The Importance of Affective Neuroscience for Child Psychotherapy

ABSTRACT

In this article, I will discuss how affective neuroscience can help us be better child therapists. I will highlight several important contributions of affective neuroscience, especially theory and research on SEEKING, PLAY, separation distress, and the role of positive emotion systems in child mental health. I will describe how these ideas deepen our understanding of healthy and pathological emotional development in childhood and inform our therapeutic work with both children and parents. I will also discuss the importance of feelings of pride and shame – vital aspects of children’s emotional lives that have not yet been extensively studied by affective neuroscience. I will briefly describe an integrative model for child therapy, informed by both psychodynamic theory and affective neuroscience. Our most successful interventions with children and families set in motion positive cycles of healthy emotional and interpersonal experiences – increased confidence and engagement in life and more affirming interactions between parents and children. In this way, we help troubled children and families reclaim some of the joyousness and wonder of childhood.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. For more recent discussions of the primacy of affect in mental life and the origin of consciousness, see Solms (2021) and Damasio (2021). Damasio offers a musical analogy – that feelings are the “musical score that accompanies our thoughts and actions” (p. 79). Stanley Greenspan had earlier suggested a different musical metaphor – that emotions are the conductor of our mental orchestra (Greenspan & Shanker, 2009). See also Zellner et al. (2011) on emotions as “command systems” of the mind and Lotterman (2012) on affect as a “psychological center around which….other elements …are organized, like a force field.”

2. Sadly, when children enter school, asking questions is rarely encouraged. Instead, children are rewarded for knowing the answer. There is a disheartening irony here, because children who ask the most questions will also learn the most answers.

3. Panksepp observed that rats instinctively engage in play fighting, similar to human wrestling. He explained to a colleague who was visiting his lab that this was play, not aggression. The animals were not injured, the loser returned for more play, and the activity was accompanied by a characteristic vocalization, outside the range of human hearing (also elicited by tickling) that Jaak proposed is laughter. In subsequent experiments, Panksepp and his colleagues found that rats who were allowed to play showed increased gene expression and refinement of cellular structure in areas of the brain associated with social behavior (Burgdorf et al., 2010; Gordon et al., 2002, 2003). Increased opportunities for play in rats may also reduce, to some extent, the impulsive behavior that results from damage to the frontal lobes (Panksepp, 1998). After hearing Jaak talk about this research at one of the first neuropsychoanalytic lectures I attended, I imagined that Panksepp’s laughing rats would become as well known to undergraduate students of psychology as Lorenz’s geese and Skinner’s pigeons. Unfortunately, to my knowledge, this has not yet occurred (Barish, 2020a).

4. See seminal contributions by Slade (1994) and Frankel (1998) on the therapeutic value of “simply playing” in child therapy.

5. In previous publications, I have offered this summary statement: “Interactive play is to children’s social development what talking with children is to their vocabulary development and what exercise is to their physical development” (Barish, 2012, 2018).

6. See Granic & Patterson, 2006, and Lewis & Douglas, 1998, for Dynamic Systems models of emotional development.