Background: Assessment of mother-child interactions is a core issue of early child development and psychopathology. This paper focuses on the concept of “synchrony” and examines (1) how synchrony in mother-child interaction is defined and operationalized; (2) the contribution that the concept of synchrony has brought to understanding the nature of mother-child interactions.
Method: Between 1977 and 2013, we searched several databases using the following key-words: « synchrony » « interaction » and « mother-child ». We focused on studies examining parent-child interactions among children aged 2 months to 5 years. From the 63 relevant studies, we extracted study description variables (authors, year, design, number of subjects, age); assessment conditions and modalities; and main findings.
Results: The most common terms referring to synchrony were mutuality, reciprocity, rhythmicity, harmonious interaction, turn-taking and shared affect; all terms were used to characterize the mother-child dyad. As a consequence, we propose defining synchrony as a dynamic and reciprocal adaptation of the temporal structure of behaviors and shared affect between interactive partners. Three main types of assessment methods for studying synchrony emerged: (1) global interaction scales with dyadic items; (2) specific synchrony scales; and (3) micro-coded time-series analyses. It appears that synchrony should be regarded as a social signal per se as it has been shown to be valid in both normal and pathological populations. Better mother-child synchrony is associated with familiarity (vs. unknown partner), a healthy mother (vs. pathological mother), typical development (vs. psychopathological development), and a more positive child outcomes.
Discussion: Synchrony is a key feature of mother-infant interactions. Adopting an objective approach in studying synchrony is not a simple task given available assessment tools and due to its temporality and multimodal expression. We propose an integrative approach combining clinical observation and engineering techniques to improve the quality of synchrony analysis.

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Why synchrony matters during mother-child interactions: a systematic review.

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: Patients with Prader–Willi syndrome (PWS) display poor feeding and social skills as infants and fewer hypothalamic oxytocin (OXT)-producing neurons were documented in adults. Animal data demonstrated that early treatment with OXT restores sucking after birth. Our aim is to reproduce these data in infants with PWS. METHODS: We conducted a phase 2 escalating dose study of a short course (7 days) of intranasal OXT administration. We enrolled 18 infants with PWS under 6 months old (6 infants in each step) who received 4 IU of OXT either every other day, daily, or twice daily. We investigated the tolerance and the effects on feeding and social skills and changes in circulating ghrelin and brain connectivity by functional MRI. RESULTS: No adverse events were reported. No dose effect was observed. Sucking assessed by the Neonatal Oral-Motor Scale was abnormal in all infants at baseline and normalized in 88% after treatment. The scores of Neonatal Oral-Motor Scale and videofluoroscopy of swallowing significantly decreased from 16 to 9 (P CONCLUSIONS: OXT is well tolerated in infants with PWS and improves feeding and social skills. These results open perspectives for early treatment in neurodevelopment diseases with feeding problems.

https://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/pediatrics/early/2017/01/16/peds.2016-2976.full.pdf

The Use of Oxytocin to Improve Feeding and Social Skills in Infants With Prader-Willi Syndrome.

Engagement is crucial to designing intelligent systems that can adapt to the characteristics of their users. This paper focuses on the automatic analysis and classification of engagement based on humans’ and robot’s personality profiles in a triadic human–human–robot interaction setting. More explicitly, we present a study that involves two participants interacting with a humanoid robot, and investigate how participants’ personalities can be used together with the robot’s personality to predict the engagement state of each participant. The fully automatic system is first trained to predict the Big Five personality traits of each participant by extracting individual and interpersonal features from their nonverbal behavioural cues. Second, the output of the personality prediction system is used as an input to the engagement classification system. Third, we focus on the concept of “group engagement”, which we define as the collective engagement of the participants with the robot, and analyze the impact of similar and dissimilar personalities on the engagement classification. Our experimental results show that: 1) using the automatically predicted personality labels for engagement classification yields an F-measure on par with using the manually annotated personality labels, demonstrating the effectiveness of the automatic personality prediction module proposed; 2) using the individual and interpersonal features without utilizing personality information is not sufficient for engagement classification, instead incorporating the participants and robots personalities with individual/interpersonal features increases engagement classification performance; and 3) the best classification performance is achieved when the participants and the robot are extroverted, while the worst results are obtained when all are introverted.

Fully Automatic Analysis of Engagement and Its Relationship to Personality in Human-Robot Interactions

