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Caregiver infant interactions

• Reciprocity
• From birth babies and their mothers spend a lot of time in intense and pleasurable interaction. Babies have periodic alert phases and signal that they are ready for interaction. Mothers typically pick up on and respond to infant alertness around 2/3 of the time.
• From around 3 months this interaction tends to be increasingly frequent and involves close attention to each others verbal signals and facial expressions. A key element of this interaction is reciprocity. An interaction is reciprocal when each person responds to the other and elicits a response from them.
• Traditional views of Childhood have seen the baby in a passive role, receiving care from an adult. However, it seems that the baby takes an active role. Both Mother and Child can initiate interactions as they appear to take turns in doing so. Brazelton describe this interaction as a dance because it is just like a couples dance where each partner responds to each other's moves.
• Interactional synchrony
• Two people are said to be synchronised when they carry out the same action simultaneously. Interactional synchrony can be defined as the temporal coordination of micro-level social behaviour. It takes place when mother and infant interact in such a way that their actions and emotions mirror the other
• Meltzoff and moore observed the beginnings of interactional synchrony in infants as young as 2 weeks old. An adult displayed one of 3 facial expressions or 1 of 3 distinctive gestures. The child's response was filmed and identified by independent observers. An association was found between the expression or gesture made by the adult and the actions of the baby's
• It is believed that interactional synchrony is important for the development of mother- infant attachment. Isabella observed 30 mothers and Infants together and assessed the degree of synchrony. The researchers also assess the quality of mother- infant attachment. They found that high levels of synchrony were associated with better quality mother- infant attachment.

Attachment figures

• Parent- infant attachment
• Traditionally we have thought interned of mother- infant attachment. Schaffer and Emerson found that the majority of babies did become attached to their mother first and within a few weeks or months formed secondary attachments to other family members including the father. In 75% of the infants studied and attachment was formed with the father by age 18 months. This was determined by the fact that the infant protested when their fathers walked away - a sign of attachment.
• The role of the Father
• Grossman carried out a longitudinal study looking at both parents behaviour and it's relationship to the quality of children's attachments into the teens. Quality of infant attachment with mothers but not fathers was related to children's attachments in adolescence suggesting that father attachment was less important. However, the quality of Father's play with infants was related to the quality of adolescent attachments. This suggests that Father's have a different role in attachment - one that is more to do with play and stimulation, less to do with nurturing.
• Fathers as primary carers
• There is some evidence to suggest that when father's do take on the role of being the main caregiver they adopt behaviour more typical of mothers. Tiffany field filmed a 4 month old baby in face to face interaction with primary caregiver mothers, secondary caregiver fathers and Primary caregiver fathers. Primary caregiver fathers, spent more time smiling imitating and holding infants than the secondary caregiver fathers. This behaviour appears to be more important in building an attachment with infant so it seems that Father's can be more nurturing attachment figures. The key to the attachment relationship is the level of responsiveness and not the gender of the parent or time spent.

Evaluation

• It is hard to know what is happening when observing infants
• Many studies involving observation of interactions between mother and infants have shown the same patterns of interaction. However, does being observed is merely hand movements or changes in the expressions. It is extremely difficult to be certain, based on these observations, taking place from the infants perspective. Is, for example, the infants imitation of adults signals conscious and deliberate? This means that we cannot really know for certain that behaviour seen in mother-infant interaction have a special meaning.
• Controlled observations capture fine detail
• Observations of mother- infant interactions are generally well controlled procedures, mother and infant being filmed, multiple angles. This ensures that very fine details of behaviour can be recorded and later analysed. Furthermore babies don't know or care that they are being observed so their behaviour does not change in response to controlled observation - is generally a problem for observational research. This is a strength of this line of research because it means it has good validity.
• Observations don't tell us the purpose of synchrony and reciprocity
• Feldman point out that synchrony simply describe behaviours that occur at the same time. These are robust phenomena in the sense that they can be reliably observed, but this may not be particularly useful as it does not tell us their purpose. However, evidence that reciprocal interaction and synchrony are helpful in the development of mother - infant attachment, as well I'm also as helpful in stress responses, empathy, language and moral development.

Evalution cont.