Cyclicity and stability in mother-infant face-to-face interaction: A comment on Cohn and Tronick (1988).

Abstract

Cohn and Tronick (1988) found that the onset times of behavioral change in mother-infant face-toface interaction are stochastic rather than periodic. This comment offers an explanation of why thenresult replicates that of Kaye and Fogel (1980), in spite of important differences in how interactive behavior is conceptualized, coded, and treated statistically. Furthermore, it is suggested that stochastic variability in onset times has profound implications for our understanding of the process of mother-infant interaction and of the ways in which infants develop in the context of that interaction. The social system of mother-infant face-to-face interaction during the first year has attracted the attention of scholars from a variety of disciplines. This dyadic relationship has been examined as a setting for infant development of affect and attention, as a paradigm of changes in bidirectional social influences, and as the source of individual differences in attachment and selfregulation. In these ways, the mother-infant face-to-face interaction partakes of the same conceptual issues that drive inquiry in all human development research. Mother-infant face-to-face interaction studies differ from other social interaction studies because issues of sequence and cyclicity have been brought to the forefront of the inquiry. Research on mother-infant face-to-face interaction uses time as an explicit variable and examines the role of timing in the process of mutual regulation. Although the timing of actions is a general feature of dyadic relationships, it has become salient in studies of early interactions because they are relatively contentfree. In early adult-infant interaction it may matter less what specific actions are performed than when and how frequently those actions occur. Cohn and Tronick (1988) have presented a rigorous analysis of the nature of timing processes in face-to-face interaction. They reject the hypothesis that mutual regulation between mother and infant is achieved by bidirectional entrainment of periodic cycling of each individual's behavior, a view advanced in the work of Condon and Sander (1974) and of Brazelton, Koslowski, and Main (1974). The periodic entrainment hypothesis leaves mother and infant dependent on speeding up or slowing down some presumed internal clocks. Even for the relatively content-free mother-infant face-to-face interaction, this hypothesis oversimplifies and rigidifies the process of mutual adaptation. Cohn and Tronick's (1988) data, instead, supported the hypothesis that mutual regulation is achieved by short-term bidirectional responsiveness to occurrences, the onsets of which