A: Caregiver Infant Interactions Flashcards
What is attachment?
Close two way emotional bond between two individuals in which each sees the other as essential for their emotional security
Human babies are ‘altricial’
What does this mean
Born at relatively early stage of development
What are precocial animals?
Animals born at advanced stage of development
What deepens a relationship?
Sensitivity to each others signals
How can you tell that an attachment had been made?
Bodily contact
Mimicking
Caregivers using high pitched song like, slow, repetitive voice
Reciprocity
Define reciprocity
One person responds to the other one taking turns like a conversation
Define intersectional synchronicity
When they carry out the same action simultaneously
Brazleton (1975)
Described mother infant interactions as a dance
Mother and children take turns initiating interactions
From birth babies and carers spend lots of time in intense and pleasurable interaction
Intersectional synchrony
Meltzoff and Moore (1977)
Adult displayed one of three facial expressions or hand movements
Dummy placed in infants moth during initial display to prevent any response
Dummy removed and child’s expression filmed
Infants as young as two to three weeks old imitated specific facial and hand gestures
Isabella et al (1989)
Securely attached mother infant pairs had shown more instances of international synchrony in the first year of life
What do high levels of synchrony show?
Emotional bond
International synchrony plays a part in strong attachment
Caregiver infant interactions are:
•non verbal
•specific to you and the baby
•different between mother+father
•cultural specific
AO3: controlled observations capture fine detail
-Observations of mother-infant interactions are generally well controlled with mother and child being filmed, often from multiple angles, ensuring all detail is caught and can later be analysed
-increased validity
AO3: No demand characteristics from baby
- babies are unaware/ don’t care if they are being observed so their behaviour wont change in an experiment
-mothers may have demand characteristics though
AO3: Difficult to know whats happening when observing infants
-whilst many studies have shown the same patterns of interaction, what is being observed is merely hand movements or expression changes
-hard to tell what is taking place from infants perspective
-hand movements aren’t very specific and may not have any special meaning
AO3: socially sensitive
-e.g. working mothers may not have the same opportunity to achieve interactional synchrony
AO3: research may be ethnocentric
-results are not found in all cultures
-e.g. Le Vine et al. reported that Kenyan mothers have little physical interactions/contact with their infants but even so the infants have high proportion of physical attachments
-reduced validity
