Emotions and emotional communication in infants

What This Research Found

Edward Tronick's influential research on infant emotional development, published in American Psychologist in 1989 and cited over 4,000 times, fundamentally changed our understanding of how babies and caregivers create each other's emotional realities. Using the Still Face Paradigm and decades of microanalytic observation, Tronick demonstrated that infants are not passive recipients of care but active, intentional partners in emotional communication from the earliest months of life.

The Still Face Paradigm reveals infant intentionality. In this experimental procedure, mothers engage in normal face-to-face play with their infants, then are instructed to maintain a neutral, unresponsive expression for two minutes. Within seconds, infants as young as two months show dramatic attempts to re-engage: smiling, vocalising, pointing, reaching. When these bids fail, they escalate to distress signals, then attempt self-regulation (looking away, self-soothing), and finally, if the mother remains unresponsive, collapse into withdrawal and despair. The reunion phase, when the mother resumes normal interaction, reveals the infant's capacity to recover, though initial wariness often persists. This sequence demonstrates that infants expect reciprocal engagement and experience its absence as profoundly distressing.

The Mutual Regulation Model reframes development. Tronick's research revealed that infant emotional states are not self-contained but emerge from the dyadic system of infant and caregiver together. Neither party regulates emotion alone; both participate in creating and managing shared affective states. The infant's affect regulation develops not through the caregiver simply soothing the infant, but through the interactive process of co-constructing emotional states and repairing mismatches. This means that the quality of early relationships does not merely influence emotional development; it constitutes the process by which emotional regulation capacities are built.

Perfect synchrony is not the goal, and may even be harmful. Perhaps the most counterintuitive finding was that healthy mother-infant pairs are in coordinated, synchronised states only about 30% of the time. The remaining 70% involves constant micro-misattunements: the infant seeks gaze and the mother looks away; the infant becomes fussy when the mother is playful; timing is slightly off; emotional tone is mismatched. These ruptures are not pathological. They are the ordinary fabric of human interaction. The critical finding is that what distinguishes healthy development is not the absence of misattunement but the rapidity and effectiveness of repair. Infants whose mothers reliably repair ruptures develop superior self-regulation and more secure attachment.

The key insight: repair builds resilience. Each successful repair sequence teaches the developing brain multiple lessons: interactive disruption is survivable and temporary; the self and other can tolerate asynchrony without relational dissolution; distress is not catastrophic; and crucially, the infant has agency in restoring connection. These experiences, repeated thousands of times in the first years of life, build the neural architecture for emotional resilience. When repair consistently fails, as in cases of maternal depression, neglect, or narcissistic self-absorption, infants learn a very different set of lessons about themselves, others, and relationships. The foundations for later dissociation, people-pleasing, and relationship difficulties are laid in these earliest experiences.

Why This Matters for Survivors

If you were raised by a narcissistic parent, Tronick's research explains something crucial: the damage did not come from imperfect parenting. The damage came from the absence of repair.

Your nervous system encoded a world without repair. Every infant experiences ruptures, as these are unavoidable in any relationship. But when ruptures are reliably repaired, the infant's nervous system learns that distress is temporary and connection can be restored. When ruptures go unrepaired, as they chronically do with narcissistic parents, the developing brain encodes a very different reality: distress is permanent, connection is unreliable, and I must manage my emotional states alone. This is not a cognitive belief you can simply decide to change; it is the architecture your amygdala, hippocampus, and regulatory circuits were built on.

The 'still face' was your normal. In Tronick's experiment, the still face lasts two minutes and is followed by repair. For children of narcissistic parents, the still face was chronic and the repair never came. The parent who looked through you rather than at you, who was emotionally unavailable, who could not see your distress as separate from their own needs, was enacting a permanent still face. Your desperate attempts to re-engage, whether through achievement, compliance, acting out, or becoming invisible, were the same reaching behaviours Tronick observed in his distressed infants. The difference is that your reaching was never answered with attuned return.

Your hypervigilance makes sense. Tronick's research showed that infants become acutely sensitive to any cues of impending disconnection. If you learned that ruptures would not be repaired, your nervous system developed sophisticated scanning for danger. The ability to read microexpressions, to detect shifts in tone, to anticipate parental moods before they manifested, these were survival adaptations born from an environment where repair could not be counted on. This hypervigilance served you well then, even as it exhausts you now. This hypervigilance was intelligent; in your original environment, it was necessary. The challenge now is that it remains active even when it is no longer needed.

