Attachment Flashcards
What is an attachment?
An enduring two-way emotional tie to a specific other person, normally a parent and child
How long do attachments normally take?
Attachments normally take a few months to develop
What features do those with an attachment normally display?
Proximity
Separation distress
Secure base behaviour
(stranger anxiety)
What is proximity?
They try to stay physically close to one another
What is separation distress?
They are distressed when they leave one another
What is secure base behaviour?
Even when independent, they make regular contact, e.g. infants go off and play but return to the mother while playing
What is reciprocity?
Responding to the actions of another with an action
(turn taking)
Interaction flows back and forth between caregiver and infant
Why is reciprocity important?
It helps to reinforce attachment bond and is important for later development of communications skills
What are ‘alert phases’?
Where babies are ready for interaction
More frequent after 3 months
Why are ‘alert phases’ important?
Mothers generally pick up on this and respond to it 2/3 of the time; the sensitivity level can predetermine how strong an attachment is formed
What is interactional synchrony?
When two people interact they tend to mirror what the other is doing - facial and body movements/expressions
How can interactional synchrony be defined?
‘the temporal coordination of micro level social behaviour’
What was the procedure of Meltzoff and Moore’s study into interactional synchrony (I.S.)?
Observed the beginnings of I.S. in infants as young as 2 weeks. Adult displayed 1 of 3 facial expressions or hand gestures.
Baby had in a dummy to stop immediate gesture response, it was then taken out and response was filmed
What did Melzoff and Moore’s original study find?
An association between the adult’s facial expression and the baby’s response
What did Meltzoff and Moore’s later study find?
The same synchrony was found in children only 3 days old, so is therefore thought to be innate rather than learnt
What did Isabella et al discover in relation to interactional synchrony?
That high synchrony was associated with better attachment quality
What did Condon and Sander do?
Analysed frame by frame video recordings of infants’ movements, and found that infants coordinated their actions in sequence with adults’ speech
What are the strengths of interactional synchrony?
controlled observations mean we see fine details
research support
real world application
behaviour is intentional and human specific
What are the weaknesses of interactional synchrony?
We don’t know the purpose of it
Interactional synchrony is not universal
Why is having controlled observations a strength of interactional synchrony?
Observations are generally filmed from multiple angles, ensuring that fine details of behaviour are seen.
And because babies are unaware of being observes they act normally- increases validity
What is a limitation of some research into interactional synchrony?
Difficulties in testing babies’ behaviours as their mouths are in fairly constant motion and the motions being tested occur frequently
-Difficult to identify what is a response to the experiment and what is normal behaviour
What is an example of real world application for interactional synchrony?
Research by Isabella et al showed that achieving interactional synchrony is important in developing attachment
Suggests mothers should not return to work too soon; has implications for childcare practices and maternity leave in the UK
How do we know that behaviour is intentional and human specific in interactional synchrony?
Abravenal and Deyong: observed infant behaviour to two objects: one simulated a tongue moving and the other a mouth opening and closing
5 and 12 week babies made little response to either
-infants do not just imitate everything, their responses are a specific social response to other humans
Why is the purpose of interactional synchrony a weakness?
The ideas of synchrony and reciprocity simply describe the behaviours seen in research, there is no knowledge of purpose.
There are suggestions that it helps develop attachments or relieve stress but simple observations do not show if this is the case.