caregiver-infant interactins

• what is a caregiver-infant interaction

  how attatchment is thought to be formed
• what are the two main aspects to caregive-infant interactions

  reciprocity

  interactional synchrony
• what is reciprocity

  the caregiver-infant interaction is a two way/mutual process so each party responds to the others signals to sustain interaction

  
  

  the behaviour of each partly elicits a responce from the other
• what is interactional synchrony

  When two people interact, they mirror each other, including facial expressions and movements
• why is interactional synchrony important


  it is important for developing a bond of attatchment as it is leads to having a better quality of caregiver-infant attachment
• who investigated interactional synchrony

  Meltzoff and Moore
• what did meltzoff and moore do

  they carried out observational experiments to investigate the beginings of intercational synchrony in infacts as young as 2 weeks

  
  

  1) an adult displayed a distinctive facial gesture eg sticking toungue out

  2) infants responces were observed
• results/conclusions of meltzoff and moore


  their results indicated that infants could immitate the facial gestures

  they argue that this synchrony is important for the development of attatchment and leads to a better quality of attatchment
• evaluation of meltzoff and moore (negative)

  was it real or was it pseudo imitation?

  - m+m proposed that the imitation was intentional however Jean piaget believed that true imitation only developed towards the end of the first year

  -piaget suggested that any responce is because doing a certain behaviour was rewarded as a result of operant conditioning eg: baby mimics mother sticking out toungue because as a reward the caregiver smiles

  - so in piagets view the infant is just doing pseudo-imitation and had not consciously translated what they saw into matching movement

  
  

  individual differences

  - due to how people are naturally different and different ways of rearing a child, children react differently idfk
• evaluation of meltzoff and moore (positive)

  supported by the research of murray and trevarthan

  - they carried out a variation of the still face paradigm which was first demonstrated by tronick

  
  

  -the 2 month old infants first interacted with their mother in real time on a screen

  -next, the 2 month old infants interacted with their mother on a recording so that her face was now not responding to the infants facial expressions/noises etc

  
  

  the result was of acute distress after not being able to get their mothers attention/responce

  
  

  conclusion:

  this shows that the infant is actively eliciting a responce and wanting a responce from the mother in turn rather than just displaying a responce to be rewarded

  
  

  this shows that the infant is an active and intentional partner of the caregiver-infant interaction
• evaluation of investigating caregiver-infant interactions overall (negative)

  infants mouths are in fairly constant motion

  - the expressions they make occur quite frequently so it makes it hard to distinquish between genuine activity and specific behaviours

  
  

  failure to replicate

  multiple people have failed to replicate the findings of meltzoff and moore

  - they found that the babies were equally likely to stick out their tongue when a researcher did compared to the mother

  - this suggests that infant imitation and the concepts such as reciporcity and interactional synchrony may need to be changed or abandoned
• who failed to replicate the findings of meltzoff and moore (2 people)

  oostenbroek et al

  koepke et al
• how did meltzoff and moore overcome the problem of infants mouths being in constant motion

  -they filmed the infants

  -asked an independant observer to judge the infants behaviour

  -the person judging had no idea what behaviour was being imitated

  
  

  this increases the internal validity of the data