Caregiver & Infant Interactions

Question 1

What is interactional synchrony?

Answer 1

• Occurs in the first weeks of life
• When the child and the parents engage in the same actions in unison
• It’s believed that interactional synchrony is important for the development of the mother infant attachment
• Isabella et al assessed the quality of mother infant attachment and found that high levels of synchrony was associated with better quality attachment between the mother and infant

Question 2

What is reciprocity?

Answer 2

• Emerges around 3 months
• A two-way process of communication between infant and caregiver
• Each party responds to the other’s signal to sustain the interaction – the behaviour of each party elicits a response from the other
• e.g. mother smiling and the infant smiling back – the infant is showing reciprocity

Question 3

How does Gratier support?

Answer 3

• A strength of caregiver-infant interactions is that there is supporting cross-cultural evidence
• Gratier studied the spontaneous vocal interactions of 30 mothers and their 2-5 month old infants from India, France, USA and found that mothers and infants from all these countries coordinate their spontaneous vocalisations
• This shows that different cultures engage in interactional synchrony, thus as it is a universal behaviour it must be a vital part of forming attachments between the mother and infant
• This validates our understanding of caregiver infant interactions

Question 4

What is a weakness?

Answer 4

• A weakness is that it is based on observations which has problems testing infant behaviour
• It’s hard to perform valid and meaningful observations of infant behaviour e.g. infants’ mouths are in constant motion and they constantly change their expressions (yawn, smile, etc)
• This is an issue as this makes it distinguish between general activity a child engages in that isn’t related to an interaction and special directed expressions as a part of an interaction
• This problem will leave data open to subjective interpretation which compromise the accuracy of the observations
• Thus, since our understanding of caregiver-infant interactions on such observations, our understandings may lack validity too

Question 5

How do Murray and Trevarthen support?

Answer 5

• A strength of research into caregiver interactions is that there is supporting evidence for the role of interactional synchrony and reciprocity
• Murray and Trevarthen asked mothers to interact with their two month old infants through live video chat in real time
• In the next part of the study, the infant saw a video of the mother interacting. Since it was a prerecorded video, it did not respond to the infant’s facial and bodily gestures
• The caused acute distress, as the infants tried to gain their mothers interest but could not
• This is a strength as it shows that reciprocity and international synchrony within the infant-caregiver interaction is important as a lack of this leads to infants showing distress and is possibly harming the development of caregiver-infant interactions and potentially their attachment too
• Therefore, this supports the notion that these processes are likely to lead to better attachments between infants and the caregiver