Discuss caregiver-infant interactions. Refer to reciprocity and interactional synchrony in your answer. (16 marker)

Discuss caregiver-infant interactions. Refer to reciprocity and interactional synchrony in your answer. (16 marker) Caregiver-infant interactions are interactions between a young baby and a caregiver with the baby responding to the behaviour of the care-giver. It’s a sort of way how babies interact and react to the caregiver as a sense on communication. The purpose of this is to form an attachment. There are several ways as to how babies communicate. One is reciprocity which are interactions between carers and infants which result in mutual responses. It’s where the infant and caregiver respond to each other’s signals and each elicits a response from each other. This helps to fortify the attachment bond. Tronick researched this method by doing a still face experiment. The caregivers speaking to the baby, doing facial expressions, responding to behaviour of infant and mimicking. Then the mother stops responding and does a blank facial expression for 2 mins. Infant starts to scream, cry and carry out actions which previously got a response reaching out. Another way in which babies communicate is interactional synchrony which is a form of rhythmic interaction between an infant and a caregiver involving mutual focus, reciprocity and mirroring of emotion or behaviour. Infants coordinate their actions with caregivers in a kind of communication. This was researched by Condon and Sander. They had frame by frame recordings of infants’ movements. They found that co-ordinated actions in sequence with the adult’s speech form a turn-taking conversation. In the investigation of caregiver-infant interactions; it is known that the experiment was a controlled observation which captures fine details. It is a generally well-controlled procedure, with the mother and infant being filmed from multiple angles. This ensures that fine details are recorded and can be analysed in further dept later. In addition to that; the babies don’t know or care that they are being observed, so their behaviour doesn’t change accordingly. This increases the validity of the experiment. Therefore this comes as supporting evidence for caregiver-infant interactions. While it is true that it increases validity, watching those videos after to analyse could mean that we have to make inferences from it. We cannot directly observe it; we can only make assumptions and base our ideas on that. In addition to that, it is hard to know what is happening when observing infants. What is being observed is merely hand movements or changes in expression. It is difficult to be certain based on these observations; what is taking place from the infants’ perspective. This means that we cannot really know for certain that behaviours seen in mother-infant interaction have a special meaning. So in short, there is lacking evidence for the caregiver-infant interaction. In 1989, Isabella et all further strengthened the notion of interactional synchrony reinforcing attachment bonds by concluding from her research that infants with secure attachments demonstrated more evidence of such behaviour during their first year of life. This conveys that it is vital for secure attachments with a caregiver. This means that it has a special meaning and that caregiver-infant interactions are vital for a secure attachment. However; for example, in interactional synchrony; it is not found in all cultures. In 1994, Le vine et al reported that Kenyan mothers have little physical contact or interactions with their infants. This therefore weakens the idea that it is necessary for the attachment formation. However, some infants do have high proportions of secure attachments but we can’t generalise it for everyone. Hence, it lacks evidence for caregiver-infant interactions.