Flashcards
Attachments: Introduction to Attachment
Cards in this deck (8)
- 1AttachmentIt begins with the meaningful social interactions between infants and their caregivers. It is the responsiveness of the caregiver to the infant's signals that has strong effects. These interactions have crucial functions for the child's social development.
- 2What is Reciprocity? A description of how 2 people interact. Mother-infant interaction is reciprocal in that both infant and caregiver respond to each other's signals and each elicit a response from the other.From birth, both spend a lot of time in intense and pleasurable interaction. Babies have periodic alert phrases and signal that they are ready for interaction. Mothers pick up on this and respond to infant alertness 2/3 of the time. From around 3 months this interaction tends to be more frequent and involves close attention to each other's verbal signals and facial expressions. A key element of this interaction is reciprocity Babies take both the active and passive roles. Brazelton said the interaction is a dance as it is just like a couple's dance where each partner responds to each other's moves.
- 3What is Interactional Synchrony? Defined as the temporal coordination of micro level social behaviour. Mother and infant reflect both the actions and emotions of the other and do this in a synchronised way. Their actions mirror each other.Meltzoff and Moore observed beginnings of interactional synchrony in infants from two weeks old. Adult displayed 1 of 3 facial expressions/gestures. The child's reponse was filmed and identified by independent observers. Association was found between the adults actions and the babies' actions.
Isabella observed 30 mothers and infants together and assessed the degree of synchrony and quality of their attachment. Found that high levels of synchrony were associated with better attachments like the emotional intensity of the relationship. - 4Evaluation for Caregiver-Infant InteractionsStrength: Observations of this are well controlled procedures. Ensures that fine details of behaviour can be recorded and later analysed. Furthermore babies don't know or care they are being watched so their behaviour is natural. Has good validity.
Weakness: Only observing hand movements and changes in expressions. Hard to be certain about what is taking place in the baby's perspective: is the imitation of adult's actions conscious or deliberate. Therefore don't know if their interactions has a special meaning.
Weakness: Observations don't tell the purpose of reciprocity and synchrony. - 5Parent infant AttachmentSchaffer and Emerson found that babies can attached to their mothers first aound 7 months and then in a few weeks form secondary attachments to other family members like the father. 75% of infants formed an attachment with the father within 18 months. This was determined by the babies protesting when the father walked away: sign of attachment.
- 6Role of the FatherGrossman did a longitudinal study (same children were followed up and observed regularly) looking at both parents' behaviour and its relationship to the quality of children' attachments into their teens. In adolescence, mother's attachment was more important. But the quality of father's play with infants was related to the quality of adolescent attachments. This means that fathers have role that is to do with play and stimulation and less to do with nurturing.
- 7Fathers As Primary CarersField filmed 4 month old babies in face to face interaction with primary caregivers mother and father and secondary caregiver fathers. Primary caregiver fathers like mothers spend more time smiling imitating and holding infants than the secondary caregiver father. This shows that fathers can be the more nurturing attachment as the key to the attachment relationship is the level of responsiveness not the parent's gender.
- 8Evaluation on Attachment FiguresWeakness: Research into role of fathers is confusing as different researchers are interested in different research questions: one part are interested in fathers being secondary whilst another part are interested in fathers being primary. Both parts have a different role. This means psychologists can't answer the question of what is the role of the father.
Weakness: Grossman concluded that father's attachments as a secondary figure is important. However Mccallum and Golomobok found that children growing up in a single sex or same sex household don't develop any differently form those in heterosexual families. This means that the father role as a secondary figure isn't important.
Weakness: The fact that fathers don't tend to becone the primary figure could be due to traditional gender roles: women are expect to be more caring and nurturing than men so fathers feel they don't have to act like that. Or it could be because female hormones create higher levels of nurturing so they are biologically predisposed to be the primary attachment figure.
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- A level Attachments Flashcards on Attachments: Introduction to Attachment, created by Christolin Calistas on 03/04/2021.
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- Christolin Calistas · Apr 2021
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- Apr 3, 2021
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