BODILY-AFFECTIVE ATTUNEMENT IN SOCIAL INTERACTION

Abstract

The paper intends to supplement the studies of emotional affordances of BAA by elaborating on the conception of participatory sense-making as well as developmental studies on joint attention and interattentionality. I address different spheres of expertise from the experience-based phenomenological perspective, which allows exploring the problem both from the first-person and second-person perspectives. This research presents the conception of inter-selfness that carries on M. Merleau-Ponty’s idea of intercorporeality, T. Fuchs’ et al. analysis of intersubjectivity and phenomenologically oriented psychoanalysis by E. Z. Tronick et al., R. Stolorow et al. The mechanism of BAA is presented through the conception of participatory sense-making and the idea of minimal inter-attentionality in developmental studies. The paper presents an emotional affordances scheme that illustrates the emotional regulation of BAA. By examining this process of regulation one could see in what way the self becomes an inter-self in communication. The article also postulates correlation between cultural mediation of emotional affordances and their direct accessibility from the second-person perspective. In the last part of the paper, I examine social interaction from the viewpoint of developmental studies (C. Trevarthen, V. Reddy, M. Carpenter). The developmental perspective supplements the idea of emotional regulation in interaction, by focusing on primary such forms of BAA between a caregiver and a baby, as joint attention and mutual gaze. Herein, I demonstrate how the initial forms of the positive bodily-affective attunement develop into the interattentionality and self-representation practices of the subject. This point could contribute to the theory of personal identity by exploring the process of maturing of the sense of self in its different aspects. The results of the research could be useful for further study of BAA and its pathologies. The results could also be of use for the discussion on non-human or human-like affordance-based technological interaction theory.