Reading focus
Syllabus: How Do Relationships and Social Understanding Develop?
Separate bodily awareness, self-identification, and awareness of others’ evaluations. Carry forward the attachment unit’s distinction between an observable response and the broader capacity or relationship inferred from it.
A question to consider. How would you distinguish a child’s awareness of being seen by others from recognizing a familiar image of themselves?
Why this reading
Recognizing a reflection is only one possible meaning of knowing oneself. Rochat distinguishes bodily awareness, self-identification, and awareness of how others see us. The framework helps readers ask which meaning a particular observation supports.
Before you read
Proprioception provides information about the position and movement of one’s body. Mirror self-recognition is usually inferred from behavior directed toward a mark on one’s own body. An implicit distinction can guide behavior without a person verbally describing it.
Read for
- Explain what changes between differentiation, situation, identification, permanence, and self-consciousness.
- For one example, separate the observed behavior from its interpretation as self-awareness. Consider an alternative.
- Examine how the account relates developmental emergence to adults moving between forms of awareness. Are these mutually exclusive stages?
Consider afterwards
- A child notices a mark in a mirror but does not touch it. What additional observations would make that response more informative?
Editorial context
This is a theoretical synthesis, not a validated universal timetable. Broesch and colleagues’ cross-cultural study questions treating absence of mark-directed behavior as absence of self-recognition. Its proposed social explanations also require further testing. Rochat’s historical illustrations and age claims should be evaluated separately from the usefulness of his conceptual distinctions.