Caregiver-infant interactions Flashcards
Define reciprocity.
From birth babies and their mothers spend a lot of time in intense and highly pleasurable interaction. An interaction is said to show reciprocity when each person responds to the other and elicits a response from them
Give an example of reciprocity.
A caregiver might respond to their babies smile by saying something which would elicit a response from the baby.
What are alert phases?
Babies have periodic alert phases in which they signal that they are ready for an interaction and research shows that mothers can typically pick up on this alertness.
From around three months this interaction tends to be increasingly frequent and involves birth mother and baby paying attention to each others verbal signals and facial expressions.
Explain active involvement.
Traditional views of childhood have portrayed babies in a passive role in which they receive care from an adult however it seems that babies as well as babies have an active role. Both caregiver and baby can initiate interactions and take turns in doing this.
Define interactional synchrony.
Interactional synchrony can be defined as ‘the temporal co-ordination of micro-level social behaviour’. It takes place when a caregiver and baby interact in such ways that their actions and emotions mirror the other
Outline Meltzoff and Moore’s study into care-giver infant interactions.
Observed the beginning of interactional synchrony in babies as young as two weeks old.
An adult displayed one of three facial expression or one of three distinctive gestures and the baby’s response was filmed and labelled.
The babies expressions and gestures were more likely to mirror those of the adults than not.
What can we conclude from Meltzoff and Moores study?
The fact that babies as young as two weeks were displaying this behaviour shows that it must be innate and not learned.
Give a strength of research into care-giver infant interactions.
One strength of research on this topic is that care-giver infant interactions are usually filmed in a laboratory. This means that any other activity which may distract a baby can be controlled. Also, using films means that observations can be recorded and analysed later. Therefore it is unlikely that researchers will miss seeing key behaviours. Also, baby’s do not know they are being observed and so their behaviour will not change in response to observation.
Therefore, the data collected in the research should have good reliability and validity.
Give a limitation of caregiver-infant interactions.
It is hard to interpret a baby’s behaviour.
Young babies lack coordination and much of their bodies are immobile and so some of the movements being observed are just small hand movements or subtle changes in expression. It is difficult to determine what is happening from the babies perspective. For example, we do not know wether a hand twitch is random or triggered by something the caregiver has done. This means we cannot be certain that certain behaviours seen in caregiver infant interactions have special meaning.
Give a limitation of caregiver-infant interaction.
Simply observing a behaviour does not tell us the developmental importance. Ideas like synchrony simply give names to patterns of observable caregiver and baby behaviours. These may not be particularly useful in understanding child development as it does not tell us the purpose of these behaviours. This means that we cannot be certain from observations research alone that reciprocity and synchrony are important for child development.
