Infant-Caregiver Interactions

• PROXIMITY: Children remain physically close to those they are attached to.
• SEPARATION DISTRESS: People are distressed when an attachment figure leaves their presence.
• SECURE-BASE BEHAVIOUR: Infants display secure-base behaviour when they return to their attachment figure while playing.
• • Research in the 1970s (Jaffe et al 1973) suggest infants have an innate tendency to coordinate their actions with a caregiver (IE taking actions in turns) this is known as reciprocity
• • Brazelton (1979) suggests reciprocity is an important precursor for later communication development.
• Psychologists like Meltzoff and Moore (1977) argue the interactions between infant and caregiver are a fundamental basis for the formation of attachments. They suggest one of the key interactions is non verbal communication IE pulling faces or hand gestures. The more sensitive each is to the other’s signals, the stronger the attachment.
• Meltzoff and Moore (1977) used an uncontrolled observation. They found that there was an association between infant behaviour and the adult model.
• • Based on the findings, Meltzoff and Moore (1977) built on the idea of reciprocity, suggesting a new term ‘interactional synchronicity’ was occurring. This is where an infant mirrors the actions of another person, for example, their facial expressions and body movements, moving their body in tune with the rhythm of their carer
• • In a later study, Meltzoff and Moore (1983) were able to replicate these findings in infants that were 3 days old.
• Further support for Meltzoff and Moore’s study comes from Abravanel and DeYong (1991). They replicated the study but instead used inanimate objects displaying the tongue and mouth movements in the original. They found children aged 5-12 weeks showed little response to these objects, suggesting the response is a specific social response to humans.
• Based on their results, Meltzoff and Moore proposed that this imitation is intentional. However, Piaget (1962) believed that true imitation only develops towards the end of the first year and anything before this is just ‘response training’. Piaget argues that what is really happening is a form of operant condition where when the infant copies the behaviour they are rewarded by the caregiver’s smile and as such are encouraged to imitate the behaviour again.
• Whilst the findings provide valuable insight, it is difficult to reliably make interpretations based on infants’ behaviour. Infants’ mouths and faces are typically in constant motion and the behaviour Meltzoff and Moore tested for (tongue sticking out, yawning, smiling) may just be a form of this.
• Another issue with Meltzofff and Moore’s study is that other research has failed to replicate their findings (Koepke et al 1983, Marian et al 1996) this indicates the original findings lack reliability.