Early Relationships: Social Development During The First 24 Months

Question 1

What are the key phases of social development ?

Answer 1

1. Birth/1 month: A basic attraction to people
2. 2 months: Core relatedness/ primary intersubjectivity
3. 5 months : Topic based relatedness
4. 9-10 months : connected up relatedness
5. 18 months: cooperative relatedness

Question 2

What do parents do when infants progress through the stages of social development?

Answer 2

They adjust the quality of their infants engagement and support their development in new ways intuitively.

Question 3

What characteristics do infants display in phase 1 of infants social development?

Answer 3

• 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.

Question 4

What is the adult responses to infant faces?

Answer 4

• 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

Question 5

What is neonatal imitation?

Answer 5

Infants are readily able to imitate and interact with adult caregivers behaviours.

Also present in evolutionary neighbours. (Rhessus McKaks)

Question 6

What is motherese?

Answer 6

Infant directed speech (16 months and younger)

Characterised by:

• exaggerated intonation/melody
• simple often diminutive vocabulary
• repetition

Question 7

Why is motherese used?

Answer 7

Infants show preference towards IDS compared to adult directed speech

Motherese has similar properties across cultural contexts (universal)

Also found in primates (monkeys etc)

Question 8

What characterises phase 1 of social development?

Answer 8

• 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.

Question 9

Describe the period of core relatedness or primary intersubjectivity?

How do parents describe it?

Answer 9

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.

Question 10

What do infants display in core relatedness in 6 to 8 weeks?

Answer 10

Hold eye contact
Vocalise
Smile
Show ‘pre speech’ (mouth openings, lip/ tounge protrusions)

Question 11

When does eye contact per minute increase?

When does communicative behaviour with mouths increase ?

Answer 11

• 6 to 8 weeks parks at 8 weeks

- Same (smile, vocalisation, pre speech) non social mouth movements decreases during second month of life

Question 12

Describe method and results of still face (tronick) experiment

Answer 12

1. Normal engagement : infant is cheerful and engaging
2. Still face : infant is puzzled , will bid for response and then withdraw

Conclusion: infants want responses and specific responses attuned to the the interactions

Question 13

What does the double video non contingency experiment show?

Answer 13

-Infants are sensitive to the temporal contingency of maternal responses.

Question 14

What kind of maternal responses do we have?

Answer 14

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)

Question 15

What type of parental responses are used more frequently?

Answer 15

-when an infant produces social behaviours adults will intuitively immediately use mirroring and positive marking.

Question 16

What type of parental responses promote social development of infant social behaviour?

Answer 16

Positive marking and mirroring

Mirroring is the strongest promoter.

Question 17

What summarises the core relatedness period?

Answer 17

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

Question 18

What occurs to infants that affects behaviours of infants and caregivers in topic based relatedness?

Answer 18

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

Question 19

How do parents interact with infants in topic based relatedness?

Answer 19

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’

Question 20

Describe body games with a topic?

Answer 20

Triggering some kind of perception,such as tickle games.

Infants discover sensations and the experience is shared with caregiver and infant.

Question 21

Describe games with rules?

Answer 21

Rules are a topic of conversation, such as stand and stretch. The infant will anticipate being picked up to stand

Question 22

What is ostensive marking? (Gergley 2007)

Answer 22

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

Question 23

Why is topic based relatedness a necessary transitional phase?

Answer 23

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.

Question 24

What is the child still not able to do at topic based relatedness?

Answer 24

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.

Question 25

What important development occurs during connected-up relatedness or secondary intersubjectivity ?

Answer 25

The infant establishes a cognitive link between their caregiver and the outside world.

Question 26

What behaviours from parents in topic based relatedness to connected up relatedness promote the shift and why?

Answer 26

Ostensive marking, sharing and showing objects, Triassic play, Games with rules and routines

-transmit a sense of shared interest, and coordination between partners.

Question 27

What landmark shows the shift from topic based relatedness to connected up relatedness?

Answer 27

Pointing 
Gaze following 
Reciprocal play 
Giving games
Sharing interests

Question 28

What occurs at 9 months in connected up relatedness?

Answer 28

9 months, infants can follow others pointing gestures.

Question 29

What age do infants begin to point and describe it?

Answer 29

Between 9 and 14 months

Arm extended, index finger separated from other fingers which are curled in.

Question 30

Describe gaze following

Answer 30

Early in infancy infants begin to follow other people’s line of regard

Question 31

What factors affects the ability of gaze following ?

Answer 31

Wether the persons head is moving or just their eyes

How far away and how far to the side the gaze target object is

Question 32

What does the ability to gaze follow predict?

Answer 32

Gaze following is a good predictor of the onset of the pointing gesture, which in turn predicts vocabulary development

Question 33

What does the ability to point predict?

Answer 33

Vocabulary development

Question 34

Describe secondary intersubjectivity?

Answer 34

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.

Question 35

Summarise Cooperative relatedness

Answer 35

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)

Question 36

What behaviours does the infant produce that displays that they acknowledge others have interests that are not the same as their own?

Answer 36

Playful manipulation : teasing

Question 37

What occurs in the 2nd year of development?

Answer 37

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.