Baby Smile Revised 12~08

BABY SMILE Alan Challoner MA(Phil.) MChS The first social action of an infant is the smile. However the infant’s ability to smile, or appear to smile, is present before the socialisation process begins. Sometimes when a baby is troubled by wind due to taking air down with its milk, an expression akin to smiling may be seen. By the third week of life infants genuinely smile at a nodding head, and during the fourth week there is mutual gaze between infant and mother. This has transcended to the extra familiarity of peek-a-boo games by the age of six weeks. This making and breaking of the mutual gaze action is useful developmental support, and it encourages the infant to understand the different characteristics of the mother’s face, especially during the phase when good focus has not yet been established. Washburn investigated the development of smiling and laughing in fifteen infants during the first year of life.1 Standard situations were used to elicit these responses; smiling to social stimulation appeared at eight weeks, laughing at twelve weeks. Peek-a-boo games first elicited smiling at eight weeks and laughing at sixteen weeks. Altogether, eleven situations of this general nature were used. Laughing in response to a given situation appeared later than smiling. Definite changes in the “smiling” pattern were observed to appear with an increase in age. Laughter, which was more stereotyped than smiling, exhibited no discernible age changes. Silent laughter was not observed in any of the subjects. Doubling of the body in laughter occurred after the seated position had been assumed. The average frequency of smiling increased with age. This is attributed to the fact that smiling becomes conditioned to an increasing number of objects and situations as the infant grows older. At about two months infants begin to smile more in response to voice, and they seem to respond more to this sound than to any other, [except perhaps a frightening one]. Clear evidence that perception, cognition, and affect have begun to co-ordinate is seen in the appearance of the “smiling response”. 2,3 This indicates an unequivocal expression of integrated pleasure experiences and affective communication. The conditional nature of this response ensures the continuing interplay between mother and child and fosters affective and cognitive development to the point at which the child looks, in turn, for the mother’s smiling response. When the child is rewarded by this response, his smile broadens. On the other hand, when the response is denied the child, his smile fades and is fleetingly replaced by an expression of unpleasure and perplexity. This precursor of anxiety indicates that the structuralisation of unpleasurable experiences is beginning to be developed. In this way the child and mother enter a new phase of psychic reciprocity that brings a new quality into object

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Washburn, R.W. A Study of Smiling and Laughing of Infants in the first year of life. . Genet. Psychol. Monog. 1929, 6, 397-539. Spitz, R.A. The Smiling Response: A contribution to the ontogenesis of social relations. Genet. Psychol. Monog. 1946, 34, 57-125. Spitz, R.A. The First Year of Life. New York; International Universities Press, 1965. 1

BABY SMILE

Alan Challoner MA(Phil.) MChS

relations and provides a foundation for the more complex mutuality of object relationships in later years. Elkin views the infant’s smiling response by two or three months of age as a sign of self-other awareness.4 At some point within the first several months, the infant will smile upon seeing a face or a face representation (e.g., a mask with eyes and nose marks). This smiling response is not due to gas discharge, a transient spectacle, or stroking. It requires distance (seeing) and recognition. It betokens the advent of a symbolising consciousness. Yet, Elkin emphasizes, this self-other awareness arises before a coherent body image is worked out. The latter, signalled by eye-hand-mouth co-ordination, is consolidated by about six months of age. A question then is, what kind of world does the infant live in, if he is aware of self-other before he knows he has a body? Although smiling starts around the time of birth, at first it is fleeting and incomplete and leaves the spectator wholly unmoved. During the fourth and fifth weeks it is still fleeting but more nearly complete, and it begins to have social effects. The triggers for the smile become gradually more specific; initially the voice, then the face, but neither of these yet specific for a particular person. The response by the fifth or sixth week is fully formed, and though still difficult to elicit, it is fully effective in evoking a playful and loving response in the mother. Over the next few weeks the baby becomes more discriminating. He smiles more readily in response to a familiar voice, and by ten weeks, the mother’s face evokes a more immediate and generous smile than any other. Over the next few months, the response to the mother’s face and to other familiar faces becomes more dominant; the response to strange faces becomes weaker. Finally, perhaps by eight months, the specificity of response becomes firmly established, Strangers are responded to quite differently from familiar faces, and the mother’s face usually evokes the strongest response of all.5 Until the fifth week, the voice has been the most effective stimulus for eliciting a smile, but around this time it loses much of its power and the face assumes pre-eminence. From this point on, says Bowlby, it is in happy visual interchanges that the baby’s smile comes into its own. It would seem that from about six to fourteen weeks the baby is learning the characteristics of human faces. Before the baby starts to smile at what he sees, he goes through a phase during which he stares intently at faces. During the first three weeks he seems to track them, though not to focus on them; shortly after that he seems to focus and engage in eye-to-eye contact. This is the point at which the mother starts to feel that her baby can see her, and when this occurs she seems to spend much more time with her baby. Wolff6 describes the baby’s scanning of the face and the evident importance of eye-to-eye contact. The child searches the face, looking at the hairline, the mouth, and the rest of the face; then, as soon as eye-to-eye contact is made, he grins. Experiments with masks tend to confirm that the eyes are the most important part of the visual gestalt that elicits smiling. For example, at two months, a pair of black dots on a face-sized card will elicit the response. Gradually, however, the complexity of the gestalt must be increased, until at eight months nothing short of an actual human face will do. Overall, a moving 4 5