You can build the capacity you were not given. The same research that explains why narcissistic parenting causes such deep harm also points toward healing. Mutual regulation capacity is built through experience, not instruction. New relationships that provide consistent repair, whether with therapists, safe friends, or healthy partners, can gradually build the neural patterns that were not laid down in infancy. This capacity for neuroplasticity means recovery is possible, though it requires the experiences that were missing, not just understanding. This is slower and harder than childhood learning, but the research on 'earned secure attachment' confirms it is possible. You are not practicing new skills; you are receiving the relational experiences that build the capacity for regulation from the inside out.

Clinical Implications

For psychiatrists, psychologists, and trauma-informed healthcare providers, Tronick's research has direct implications for assessment and treatment of survivors of narcissistic abuse.

The therapeutic relationship is the primary intervention. Tronick's work demonstrates that regulatory capacity develops through relational experience, not insight alone. For survivors whose early relationships lacked reliable repair, the therapeutic relationship must provide what was missing: consistent, attuned responsiveness and, crucially, repair after inevitable therapeutic ruptures. The therapist's ability to recognise misattunements and initiate repair, to acknowledge when they have missed something, and to survive the client's distress without becoming defensive or withdrawing, teaches at the level that early experience teaches. This is why the relationship itself, not just the techniques employed within it, predicts outcome.

Assess for mutual regulation capacity. Survivors of narcissistic abuse often present with dysregulated affect that may be labelled as 'borderline' or 'histrionic' without understanding its developmental origin. Tronick's framework suggests assessing whether the client can be soothed by relational contact, whether they can signal distress in ways that invite rather than repel care, and whether they can tolerate the therapist's imperfection without catastrophic rupture. Deficits in these areas are not character pathology; they are the predictable result of development without reliable repair. Intervention should target building these capacities gradually through the therapeutic relationship.

Expect and utilise ruptures. Therapeutic ruptures are not treatment failures; they are opportunities. Tronick's research suggests that repair after rupture is more valuable developmentally than uninterrupted attunement. When misunderstandings, empathic failures, or scheduling disruptions occur, the therapist's ability to acknowledge the rupture, take responsibility appropriately, and restore connection teaches what the client never learned: that relationships survive imperfection. Some of the most therapeutic moments may be successful repairs after the therapist has genuinely failed.

Understand the neurobiological depth. The patterns Tronick documented are not psychological preferences but neurobiological architecture. The client's difficulty trusting repair, their conviction that connection cannot be reliable, their tendency toward withdrawal or desperate clinging, these reflect neural circuits built during a time of maximum brain neuroplasticity. Treatment intensity and duration must account for this depth. Brief therapies may provide insight but may not provide sufficient repair experiences to rewire regulatory systems. Longer-term, relationally-focused treatment may be necessary for survivors whose regulatory deficits were established in the first years of life.

Consider the role of cortisol and chronic stress. Tronick's research documented the physiological stress responses in infants during still face episodes. Children raised with chronic emotional unavailability experienced repeated activation of stress systems without the return to baseline that repair provides. The resulting dysregulation of the HPA axis has implications for treatment: these clients may present with anxiety, depression, or somatic symptoms rooted in chronic stress physiology. Mind-body approaches and attention to nervous system regulation, not just cognitive content, may be essential.

Broader Implications

Tronick's research on mutual regulation extends far beyond the therapy room. Understanding how early relational experiences shape regulatory capacity illuminates patterns across society.

The Intergenerational Transmission of Dysfunction

Narcissistic parents typically had their own regulatory development disrupted. Unable to have received reliable repair in their own infancy, they cannot provide it for their children. Tronick's framework explains this intergenerational trauma not as moral failure but as developmental absence: you cannot give what you never received, what was never built into your neural architecture. The parent who looks through their child is often themselves unable to experience mutual regulation, seeking instead narcissistic supply to manage states they cannot regulate internally. Intervention at any generation, providing the repair experiences that build regulatory capacity, can potentially interrupt this cycle.

