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ABSTRACT: Current advances in the developmental and neurobiological sciences are now being integrated into complex models of the development of self, and therefore personality. The human brain growth spurt, which begins in the last quarter of pregnancy and extends into the second year, overlaps the prenatal, perinatal, and postnatal periods. It also represents the early critical period for the experience-dependent maturation of the right hemisphere, which is dominant for processing socioemotional and bodily information, stress coping functions, and self-regulation. Interactively regulated psychobiological transactions between the infant and primary caregiver, embedded in the attachment relationship, are thus essential for the optimal development of self-regulatory functions and the organization of a personality with resilient coping functions.
INTRODUCTION
At this point in time, although "the decade of the brain" has ended, it is clear that we are in the midst of a remarkable period in which dramatic new brain technologies continue to concentrate their focus upon certain basic problems of the human condition. Current brain imaging studies of adults are now beginning to shift focus from neurology, to psychiatry, and now to psychological studies of the normal brain. This research is moving into the study of individual differences and personality. At the same time developmental neuroscience is beginning to explore the early origins of personality.
I want to suggest that very recent findings in neuroscience, which integrate nicely with current attachment theory, the dominant model of social-emotional development available to science, can offer us more powerful models of how events influencing early brain development indelibly shape the origin of the personality, the self. In a 1991 article in the American Psychologist entitled "An ethological approach to personality development," John Bowlby and Mary Main argued that attachment theory is fundamentally a theory of the development of the personality over the life span.
The Oxford dictionary defines self as "A person's individuality or essence at a particular time or in a particular aspect; a person's nature, character, or physical constitution." For some time psychology and psychiatry have assumed that the origins of personality trace back to early childhood. Current developmental brain research not only strongly supports this notion, it deepens our understanding of the mechanisms that underlie adaptive self functions.
The question of why the early events of...