Caregiver-infant interactions

• Attachment

  • An emotional bond between 2 people
  • 2 way process that endures over time - generally takes a few months for humans
  • Each individual sees the other as essential for their emotional security
  • Leads to behaviours of proximity seeking and clinging
  • Serves the function of protecting an infant
• reciprocity

  • Turn taking and responding - communication
  • Eliciting a response from the other but doesn’t always mean responding with the same behaviours
• Interactional synchrony

  • Infant and caregiver mirror each other
  • They imitate the same behaviours in a synchronised fashion (e.g smiling at each other)
• sensitive responsiveness

  • adult attends sensitively to infants communications
• jaffe

  • Reciprocity
  • Demonstrated that infants coordinated their actions with caregivers in a conversation
  • From birth babies move in a rhythm when interacting with an adult almost as if they were taking turns
• brazeltan

  • Reciprocity
  • The regularity of the infant allows the caregiver to anticipate future behaviour
• Isabella

  • Interactional synchrony
  • Observed 30 mothers and infants together and assessed the degree of synchrony
  • Researchers also assessed the quality of mother-infant Attachment and found high levels of synchrony associated with better quality attachments
• Strength

  • Mother-infant interactions are usually filmed from multiple angles - details can be recorder
  • Babies don’t know they are being observed - increases internal validity
• weaknesses

  • infants mouths are constantly in motion, the expressions tested occur frequently making it difficult to distinguish between imitated and general behaviour - can’t be sure if it’s meaningful or not
  • Koepke - failed to replicate meltzoff and Moore study findings
  • Feldman - says that synchrony and reciprocity simply describe behaviours that occur at the same time, it can’t determine If these are important for a babies development or not