that engage in alive communication with other bodies, bodies that co-regulate their movements with the movements of others. It follows then that a productive strategy to study how infants develop their sense of self is through the examination of early emotions in the dialogical contexts infants cocreate with their mothers. The theoretical underpinnings of the work presented are strongly influenced by dynamic systems theory and the works of Henri Wallon and Mikhail Bakhtin.