Early Relationships: Social Development During The First 24 Months Flashcards
What are the key phases of social development ?
- Birth/1 month: A basic attraction to people
- 2 months: Core relatedness/ primary intersubjectivity
- 5 months : Topic based relatedness
- 9-10 months : connected up relatedness
- 18 months: cooperative relatedness
What do parents do when infants progress through the stages of social development?
They adjust the quality of their infants engagement and support their development in new ways intuitively.
What characteristics do infants display in phase 1 of infants social development?
- newborns display social readiness
- Infants have innate abilities to immediately lock on to prototypical caregiver
- Prefer face like stimuli rather than abstract patterns
- Have an attraction to faces ready to engage(eyes open and looking forward rather than sideways)
- Also sensitive to voices and not just faces. (Recognition of mothers voice from 3rd trimester) especially voices that are familiar
- Attraction for mothers smell such as breast milk.
What is the adult responses to infant faces?
- Baby Schema (Lorenz)
- There is a typical configuration of infants:
1. Big round head
2. High forehead
3. Big eyes
4. Chubby cheeks
5. Small mouth and nose - it elicits caregiving behaviours in adults (social releasers)
- Specific brain responses to baby faces which motivates caretaking behaviour
- it’s stronger with dealing with our own infant.
-In conclusion we are biologically prepared to care for children
What is neonatal imitation?
Infants are readily able to imitate and interact with adult caregivers behaviours.
Also present in evolutionary neighbours. (Rhessus McKaks)
What is motherese?
Infant directed speech (16 months and younger)
Characterised by:
- exaggerated intonation/melody
- simple often diminutive vocabulary
- repetition
Why is motherese used?
Infants show preference towards IDS compared to adult directed speech
Motherese has similar properties across cultural contexts (universal)
Also found in primates (monkeys etc)
What characterises phase 1 of social development?
- Hardwired basic, fundamental, connection between caregiver and infant
- Parents - sympathetic and emotional involvement
- Infants - a strong motivation to engage
- These processes ensure infants and their parents to establish a close connection, and over the first month lay the foundations for social communication.
Describe the period of core relatedness or primary intersubjectivity?
How do parents describe it?
A period of purely social and emotionally intimate one to one engagements
-notice change in infant the become really human or recognised a person in their infant.
What do infants display in core relatedness in 6 to 8 weeks?
Hold eye contact
Vocalise
Smile
Show ‘pre speech’ (mouth openings, lip/ tounge protrusions)
When does eye contact per minute increase?
When does communicative behaviour with mouths increase ?
- 6 to 8 weeks parks at 8 weeks
- Same (smile, vocalisation, pre speech) non social mouth movements decreases during second month of life
Describe method and results of still face (tronick) experiment
- Normal engagement : infant is cheerful and engaging
- Still face : infant is puzzled , will bid for response and then withdraw
Conclusion: infants want responses and specific responses attuned to the the interactions
What does the double video non contingency experiment show?
-Infants are sensitive to the temporal contingency of maternal responses.
What kind of maternal responses do we have?
Mirroring:
- Mothers imitate/ match infants behaviour
- response is attuned to the form, intensity and affective quality of infant behaviour.
Marking: (positive or neutral)
-Mother does not mirror infant behaviour.
-Affective quality and intensity of response is well attuned, and singles out (marks) an infant behaviour.
Positive: marking behaviour is accompanied by a positive clear emotional commenting
Neutral: No particular notion attached to marking behaviour
Negative responses:
- mis-attuned responses (overshoots or undershorts intensity of infant behaviour)
- negating responses(rejecting, mocking)
What type of parental responses are used more frequently?
-when an infant produces social behaviours adults will intuitively immediately use mirroring and positive marking.
What type of parental responses promote social development of infant social behaviour?
Positive marking and mirroring
Mirroring is the strongest promoter.
What summarises the core relatedness period?
Infants become sophisticated social partners;
- as they are highly motivated to engage socially with others.
- Has a rich repertoire of gestures, and vocal and facial expressions
- Is remarkably sensitive to the quality of his partners engagement
What occurs to infants that affects behaviours of infants and caregivers in topic based relatedness?
Infants have improvements in vision and grasping expand the field of interest.
-Decline in eye contact
-interactions go from being purely communication to being about a third topic
How do parents interact with infants in topic based relatedness?
They share experience and engage with the infant via body games, object and triadic play, showing and using ‘ostensive marking’
Interactions go from being purely about communication to being about a ‘third topic’
Describe body games with a topic?
Triggering some kind of perception,such as tickle games.
Infants discover sensations and the experience is shared with caregiver and infant.
Describe games with rules?
Rules are a topic of conversation, such as stand and stretch. The infant will anticipate being picked up to stand
What is ostensive marking? (Gergley 2007)
Employ same kind of marking behaviour such as smiling or flushing brows, in turn full eye. Contact while interacting with something else in external world. Such as showing and playing.
-mother initiates this interaction
Why is topic based relatedness a necessary transitional phase?
Infants: acquire elaborate social skills, their experiences leave boundaries or core relatedness
parents: They intuitively adjust their parenting, including ‘third’ shared objects of interest in their social engagements.
What is the child still not able to do at topic based relatedness?
Infant still does not directly acknowledge the link between his partner, the topic and his own experience. E.g., to get his teddy when its out of reach
- stretch towards
- grunt
- show desire
- But not look to partner to fetch it
The adult has to read the cues of infant.
What important development occurs during connected-up relatedness or secondary intersubjectivity ?
The infant establishes a cognitive link between their caregiver and the outside world.
What behaviours from parents in topic based relatedness to connected up relatedness promote the shift and why?
Ostensive marking, sharing and showing objects, Triassic play, Games with rules and routines
-transmit a sense of shared interest, and coordination between partners.
What landmark shows the shift from topic based relatedness to connected up relatedness?
Pointing Gaze following Reciprocal play Giving games Sharing interests
What occurs at 9 months in connected up relatedness?
9 months, infants can follow others pointing gestures.
What age do infants begin to point and describe it?
Between 9 and 14 months
Arm extended, index finger separated from other fingers which are curled in.
Describe gaze following
Early in infancy infants begin to follow other people’s line of regard
What factors affects the ability of gaze following ?
Wether the persons head is moving or just their eyes
How far away and how far to the side the gaze target object is
What does the ability to gaze follow predict?
Gaze following is a good predictor of the onset of the pointing gesture, which in turn predicts vocabulary development
What does the ability to point predict?
Vocabulary development
Describe secondary intersubjectivity?
Infants:
-Considerate physical mastery of environment ( reaching, grabbing, manipulating objects and often crawling)
-building on fundamental capacity for communication, and supported in his interactions with others , they learn to grasp others engagement with the environment, and to coordinate this with their own experiences.
Summarise Cooperative relatedness
18-24 months : impressive understanding of others experience and more objective take on experience.
This understanding is still largely intuitive, but predicts later theory of mind abilities (3-4 years)
What behaviours does the infant produce that displays that they acknowledge others have interests that are not the same as their own?
Playful manipulation : teasing
What occurs in the 2nd year of development?
Great advances in social understanding:
-Infants appreciate that others can have different experiences from their own, which they can manipulate, but also share, in cooperation.
Parents can support this by offering opportunities to share activities, engage in pretend play, and have conversations about what people feel, and why they behave as they do.
