Caregiver-Infant Interactions Flashcards
(6 cards)
What is infancy?
- the period of a child’s life before speech begins.
- One of the key interactions between caregivers and infants is their nonverbal communication
- Such interactions may form the basis of attachment between an infant and caregiver.
-The more sensitive each is to the other’s signals, the deeper the relationship.
What is reciprocity?
The term reciprocity refers to a two-way interaction between the caregiver and the child, referred to
as turn-taking and mirroring. Parents and babies develop a finely tuned, shared sense of timing,
which develops into a flow of mutual behaviours. e.g. a baby smiling back when a caregiver smiles at them.
What is interactional syncrony?
- Interactional synchrony is a simultaneous co-ordinated sequence of movements, communication, emotions.
-It refers to how a parent’s speech and infant’s behaviour become finely synchronised so that they are in direct response to one another. - It was defined by Feldman (2007) as a “temporal coordination of micro-level social behaviour” and as “symbolic exchanges between parent and
child”.
-Feldman suggests that interactional synchrony serves a critical role in developmental outcomes in terms of self-regulation, symbol use, and the capacity for empathy.
A03 - Isabella and Belsky - Interactional Synchrony
-Isabella and Belsky (1991) hypothesised that caregiver-baby pairs that developed secure attachment relationships would display more synchronous behaviour than babies with insecure relationships.
-Babies were observed at 3 and 9 months and the secure group interacted in a well-timed, reciprocal, and mutually rewarding manner.
-In contrast, caregiver-baby pairs classed as insecure were
characterized by interactions that were minimally involved, unresponsive and intrusive.
-Avoidant pairs displayed maternal intrusiveness and overstimulation
-while resistant pairs were poorly coordinated, under-involved and inconsistent.
-Isabella and Belsky concluded that different interactional behaviours predicted attachment quality.
A03 - Belsky - Reciprocity
- Some research suggests that quality of reciprocity in infancy is associated with later attachment type.
- Belsky et al found that infants securely attached at 12 months had been involved in a middle amount of reciprocity.
-Those with a low level of reciprocity tended to have insecure
resistant attachment.
-Those who had the highest levels of reciprocity had insecure avoidant attachment.
- Belsky argues that a middle level of reciprocity may indicate a caregiver who is sensitive to the infant but does not press the infant to interact when they need to take a break from stimulation.
- This suggests the importance of understanding reciprocity and may provide a basis to support effective parenting.
- However, the correlation between parental behaviours and
later infant attachment types does not necessarily indicate a causal relationship.
A03 - Reciprocity - Meltzoff and Moore
-Meltzoff and Moore (1997) studied 18 babies in their first month of life.
- They found that babies aged 12 to 27 days old could imitate both facial and manual gestures.
- By around the age of four weeks, babies begin to communicate by smiling.
-They argued that the ability to imitate serves as an
important building block for later social and cognitive development.
-To record observations an independent “blind” observer watched videotapes of the infant’s behaviour in real time and slow motion.
-Each observer was asked to note all instances of infant tongue protrusions and head movements using behavioural categories.
-Each observer scored the tapes twice so that both intra- observer and inter-observer reliability could be calculated.
-All scores were greater than .92. supporting the notion of the existence of reciprocity.
- However, it is difficult to reliably record
infant behaviour.
- Infants’ mouths are in fairly constant motion and the expressions that are tested
occur frequently.
-This makes it difficult to distinguish between general activity and specific imitated behaviours. We must be cautious therefore when directly applying these findings as evidence for reciprocity.
