Understanding Attachment: The Bond Between Caregiver and Infant

hello everyone and welcome to attachment lesson one now the attachment topic in psychology concerns itself with the

bond between infants and their primary caregivers throughout this chapter we'll explore

the research conducted by psychologists regarding the source the nature the development and the

importance of this bond this is what we need to know for this very first

chapter so we need to be able to outline and evaluate caregiver infant interactions in humans

so that specifically means we need to look at reciprocity and interactional synchrony both of

those being specific ways in which infants and caregivers interact with each other in order to

form an attachment so let's just start with a key definition for this chapter attachment

so attachment is defined as an emotional tie or bond between two people usually a

primary caregiver and a child the relationship is usually reciprocal

which means it's a two-way relationship that endures over time now that is a important

definition to know and that has come up as a two mark question before in the past so

it would be a good definition to just kind of have in your mind attachments begin with

the interactions between babies and their caregivers research has suggested that the

responsiveness of the caregiver to the baby's signals has a profound effect on the quality of

the attachment between the two babies have meaningful interactions with carers from the very

start of their lives and psychologists believe that these interactions have important functions

for the child's social development in particular good quality early social interactions are associated with

successful development of attachment between babies and their caregivers the focus of this lesson is going to be

on these meaningful interactions specif specifically we're going to be looking at reciprocity

and interactional synchrony from birth babies and their primary carers spend a lot of time engaged in interactions

reciprocity is a turn-taking form of interaction where each person responds to the other and elicits a

response from them so for example a caregiver might respond to a baby smiling

by saying something to them and then that would in turn elicit a response from the baby like

another smile or a laugh or a giggle or a coo or just something it is effectively

a conversation except for the fact that the baby can't really talk but it doesn't matter because the interaction

is still happening in a turn-taking basis and nobody's interrupting the other one

so it just goes backwards and forwards now research into reciprocity has shown that babies have a

periodic alert phase in which they signal that they're ready for interaction

so they might do that by making eye contact or by making a sound of some kind and according to feldman

and idleman in 2007 mothers typically pick up and respond to their babies alertness

around two-thirds of the time however they do also say in their research that mother's ability to

pick up and respond to their baby's alertness is also influenced by external factors

such as the skill of the mother at being a parent and also

something like stress which tends to get in the way of everyday life if you're suffering with it it even gets

in the way of being a parent sometimes further research conducted by feldman has also shown

that the interactions between primary carer and infant tends to become more frequent

around the age of three months and it tends to involve both the mother and the baby paying close attention to

one another's signals whether they are verbal or whether they are facial expressions

now findings like this from research mark a very clear development in our understanding of how babies interact

with their caregivers because traditional views of childhood have generally

portrayed babies as having a very passive role in that they receive care from an adult

but it seems that babies as well as caregivers actually have quite an active role so research

has found that both caregivers and babies can initiate interactions and actually appear to take

turns in doing so which has been described by brazilton at al as

a dance because it's just like couples dancing in that each person responds to the other

person's moves our second form of caregiver infant interaction is called interactional

synchrony now two people are said to be synchronized when they carry out the

same action simultaneously and the official definition of

interactional synchrony is temporal coordination of micro level social behavior

according to feldman in 2007 now that is just a fancy way of saying that babies imitate their caregivers

okay so if you have a look at the pictures you can see the man sticks his tongue out the baby sticks his tongue

out the man opens his mouth the baby opens his mouth the man frowns

the baby frowns it's imitation okay so caregivers and babies interact in such a way that their actions

and emotions mirror the other okay and just to finish off our little bit of outline we have some research

studies into interactional synchrony now there are two pieces of research that you

should know for interactional synchrony the first one was conducted by meltzoff and

more and in this piece of research they observed the beginnings of interactional synchrony in infants

as young as two weeks old in their study they asked adults to display two of three facial expressions or

gestures and then they filmed and identified how the infants reacted

to those expressions and gestures and they found that there was a positive correlation

between adult behavior and infant response so effectively they found

that the infants would imitate the adults the second piece of research was

conducted by isabella ethel in 1989 and in this piece of research the degree of synchrony in 30 infants

and their mothers was assessed they also assessed the quality of attachment between the

mothers and the infants and they found that high levels of interactional synchrony were associated

with better quality attachments okay so that piece of research actually shows that

interactional synchrony is very important in developing good quality attachments now both of these pieces of

research are useful for different reasons if you ever get asked

to outline a research study into interactional synchrony or into caregiver infant interactions the

melts off and more study is probably the better way to go although to be fair

neither of them are wrong but the isabella study will be quite useful in the evaluation section a little bit

