The temporal dimension in the understanding of maternal sensitivity in caregiver-infant interactions: The ‘Early Mother-Child Interaction Coding System’

Caregiver-child interaction is known to play a central role in children’s socioemotional development, yet the diversity of measures commonly used to evaluate it call into question the nature of the construct being assessed. Contingency within caregiver-child interactions has been identified as a key dyadic process that requires taking a temporal perspective to evaluating interactions. The Early Mother-Child Interaction Coding System is a psychometrically sound measure that sequentially code the flow of interactive and non-interactive behaviours within a caregiver-infant system. Its use of the framework of nonlinear dynamical systems (NDS) expands our understanding of contingent caregiver-infant dyadic behaviour.