Dr. Schore is on the clinical faculty of the Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences, UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine, and at the UCLA Center for Culture, Brain, and Development. In this talk at our 2012 Research Symposium, he talks about the importance in a newborn's life of a secure, primary attachment to a psychobiologicallyattuned empathic caregiver. The empathic caregiver can soothe and calm as well as as enhance joy, interest and excitement. This shapes the child’s ability to communicate emotions. This plays an important role in infant brain development, and ultimately, the caregiver influences the critical wiring of infant brain circuits. The selforganization of an infant's developing brain occurs in the context of a relationship with another self, another brain. There is now consensus, he says, "that current advances in our understanding of how social forces shape early brain development is 'one of the most important discoveries in all of science that have major implications for our field.'"
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