Care-Giver Infant Interactions Flashcards
What is attachment?
A close two-way emotional bond between twoindividuals in which each individual sees theother as essential for their own emotionalsecurity.
What are the 3 key behaviours of attachment?
Proximity
Separation distress
Secure based behaviour
What is proximity?
When people tend to stay physically close to their attachment figure.
What is separation distress?
When people show signs of anxiety when the attachment figure leaves their presence.
What is secure base behaviour?
Even when we are independent of our attachment figure we tend to make regular contact with them. Babies will regularly return to their attachment figure when playing.
What is care-giver infant interactions?
From an early age, babies have meaningful social interactions with their carers.
Psychologists believe these interactions have important functions for the child’s social development.
Good quality early social interactions = successful development of attachments between babies and caregiver(s).
One key interaction may be non-verbal communication
The way in which each responds to the other determines what type of attachment is formed.
More sensitive = deeper the relationship/attachment
What is reciprocity?
Three months +, interaction is more and more frequent.
Involves close attention to each other’s verbal signals and facial expressions
This is reciprocity.
An interaction is reciprocal when each person responds to the other and elicits a response from them.
What are alert phases?
Alert Phases: Babies have periodic ‘alert phases’ when they signal that they are ready for some interaction.
e.g. making eye contact
Mothers typically pick up on and respond to babies alertness 2/3 of the time (Feldman and Eidelman, 2007).
What is active involvement?
Active Involvement: Traditionally, babies have been seen as passive beings who receive care from an adult
BUT! It seems that babies take on an active role. Both mother and child initiate interactions and appear to take turns in doing so.
Brazelton et al (1975) described this interaction as a ‘dance’ because each person responds to the moves of the other.
What is the still face experiment?
This experiment involves a baby and parent (in this case the mother) sitting facing each other. The mother starts by playing with her baby, smiling at them, and talking to them. The mother then turns away. The next step is that the mother shows a still face or a lack of responsiveness to her baby for 2 mins. After the still face portion of the experiment there is a repair when the mother returns to normal and returns to playing with and talking to her baby. The interesting part of this experiment is not the actions of the mother but rather the reaction of her baby. You start by seeing a smiling happy baby who is engaging with her mother. The baby is making movements and sounds to communicate with her mother and responding to her mother’s interactions with her.
What are the results of the still face experiment?
Once the still face portion of the experiment begins the baby at first looks confused. She attempts to use all of her abilities to initiate a response from her mother.
As her attempts to connect continue to be ignored by her mother you see her start to show distress and frustration. She begins crying and then screeching.
After the still face portion of the experiment when the mother returns to interacting with the baby. You can see the joyfulness of the reunion and the relief is clear.
Whats international synchrony?
Feldman (2007) defined it as ‘the temporal coordination of micro-level social behaviour’.
It takes place when caregiver and baby interact in such a way that their actions and emotions mirror each other
‘The baby picks up on your stress’
Interactional synchrony is important for the development of mother-infant attachment.
High levels of synchrony between mother and infant = better quality mother-infant attachment. (Russell Isabella et al, 1989)
Who did international synchrony research?
Meltzoff and Moore (1977)
Who did they observe?
observed babies as young as two weeks old.
What was the method?
An adult displayed one of three facial expressions or one of three gestures.
A dummy was placed in the babies mouth during the initial display to prevent any response.
It was then removed and babies response was filmed and labelled by independent observers.
