Caregiver-infant interactions

• An attachment is a strong emotional bond that develops over time between infant and caregiver.
• Reciprocity

  Both the mother and the infant respond to each other's signals and can get a response back from the other.

  • appear to take turns e.g. mother smiles at baby and baby then smiles back at her

  Babies have periodic alert phases where they signal that they are ready for a spell of interaction. Researchers suggest that mothers pick up on these signals about 2/3rds of the time, though responses vary depending on the skill of the mother
• Interactional synchrony

  Mother and infant interact in a way that their actions and emotions will mirror the other

  "The temporal coordination of micro level social behaviour."

  They perform the same expressions at the same time. A high level of synchrony will be assosciated with better relationship. This is fundamental for development.
• Meltzoff and Moore

  • researched infants imitations of adult facial expressions
  • used a controlled observation and studied infants aged 2-3 weeks
  • presented babies with four stimuli which were three faces and a hand opening gesture
  • an adult displayed these to the infant and a dummy was placed in the infants mouth during the initial display to prevent a response
  • THEN the dummy was removed and the responses were filmed
  • observers watched videotapes in real time, slow motion or frame by frame and each observer scored the tapes twice
  • they found infants aged as young as 2-3 weeks imitated specific hand and facial expressions
• A03

  • Further support for the idea that infants will respond to adults facial gestures comes from another study by Meltzoff and Moore. Babies as young as three days old displayed interactional synchrony, thus suggesting that behaviour is innate.
• A03

  • The study has value as it explains how children begin to understand what others think and feel and is a key aspect in forming relationships. Furthermore the analysis was consistent with a very high correlation coefficient of 0.92.
  • It has also got useful practical applications for parents in developing good quality interactions with their children. For e.g. parent child interaction therapy has been developed to improve quality of interactions. This led to beneficial effects when used on a group of 20 low income mothers and their pre school children.
  • Filmed observations also increase internal validity and inter-rater reliability.
• A03

  • However, the interpretation of behaviour can be said to be problematic. The behaviour being observed is usually some small hand movements or subtle changes in expression.
  • Therefore it can be hard to determine what is taking place from the baby's perspective. For e.g. a hand twitch could be random rather than a response for what a caregiver has done.
  • Thus we cannot be certain that the behaviour seen in infant caregiver interactions has special meaning.
• A03

  There are individual differences in the amount of interactional synchrony infants and parents engaged in. Strongly attached infant-caregiver pairs will respond differently, i.e. show greater interactional synchrony.

  HOWEVER we cannot claim that interactional synchrony causes a secure attachment. Research is correlational and so a clear cause and effect direction cannot be identified.