p.3 The purpose of this work is to address the problem of how individuals develop through their relationships with others.

p.3-4 I try to show that an attempt to comprehend the human mind and self that is not grounded in a theory of personal relationships may sprout and grow but is unlikely to yield edible fruit and attractive flowers. Human cognition and the sense of self are fundamentally and originally relational.

p.4 I believe that cognition and perception are not mirrors of reality, but relational processes that reflect the ways in which we have experienced the world.

p.4 The human mind and sense of self must also be understood as evolving out of the historical process of personal relationship formation between the self and other individuals. Upon close examination, one finds that the workings of the mind and the ways in which we perceive and understand ourselves is remarkably like the form of our personal relationships. The life of the mind is a dialogue, most typically a verbal dialogue, between imagined points of view... To continue treating the mind as a disembodied relationless computational machine... is to be blind to the evidence of one's own cognitive experience.

[JLJ - I think if you look still further, the life of the mind is engaged in two fundamental tasks, operating simultaneously: 1. an attempt to further understand the predicament that we are in or the larger environment within which we daily operate (as small as a child exploring his/her neighborhood or as large as an academic exploring the universe), which contains by its nature a hidden complexity, and 2. an attempt to revel in the present moment or to temporarily postpone such reveling until a later time in which we can revel in the present. We alternate pulses of managed/directed activity and relaxation/recovery, we live within an improvised dialogue of the moment, whether it be with ourselves, or with others. We all operate to efficiently manage the daily struggle, the directable burst of energy magically produced by the life that we are, and we seek at once a life and a better life, leveraging our strengths and learning how to minimize our weaknesses.]

p.6 As developmental biologists and a small number of developmental psychologists have been pointing out, developmental patterning can occur by means of the local interactions of biological components within the individual and between the individual and the environment. Systematic developmental change processes can emerge out of the mutual constraints imposed on components of the individual-environmental system as they interact.

These mutual constraints are discussed in this book with respect to the concept of co-regulation. Co-regulation occurs whenever individuals' joint actions blend together to achieve a unique and mutually created set of social actions. Co-regulation arises as part of a continuous process of communication... Co-regulation is recognized by its spontaneity and creativity and is thus the fundamental source of developmental change. Co-regulation, in social and mental life, allows the individual to participate in the discovery of the unknown and the invention of possibilities.

p.7 Artificial intelligence will never occur in the form of a clever program of commands. The program must have a open relationship to its operating system and to the environment outside the machine... At the same time, a growing mind is imprisoned and retarded without access to culture in its broadest and most dynamic sense: as a complex system of co-regulated relationships.

p.14 Children acquire patterns of action and thought that work for them in particular real-life situations, when alone and in the company of others.

p.19 In this book, the concept of co-regulation will refer to the dynamic balancing act by which a smooth social performance is created out of the continuous mutual adjustments of action between partners. In co-regulated communication, information is created between people in such a way that the information changes as the interaction unfolds. Co-regulated communication is created as it happens, its process and outcome is partially unpredictable.

p.19 I will propose in this book that the original sense of self arises from one's physical and social relationships.

p.27 when one examines communication in some detail, it is nearly impossible to say who initiates a communication, nor who responds to whom.

p.28 My point is that in normal situations, one's emotions and expressions are not discrete entities encased in the individual, but they are socially constructed, dynamically created out of the fabric of the present.

[JLJ - I would argue that emotions are triggered by certain events - constructed if you will - and in an improvised fashion once triggered. One does not so much construct a smile, like making a cake from a recipe, as much as follow a template for improvising it within the context or predicament that one is in. It is like we have a spring-loaded smile reflex, which is kept blocked or suppressed, but occasionally the block is removed by a releasing of tension, and we smile.]

p.29 Mutual social coordination requires that there be a continuous unfolding of individual action that is susceptible to being continuously modified by the continuously changing actions of the partner. I call this continuous mutual adaptation process co-regulation. The systematic description of co-regulation and its role in the formation of social relationships and developmental change is complicated, in fact it takes up most of this book.

p.29-30 One of my favorite examples of co-regulated communication... patterns of ritualized fighting between adult wolves... The circling [action of the wolves] is a wonderful example of the impossibility of determining who is the sender or receiver... the circular configuration is a dynamically created co-regulated system... The pattern is a consensual, negotiated system of action.

This co-regulated pattern emerges from the dynamics of the interaction and the constraints on the communication system. What are constraints? Probably each wolf needs to be moving to maintain optimal readiness to attack and to respond to attack.

p.31 co-regulated interactions are continuous processes, created out of the dynamics of action, the results of which are emergent, that is, occurring without an explicit plan, without a scheme or program inside each animal's nervous system that guides the action. The circling pattern [of the wolves] emerges from the dynamic interactions of the partners with respect to the constraints within the system. It is impossible to understand how such patterns emerge by only considering the goals of the participants.

p.31 We must also place creativity at center stage since the most salient aspect of co-regulated interchange is the emergence of something novel, something that was not there before. According to Ernest Schachtel,

The quality of the encounter that leads to creative experience consists primarily in the openness during the encounter and in the repeated and varied approach to the object, in the free and open play of attention, thought, feeling, perception, etc. ...In characterizing this activity as play I do not mean that it is playful rather than serious, but that it is not bound by rigorous rules or by conventional schemata of memory, thought or perception.

p.32 Human teasing is similar to ritualized fighting in wolves. For example, ...American male teenagers have been observed to exchange ritual insults, like 'Your mother eats dog food.' These insults typically do not lead to a fight, but rather to continued trading of insults and laughter.

