ABSTRACT
In recent years, neuroscience has paid increasing attention to mechanisms of what is called affective self-regulation, which have come to be seen as important for how we experience ourselves and the world around us. These are the processes by which we are able to cope with everyday events and also with stressful experiences. On the whole, they are habits; and as the habits of processing and digesting what happens, they form the foundations of what we call our coping style. What is newly percolating into the collective awareness of the professions is twofold: that these mechanisms are not innate but acquired in infancy and early childhood; and that the learning of affective self-regulation is critically dependent on attachment to, and intensive interactions with, a primary carer. In other words, we ‘learn’ to emotionally selfregulate in the way – and to the extent – that we see it mirrored in our earliest caregivers.
