Discuss care-giver infant interactions

• What is reciprocity?

  • how two people interact
  • how mother and baby respond to each other by turn taking
• Fieldman and Eidelman


  mothers respond to infant alertness around 2/3 of the time
• Brazelton


  described reciprocity as a dance as it is how mother and baby respond to each other moves
• what is interactional synchrony


  mother and infant reflect the actions and emotions and do this in a coordinated way
• Meltzoff and Moore


  • filmed infants and mothers expressions.
  • found an association between the emotion the baby made and the action the mother made
• Isabella


  found high levels of interactional synchrony were associated with better mother infant attachment
• A03

  Limitation - hard to observe baby behaviour

  • due to the infants being young in multiple studies
  • it is hard to actually tell if what they are doing is what they intended
  • because infants can't talk and express their emotions
• A03

  Strength - controlled

  • A strength is filmed observations
  • they are usually filmed in labs so usual distractions can be controlled
  • this means there is less extraneous variables so a higher validity.
  • More than one observer can view it = interrater reliability.
• A03

  Limitation - Socially sensitive research


  • it could be argued that when the mother returns to work to soon after having a baby
  • it may risk damaging their babies development so mothers may feel bad for returning to work
  • even if they have to, to have a sustainable income