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The fact that babies smile to control their parents, I argued 15 years ago, but it was not until 2014 that scientific studies were conducted at the University of San Diego that confirmed this experimentally. The experiment involved thirteen mothers with their four-month-old children. What did the experiments show?
It turned out that four-month-old babies are not cute silly, but trained specialists in the field of relations with parents. Firstly, children do not have any love for smiles, and just like that, by no means, children do not smile. Children need their parents to be with them and to entertain them, and children are best entertained by smiling parents, parents in a state of smiling. Children want to have fun, their parents are best suited for this, but in order to start their parents up, they first need to smile. When parents are not disposed to smile, children do not smile at them. What for? Bestolku. Children wait for the right moment and start smiling at their mother when they see: right now, mom is disposed to smile. Children keep track of the moment when their parents are ready to smile, and then their little smile is enough for their parents to start smiling at them. Mothers are looking for mutual joy and are ready to work “for this”, while children are not ready to work “for this” and are looking for how to “invest less, but get more”. Well, and who is smarter in this case is smarter: parents or children?
Infants Time Their Smiles to Make Their Moms Smile
One of the earliest forms of interaction between mothers and infants is smiling games. While the temporal dynamics of these games have been extensively studied, they are still not well understood. Why do mothers and infants time their smiles the way they do? To answer this question we applied methods from control theory, an approach frequently used in robotics, to analyze and synthesize goal-oriented behavior. The results of our analysis show that by the time infants reach 4 months of age both mothers and infants time their smiles in a purposeful, goal-oriented manner. In our study, mothers consistently attempted to maximize the time spent in mutual smiling, while infants tried to maximize mother-only smile time. To validate this finding, we ported the smile timing strategy used by infants to a sophisticated child-like robot that automatically perceived and produced smiles while interacting with adults. As predicted, this strategy proved successful at maximizing adult-only smile time. The results indicate that by 4 months of age infants interact with their mothers in a goal-oriented manner, utilizing a sophisticated understanding of timing in social interactions. Our work suggests that control theory is a promising technique for both analyzing complex interactive behavior and providing new insights into the development of social communication.
See the entire article here…
Video from Yana Shchastya: interview with professor of psychology N.I. Kozlov
Topics of conversation: What kind of woman do you need to be in order to successfully marry? How many times do men get married? Why are there so few normal men? Childfree. Parenting. What is love? A story that couldn’t be better. Paying for the opportunity to be close to a beautiful woman.