Mini-Conference On Father-Child Attachment - SEAS

June 2021

Aim

• To understand the role of fathers and mothers in infant parenting expectancies

Hypothesis

• Infants will look longer at the unresponsive caregiving event if their mother and father exhibit lower levels of detachment

  • Detachment: The extent to which parents are emotionally and physically disengaged when interacting with their infants

Procedure

• 39 infants and their mothers and fathers participated

• Mothers and fathers' completed a free play session with their infants - behavioral task

  • Detachment was coded from these videos

• Infants' looking time - or how long they looked at the stimulus - was recorded during a parenting-based puppet paradigm

  • The puppets acted as such:

    1. To start, a "baby" doll sat on the stage with a "woman" doll next to it

    2. Then, the woman gets up and leaves the baby.

    3. When she is halfway across the stage, the baby starts to cry

    4. Then she either comes back to the baby in the responsive event, or keeps going until she reaches the other side of the stage in the unresponsive event

Results

• Infants with mothers and fathers scoring low detachment (i.e. they were responsive caregivers) looked longer at the unresponsive event. Thus showing they expected responsive caregiving based on their experience with responsive caregiving.

• Infants with caregivers scoring high on detachment had no difference in their looking time. This suggests they do not have an expectation

My Contribution:

• Conducted secondary research to understand how attachment develops in infancy and the role it plays in socio-emotional development

• Managed and analyzed data

• Coded infant behavior

• Presented the findings at an international conference

Tools used:

• Qualtrics

• R & R-Studio

• IBM SPSS Statistics

• Microsoft Excel and Powerpoint