caregiver-infant interactions Flashcards
what are the two main types of caregiver-infant interaction?
Reciprocity and interactional synchrony.
why are caregiver-infant interactions so important?
Helps child’s social development and caregiver-infant attachment.
what is reciprocity?
when baby and parent respond to each other and elicits responses from eachother.
‘like a conversation but without words’
what was the still face experiment?
- mother was asked to playfully interact with her child maintaining reciprocity and then to turn away and turn back around with a straight face
- to begin with the baby was trying to gain back the mothers attention by smiling/pointing, but as time went on the baby became distressed/confused and started screaming/crying.
what is interactional synchrony?
when mother and infant interact in such a way that their actions and emotions mirror each other.
what was the aim of meltzoff and moore’s experiment?
carry out a controlled experiment to observe infant behaviour in response to different stimuli (3 faces & 1 hand gesture)
what was meltzoff and moore’s procedure?
- an observer watched videotapes of the infant’s behaviour in real time, slowmo, frame by frame
- the video was then judged by independent observers who didn’t know what the infant had seen
- each observer was asked to note all instances of infant tongue protrusions and head movements using various behavioural categories such as mouth opening
what were the results?
a strong association was found between the expression/gesture displayed by the adult and the actions of the babies (all scores greater than 92)
what was there conclusion?
infants copy/mirror adult
what did Field find?
Primary caregiver fathers, like mothers, spent more time smiling, imitating and holding infants than the secondary caregiver fathers.
This behaviour is important for attachment building – so, it seems that fathers can be the more nurturing attachment figure.
what is the key to an attachment relationship
the level of responsiveness not the gender of the parent
strength of Meltzoff and Moore’s research
it has high inter-observer reliability - shown by use of clearly defined behavioural categories and observers watched videos twice - reliable and replicable
weakness of Meltzoff and Moore’s research
often difficult to test infant behaviour - hard to distinguish general expressions and ones that are specifically imitated - questions validity
only observers 1 infant - doesn’t account for individual differences - Isabella et al > strongly attached infant-caregiver pairs showed greater IS - not applicable to all - can’t generalise
what did Field carry out?
Field (1978) filmed 4-month old babies in face-to-face interaction with primary caregiver mothers, secondary caregiver fathers and primary caregiver fathers.
