Overview
This chapter focuses on infants’ socioemotional reactions to their mother and to a relatively unfamiliar experimenter during a structured social interaction sequence similar to the one developed by Klein and Durfee (1976). Infants were divided into two groups based on their differential (comparative) pattern of reaction to experimenter and mother rather than the more common procedure (e.g., Morgan & Ricciuti, 1969) of using only the reaction to the experimenter or analyzing the reactions to the two adults separately. We felt, based on a study by Harmon, Suwalsky, and Klein (1979), that grouping infants by the type of differential social reaction they showed could provide a meaningful index of the quality of the infant—mother relationship. Furthermore, we hypothesized that the type of differential social response would be related on the one hand to maternal characteristics and on the other hand to the quality of infant play. Thus differential social response is conceptualized as an intervening variable mediating the relationships between maternal variables and child variables.
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Morgan, G.A., Busch-Rossnagel, N.A., Culp, R.E., Vance, A.K., Fritz, J.J. (1982). Infant’s Differential Social Response to Mother and Experimenter. In: Emde, R.N., Harmon, R.J. (eds) The Development of Attachment and Affiliative Systems. Topics in Developmental Psychobiology. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4684-4076-8_16
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4684-4076-8_16
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