Caregiver- infant interactions Flashcards
What is reciprocity in caregiver-infant interaction?
A form of interaction where both caregiver and infant respond to each other and elicit responses—like a conversation or turn-taking.
What is meant by alert phases in infants?
Periods when babies signal they’re ready for interaction, e.g. by making eye contact. Mothers typically respond around two-thirds of the time (Feldman & Eidelman, 2007).
How does active involvement challenge traditional views of infants?
Babies are not passive—they actively initiate and respond in interactions, much like a “dance” with the caregiver (Brazelton et al., 1975).
What is interactional synchrony?
The coordinated, simultaneous mirroring of actions and emotions between caregiver and infant (Feldman, 2007).
Who first observed interactional synchrony and in what year?
Meltzoff and Moore in 1977.
What was the procedure of Meltzoff and Moore’s (1977) study?
Babies as young as 2 weeks were shown facial expressions or gestures by an adult, and their responses were filmed and analysed.
What did Meltzoff and Moore find?
Babies mirrored the adult’s expressions/gestures more than could be expected by chance, showing early synchrony.
Why is interactional synchrony important for attachment?
It is associated with better quality attachments—Isabella et al. (1989) found high synchrony linked to emotionally intense relationships.
strength of CAREGIVER INTERACTIONS
One strength of the research on this topic is that caregiver-infant interactions are usually filmed in a laboratory.
This means that other activity, that might 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. Furthermore having filmed interactions means that more than one observer can record data and establish the inter-rater reliability of observations. Finally, babies don’t know they are being observed, so their behaviour does not change in response to observation (this is generally the main problem for overt observations).
Therefore the data collected in such research should have good reliability and validity.
limitation (1) of CAREGIVER INTERACTION
One limitation of research into caregiver-infant interaction is that it is hard to interpret a baby’s behaviour.
Young babies lack co-ordination and much of their bodies are almost immobile. The movements being observed are just small hand movements or subtle changes in expression. It is difficult to be sure, for example, whether a baby is smiling or just passing wind. It is also dificult to determine what is taking place from the baby’s perspective. For example, we cannot know whether a movement such as a hand twitch is random or triggered by something the caregiver has done.
This means we cannot be certain that the behaviours seen in caregiver-infant interactions have a special meaning.
limitation (2) of CAREGIVER INTERACTION
A further limitation is that simply observing a behaviour does not tell us its developmental importance.
Ruth Feldman (2012) points out that ideas like synchrony (and by implication reciprocity) simply give names to patterns of observable caregiver and baby behaviours. These are robust phenomena in the sense that they can be reliably observed, but they still 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 observational research alone that reciprocitv and sunchronv are important for a child’s develooment.