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Elkin, H. On the Origin of the Self. Psychoanalytic Review; 1972, 59:389-416. Wright, K. Vision and Separation between mother and baby. London, Free Association Books; 1991. Wolff, P.H. Observations on the Early Development of Smiling. In Determinants of Infant Behaviour; Vol. 2; B.M. Foss, [Ed.] London, Methuen, 1963. 2

BABY SMILE

Alan Challoner MA(Phil.) MChS

human face, seen frontally, is the optimum stimulus; a profile face (i.e., without eyes) will not be effective. Starting from the beginning, then, the mother’s face and the baby’s smile soon become central features of a playful social interaction; this social interaction seems to be basic to the attachment process. The baby’s responses become increasingly directed and specific; the mother’s pleasure in and responsiveness to her baby increase as she feels that her baby recognizes her. Here is a conversation without words, a smiling between faces, at the heart of human development. Wright speculates about what the baby’s experience of the mother’s face might be, and where in our adult experience we might find traces of this earliest era. He also develops the idea of this formative “conversation of gestures” between mother and infant. [Wright ibid] Winnicott asks: “What does the baby see when he or she looks at the mother’s face? I am suggesting that ordinarily, what the baby sees is himself or herself. In other words, the mother is looking at the baby, and what she looks like is related to what she sees there. All this is too easily taken for granted. I am asking that all this which is naturally well done by mothers caring for their babies shall not be taken for granted.” [Winnicott 1967, p. 112]

In other words, as Winnicott says in the opening lines of the same paper: “In individual emotional development the precursor of the mirror is the mother’s face.”

The face as a mirror Winnicott offers a rich new metaphor for exploring the meaning and function of the face. The face reflects and what it reflects back is the other person. The baby looks in the mother’s face and sees a reflection of himself. Of course, the baby does see the mother’s smiling face, but this, which is in reality her response to his smiles, reflects back to him his own aliveness: “The mother is looking at the baby and what she looks like is related to what she sees there” (p. 112).

He sees this as a positively amplifying circuit mutually affirming both partners. The mother is affirmed in her sense of herself as a “good” mother by her baby’s smiles of recognition; the baby, we may suppose, feels affirmed in his state of being by the mother’s lively and smiling response to him. What we have in purely behavioural terms on the level of the smile, is mutual reinforcement; in experiential terms, on the level of communication is mutual affirmation. We are, I suppose, on dangerous ground when we start to speculate about an infant’s experience; but if we do not allow ourselves to imagine and wonder about such things, we may well be closing the door to understanding elements of adult experience that are pre-verbal yet deeply important. Obviously, we can never know what the baby actually feels when the mother smiles at him; but perhaps it would not be too far wrong to think of the experience as quite undifferentiated, whole, and “good.” “Smiling face good smiling feeling,” all in one, direct and unmediated. The mother’s smiling face is but the most visible part of a total experiential moment. I like to think it is in some such way that the mother’s face gets into the baby’s experience, not only as the 3

BABY SMILE

Alan Challoner MA(Phil.) MChS

cherished centre of his world, but simultaneously as the guiding light of his mind. All this can be thought of as happening quite easily and naturally where the mother is responding to her baby’s needs and her face reflects her pleasure in the baby’s communications. What happens, however, if the mother’s face does not respond in this way if, for example, she is depressed, with a mask-like face, or if her smiles are brittle with the rigidity of her own defences? “In such a case,” says Winnicott7, “what does the baby see?” (p. 112). He looks and does not see himself, but the mother’s face. The mother’s face is not then a mirror: “ . . . perception takes the place of that which might have been the beginning of a significant exchange with the world, a two-way process in which selfenrichment alternates with the discovery of meaning in the world of seen things” (p. 113).

The baby’s creative capacity begins to dry up. In mother-child relationships, where this affirmation does not develop, there will be a very early onset of the anxiety state. Winnicott stresses that the child now sees the mother’s face, not her mirroring response, and suggests that such children become preoccupied with their mothers’ faces in order to read and predict their moods. By the age of six months, sometimes later, an infant will come to have some idea that he has a body, and that others do also. Prior to that stage his ‘selfother’ awareness is almost totally dependent upon his mother’s face and the reflection that he gains by his smile. In other words he learns that his smile produces a smile in return; but not only that, the intensity of his smile is reflected back in by a similar one from his mother. So before he has come to appreciate ‘bodies’, he knows that there is reciprocity of affect between his mother and himself. Such babies, tantalised by this type of relative maternal failure, study the variable maternal visage in an attempt to predict the mother’s mood, just exactly as we all study the weather. The baby quickly learns to make a forecast: “Just now it is safe to forget the mother’s mood and to be spontaneous, but any moment the mother’s face will become fixed or her mood will dominate, and my own personal needs must then be withdrawn otherwise my central self will suffer insult.” [P. 113]

