intro to attachment

• attachment - a close two-way emotional bond between two individuals in which each other sees the other as essential for their own emotional security
• babies have ‘alert phases’ when they signal they are ready for interaction. Mothers pick up on this and respond two-thirds of the time (feldman and eidelman, 2007)
• from around 3 months this interaction tends to be increasingly frequent and involves close attention to each others signals and facial expressions (feldman 2007)
• caregiver - infant interaction is a two way process. each party responds to other’s signals sustain interaction
• the behaviour of each party elicits a response from the other
• doesn’t necessarily have to be a matching response
• brazelton et al (1975) described the interaction as a ‘dance’ because it is just like a couple’s dance where each partner responds to each other’s moves
• interactional synchrony - when a caregiver and infant carry out the actions and emotions of each other in a co-ordinated way
• these behaviours mirror each other - they are in sync e.g. caregiver smiles, baby smiles
• meltzoff and moore (1977) observed the beginnings of interactional synchrony in infants as young as two weeks old
• an adult displayed one of three facial expressions or one of three distinctive gestures
• the child’s response was filmed and identified by independent observers, an association was found between the expression or gesture that the adult had displayed and the actions of babies
• isabella et al. (1989) - interactional synchrony is important for the development of mother-infant interaction. they observed 30 mothers and infants together and assessed the degree of synchrony. the researchers assessed the quality of their attachment
• observing hand movements is extremely difficult to say whether the infants limitation of the adults signals is deliberate or conscious