Caregiver-infant interactions

• What is Attachment?


  A deep and enduring emotional bond that connects one person to another across the time and space.
• How do babies communicate?

  • Crying = want attention
  • Eye contact
  • Lips moving = hungry
  • Laughing/smiling
  • Grasping/grabbing/reaching

  The more interactions between caregivers and infants, the stronger the attachment
• What are the 2 types of caregiver-infant interactions?

  • Reciprocity
  • Interactional synchrony
• What is Reciprocity?


  2-way interaction between infants and caregivers, where actions are reciprocated by taking turns.

  • Babies will have alert phases (ready for interaction) - more common at 3 months.
  • 2/3 of the time, mothers will respond to alert phases
• More about reciprocity:

  • Tronick’s still face experiment (1972) found babies to be very distressed when they didn’t get any attention from their mothers
  • Brezelton et al (2007) describe the interaction as a dance (respond to each other’s movements)
  • Feldman (2007) found reciprocity increases from 3 months old as they pay increasing attention to each other’s verbal/facial communication (sensitive responsiveness will lay the strong foundations for attachment to develop
• What is Interactional synchrony?

  Caregiver and infant reflect each other's actions and emotions at a similar time.

  • Meltzoff and Moore's interactional synchrony experiment (1977) found the babies copied their caregiver when there was no barrier (the dummy). They concluded the interactional synchrony was innate.
  • Isabella et al (1989) found that the mothers and infants that had higher levels of interactional synchrony had a higher quality of attachment.
• What is a strength if caregiver-infant interactions?

  Research support

  • Meltzoff and Moore (1977) - interactional synchrony was innate
  • Isabelle et al (1989) - connection found between interactional synchrony and high-quality attachment
• What is a counter argument of 'research method' to that if caregiver-infant interactions?

  Feldman (2012) points out synchrony and reciprocity only describes behaviours that happen at the same time – doesn't tell us the purpose
• What is a strength if caregiver-infant interactions?

  Controlled observation = easily replicable as EV’s are less common
• What is a limitation if caregiver-infant interactions?

  Controlled observation = not generalisable

  • Not readily available to be applied to everyday life and potentially more demand characteristics (participants aren’t in their natural environment)
• What is a limitation if caregiver-infant interactions?

  Testability issues with investigating children

  • Infants move a lot, which causes issues working out what behaviour is intentional
• What is a limitation if caregiver-infant interactions?





  Mothers may cause unreliable results

  • Mays may lie about the presence of separation anxiety due to embarrassment, meaning the results may not be 100% valid