Caregiver Infant Interaction - Expanded

• What is attachment?

  Infants and Caregivers develop deep and lasting emotional bonds.

  Bot members of this emotional relationship seek closeness and feel more secure when close to their attachment figure.

  • Strength of the bonds can be seen in complex two way caregiver interactions such as reciprocity and interactional synchrony.
• What is Reciprocity?

  Mutual turn-taking form of interaction.

  • Both caregiver and infant contribute to the interaction by responding to the other's signals and cues.
• What is Interactional Synchrony?

  Simultaneous Interaction between infant and caregiver who appear to be acting rhythmically with matching behaviour and emotional states.
• What is Imitation?

  The infant directly copying the caregiver's expression.
• What is sensitive responsiveness?

  The adult caregiver correctly interprets the meaning of the infant's communication is motivated to respond appropriately.
• Evaluation - Research Support

  Meltzoff and Moore

  An experimenter displayed facial gestures such as sticking a tongue out and opening their mouth in shock to 12-21 day old infants.

  • Recordings of the infant's responses were rated by people blind to the experiment.

  It was found that infant responses matched the experimenter's facial expressions.

  • The results suggest the ability to observe and reciprocate through imitation from early age.
• Evaluation - Research Support

  • Condon and Sander

  They videotaped interactions between adults and neonates.

  • Focusing in the movements of the neonates in response to adult speech.

  Using a detailed frame-by-frame analysis of video recordings, they found evidence of INTERACTIONAL SYNCHRONY.

  • Coordination between neonates movements and rhythmic patterns of behaviour of adult speech.

  These results suggest that even from birth human have innate ability for social interaction.
• Evaluation - STRENGTH

  Many multiple observers.

  Blind to true aim of the experiment to provide inter-rater reliability.

  Even use complex camera systems to document and slow down sequences of interactions between the caregiver and Infant.

  High Internal Validity.
• EVALUATION - WEAKNESS

  Infant cannot really share their thoughts so findings depend on inferences.

  Inferences are considered unscientific.

  This is because they are assumptions about the infants internal mental states based on the observed behaviour.
• EVALUATION - WEAKNESS

  Social Sensitivity

  Parents may change their way of connecting with their infants because of findings