Caregiver - Infant Interactions Flashcards
What is an attachment?
An attachment can be defined as a close two way emotional based bond between two individuals in which each individual sees the other as essential for their own emotional security
What are the signs of attachment?
Proximity - People try to be physically close to those to whom they are attached providing a secure and safe base
Stranger anxiety - Infants especially feel anxious when a stranger appears in relation to your current attachment
Separation anxiety - People show distress when seperated from their attachment figure
What is Interactional synchrony ?
adults and babies respond in time to sustain communication
What is meant by reciprocity?
Interaction flows both ways between adult and infant as a two way process responding to each others signals
What is meant by imitation?
Infant mimics / copies the adults behaviour.
Who researched into caregiver infant interactions?
Meltzoff and Moore (1977)
What was the aim of Meltzoff and Moore’s study?
To identify imitation (interactional synchrony) between caregiver.
What was Meltzoff and Moore’s procedure?
Infants aged between 12 and 27 days old were shown facial gestures and manual gestures to see if the infant would imitate the behaviour. The adult showed one of the three different gestures to assess the response and a dummy was placed in the infants mouth to prevent a direct response. Following the display, the dummy was removed
What were Meltzoff’s and Moore’s results?
Infants as young as 12 days old could imitate both facial and manual gestures
What did Meltzoff and Moore conclude?
The ability to imitate serves as an important building block for later development therefore must be innate
What are some strengths of caregiver infant interactions?
Research to support from Meltzoff and Moore (1977)
This allows us to look further into the impact of attachment between individuals
The use of clear controlled observations, specifically filming mother - child interactions ensuring a detailed analysis meaning the validity of findings must be strong
What are the weaknesses of caregiver infant interactions?
It is difficult to test infant behaviour as infant’s behaviour is very irrational and may occur by chance
Difficulties with replication of research as few researchers have replicated the findings
As babies cannot communicate, much of this is based on inference meaning we cannot be certain on causes of behaviour.
There are practical issues with research as babies are often being fed or asleep making research difficult to conduct