Relationship Patterns in Adulthood

Adults who developed without reliable repair often recreate familiar dynamics in intimate relationships. Partners who are emotionally unpredictable, alternating between attunement and withdrawal, may feel compelling because they match early experience. This intermittent reinforcement activates powerful attachment systems precisely because it echoes the developmental context in which those systems formed. Conversely, consistently available partners may feel unfamiliar, boring, or even threatening, as their reliability violates expectations built into the nervous system. Understanding these patterns as developmental adaptations rather than character flaws opens space for change.

Workplace and Organisational Dynamics

Adults whose early regulatory development was disrupted often struggle in hierarchical environments that trigger early relational patterns. A manager's neutral expression in a meeting can activate the same distress response as the still face did in infancy. Criticism, however constructive, may register as catastrophic because the nervous system lacks the template for rupture-followed-by-repair. Organisations that understand this can design feedback processes, management practices, and cultures that provide repair after inevitable workplace ruptures, reducing trauma activation and improving performance.

Institutional Care and Policy

Tronick's research has direct implications for any setting that separates children from consistent caregivers: hospital policies, foster care systems, refugee services, childcare settings. The research demonstrates that what matters is not just meeting physical needs but maintaining the relational consistency that allows repair sequences. Policies that rotate caregivers, separate siblings, or prioritise efficiency over relational continuity may be causing neurobiological harm that will manifest in regulatory difficulties for years to come.

Legal and Policy Considerations

Family courts making custody decisions should understand that emotional unavailability causes measurable developmental harm, even when physical needs are met and no overt abuse occurs. The narcissistic parent who looks through the child rather than at them, who cannot repair ruptures, who uses the child for narcissistic supply rather than seeing them as a separate person, is causing damage that Tronick's research has documented. This creates challenges for legal systems that rely on observable behaviour rather than relational quality, but it suggests the importance of including attachment-informed evaluation in custody proceedings.

Public Health Framework

Viewing mutual regulation through a public health lens reframes early childhood intervention. Just as we invest in preventing infectious disease, investing in parental support, early mental health services, and programs that teach repair skills could reduce the population-level burden of regulatory disorders. The return on investment, measured in reduced mental health costs, addiction treatment, criminal justice involvement, and lost productivity, would likely be substantial. Tronick's research provides the scientific foundation for prioritising early relational health as a public health imperative.

Limitations and Considerations

No research is without limitations, and responsible engagement with Tronick's work requires acknowledging several:

The experimental context differs from chronic experience. The Still Face Paradigm involves two minutes of maternal unresponsiveness followed by repair. Children of narcissistic parents experience something quite different: chronic, unpredictable emotional unavailability without reliable repair. While the experiment illuminates basic mechanisms, the translation to real-world developmental trajectories involves extrapolation. The cumulative effect of thousands of unrepaired ruptures likely differs qualitatively, not just quantitatively, from a brief experimental disruption.

Cultural variations in caregiving. Tronick's early work was conducted primarily with Western, middle-class samples. His later cross-cultural research has explored variations in caregiving practices, but questions remain about how the mutual regulation model applies across cultures with different norms for emotional expression, physical contact, and caregiver roles. What constitutes 'repair' may vary culturally, even if the need for some form of relational restoration is universal.

The role of temperament. Infants differ in their regulatory capacities and sensitivity to disruption from birth. Some infants show more resilience to still face episodes than others, suggesting that the interaction between caregiver behaviour and infant temperament is more complex than simple cause and effect. The same parenting may produce different outcomes in different children, complicating prediction and intervention.

Translation to adult intervention. While the research strongly suggests that regulatory capacity can develop through new relational experiences, the optimal 'dose' and form of such experiences for adults remains unclear. How many repair experiences are needed? Over what timeframe? Can therapy alone provide sufficient repair, or are other relationships necessary? These questions remain actively researched.

How This Research Is Used in the Book

Tronick's research appears throughout Narcissus and the Child as foundational evidence for how narcissistic parenting damages children and why healing requires specific relational experiences. In Chapter 5: Protective Factors and Resilience, the still-face paradigm provides empirical validation for the concept of 'good enough' parenting:

"Tronick back in 1989, through his still-face paradigm and decades of developmental research, delivered the most direct empirical validation of good enough parenting's protective powers. Tronick's work showed that healthy parent-infant relationships are actually driven by cyclical patterns of interactive coordination ('being in sync'), inevitable mis-coordination (rupture), and crucially, reparative re-coordination."

