lesson 1- caregiver-infant interactions

Question 1

developmental psychology

Answer 1

branch of psychology concerned with the progressive behavioural changes that occur in individuals across their lifespans

Question 2

attachment

Answer 2

an emotional bond between two people, a two way process that endures over time

Question 3

caregiver-infant interactions

Answer 3

Reciprocity- turn-taking, two-way mutual process, where each party responds to the other’s signals to sustain interaction, behaviour of each party elicits a response from the other, studies have demonstrated that infants coordinate their actions with their caregiver’s actions in a kind of conversation, regularity of infants signals allows a caregiver to anticipate the infants behaviour and response appropriately, sensitivity to infant behaviour lays foundation for later attachment between caregiver and infant
Interactional Synchrony- when adults and babies respond in time to sustain communication, caregiver and infant interact in such a way that their actions and emotions mirror each other, research has found that infants as young 2/3 weeks imitated specific facial and hand gestures that they saw adults do, an adult model displayed one of three facial expressions or hand movements, a dummy was placed in baby’s mouth during display to prevent any response, following display dummy was removed and infants expression was filmed, found there was an association between infants behaviour and adult model

Question 4

evaluation (2 strengths 2 weakness)

Answer 4

-Murray and Trevarthen (1985) got mothers to interact with their babies over a video monitor, next part babies were played a tape of their mother so she was not responding to them, babies tried to attract their mothers attention but when this failed they gave up responding, shows babies want their mothers to reciprocate
-Abravanal and DeYong (1991) observed infant behaviour when interacting with a puppet that looked like a human with mouth opening and closing, infants made little response to this, shows they are not just imitating what they see, interactional synchrony is a specific social response
-babies cannot use language to communicate so psychologists are relying on their inferences cannot be sure what infants are actually trying to communicate with caregivers
-expressions tested are ones that infants frequently make (tongue sticking out, yawning, smiling) so they may not have been deliberately imitating what they saw

Question 5

difficulties investigating caregiver-infant interactions

Answer 5

1. studies have found that babies attachment behaviour are much stranger in lab settings than they are in their home environment, therefore studies should take place in a natural setting to increase validity
2. most studies are observational so there may be bias in the observers interpretation of what they see (observer bias), can be countered by using more that one observer (inter-rater reliability)
3. practical issues, infants often asleep or feeding when psychologists want to observe them, researchers need to use fewer but shorter observation periods because of babies limited waking periods
4. extra care needs to be taken in relation to ethics so as to not affect the child or parent in any way eg. protection from harm, confidentiality