Caregiver - infant interaction

Reciprocity – key studies

Attachment – strong enduring, emotional and reciprocal bond between two people usually
an infant and caregiver.

Reciprocity – infant and mother respond to each other’s signal, and each elicit a response
from the other

Brazelton (1975)
- Reciprocity as a ‘dance’ between infant and caregiver, respond to each other’s
moves
- Babies and caregiver take active roles and can initiate interactions
- Baby is not passive
- Videotapes of 12 mothers and babies up to 5 months

Feldman (2007)
- Reciprocity increases in frequency as the infant and as caregiver pay increasing
attention to each other’s verbal and facial communication
- Showing attention allows strong attachment to develop

Tronich – still face experiment

- Baby and mother sit facing each other as mother plays with baby
- Mother turns away and proceeds to show a still face for 2 minutes
- In result the baby tries to seek the mother’s attention by crying or screaming or
attempts to self-soothe
- Filmed in a lab

Interactional synchrony – key studies

Interactional synchrony – mother and infant reflect both the actions and emotions of the
other in a co – ordinated way

Meltzoff and Moore (1977)

- Studied interactional synchrony in infants as young as 3 weeks
- Adults displayed 3 different facial expressions towards the baby
- Babies’ responses were filmed and independently observed
- Association was found between the expression the adult displayed and the babies’
expressions and gestures
Meltzoff (2005)
- “Like me” hypothesis
- Infants imitate and see behaviour
- Infants associate their own actions with their own mental states
- Infants project their internal experiences to others performing similar acts
- Start of the ‘theory of mind’.

Isabella et al (1989)
- Observed 30 mothers and babies
- Assessed degree of synchrony
- Assessed quality of mothers-baby attachment
- High levels of synchrony associated with better quality attachment

EVALUATION

Filmed observations
- Filmed observations in a lab so thing that may distract a baby may be controlled.
- Observations can be recorded and analysed later (inter- rater reliability)
- Babies do not know they are being observed, so their behaviour won’t change
(covert observation)
- Data collected would have good reliability and validity

Difficulty observing babies.

- Hard to accurately interpret a baby’s behaviour.
- Babies lack co-ordination so movements being observed are small hand movements
or changing in expression  hard to know whether baby is passing wind or smiling.
- Unable to know what's taking place from a baby’s perspective  we don’t know
whether a movement is hand twitch is random or triggered by something caregiver
has done.
- We cannot be certain that behaviours seen in caregiver interaction have a special
meaning.

Developmental importance
- Observing babies doesn’t tell us about developmental importance.
 Feldman  synchrony and reciprocity gives names to patterns of observable
caregivers and baby behaviours.
- They aren’t particularly useful in understanding child development as it doesn’t tell
the purpose of these behaviours.
- Meaning we can't be certain from observational research alone that reciprocity and
synchrony are important for a child’s development.
 Isabelle et al found that achievement of interactional synchrony predicted the
development of a good quality attachment. Meaning caregiver interactions are probably
important in development.