Reciprocity and internal synchrony

Question 1

What is meant by attachment?

Answer 1

An affectional tie that one person or animal forms between themselves and another specific one, attachment behaviours aim to maintain proximity or contact.

Question 2

Caregiver and infant interaction

Answer 2

Infancy is the period of a child’s life before they can speak, usually the first year or two. Early interaction is in verbal and they firm the basis of attachment between an infant and caregiver, this depends on how they respond to each other such being more sensitive to the others signals making the relationship deeper.

Question 3

Reciprocity

Answer 3

Babies and their caregivers often spend their time in intense and pleasurable interaction, babies have periodic alert phases and signal that they are ready for interaction. Caregivers notice this and respond around two thirds of the time, after about 3 months this interaction tends to be increasingly frequent and involve paying attention to each other’s verbal signals and facial expressions. A key part of reciprocity is when each person responds to the other and elicits a response from them.
Brazelton suggested that the basic rhythm of interaction and the sensitivity of a caregiver to an infringe behaviour is the foundation of later attachment.

Question 4

Internal synchrony

Answer 4

Two people are synchronised when they carry out the same action simultaneously, internal synchrony is when a career and an infant reflect the actions and emotions of the other and do this in a coordinated and synchronised way.

Question 5

Internal synchrony study

Answer 5

Meltzoff and Moore used a controlled observation, they selected four stimuli (3 facial express and a hand gesture), they observed the infants reactions to these stimuli. The first time they saw the child has a dummy in their mouth so they could not respond, they recorded the babies response the second time and got independent observes to categorise and observe the infants responses, they found that the infants behaviour tended to mirror the adults. Laters studies showed infants as young as 3 days old showed interactional synchrony suggesting it is innate rather then learned.

Question 6

Evaluation of reciprocity and internal synchrony

Answer 6

• ) studies using infants such as Meltzoff and Moore’s may have doubtful findings as it is hard to reliably test the infants behaviour, and the expressions that are tested happen frequently so it is hard to distinguish between general behaviour and behaviour caused by internal synchrony, they tried to make the findings more valid by getting an independent judge to look at the tapes.
• ) Other studies such as Koepke’s failed to replicate Meltzoff and Moore’s finding although Meltzoff says this is because it was not controlled enough. Martin et al also showed that babies couldn’t distinguish between their real career and video tapes of them when trying to replicate Murray’s study.
• ) They tried to get infants to react with inanimate objects to show if they imitate our actions and found they did not imitate the actions taken with the objects but just ignored them suggesting they do not just imitate everything they see.
• ) There is variation in infant behaviour due to individual differences such as Isabella et al found more strongly attached caregivers and infants where to each other the higher a,punt of internal synchrony there was.

+) the research has real life applications as it explains how children are able to develop a theory of mind and conduct relationships.