Emotion, Development, and Self-Organization: Dynamic Systems Approaches to Emotional Development

Presented here for the first time is the idea that emotional development is "self-organizing." It replaces older ideas that genes or environments "control" the process of development. Self-organization is one aspect of a revolutionary approach to science that embraces "chaos theory" and the new "science of complexity." Physicists, chemists, biologists, and other scientists see self-organization as a significant way of explaining patterns in nature.