Caregiver-Infant Interactions

• caregiver-infant interaction

  • a caregiver is someone who provides care for a child
  • infant - the first year of a child's life
  • the communication between a caregiver and infant, they are important for the child's social development and forms the basis of the attachment between the twp
  • the more responsive or sensitive they are to each other's signals, the deeper the bond
  • important for the development of future relationships, stress responses, empathy, moral and language development
• reciprocity

  • two-way mutual process (turn-taking)
  • each person responds to the other and the behaviour of each part elicits a response from the other
  • important precursor to later communications as infant's signals are regular, this enables the caregiver to anticipate the infant's behaviour and respond appropriately
• Feldman and Eidelman (2007)

  reciprocity can be seen in interactions from 3 months old
• Finegood et al (2016)

  • mothers typically pick up and respond to this alertness around 2/3 of the time
  • however, external factors also play a part in how often mothers pick up their babies
  • these include the stress and skill of being a mother and parent
• Brazelton (1979)

  suggested that the basic rhythm of reciprocity is an important precursor to later communications and the regularity of an infant's signal allows a caregiver to anticipate the infant's behaviour and responds appropriately
• interactional synchrony

  • a type of interaction
  • caregiver and infant reflect the actions and emotions of the other in a coordinated way
  • in time with one another, they mirror each other in terms of their facial and body movements
  • this is different reciprocity as the response is imitation in IS
• Meltzoff and Moore (1977)

  • observed the beginnings of interactional synchrony in infants as young as 2 weeks old
  • adults were asked to display 1 of 3 different facial expressions while the infant watches and their reaction was filmed
  • after presentation, judges rate the behaviour of 2-3 week old babies for likeness of the target behaviour
  • there was a significant correlation between the adult's behaviour and infant's response
• evaluation of Meltzoff and Moore

  • low reliability/internal validity of testing babies as we can't tell if they were actually engaging in IS
  • methodological problems with using observational methods - observer bias an more than one observer should be used to examine the inter-observer reliability of the observations
  • can't be repeated - lack of conclusive evidence support undermines the reliability of the theory
  • recent research has found that securely attached infants engage in interactional synchrony and this indicated there is some variation between infants
  • Isabella et al (1989) - more securely attached the infant, the greater the level of interaction synchrony, suggesting not all children engage in IS