Caregiver-infant interactions

• What is attachment?


  • A two-way emotional bond between infant and care-giver in which both parties rely on each other for emotional development and growth
  • An engine of social, emotional, and cognitive development
• What are the 3 behaviours of attachment?

  • Proximity maintenance: the desire to be near the people we are attached to
  • Separation distress: showing signs of anxiety when an attachment figure leaves their presence
  • Secure base: attachment figure acts as a base of security from which the child can explore the surrounding environment but return to regularly
• What is reciprocity as a caregiver-infant interaction?

  • A two-way interaction between caregiver and infant where they take turns in responding to each other
  • Interaction is sustained as they continuously elicit responses from each other like a mother reacting to her baby's smile
• What are 'alert phases'?

  • When a baby signals that they are ready for interaction e.g. by making eye contact
  • Research shows mothers pick up on these around 2/3rds of the time
  • Become increasingly frequent at around 3 months - caregivers and infants will pay closer attention to each other's verbal and facial expressions
• What is active involvement?

  • Babies can take an active role by initiating interactions as they appear to take turns in doing so (reciprocity)
  • Opposes traditional view that babies passively receive care from adults
• What is interactional synchrony?

  • When an infant mirrors the micro-level social behaviours of their caregiver, like facial expressions or tone of voice
  • Caregiver and infant reflect the actions of the other in a co-ordinated, synchronised way
• When does interactional synchrony begin?

  • Meltzoff and Moore (1977) observed synchrony in infants as young as 2 weeks old
  • Had adults display facial/hand expressions to a baby with a dummy
  • When dummy was removed the baby's expression imitated that of the model showing imitation is important for forming attachments
• Why is interactional synchrony important for attachment?

  • Isabella et al. (1989) found that mother-infant pairs who were securely attached had more interactional synchrony in the first year of life
  • Shows high levels of synchrony is associated with better quality attachment suggesting it should be implemented by parents
• What is the difference between reciprocity and interactional synchrony?

  • Reciprocity is the exchange of caregiver-infant behaviours over time whereas interactional synchrony is the simultaneous co-ordination of behaviours between them
• What is one strength of research into caregiver-infant interactions?

  • High reliability and validity: interactions are usually laboratory filmed, meaning distractions can be controlled
  • Recordings that can be analysed later means it is unlikely researchers will miss any key behaviours, and allows for inter-rater reliability to be established
  • Babies are also unaware of being observed meaning their behaviour will not change in response to observation
• What is one limitation of research into caregiver-infant interactions?

  • Difficulty observing babies: infants lack co-ordination and most are immobile, meaning behaviours being observed are mostly small hand movements or expression changes
  • Difficult to determine what is taking place from the baby's perspective e.g. we cannot know whether their movements are random or triggered by a caregiver's behaviour
  • We cannot be certain that infant behaviour during interactions have any special meaning
• What is another limitation of research into caregiver-infant interactions?

  • Developmental importance: Feldman (2012) pointed out that ideas like synchrony simply give names to patterns of observable caregiver and baby behaviours
  • Robust phenomena in the sense that they can be reliably observed but they may not be particularly useful in understanding child development as we do not know the purpose of them
  • We cannot be certain that reciprocity and synchrony are important for development from observational research alone
• What is another limitation of research into caregiver-infant interactions?

  • Ethnocentric research: Le Vine et al (1994) reported that Kenyan mothers have little physical interactions with their infants yet they have a high proportion of secure attachments
  • Differs to the predictions of synchrony and reciprocity, suggesting that this research ignores how attachments may be formed in other cultures
  • Shows low generalisability and culture bias