AO1

• Define Attachment


  -a deep emotional and reciprocal bond between caregiver and infant

  -each seek proximity to each other and sees the other as essential for their emotional security
• What happens from around 3 months age

  -interactions tend to be frequent and close attention is paid to each other's verbal and facial expressions

  -a key element is reciprocity
• Define reciprocity


  -when a parent and child respond to each others signals and each elicits a response from the other (e.g caregiver smiling at baby and baby smiling back)
• What do babies have?

  -Alert periods in which they are more receptive to being interactive

  -This may look like tracking their caregiver around the room, making eye contact or verbal signals

  -mothers typically pick up on this alertness 2/3 of the time(Feldman &Eidelman 2007)
• What have traditional views of childhood seen

  -the infant as being passive

  -The interaction between the infant and caregiver is a two-way process where babies take an active involvement just as much as the caregiver

  -Brazelton et al. (1975) described the interaction between infants and caregivers as a 'dance' where each is responding to the other person's moves
• Define interactional synchrony

  -temporary coordination of infant and caregiver responses, actions and emotions mirror the other
• Who were the researchers and what did they conduct

  -Meltzoff & Moore (1977)

  -conducted a controlled observation using 2 week old infants
• What did they select

  -4 Different stimuli (3 facial expressions and 1 hand gesture)

  -and observed the behaviour of the infants in response
• What did they observers watch

  -video tapes of the infants behaviour and had no knowledge of what the infant had just seen

  -each observer was asked to note all instances of infant tongue protrusions and head movements using behavioural categories

  -each observer scored each video twice
• What did they find?

  -They found that interactional synchrony began as young as two weeks old when infants could mirror the facial expressions and hand gestures of an adult