Caregiver And Infant Interactions Flashcards
The two social interactions that form the basis of caregiver-infant attachments:
- Interactional Synchrony
- Reciprocity
What is interactional synchrony?
When the child and parent are ‘synchronised’ as they engage in the same actions at the same time.
Usually occurs within the first weeks of life.
It is important for the development for mother-infant attachment.
+ Isabella et al
Who investigated interactional synchrony?
Isabella et al (1989) found that high levels of synchrony meant there was a better quality attachment between the mother and infant.
When does interactional synchrony emerge?
Usually occurs within the first weeks of life.
What is reciprocity?
It’s a two way process of communication between the infant and caregiver where the behaviour of each party elicits a response from the other in order to sustain the interaction.
Benefit of reciprocity to the baby:
Reciprocity helps the infant learn a basic rhythm of conversation. This basic rythm shows that reciprocity is an important precursor to later communications.
Benefit of reciprocity to the adult:
This regularity of an infant’s signals allows a caregiver to anticipate the baby’s behaviour and respond accordingly.
Benefit of reciprocity to both the baby and adult:
An effective back and forth interaction allows for the development of a healthy attachment.
A strength of our understanding of caregiver- infant interactions is that there is supporting evidence for the importance of reciprocity and interactional synchrony.
Murray and Trevarthen asked mothers to interact with their two-month-old infants through live video chat in real time. In the next part of the study, the infant saw a pre-recorded video of the mother interacting. Since it was a pre-recorded video, the mother could not respond to the infant’s facial and bodily expressions- this led to acute distress, as the infants tried to gain their mother’s interest but could not.
- strength as it shows that reciprocity and interactional synchrony is an important interaction because a lack of them leads to infants showing distress and possibly harming the development of infant-caregiver interactions. Therefore, our understanding of caregiver-infant interactions increases in validity.
A strength of caregiver-infant interactions is that there is supporting cross cultural evidence.
Gratier (2003) studied the timing of spontaneous vocal interactions of 30 mothers and their
2- to 5-month-old infants from India, France and the U.S. She found that mothers and infants from all those countries coordinate their spontaneous vocalisations with each other.
This shows that infants and carers from different cultures engage in interactional synchrony during social interactions. Therefore, since interactional synchrony seems to be a universal behaviour, it must be a vital part of the process of forming attachments between the mother and infant. Increases the validity of our understanding of infant-caregiver interactions.
A weakness of our understanding, of caregiver and infant interactions is that we are unaware of the exact purpose of interactional synchrony and reciprocity.
Fieldman (2012) points out that synchrony simply describes behaviour between parent and child which occurs at the same time. While these are obvious behaviours that can be easily observed, we cannot easily understand their purpose. This is a weakness because whilst we understand that it occurs within parental interactions, we do not know exactly the mechanisms of how it affects the quality of future attachments, giving us a very shallow understanding. Thus, our understanding of caregiver interactions may be considered incomplete, reducing in validity.
A further weakness of our understanding is that it is based on research that has problems testing infant behaviour.
It is difficult to perform valid and meaningful observations of infant behaviour in the research our understanding comes from. For example, Infant’s mouths are in constant motion and they constantly make and change their expressions (yawn, smile etc.)- makes it difficult to distinguish between general activity which a child engages in that is not related to an interaction, and special directed expressions as a part of an interaction. This problem can leave the data open to interpretation, which would call into question the accuracy of such observations. Therefore, since our theories and understanding of infant-caregiver interactions depends on such observations, our understanding may lack validity too.