The book uses Tronick's findings to explain why narcissistic parents fail their children so profoundly: it is not that they were imperfect (all parents are), but that they could not or would not repair the inevitable ruptures. The narcissistic parent's inability to recognise the child as a separate person with valid emotional experiences makes repair impossible, because repair requires seeing and responding to the other's distress. This chronic failure of mirroring leaves lasting marks on the developing self.

In Chapter 6: Diamorphic Agency, Tronick's microanalytic methods are cited as evidence for how relational dynamics can be measured:

"Tronick's research on mother-infant interaction revealed what this looks like in practice. Using frame-by-frame video analysis, his team documented that even healthy dyads are in synchrony only about 30% of the time. That remaining 70% involves constant micro-misattunements. What distinguishes healthy development is not the absence of these misattunements but the speed and reliability of their repair."

In Chapter 12: The Unseen Child, the still-face paradigm provides the experimental demonstration of what narcissistic children experience chronically:

"In 1978, developmental psychologist Edward Tronick and colleagues published the Still Face Paradigm, demonstrating this devastation experimentally... For children of narcissists, no repair comes. The still face is permanent."

Throughout the book, Tronick's work grounds the theoretical discussion in empirical evidence, demonstrating that the concepts of mutual regulation, rupture and repair, and the developmental necessity of being seen are not abstractions but measurable realities with profound implications for understanding narcissistic abuse.

Historical Context

Edward Tronick's research on infant emotional development emerged in the 1970s and 1980s, a period when developmental psychology was being transformed by new methods for studying infant capabilities. The Still Face Paradigm, first published in 1978, built on earlier work by Bowlby and Ainsworth on attachment but added a crucial experimental tool for studying the dynamics of parent-infant interaction in real time.

Before Tronick's work, infants were often viewed as relatively passive recipients of caregiving. The dominant Piagetian framework focused on cognitive development and largely treated the infant as an individual problem-solver. Tronick's research demonstrated that from the earliest months, infants are active, intentional partners in emotional communication, with clear expectations about reciprocity and distress when those expectations are violated.

The Mutual Regulation Model, developed in the 1980s and refined through the 1990s, provided a theoretical framework for understanding development as fundamentally relational. This aligned with emerging neuroscience showing that brain development is experience-dependent and relational, not simply genetically programmed. Tronick's later theoretical work on the Dyadic Expansion of States of Consciousness further elaborated how mutual regulation creates shared meaning and expanded capacities for both infant and caregiver.

The research has been replicated thousands of times across cultures, with variations exploring maternal depression, substance abuse, prematurity, and cultural differences in caregiving. It has directly influenced clinical interventions including Child-Parent Psychotherapy, Circle of Security, and various forms of attachment-focused therapy. The fundamental insight, that what matters is not perfect attunement but reliable repair, has become a cornerstone of modern developmental psychology and trauma treatment.

Tronick continues active research at age 83, exploring cross-cultural caregiving practices, the effects of technology on parent-infant interaction, and the development of interventions for at-risk dyads. His work has been cited over 40,000 times, making him one of the most influential developmental psychologists of the past half-century.

Further Reading

• Tronick, E.Z. et al. (1978). The infant's response to entrapment between contradictory messages in face-to-face interaction. Journal of the American Academy of Child Psychiatry, 17(1), 1-13.
• Tronick, E.Z. (2003). "Of course all relationships are unique": How co-creative processes generate unique mother-infant and patient-therapist relationships and change other relationships. Psychoanalytic Inquiry, 23(3), 473-491.
• Tronick, E. & Beeghly, M. (2011). Infants' meaning-making and the development of mental health problems. American Psychologist, 66(2), 107-119.
• Beebe, B. et al. (2010). The origins of 12-month attachment: A microanalysis of 4-month mother-infant interaction. Attachment & Human Development, 12(1-2), 3-141.
• Feldman, R. (2007). Parent-infant synchrony and the construction of shared timing: Physiological precursors, developmental outcomes, and risk conditions. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 48(3-4), 329-354.
• Schore, A.N. (2003). Affect Dysregulation and Disorders of the Self. W.W. Norton.