Winnicott thus suggests a sequence in the baby’s development of his sense of self first the mother giving back reflections, then the mirror. The way the mirror is used will depend on how the mother reflected or failed to reflect. Winnicott, however, does not really explore the idea, implicit in his own paper, that the fixed face of the unresponsive mother could equally be experienced as a reflection, but a distorting one, giving a false feed back of deadness. This actually seems to me more likely. Once the baby knows that it is the mother’s face and moods that he sees, he has already moved a long way on the path of differentiation from her. Indeed, my own experience would make me feel that Winnicott, D.W. Mirror-role of mother and family in child development. In Playing and Reality. [Pp. 111-118]; 1967, London, Tavistock. 4 7

BABY SMILE

Alan Challoner MA(Phil.) MChS

even in adult life; it is hard to free ourselves completely from the feeling that we are the “cause” of expressions we see in the faces of those near us. This brings us back to the idea of truth or falsity in relation to the face this time, true or false reflections. This is an idea that could be explored extensively in relation to both development and therapy. I will let Winnicott speak on it in relation to therapy; I can do no more than open the topic in relation to development after that. Winnicott (1967) writes: “This glimpse of the baby’s and child’s seeing the self in the mother’s face and afterwards in the mirror, gives a way of looking at analysis and the psychotherapeutic task. Psychotherapy is not making clever and apt interpretations; by and large it is a long term giving the patient back what the patient brings. It is a complex derivative of the face that reflects what is there to be seen [italics added]. I like to think of my work this way, and to think that if I do this well enough the patient will find his or her own self, and will be able to exist and to feel real. Feeling real is more than existing; it is finding a way to exist as oneself, and to relate to objects as oneself, and to have a self into which to retreat for relaxation.” [P. 117]

In this brief passage, Winnicott reveals a whole model of therapy, considerably at variance with traditional psychoanalytic technique. From this point of view, the mother’s smile is also the infant’s first object that is not an object the first experience of a “virtual object”; Winnicott calls the mother’s smile as the first transitional object, yet like the transitional object, it lies in some sense beyond a giving up of the mother as physical, tactile object, and points to a world that can only come into being in the space so created a world between the mother and child, and spanned by their increasingly complex communication The mother’s face, particularly her smile and facial expressions, occupies a very special place in the child’s experience. From the beginning, spanning and allowing contact over distance, the face has an irreducible communicative significance. As pure visual form, it precludes the more primitive mode of tactile, bodily appropriation; thus, in some sense, it guarantees and points toward a space within which communication can develop. It is true, of course, that from a very early stage the vocal-auditory channel (the conversation of mother’s talk and baby’s babble) runs, as it were, a parallel course; it is also true that later on this vocal-auditory channel overtakes the visual, and indeed achieves a pre-eminence. (When language develops and words become the primary vehicle of communication.) But it seems that the face and the expressions that pass over it nevertheless provide a kind of model for the later relation between words and meanings that has eventually to be grasped. In this sense, the facial expression, even though it is only vaguely apprehended, can be seen as a sort of protosymbol, paving the way for the more momentous later discovery that, “all this noise (the spoken word) begins to mean something”8 (p.40). All of this would be entirely compatible with the view that there is a primary non-instinctual element in our constitution from the start that links into the basic attachment propensity of the human species. It would not be surprising in such a view if the face, which plays such an important part in the 8

Merleau-Ponty, M. Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence. In Signs, trans. R. McCleary, Ill.; Northwestern University Press, 1964. 5

BABY SMILE

Alan Challoner MA(Phil.) MChS

development of attachment, were also to be important in the development of the symbolic function, and ultimately the communication that maintains attachment. There is much to suggest that the language function itself has a built-in biological basis, and it would be somehow surprising if the development of language depended solely on the attenuation of instinctual relations with objects for its development. The suggestion that the face and its expressions form a bridge or transition to the symbolic function and language, by providing an early model of emergent meanings, seems to find some justification in these thoughts. [Wright, ibid]

BIBLIOGRAPHY Sherman, M. The Differentiation of emotional Responses in Infants. J. Comp. Psychol. 1927, 7, 265-284; & 335-351; & 8, 385-394. Goodenough, F.L. The Expressions of the Emotions in Infancy. Child Development. 1931, 2, 96101. Spitz, R.A. The Smiling Response: A contribution to the ontogenesis of social relations. Genet. Psychol. Monog. 1946, 34, 57-125. Bridges, K.M.B. Emotional Development in Early Infancy. Child Development. 1932, 3, 324341. Washburn, R.W. A Study of Smiling and Laughing of Infants in the first year of life. . Genet. Psychol. Monog. 1929, 6, 397-539.

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