[JLJ - Fogel must have been teased as a teenager...]

p.33 In ordinary conversation we don't notice or think about the fact that speech is constructed dynamically out of movements of the body.

p.34 Co-regulation is a social process by which individuals dynamically alter their actions with respect to the ongoing and anticipated actions of their partners. During co-regulated discourse the individual's actions are emergent from the constraints imposed by their own body (its shape, size and possibilities for movement), by their expectations, by the actions of the partner, and by the cultural setting.

p.35 Co-regulated processes are emergent from the constraints on individual action.

p.35 when one observes real individuals playing - in any species in which play occurs - the subtle variability and emergent creativity leap out almost in mockery of the supposed rules of the game.

p.36 A frame is a co-regulated consensual agreement about the scope of the discourse: its location, its setting, the acts that are taken to be significant vs. those that are irrelevant, and the main focus or topic.

p.37 When frames are being negotiated, they become the main topic of discourse.

p.41 every time there is co-regulation it must involve an intention, a memory and a meaning... The essence of communication, in my view, is mutual creativity. It is from creativity in communication that we inherit creativity in personal action.

p.46 Some of the basic principles of systems theory are: complexity, organization, self-stability, equifinality, and hierarchy.

p.47 The stability of a collective organization is maintained by dynamic fluctuations of activity between its component individuals, not by a static structural framework.

p.51 Stability over time in a communication system occurs by virtue of a co-regulated process.

p.57 In my view, individual behavior takes its characteristic form by virtue of its engagement with others; behavior is created in the process of co-regulation.

p.57 the mutual regulation model of Edward Tronick and his colleagues is defined as the goal to achieve a joint regulation of the interaction with interactive behaviors, or the goal of achieving a joint state of reciprocity.

p.61 The concept of co-regulation emphasizes the dynamically changing individual at the very moment of transaction with others: an individual whose behavior and goals are not entirely planned in advance but emerge creatively out of social discourse... It is my belief, however, that co-regulated systems are scientifically understandable. The science, however, will not be based on the logical manipulation of objective entities.

p.69 From these examples, one can see that information is created out of the dynamics of action in an environment. Information is in formation, always being created out of itself and always changing with respect to action.

p.75 This model of continuous information creation provides a link to the continuous creation of mutual action during co-regulation.

p.80 Information in this system is continuously updated and mutually negotiated. It is not in the form of a signal and a response but is part of the process of how the interaction unfolds over time... information in continuous systems is broadly defined as anything created by co-regulation

p.85-86 A continuous process model of relationship history assumes that new consensual frames in a relationship emerge via continuously changing and co-regulating processes. The relationship system has a history because each new encounter creates new information that then becomes part of the consensual frame between the partners. Consensual frames emerge and stabilize as part of the active process of re-creation

p.89 Relationships, therefore, are dynamic systems. They are created out of repeated interactions between the same two individuals, they develop stable and consensual frames over time, they change via creativity and variability.

p.89 Co-regulation is creative because information is not entirely fixed in advance, not entirely 'in' the self or 'in' the other. Information becomes available only through active engagement.

p.103 Complex systems, by their very nature, will converge after a period of time toward a relatively stable and identifiable pattern of functioning because of the ways in which the elements of the system constrain each other to act.

p.103 Information is created when the degrees of freedom are reduced. How can this happen?

p.104 we can begin to see how the creation of information is related to the reduction of degrees of freedom in the action dynamics.... Thus, in a very short time, a consensual frame emerges with only a few degrees of freedom left to each animal

p.104 We can formalize the description of the frame, therefore, as the set of degrees of freedom that have been consensually constrained, via the initial co-regulated negotiation, while the remaining degrees of freedom in the system are currently part of the negotiation process.

Information, therefore, is created when degrees of freedom are compressed, when one 'submits' to the restraints of the collective, of the discourse.

p.104 First, we can see how information arises when the dynamics of action are co-regulated... Second, the inevitable consequence of reducing degrees of freedom in a consensual communication system... is that frames coalesce spontaneously.

p.106 Innovation leading to the emergence of new stable patterns is an inherent feature of any dynamic system assuming that variation occurs across the range of system activity. Some variations will return the system to a stable configuration, while other variations will shift the system to another and perhaps entirely new stable pattern.

p.107 Finally, and perhaps the most critical problem for me, is that dynamic systems approaches are models of the macroscopic behavior of the system.

p.108 Information creation is the primary motivation for action and for development.

