ABSTRACT
Positive attention (praise and appreciation) received from another individual is rewarding. The unconscious striving to create and maintain conditions under which we receive praise and affection, or which assure us of our potential to receive praise and affection, is one of the principles that underpins social behaviour across the lifespan. Social behaviour begins with the infant's affective attunement to the mother's (caregiver's) facial expressions. Face-to-face interactions emerge in the infant's development at approximately two months of age. The functional specialisation of the human brain for language and face perception does not arise from passive unfolding of an innate maturational sequence but requires a process of development that is critically shaped by postnatal experience. Newborns are predisposed to express certain emotional states (affects) by facial expressions, vocalisations, and gestures. "Intersubjective relatedness" entails "the creation of mutually held mental states" "the joining of subjective psychic experience"— a joining that is actively (appetitively) sought.
