2.1. Caregiver- infant interactions Flashcards
What is attachment?
- an emotional bond between 2 people
- two way process that endures over time
- each individual sees the other as essential for own emotional security
- leads to certain behaviours such as clinging and proximity seeking, and serves the function of protecting an infant
What is reciprocity?
- turn taking and responding
- eliciting a response from the other
- doesn’t mean responding with the same behaviours
- two way
What is interactional synchrony?
- infant and caregiver signals synchronise
- move in time with each other
What are alert phases?
from birth, babies signal when they are ready to interact
What did Meltzoff and Moore do?
- observed the beginnings of interactional synchrony infants as young as 2 weeks
- an adult displayed one of three facial expressions or one of three distinctive gestures
- child’s response was filmed
What did Meltzoff and Moore find?
Babies as young as 12-27 days would attempt to imitate facial and physical gestures
What was Jaffe’s study?
- Demonstrated that infants coordinated their actions with caregivers in a conversation.
- From birth babies move in a rhythm when interacting with an adult almost as if they were taking turns, as people do when having a conversation.
- One person leans forward and speaks and then it’s the other person’s turn = reciprocity
What was Brazelton’s study?
- This rhythm is important for later communication.
- The regularity of the infant signals allows the caregiver to anticipate future behaviour = lays foundations of attachment
What was Isabella’s study?
- Observed 30 mothers and infants together and assessed degree of synchrony
- researchers also assessed quality of mother-infant attachment
- They found high levels of synchrony were associated with better quality mother-infant attachment
Strength: film interactions
+ mother-baby interactions are usually filmed from multiple angles -> very fine details of behaviour can be recorded and analysed later
+ babies don’t know they’re being observed, so their behaviour doesn’t change in response to observation
+ studies have reliability and validity
Weakness: problems with testing infant behaviour
- Infants mouths are constantly in motion, the expressions tested occur frequently -> this makes it difficult to distinguish between imitated behaviour and general activity
- Hard to know if a hand movement is a response to the caregiver or a random twitch
- This means we cannot be certain that any particular interactions observed between baby and caregiver are meaningful\
+ Meltzoff and Moore overcame this issue by filming infants and asking an observer to judge the infants behaviour when they didn’t know what behaviour was being intimate - increases internal validity
Weakness: failure to replicate
Kopek failed to replicate Meltzoff and Moore study findings, could be as it was less carefully controlled
Weakness: difficulty inferring developmental importance
- Feldman says that synchrony and reciprocity simply described behaviours that occur at the same time
- These can be reliably observed but this might not be useful as it doesn’t tell us their purpose
- This means we can’t be certain from observations that reciprocity or synchrony are important to development
