The relation between emotions and physical actions begins very early in life. I have been investigating how children first express themselves aesthetically through their bodies; through facial expression, gesture, and posture. I am trying to determine what kinds of skills are involved and how they develop.
A child's first movements dearly have emotional connotations; the sensory receptors that signal movement are directly connected to that part of the brain that generates emotion. From observation, we know that at around age two, even depictive gestures, such as learning to bow, or ritual gestures, performed in religious and other ceremonies, have emotional overtones.
By three to four years, children become sensitive to the increased dynamic properties of movement, such as direction, force, rhythm enclosure, and balance. They can also balance themselves on a small chair and sustain the correct rhythm to a simple dance. They are learning to "think" with their bodies - they can distinguish left-right and up-down movements, soft gliding from strong explosive movements. They perceive that their body is a physical object in a "container" - it has clear boundaries - that takes up space.
By six they know that movements have psychological overtones. They can express sadness through the gesture of a downturned head, or represent a man thinking by placing their hand under their chin. Educators argue that teaching dance movement to preschoolers is important because it aids the child in developing socially and acquiring the ability to organize and communicate thoughts and feelings.
Social and cognitive development is intimately connected with the body from the earliest stages of life. University of Miami psychologist Tiffany Field has demonstrated the power of touch with tiny preterm infants. Those preemies who receive extensive touching from caretakers show measurably better social and intellectual development later in infancy and in the preschool years than infants who receive minimal handling.
Body English
The fundamental importance of the body in the development of our intellect and social nature, and in the expression of the personality is seen in the role that posture and gesture play in human social interaction. To think is to communicate with ourselves and others through gesture and posture.
Instrumental gestures such as pointing and reaching are enactions of the two central functions of language - to declare (point) or request (reach for) something or someone.
Before infants can speak they express their needs through gesture. In their first year, they point to objects they find attractive or moving; they hold up their arms when they want to be picked up. And as adults, we use iconic gestures to visually represent objects - a motion of the hand to denote a hammer - or symbolic gestures to signify a feeling or idea - a "V" of our fingers to denote freedom, a downturned head for sadness. Gesture and posture enable us to organize and communicate concepts, feelings, and events through movement. Our very personalities, that is, self-expression, are constituted through bodily movement and activity.
Awareness Via The Senses
And if we stop to think about what we are expressing at the moment, we become self-aware or -conscious of what we are doing. Consciousness has been traditionally conceived, primarily by philosophers, as a mental act, a property of mind. But self-awareness is an act of the body. We receive information about the external world through our five senses, and about internal bodily states through our kinesthetic sense. We know what and where things are through the pressure, position, and stretch of muscles and tendons. If something is hard to lift, we are aware that it is heavy. If it is an apple or a pear, we recognize it by shape. Consciousness is really awareness of ourselves through our bodies' reactions to the world around us.
If we are a thinking body that figures prominently in self-expression, self-awareness, and communicating with others, then the body must have a central role in problem-solving. Psychologists have been toying for some time with the idea that our body has its own "intelligence."
Piaget argued that sensorimotor experience is the primary way in which the infant gains knowledge of the world. When a 14-month-old infant tugs on a blanket to pull her rattle closer, she is demonstrating her ability to use one object to obtain another-so-called instrumental intelligence, or means-ends knowledge. More recently, Howard Gardner, the creativity expert working at Harvard University, has suggested that we have a separate bodily-kinesthetic intelligence with two key aspects. One is masterful coordination of our bodily movements, the other is the ability to manipulate objects in a skilled manner.
We Are The World
Many thinkers, including the philosopher Mark Johnson and psychologist Seymour Fisher, have advanced the idea that bodily experience provides the framework for the very way we structure our concepts of the world. Right and left, up and down, in and on, front and back-these are concepts acquired through experience of the body and generalized to surrounding space; we first learn these (and as adults still navigate by them) by experiencing them with our hands and bodies.
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