Allan N. Schore is one of the world's foremost neuropsychoanalysts and is widely regarded as the 'American Bowlby' for his decades of work integrating developmental neuroscience with attachment theory. His regulation theory argues that the early caregiver–infant relationship literally shapes the developing right brain — the hemisphere dominant for social and emotional processing — and that play is a central mechanism through which that development unfolds. He has shown that right-brain-to-right-brain communication during face-to-face play between caregiver and infant is the biological substrate of secure attachment, empathy, and lifelong emotional regulation. A faculty member at the UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine and co-editor in chief of the Norton Series on Interpersonal Neurobiology, his three-volume work on affect regulation is among the most cited in developmental science.
