Caregiver-infant interactions

• Attachment - a strong, emotional, reciprocal bond between two people
• Charcteristics of attachment are:

  • Seeking proximity
  • Distress on separation
  • Pleasure when reunited
  • General orientation of behaviour
• Reciprocity - where the actions of one partner elicit a response from the other partner. The responses are not necessarily similiar
• Interactional synchrony - when two people interact they mirror what the other is doing in terms of their facial & body movements
• Meltzoff & Moore studied interactional synchrony is infants 3 days old, ruling out the possibility that imitation behaviours had been learnt so they must be innate.
• Infant interaction AO3:

  • ❌ Problems with testing infant behaviour - hard to distinguish between general activity & specific imitated behaviour ✅ Meltzoff & Moore used observers who didn't know what behaviour the adult was modelling. Inter-observer reliability was 0.92
  • ❌ Response training not imitation - infant is repeating a behaviour that was rewarded ( caregiver smiling )
  • ✅ Individual differences - strongly attached pairs showed greater interactional synchrony
  • ✅ Value of research - forms the basis for social development
• Infant interaction AO3:

  • ❌ Problems with testing infant behaviour
  • ❌ Response training not imitation
  • ✅ Individual differences
  • ✅ Value of research
• Caregiver infant interactions:

  • Meltzoff & Moore studied interactional synchrony
  • They recorded infants reactions to an adult modelling different expressions & hand gestures
  • They found that the infants imitated the adults movements
  • Meltzoff & Moore studied interactional synchrony in infants 3 days old, ruling out the possibility that imitation behaviours had been learnt so they must be innate.