Attachment: Caregiver-infant interactions

Question 1

What is attachment?

Answer 1

Reciprocal, long-lasting, emotional relationship between two people such as a caregiver and an infant in which they depend on each other for a sense of security.

Question 2

What is a caregiver?

Answer 2

Any person who is providing care for a child, such as a parent, grandparent, sibling, another family member, childminder and so on.

Question 3

What is infancy?

Answer 3

A period in a child’s life before speech begins, usually referring to the child’s first year of life.

Question 4

What are caregiver-infant interactions?

Answer 4

Non-verbal communication between a caregiver and an infant is vital as it forms the basis of attachment. The formation depends on how involved those in the attachment respond to each other. Two types of caregiver interactions are reciprocity and interactional synchrony.

Question 5

What is reciprocity?

Answer 5

Refers to the coordinated actions of the infant in response to their caregiver’s action. Basic communication rhythm is important in forming attachments. Although, responses are not necessarily similar to interactional synchrony. E.g. caregiver may smile at the infant, an infant may smile back.

Question 6

What is interactional synchrony?

Answer 6

Mirroring each other’s actions at the same time in terms of facial expressions and body movements as well as imitating emotions and behaviours. It reinforces that attachment bond. E.g. infant may move their body in time with the rhythm of the caregiver’s spoken language.

Question 7

What was the aim of the study carried out by Meltzoff & Moore?

Answer 7

Aims to investigate interactional synchrony.

Question 8

What was the procedure of the study?

Answer 8

Melzoff & Moore (1977) conducted the first systematic study into interactional synchrony. This was a controlled observation of an infant’s response to 4 different stimuli from an adult; three facial expressions and one hand gesture. Independent observers had to judge them in real-time, in slow motion, and frame by frame. They didn’t know what stimulus infants a scene. The dummy was removed from the infant’s mouth and the observer had to record all instances of mouth opening, tongue protrusion, termination of mouth opening, and termination of tongue protrusion. Tapes were recorded twice by each observer to calculate inter-observer reliability.

Question 9

What are the key findings of the study of caregiver-infant interactions?

Answer 9

• An association was found between infant behaviour and the adult model.
• Infants were mirroring and imitating the actions of adults, demonstrating interactional synchrony.
• They believe that imitation was intentional and deliberate.

Question 10

What are the conclusions of the study?

Answer 10

• Interactional synchrony is innate.
• The ability to imitate serves as an important building block for later social and cognitive development.

Question 11

How did Piaget criticise the Melzoff & Moore study?

Answer 11

He believed true imitation only develops towards the end of the first year. Anything before that was a kind of response training.

What the infant was doing was just pseudo-imitation. The infant hadn’t consciously translated what they saw. It supports M&M as the baby didn’t carry on making gestures. They didn’t need the reward as it was innate.

Question 12

A03: Caregiver-infant interactions

Answer 12

+ Supported evidence
+ Controlled observation
- Problems with infant behaviour
- Failure to replicate

Question 13

A03: Supported evidence

Answer 13

Another method used to test the intentionality of infant behaviour is to observe how they respond to inanimate objects. Abravanel and Deyoung (1991) observed infant behaviour when interacting with two objects, one stimulating tongue movements and the other mouth opening/closing. They found that infants of median age 5 to 12 weeks made little response to the objects. This suggests that infants do not just imitate anything they see – it is a specific social response to humans.

Question 14

A03: Controlled observation

Answer 14

A strength is that controlled observations often capture fine details as they are generally well-controlled procedures. For example, both the mother and the infant are filmed, often from multiple angles, this ensures that fine details of behaviour can be recorded and later analysed. Furthermore, babies are unaware that they are being observed so their behaviour does not change in response to controlled observations which is generally a problem for observational research. This is positive because it means that in general the research has high internal validity it is measuring what it is intending to measure.

Question 15

A03: Problem with infant behaviour

Answer 15

There is doubt about the findings on research such as Melzoff & Moore because of the difficulties in reliability testing infant behaviour. Infants mouths are fairly constant motion and the expressions that are tested occur frequently. This makes it difficult to distinguish between general activity and specific imitated behaviours. To overcome these problems Melzoff and Moore measured infant responses by filming infants and then asking an observer to judge the infants behaviour from the video. This research highlights the difficulties in testing infant behaviour, but also suggests one way of increasing the internal validity of the data.

Question 16

A03: Failure to replicate

Answer 16

Other studies have failed to replicate the findings of Melzoff & Moores study. Koepke et al failed to replicate Melzoff & Moores findings. Melzoff & Moore counterargued that the research by Koepke failed because it was less carefully controlled. Marian et al (1996) replicated the study by Murray and Trevarthen and found infants can’t distinguish live from videotaped interactions with their mothers, which suggests the infants are not responding to the adult. Therefore, earlier studies findings were not replicated in later studies, although differences in methodology may account for this.