p.115 [Social psychologist Starkey Duncan] In order for a convention to be adopted within an interaction, it must be initiated by one participant and ratified by the other. Once adopted, for convention to continue in use, it must be continually ratified by both participants... The process of initiative and ratification provides one important sense in which interaction must be regarded as an achievement involving the joint, coordinated action of both participants.

p.120 Progress in the modeling of cognitive systems is occurring when modelers attempt to incorporate bodily processes - perception and action - into their models and when the modes of the models are free to co-regulate with each other in a system that creates its own rules as it acts in a real environment.

p.120 [the Italian philosopher Gianbattista] Vico's idea is that we understand and know the world through our actions in it and our thought and language is a way of encoding the perception-action relationship between the self and the environment. Cognition is therefore embodied and relational, a reflection of our participation in a dynamic perception-action system, not a record of objective or represented contents of 'reality.'

p.143 The self, from the very beginning and by the very nature of perception, is relational.

p.146 Simply put, the self is the individual's participatory and imaginative cognition of co-regulated relationships.

p.147 the essential ingredient for self-cognition: the dialogue that results from participation in consensual action frames in a long-term relationship with another individual.

p.148 both Hamlet and the baby create the self by opposition and exertion in relation to their social surround.

The self is a metaphor for the cognition of alternative action possibilities in a particular private or social consensual frame... the self is perceived as the relation... to the environment, whether animate or inanimate, because perception is always self-referent, always with respect to the individual's position.

[JLJ - I would say say that the self emerges from the realization that the exertion or struggles (which are at the core of the life experience) can be managed and made easier by asking and answering simple questions about what one perceives and has seen before, in order to make natural exertions more effective in the environment. The self becomes the dialog used to select the actions we adopt from a repertoire of possible actions, to position ourselves and move about in the world.]

p.148 in co-regulated communication individuals create information about their own actions in relation to another person whose actions are adjusting to the individual at the same time that the individual is adjusting to those actions. Thus, the events to which one is adjusting are increasingly fitted to one's adjustive actions, making the adjustment immediately meaningful.

p.149 Each time this discourse of forces occurs in this situation the... self will be slightly different. The self will evolve with respect to the continued re-negotiation of the patterning forces within the consensual frame... The dialogical self is always present in every such transaction, although it is not really observable, any more than one's inner thoughts are observable to another person. The dialogue is the subtle interplay between one's exertion and the momentary and fleeting adjustive response of the environment to that exertion.

p.149 Research suggests that the self is created with respect to social co-regulatory processes, when the partner is not merely responsive to... signals but is an active participant in the dialogue and takes a role in the cooperative co-creation of consensual frames.

p.155 Indeed, the self dialogues have the same co-regulated form as the social dialogues.

p.162 Co-regulation is the mutual creation of action by a negotiated process of exerting and ceding control in which self and other are relational poles of a dialog.

p.178 There is an apparent paradox in describing developmental change as both partially predictable and determinate, and partially fortuitous and indeterminate.

p.178 I believe that virtually every action and event is partly determinate and partly indeterminate.

p.179 Action is always partially determinate and partially indeterminate.

p.179 Dialog is all there is. The dialogical process - in which actions and events are informative in relation to the history and current actions of the participants - occurs at all times within the self, between self and other, between self and environment, and between other selves that partake of the same culture.

p.180 Relationships develop via dual processes of innovation and dissolution, by making and breaking frames, and by engaging in both creative and rigid dialogues.

p.181 The fundamental difference between [Jean] Piaget's concept of development and mine is that he believed individuals were regulated by the ideal, but never attainable, end state of perfect logical thinking. I suggest that individuals are co-regulated within self, consensual and cultural dialogues and that the developmental trajectories are creative and emergent from the dialogue and the constraints on degrees of freedom within the frame rather than by a Platonic ideal end state.

p.182 alternatives are most clear within a frame in which many of the degrees of freedom have been constrained.

p.187 Life is the dialogue, stirred by creativity and warmed by the passions of participation.

p.188 Esther Thelen proposes the following.

...detailed longitudinal studies are necessary to capture the times of stability and change.

p.188 I have made similar points.

...When organism and environment are conceptualized as distinct for the purpose of measurement, one cannot reconstruct from those measures alone the dynamics of the developmental process... To study development as a dynamic phenomenon, we must observe the system in the process of changing, and not simply before and after the change takes place.

p.188 Susan Oyama proposed that rather than measuring and ranking, correlating and predicting, developmental research should

show us about the timing of events, the susceptibility of processes to various kinds of perturbation and the manner in which the regulation is achieved, if it is achieved ... what is needed to enable a particular developmental sequence to proceed, what will induce, facilitate or maintain such a sequence, how does sensitivity to these factors change with developmental state, what degree of specificity is evident in these interactions, what is the relationship among events at various levels of analysis?

Research, in other words, should be open to the contingent and creative processes by which relationships form and change, that is, to the possibility for both determinacy and indeterminacy. It should be designed to see the whole elephant, not just its tail.

p.188-189 Experimental studies have a role in process research, but only when perturbations of ongoing process can reveal something about branching developmental pathways. Thus, one would want to preserve as much as possible about a relationship frame while perturbing selected elements to observe the effects on the self-organization of the whole system.