Interview with Lynne Murray

Jane Barlow: I’m here with Lynne Murray, who is professor of developmental psychology at the
University of Reading. Lynne, in this course, we’re going to be looking at the way in which
the parent’s mind shapes the interactional context of the infant, and the way in which
that interactional context then shapes the baby’s developing mind. Can you tell us about
the five key stages of the first two years of life in terms of the infant’s capacity for social
understanding and cooperation?
Lynne Murray: Certainly, yes. There’s a remarkable shift from the very beginning: from the new-born,
who is prepared for social interactions but has very few capacities to the end of the first
two years, through to when you have a child who can understand that other people think
differently from themselves, who can cooperate with other people. That huge transition
takes place through various distinct stages. So in the new-born phase, we have a baby
who is ready to engage socially from the start. Infants prefer to look at faces rather than
non-face shapes. They like looking at eyes that are open and facing them, ready for social
engagement. They prefer the sound of the human voice to any other sound.
They also pick up the characteristics very quickly of the people who are going to be
looking after them. So they prefer their mother’s face, their mother’s voice, their
mother’s smell even, within the first few days, and that gets them launched into being
ready to be in relationship with somebody else who will be committed to them and who
will support their development.
Beyond that, around two months, babies become intensely social. It’s known as a period
of core-relatedness – when babies interact with other people with a wide range of
expressions and gestures. They start to vocalise and smile, and the people who interact
with them slip into supporting them by mirroring back their expressions, marking out
what’s important, and using their own support to give the infant the sense of affirming
their own expressions and sustaining the baby’s social capacities.
From around three to four months, that changes. And parents are often puzzled, because
infants lose that intense interest in one-to-one, face-to-face engagement. As their
eyesight improves, as their reaching and manipulation skills improve, they start to shift
their attention to the wider world, and that means that parents have to adjust in order to
remain engaged with the baby and find things to share together with their infant. In
doing so, they typically start to play a whole range of body games – round and round the
garden, pat-a-cake – or introduce toys or other objects into the interaction, which is the
way in which they can sustain a good engagement. That also helps the baby, because it
helps the baby shift from just being focused on engagement with one other person to
beginning to move into the wider social world, supported in their interest by somebody
else.
That stage lasts until around nine months, when we enter something where
the infant becomes much more aware of the way other people are thinking
about the world and presenting it to them. We call this stage, perhaps, one
of ‘connected-up relatedness’, or ‘joint attention’. At this stage, the infant
 will use the partner’s responses in relation to the world to guide their own experience. One
of those key features is called social referencing. So if the infant’s confronted with something
that’s a little bit unusual or puzzling to them, they will look to their parent nearby to see
‘what does the parent think about this?’, and they will note the parent’s expression, and then
respond to this new thing in their environment according to the way the parent’s reacted. So
if the parent looks worried or puzzled themselves, the infant will back off. If the parent looks
encouraging and positive, the infant will go forward and engage. So they’re really connecting
up their experience of the social relationship with their experience of the wider world.
But they still don’t know an awful lot about the fact that other people’s experiences can be
different from their own. So at this stage, for example, if the parent asks them, can they have
something to eat, the baby might choose something that they themselves know and like,
forgetting about whether that might be the same for the parent or not. An infant at this
stage can’t look at their reflection in the mirror and know that it’s themselves that they’re
seeing. They will respond to the baby in the mirror as though it’s a playmate and perhaps try
to engage with them.
So you get another shift towards the end of the second year, around 18 months onwards,
where there’s a new capacity to reflect on mental experiences, including those of other
people, and to understand that other people might think and feel differently from the way
the baby themselves thinks, and also a capacity to see themselves more objectively. So at
this age, they will perhaps, when confronted with a mirror, clearly show that they recognise
that it’s themselves in that image.
Jane Barlow: So Lynne, can you tell us what the implication of this is in terms of what the infant needs
from the primary caregiver with regards to their self-organisation?
Lynne Murray: Well, at each stage of the infant’s development through these first two years, they can use
the parent support in different ways. So, at the new-born stage, where infant feelings are
often very raw and extreme and they have no sense of their own capacity to organise
themselves, what’s really needed is parental holding and containment, just warmth and
comforting to help the baby feel himself together. But as he develops, say around the stage
of core-relatedness at about two months, when a lot of social face-to-face interactions take
place between the parent and the baby, parents are doing things without even thinking
about it that actually support the baby’s capacities to self-organise and self-regulate.
So we think about those early interactions. They’re by no means perfect. Parents don’t
understand all their baby’s cues. They don’t always respond at exactly the perfect level of
intensity, and there are often what are called mismatches where they misunderstand each
other or the infant may have some unexpected event happening, like hiccupping or a loud
noise that disrupts them. At those moments, parents can do a lot to help the baby’s self-
regulation skills by noticing the infant’s reactions and just gently supporting. Perhaps if
they’ve made a mistake, they’ve misunderstood, they’ve reacted in too extreme a way, they
notice that the infant got disregulated by that, they can repeat the same thing again in a
much gentler way, helping the infant to cope with that experience so they have the constant
experience of things going a little bit wrong, but then being put back together. This has been
shown to promote their self-regulation skills.
Through the next stage, beyond three, four months, it’s very typical for these games that
happen between parents and infants in this kind of topic-based relatedness phase to exercise
the baby’s emotions, to take them to quite an extreme degree, and get the baby up to a very
excited pitch, but in a safe context, where the infant can practise regulating difficult feelings.
So they may use techniques like gaze aversion, just taking a break from the interaction when
it gets very intense, using capacities to self-regulate, perhaps sucking on their thumbs. If
parents can take infants, help them go to points of extreme excitement and tension but also
respect their need to just take a pause and self-regulate down again, this can be helpful in
promoting the infant’s self-regulation abilities.
And then through the next months, fathers typically get into playing more boisterous body
games with infants that, again, really push their level of excitement and intensity to the limits
that are comfortable, and then help them recover from them again.
 As you go on to the stage of connected up relatedness, when babies can use other people’s
feelings and expressions to guide their own experience, this is a key way for infants’
emotions to be regulated. They can look to the parent for guidance and look to their
responses and organise their own feelings in accord with what the parent’s showing them
is meaningful about the environment.
Then finally, as you get to the stage of this more cooperative relatedness, parents can
begin to build on infants’ impulses to want to share experiences and help them to become
used to helping and joining in. This lays the foundations for good self-regulation and
cooperation and avoids babies developing aggressive behaviour problems.
At the same time, because infants can now understand what’s in other people’s minds and
know that they’re different and language begins to develop, parents can begin to use
techniques now of reasoning and of explaining why you should do something, why you
shouldn’t do something, and this, again, can be internalised by the baby and taken on
board as part of the way that he regulates his own difficult feelings.
Jane Barlow: Lynne, that’s fascinating. Thank you very much.
Lynne Murray: Pleasure.