ATTACHMENTS - Reciprocity and Interactional Synchrony

Question 1

What is infancy?

Answer 1

the period of a childs life before speech begins

Question 2

How do mothers and babies form an attachment from birth?

Answer 2

they spend a lot of time in pleasurable interaction and mothers pick up on and respond to infant alertness around two-thirds of the time. From about 3 months this interaction tends to be increasingly frequent and involves close attention to each others verbal signals and facial expressions.

Question 2

What is reciprocity?

Answer 2

an interaction is reciprocal when each person responds to the other and elicits a response from them

Question 3

What did Brazelton say about reciprocity between an infant and a caregiver?

Answer 3

The regularity of an infant’s signals allows a caregiver to anticipate the infant’s behaviour and respond appropriately. the sensitivity to infant behaviour lays the foundation for later attachment between caregiver and infant.

Question 4

What is interactional synchrony?

Answer 4

the temporal co-ordination of micro-level social behaviour.

Question 5

Explain how interactional synchrony works in caregiver-infant interaction.

Answer 5

the mother and the infant reflect both the actions and the emotions of the other and do this in a synchronised way.

Question 6

Meltzoff and Moore 1977 study interactional synchrony method

Answer 6

• Controlled observation used
• An adult model was employed to display 1 of 4 different stimuli (3 facial expressions 1 hand gesture)
• A pacifier was placed in an infant’s mouth during the initial display to prevent any response from it
• Afterwards, the pacifier was removed and the baby’s behaviour was filmed on video
• To record observations, an observer watched the video of the infant’s behaviour in real time and in slow motion
• Independent observers who had no context of what the infant had seen were asked to note down all instances of tongue protrusions and head movements using the behavioural categories:
• Mouth opening, termination of mouth opening, tongue protrusion, termination of tongue protrusion
• Each observer scored the video twice which resulted in the intra- observer and inter-observer reliability to be greater than 0.92

Question 7

Meltzoff and Moore 1977 study interactional synchrony findings

Answer 7

infants as young as 2-3 weeks old imitated specific facial gestures and that there was an association between the infant behaviour and that of the adult model.

Question 8

Murray and Trevarthen 1985 study interactional synchrony (supports Meltzoff and Moore’s study)

Answer 8

• 2 month old infants interacted with their mothers via a video feed in real time
• Then the monitor played a tape of the mother so the image on the screen was not responding to the infant’s facial and bodily gestures
• This resulted in acute distress from the infants and as they tried to attract their mother’s attention but realised they couldn’t they turned away
• This shows that an infant is actively eliciting a response rather than just displaying a response that has been rewarded.

Question 9

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