later on so if it were me i would use mount so for more for my outline if i need it

and i would save isabella for my evaluation section so that you've got something to fall back on

okay but we'll have a look at the evaluation section next and then you'll see what i mean about how it can be used

so first off we have a strength now a big strength of this research is that more often than not

interactional synchrony and reciprocity is filmed in a lab setting okay and that is great for loads of reasons

so for example other activities that could distract a baby can be controlled the observations can be recorded and

analyzed a little bit later on which means that it's unlikely that researchers are going to miss

key behaviors because they can go back and they can watch it over and over again

more than one observer can record the data and establish the integrated reliability of observations

so that's also great because you can make sure that your observations are actually reliable you're not just

relying on one person to watch it at the time the fact that it's recorded means that

loads of people can watch it and make sure that it is actually reliable

and finally babies don't know they're being observed so their behaviors don't change in

response to the observation so there's no demand characteristics which is usually a big problem for overt

observations but obviously in this case it doesn't really matter because the babies don't

know the babies don't care they just get on with what they are usually doing so because of all of that the data

collected in research like this should have good reliability because it should be consistent and it

also should have good validity as well because extraneous variables are controlled

and demand characteristics don't really exist okay so that is your first strength

the next one is a weakness and this one is all about the difficulties observing babies now

the issue is that it is hard to interpret baby's behavior because let's be honest

they have a lack of coordination in general and they're also fairly immobile as well

so the observations that people make are mainly of little hand movements or subtle changes in expression

it's hard to know what's going on you don't know if the baby's smiling because something funny has just happened or

because the smile means something or whether the baby's just pulling a funny face because he's farted

so the meaning behind all of the movements that are going on is very hard to establish and it's also

difficult to know what's going on from the baby's perspective as well because they can't articulate

anything and because they don't really do anything so we can't be sure that the behaviors

observed in caregiver infant interactions have any special meaning we assume that

they have got special meaning but we don't know for sure because of how hard it is to actually interpret the

baby's behavior and a final limitation is the fact that observing a behavior

doesn't tell us its developmental importance so we don't really know whether what

we're observing is actually important for the baby or not synchrony and reciprocity are

effectively just names that have been given to patterns of behavior

that have been observed in infants they clearly exist there's a whole wealth of research that

shows that they exist but knowing that they exist and being able to observe them

isn't really very useful in helping us to understand development because we don't really know the purpose

of the behavior so with that you have this issue that observational research alone

can't tell us whether or not interactional synchrony and reciprocity are

actually important for n infants developments however this is a beautiful opportunity

to use the research conducted by isabella from earlier as a counterpoint

you can then argue that isabella found that there was a positive correlation between the quality of attachment

between an infant and their mother and the amount of interactional synchrony that occurred

okay so you can throw in there straight away this counterpoint and say

however on the other hand isabella ettel found that and then you can outline that research

and then you can immediately evaluate your own evaluation points okay so that'll add

a nice little bit of depth to this particular point which will show the examiner that you kind of understand

what's going on and that you know what you're doing okay so make sure you use isabella there

and that makes a fourth evaluation point which means you should have a nice chunky detailed

evaluation section so before we finish off i've just got a couple of exam questions for you

now it goes without saying that this can be tested in all kinds of different ways you can get your standard bread and

butter short answer questions like outline what is meant by reciprocity

outline what is meant by attachment evaluate research into caregiver infant interactions all

that kind of stuff the two that i've picked out for you though are a little bit different so

the first one is an application question so with reference to the conversation outline two features of caregiver infant

interaction and in this you've got a pick out reciprocity

and interactional synchrony so in the second sentence you've got interactional

synchrony because aisha moves her head perfectly in time with

tasnim and then in the first one you could reference reciprocity because they were interacting with each

other the second question is a sneaky evaluation point

okay so for this one explain one reason why it's difficult to draw conclusions about the role of caregiver infant

interactions this is a question where you need to draw on your knowledge

of the weaknesses of this research so you could fall back onto the difficulties observing babies

or you could fall back on the issue of developmental importance okay either way is fine

but don't trip up over the fact that it's a hidden evaluation point okay all the other questions that um you

could get are generally your short answer questions that i mentioned before

but every now and again you'll get something like this where you just need to think

a little bit before you start writing okay also watch out this could come up as

research methods questions as well um but as a general rule they're usually okay

all right so that is the end of the video um i hope it's made sense for your first

attachment lesson and i hope it's been useful if you've got any questions please feel

free to throw them into the comment section below and i will do my best to get back to you

asap thank you very much for listening and i'll see you in the next one thank you