Caregiver-Infant Interactions

Question 1

What is attachment ?

Answer 1

• Is an emotional bond between two people.
• It is a two-way process that endures over time.
• Each individual sees the other as essential for their own emotional security.
• Attachment in humans takes a few months to develop.
  -It leads to certain behaviours such as clinging (separation distress) and proximity seeking, and serves the function of protecting an infant (secure base)

Question 2

What is reciprocity?

Answer 2

• Turntaking and responding.
• Eliciting a response from the other
• But doesn’t necessarily mean responding with the same behaviours.
• Two way communication

Question 3

International Synchrony

Answer 3

• Infant and caregiver mirror each other i.e imitate the same behaviours in a synchronised fashion (in time with each other)
• Move in time with each other e.g. both turn heads at same time/both smile at the same time.

Question 4

Alert Phases

Answer 4

From birth babies signal when they are ready to interact.

Question 5

Jaffe (1973)

Answer 5

Demonstrated that infants coordinated their actions with caregivers in a conversation. From birth babies move in a rhythm when interacting with an adult almost as if they were taking turns, as people do when having a conversation. One person leans forward and speaks and then it’s the other person’s turn = Reciprocity.

Question 6

Brazelton (1979)

Answer 6

The turn-taking rhythm that babies acquire is important for later communication. The regularity of the infant signals allows the caregiver to anticipate future behaviour = lays foundations of attachment.

Question 7

Meltzoff and Moore

Answer 7

• Observed the beginnings of interactional synchrony infants as young as 2 weeks old.
• An adult displayed one of three facial expressions or one of three distinctive gestures.
• Child’s response was filmed
• Findings – babies as young as 12-27 days would attempt to imitate facial and physical gestures.

Question 8

Isabella (1989)

Answer 8

• Observed 30 mothers and infants together and assessed the degree of synchrony.
• The researchers also assessed the quality of mother- infant attachment.
• They found high levels of synchrony were associated with better quality mother-infant attachments.

Question 9

What is Sensitive Responsiveness?

Answer 9

When adults attends/reacts sensitively to infant’s communications.

Question 10

Strengths

Answer 10

• Mother-baby interactions are usually filmed from multiple angles- very fine details of behaviour can be recorded and analysed later.
• Babies do not know they are being observed, so their behaviour does not change in response to observation (an issue for most observational research).
• This means that studies have good reliability and validity.

Question 11

Weaknesses

Answer 11

• Infants mouth’s are constantly in motion, the expressions tested occur frequently – this makes it difficult to distinguish between imitated behaviour and general activity.
• It is also hard to know if a hand movement is a response to the caregiver or a random twitch
• This means we cannot be certain that any particular interactions observed between baby and caregiver are meaningful

Question 12

Meltzoff and Moore Counterargument

Answer 12

Meltzoff and Moore overcame the issue of not knowing if a certain action made by an infant is is meaningful by filming infants and asking an observer to judge the infants behaviour when they didn’t know what behaviour was being imitated – increases internal validity.

Question 13

Koepke (1983) Weakness

Answer 13

Failed to replicate Meltzoff and Moore study findings, could be as it was less carefully controlled.

Question 14

Feldman (2012) Weakness

Answer 14

• Says that synchrony and reciprocity simple describe behaviours that occur at the same time
• These can be reliably observed BUT this may not be useful as it does not tell us their purpose
• This means that we cannot be certain from observations that reciprocity or synchrony are important in development