caregiver-infant interactions

• Caregiver-infant interactions


  Meaningful social interactions between babies and their carers
• Caregiver-infant interactions


  • Important functions for the child's social development
  • Associated with the successful development of attachments between babies and their caregiver(s)
• Reciprocity


  An interaction where each person responds to the other and elicits a response from them
• Reciprocity


  • A caregiver responds to a baby's smile by saying something, which then elicits a response from the baby
• Turn-taking


  An essential part of any conversation, where people take turns responding to each other
• Alert phases


  Periods where babies signal that they are ready for interaction
• Mothers typically pick up on and respond to their baby's alertness around two-thirds of the time
• Interaction tends to become increasingly frequent and involve close attention to each other's verbal signals and facial expressions from around three months
• Active involvement


  Babies as well as caregivers take an active role in initiating and responding to interactions
• Interactional synchrony


  The temporal co-ordination of micro-level social behaviour, where caregiver and baby's actions and emotions mirror each other
• Interactional synchrony begins as early as two weeks old, with babies mirroring the facial expressions and gestures of adults more than chance would predict
• High levels of interactional synchrony


  Associated with better quality mother-baby attachment
• Filmed observations


  • Caregiver-infant interactions are usually filmed in a laboratory
  • Observations can be recorded and analysed later
  • More than one observer can record data and establish inter-rater reliability
  • Babies don't know they are being observed, so their behaviour does not change
• The data collected in such research should have good reliability and validity
• Difficulty observing babies


  • Babies lack coordination and much of their bodies are almost immobile
  • Movements being observed are just small hand movements or subtle changes in expression
  • It is difficult to be sure what a baby's behaviour means
• We cannot be certain that the behaviours seen in caregiver-infant interactions have a special meaning
• Developmental importance


  • Simply observing a behaviour does not tell us its developmental importance
  • Reciprocity and synchrony may not be particularly useful in understanding child development
• We cannot be certain from observational research alone that reciprocity and synchrony are important for a child's development
• Early interactions are important

  Achievement of interactional synchrony predicted the development of a good quality attachment
• On balance, caregiver-infant interaction is probably important in development
• strength

  • meltzoor and moore (1977):
  • 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 infants responses were rated by ppl blind to the experiment
  • it was found that infant responses matched the experimenters expressions
  • results suggest the ability to observe and reciprocate through imitation is present from a very early age
• strength

  • condon and sander (1974):
  • videotaped interactions between adults and neonates, focusing on the movements of the neonates in response to adult speech
  • using a detailed frame-by-frame analysis of the video recordings, they found evidence of interactional synchrony between the neonate's movements and the rhythmic patterns of the adult's speech
  • suggests even from birth, humans have an innate ability for social interaction
• limitation

  • infants cannot directly communicate their thoughts or emotions
  • therefore, findings in caregiver-infant interaction research depends on inferences, which are considered unscientific as they are assumptions about infants' internal mental states based on observed behaviour
  • inferences could be mistaken, e.g. researchers should not claim imitation behaviour is intentional
  • it may be imitation is an unconscious automatic reflex response
• limitation

  • social sensitivity is a concern when investigating childrearing techniques, including norms around the caregiver-infant interactions
  • some women may find their life choices criticised, such as mothers who decide to return to the workplace shortly after giving birth and cannot develop a high level of interactional synchrony with their infant