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Attachment and joint attention in infants: The role of expectation

Neda Mohammadzade Naghashan1, M Ali Mazaheri1, Erik Gustafsson2

  • 1Department of Clinical Psychology, Shahid Behashti University, Tehran, Iran.

Infancy : the Official Journal of the International Society on Infant Studies
|January 20, 2021
PubMed

Insights

Secure parent-infant attachment may influence joint attention skills by shaping infants' expectations. This study found secure infants showed specific looking behaviors related to expectations in attachment contexts, unlike insecure infants.

Area of Science:

  • Developmental Psychology
  • Cognitive Neuroscience
  • Attachment Theory

Background:

  • Parent-infant attachment quality is linked to joint attention skills.
  • The specific mechanisms underlying this relationship remain largely unexplored.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate if "expectations" within Internal Working Models mediate the effect of attachment style on joint attention.
  • To explore the role of attachment-related contexts in infant expectations.

Main Methods:

  • Classified 12- to 20-month-old infants into secure and insecure groups using the Strange Situation Procedure.
  • Employed a violation-of-expectation paradigm with joint attention videos for habituation.
  • Compared looking times between secure and insecure infants in "divergent attention" and "joint attention" scenarios.

Main Results:

  • Infants looked longer at divergent attention videos, indicating pre-existing expectations about triadic interactions.
  • Secure infants, in contrast to insecure infants, exhibited longer looking times in divergent attention situations when an attachment-related context was present.

Conclusions:

  • Infant "expectations" may act as a mediator between attachment quality and joint attention.
  • Findings suggest attachment security influences how infants form and utilize expectations in social interactions.

Keywords:
attachment stylesexpectationinternal working modelsjoint attention

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