Emotional availability: detecting human connection and links with healthy functioning in infancy and early childhood

Emotional availability (EA) in adult-child relationships is conceptualized as “the connective tissue” in relationships ( Biringen et al., 2014 ). It doesn't matter what the adult or the child do, if it is not affectively received by the other-and hence, the dyadic nature of any human connection. EA dimensions include four qualities on the adult side (sensitivity, structuring, nonintrusiveness, and nonhostility) and two qualities on the child side (responsiveness to the adult and involvement of the adult). In addition, the system yields 4 emotional attachment zones (Emotionally available, Complicated, Detached, and Problematic), which, theoretically, correspond to the traditional attachment categories. In this paper, I briefly summarize mental and physical health during infancy and early childhood as related to EA. In the area of social/emotional functioning„ I focus on areas that have been emphasized in EA research, namely the child's emotion regulation, infant-parent attachment, and the child's emotional availability to the caregiver. In the area of physical and physiological functioning, the focus is on early brain development, stress physiology, the neuroendocrine system, and the daily activities of sleep and feeding/eating/weight issues. This is followed by a description of prevention/intervention work as related to EA. I end with a description of next steps in three areas: (1) brief preventions/interventions; (2) the inclusion of fathers on research in high-risk environments and psychopathology; and (3) the connection of EA work with machine learning/artificial intelligence.