Caregiver-infant interactions -A-Level Psychology

Attachment-Is an emotional bond between two people.It is a two-way process that developed over time. It leads to certain behaviours e.g  clinging and proximity seeking, and serves the function of protecting an infant.

Caregiver-Any person who is providing care for a child such as a parent.

Interactional synchrony- When two people interact they tend to mirror what the other is doing such as their facial and body movements, and imitating emotions and behaviours. 

Reciprocity- When a person responds to the action of another with a similar action.

Reciprocity and Interactional synchrony:

Reciprocity-Jaffe et al(1973) suggested that infants coordinated their actions with caregivers(like a conversation).Brazelton(1979) suggested that this rhythm is a precursor for later communications.This allows a caregiver to anticipate the infant’s behaviour and respond appropriately.This sensitivity to infant behaviour allows further attachment to occur.

Interactional synchrony-Andrew Meltzoff and Keith Moore(1977) 

-carried out a study of interactional synchrony between an adult model and infants of two/three weeks.They found that these young infants were able to imitate specific facial and hand gestures.

-The adult model displayed ⅓ facial expressions or hand gestures where the fingers moved in a sequence.A dummy was placed in the infant’s mouth to prevent any response in the initial display.After the display ,the dummy was removed and the child’s expression was filmed .An association between the infant behaviour and the adult model was found.In a later study,they did the same study with infants only three days old.The fact that infants this young were displaying the behaviour ruled out the possibility that the imitation behaviours are learned.

Real or pseudo imitation?

Meltzoff and Moore  suggested that the imitation is intentional. However, Jean Piaget(1962)  believed that true imitation developed at the end of the first year and anything before this was response training(infant repeating behaviour that was rewarded -a result of operant conditioning). Piaget believed the infants behaviour was pseudo imitation ,the infant had not consciously translated what they see into a matching  movement. 

Murray and Trevarthen’s study(1985)-Two month old infants first interacted via a video monitor with their mother in real time.Then the video monitor played a tape where the mother is not responding to the infants’s facial and bodily gestures causing acute distress in the infant.The infants tried to gain their mother’s interest but when they received no response they turned away.This demonstrated that the infant is actively producing a response rather than displaying a response that has been rewarded.This further supports the idea that such behaviours are innate rather than learned.

Evaluation:

Problems with testing infant behaviour-Infant’s mouths  are constantly moving and expressions that are tested occur frequently.This  makes it harder to distinguish between general activity and imitated behaviours. To increase the internal validity of Meltzoff and Moore’s  study they asked an observer  to judge the infants behaviour from the video(the observer didn’t know the behaviour was  being imitated).

Failure to replicate- Marian et al (1996) replicated Murray and Trevarthen’s study and found that infants couldn’t differentiate live and videotaped images.This suggested that they were not responding to the adult.Marian et al suggested that this may be down to procedural problems rather than the ability of infants to imitate their caregivers.

Individual differences- there are some variations between infants that affect interactional synchrony .Isabella at al(1989) found that infants that were more strongly attached  to the caregiver showed greater interactional synchrony.

Is the behavior intentional- to test this the infants  were given  an inanimate object. Abravanel and Deyoung(1991) observed infants with  two objects( 1 stimulating tongue  movement and the other mouth   opening/ closing.Infants between 5-12 weeks made little response to the objects.This concluded that imitation is limited and a specific social response to other humans