Lesson 1: Caregiver-Infant Interactions

Question 1

What is developmental psychology?

Answer 1

A branch of psychology concerned with the progressive behavioural changes that occur in individuals across their lifespan

Question 2

What is attachment?

Answer 2

An emotional bond between two people. It’s a two-way process that endures over time.

Question 3

What is reciprocity?

Answer 3

Turn-taking. Two way mutual process where each party responds to the others to sustain interaction, which initiates a response from the other. Kind of conversation, regularly allows caregiver to anticipate behaviours.

Question 4

What is interactional synchrony?

Answer 4

When adults and baby respond in time to sustain communication. Actions and emotions mirror eachother.

Question 5

Meltzoff and Moore interactional synchrony experiment.

Answer 5

Found infants as young as 2/3 weeks imitated specific facial and hand gestures they saw adults do. Adult model, 3 facial expressions and dummy was placed in child’s mouth to avoid response. Afterwards, the dummy was removed and the infants expression was filmed.
They found there was an association between the infants behaviour and adult model.

Question 6

Positive Evaluation of Caregiver infant interactions

Answer 6

1. I.S has been proven in many studies. Behaviours are innate, not learnt as 3 day old babies showed IS.
2. Psychologists got mothers to interact with their babies over a video monitor. They then played a video of the mother, so they were not interacting with the baby. The babies tried to get their mothers attention, but when that failed, they stopped trying, showing infants want mothers to reciprocate.
3. Psychologists observed infant behaviour when interacting with a puppet that looked like a human mouth opening and closing. Infants made little response to this showing they aren’t imitating what they see, but interactional synchrony is a specific social response.

Question 7

Negatives of Caregiver-Infant Interactions

Answer 7

1. Babies cannot communicate, struggle to analyse
2. Expressions from model were commonly shown from babies, so could have been no relation
3. Stronger baby behaviour in lab settings
4. Observer bias?
5. Practical issues (infants often feeding or sleeping)
6. Extra care to ethics needs to be taken