Caregiver-infant interactions

• Caregiver- infant interactions


  psychologists believe that from birth babies have meaningful social interactions with their carers.

  good quality early interactions are associated with successful development of attachments between babies and caregivers
• Reciprocity


  Description of how two people interact

  caregiver interaction is reciprocal in that both caregiver and baby respond to each others signals and elicit responses from each other
• reciprocity example

  caregiver responds to baby smiling by saying something which elicits a response fro the baby

  reciprocal interactions is sometimes called turn taking
• Explanations of reciprocity

  1. Alert Phases
  2. Active involvement
• Alert phases

  • babies have alert phases in which they signal (eg making eye contact) that they are ready for interaction
  • research show that mothers usually responds to their babies alert phases around 2/3 of the time, although this varies according to the skill of the mother and external factors eg. stress
  • from around 3 months these interactions tend to become increasingly frequent and involves involves both mother and baby paying close attention to each others verbal signals and facial expressions
• Active Involvement

  • Traditional views of childhood have portrayed babies in a passive role - receiving care from an adult, however researchers believe both babies and caregivers have an active role
  • both can initiate interactions and take turns in doing so
  • A researcher describe this as a ‘dance’ as each reason responds to the other person's moves
• Interactional Synchrony

  Caregiver and baby see the actions and emotions of the other person an does it in a co-ordinated (synchronised) way
• Explanations of interactional synchrony

  1. Synchrony begin
  2. Importance for attachment
• Synchrony begins

  • Moore et al observed the beginnings of interactional synchrony in 2 weeks old babies. an adult displayed 1 of 3 facial expressions or 1 of 3 distinctive gestures. The babies response was filmed and labelled by independent observers.
  • the babies expression and gestures were more likely to mirror those of the adults more than chance would predict —> there was a significant association
• Importance for attachment

  • it is believed that interactional synchrony is important for caregiver-infant attachment
  • Isabella et al observed 30 mothers and babies together and assessed the degree of synchrony. Found that high levels of synchrony were associated with better quality mother- baby attachment ( eg. The emotional intensity of the relationship)