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From birth, infants actively seek out and initiate social interaction. These perceptual abilities and responses help infants to engage in primary relatedness with a social partner. Their interactions are reciprocal, sensitive to the dyadic process that builds between mother and baby. By four months of age, as the authors suggest, infants communicate through non-verbal, “action-dialogue language” by responding to every shift in the parent's facial and vocal emotion, touch quality and orientation. Different patterns of self- and interactive regulation develop, which become expected and remembered by both partners and begin to shape the infant’s development. In this way emerging patterns of attachment are created. Thus, the quality of parent–infant communication patterns is fundamental for healthy developmental progress.
In earlier research, Beebe et al. (2010), one of the co-authors, found that the quality of mother–infant face-to-face interactions, which elicit the infant's most advanced communication capacities, could predict infant attachment outcomes. This book graphically illustrates these research findings by presenting these interactions through drawings of video frames. The authors contend that, by four months, patterns in mother–infant interaction are becoming sufficiently organized that there is confidence in predicting the origins of secure and insecure attachment patterns at one year of age. Insecure attachment varies and can be categorized into subsections of avoidant, resistant and disorganized.
The origins of these attachment patterns are explained in some detail, with extensive reference to the importance of early work into infant social interaction in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s that set the scene for the burgeoning interest in mother–infant interaction that continues to this day. Using Ainsworth et al.’s (1978) strange situation paradigm, attachment classification is based on the extent to which the infant uses the parent as a safe haven or touchpoint a