The effect of brief separations on 2-month-old infants

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After a two minute face-to-face interaction with an adult, twenty infants aged 7 to 13 weeks were left alone for one minute. Each infant interacted with and was left by two adults—the infant's mother and an unfamiliar female adult. The order of presentation was counterbalanced across subjects. Coding was done from videotapes by coders who were blind to the hypotheses of the study and to the identity of the infant or the adult. Infants were more likely to extend their arms in the direction of the adult's departure, to cry longer, and to show more distress brow expressions during maternal absence. During stranger absence infants were more likely to yawn or to exhibit a high rate of rhythmic (stereotypic) movements of the mouth. A second study, exactly like the first except that the infants were exposed to the stranger for a 10-minute familiarization period prior to the formal experimental procedure, yielded no systematic differences between mother and stranger separation. These findings suggest that ontogenetic precursors of proximity seeking behavior toward attachment figures may be related to the 2-month-old's capacity to respond to the cessation of interaction with familiar figures in a way which is qualitatively different from his response to the cessation of interaction with unfamiliar figures.