Background: During the last decades, the research on mother-infant dyad has produced a great amount of data, methods and theories, which largely contributed to set a revolution in the way we look at developmental changes during infancy and childhood. Very different constructs depict the different aspects of the "dyadic dance" occurring between a mother and her infant; nonetheless, a comprehensive and consistent systematization of these concepts in a coherent theoretical landscape is still lacking. Aim: In the present work, we aim at disentangling the different theoretical and methodological definitions of 9 dyadic constructs and we highlight their effects on infants' and children developmental outcomes. Methods: A literature search has been conducted on three databases-PubMed, Scopus, Web of Science. Three different reviews are reported here: (1) a review on the theoretical definitions of dyadic constructs; (2) a review of operational definitions, settings and methods of dyadic processes; (3) a systematic review of dyadic processes' outcomes for infants' and children developmental trajectories. Results: Two constructs emerged as wide meta-theoretical concepts (reciprocity and mutuality) and seven described specific processes (attunement, contingency, coordination, matching, mirroring, reparation, synchrony). A global model resuming the relationships among different processes is reported, which highlights the emergence of two specific cycles of dyadic functioning (i.e., matching-mismatching-reparation-synchrony; contingency, coordination, attunement, mirroring). A comprehensive review of the adopted measures is also provided. Finally, all the processes provided significant contributions to infants' behavioral, cognitive, and socio-emotional development during the first 3 years of age, but limited research has been conducted on specific processes (e.g. reparation and mirroring). Conclusion: The present study provides an original research-grounded framework to consider the different nature of mother-infant dyadic processes within a unified dyadic eco-system. Different levels of evidence emerged for the role of diverse mother-infant dyadic processes on infants' and children development. Open questions and future research directions are highlighted.

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Disentangling the Dyadic Dance: Theoretical, Methodological and Outcomes Systematic Review of Mother-Infant Dyadic Processes.

Engagement is a concept of the utmost importance in human-computer interaction, not only for informing the design and implementation of interfaces, but also for enabling more sophisticated interfaces capable of adapting to users. While the notion of engagement is actively being studied in a diverse set of domains, the term has been used to refer to a number of related, but different concepts. In fact it has been referred to across different disciplines under different names and with different connotations in mind. Therefore, it can be quite difficult to understand what the meaning of engagement is and how one study relates to another one accordingly. Engagement has been studied not only in human-human, but also in human-agent interactions i.e., interactions with physical robots and embodied virtual agents. In this overview article we focus on different factors involved in engagement studies, distinguishing especially between those studies that address task and social engagement, involve children and adults, are conducted in a lab or aimed for long term interaction. We also present models for detecting engagement and for generating multimodal behaviors to show engagement.

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Engagement in Human-Agent Interaction: An Overview

Studying early interaction is essential for understanding development and psychopathology. Automatic computational methods offer the possibility to analyse social signals and behaviours of several partners simultaneously and dynamically. Here, 20 dyads of mothers and their 13–36-month-old infants were videotaped during mother–infant interaction including 10 extremely high-risk and 10 low-risk dyads using two-dimensional (2D) and three-dimensional (3D) sensors. From 2D+3D data and 3D space reconstruction, we extracted individual parameters (quantity of movement and motion activity ratio for each partner) and dyadic parameters related to the dynamics of partners heads distance (contribution to heads distance), to the focus of mutual engagement (percentage of time spent face to face or oriented to the task) and to the dynamics of motion activity (synchrony ratio, overlap ratio, pause ratio). Features are compared with blind global rating of the interaction using the coding interactive behavior (CIB). We found that individual and dyadic parameters of 2D+3D motion features perfectly correlates with rated CIB maternal and dyadic composite scores. Support Vector Machine classification using all 2D–3D motion features classified 100% of the dyads in their group meaning that motion behaviours are sufficient to distinguish high-risk from low-risk dyads. The proposed method may present a promising, low-cost methodology that can uniquely use artificial technology to detect meaningful features of human interactions and may have several implications for studying dyadic behaviours in psychiatry. Combining both global rating scales and computerized methods may enable a continuum of time scale from a summary of entire interactions to second-by-second dynamics.

/pdf/interaction-and-behaviour-imaging-a-novel-method-to-measure-17fd1w726z.pdf

Interaction and behaviour imaging: a novel method to measure mother-infant interaction using video 3D reconstruction.

Resume Objectif L’evaluation des interactions mere–enfant est un enjeu majeur de la psychopathologie perinatale du fait de son impact important sur le developpement de l’enfant aussi bien sur le plan affectif que cognitif. Cet article presente les proprietes psychometriques de la validation francaise du Coding Interactive Behavior (CIB) developpe par Ruth Feldman, echelle permettant l’evaluation de la dyade mere–enfant. Methode La version francaise a d’abord ete traduite et adaptee a la terminologie francaise, puis validee par les auteurs d’origine. Elle a ensuite ete appliquee a 74 interactions dyadiques, cliniques et non cliniques recrutees en maternite, a la naissance et a 2 mois post-partum. Les cotations ont ete realisees par des professionnels formes a l’outil et aveugle du statut de la dyade. Resultats La validite interjuge (coefficient de correlation intraclasse) a la naissance et a 2 mois varie de 0,85 a 1 pour chacun des items. Les analyses soutiennent une bonne structure factorielle de l’echelle, comparable a celles rapportees pour la version d’origine israelienne avec une consistance interne allant de α = 0,67 a α = 0,96 pour les videos realisees a la naissance et α = 0,63 a 0,95 pour celles realisees a 2 mois. Conclusion Nos resultats indiquent que la version francaise du CIB dispose de la meme structure factorielle que l’outil originel et constitue une echelle utile pour l’evaluation des interactions mere–enfant.

S. Viaux-Savelon

Papers

Interaction and behaviour imaging: a novel method to measure mother-infant interaction using video 3D reconstruction.

Validation de la version française du Coding Interactive Behavior sur une population d’enfants à la naissance et à 2 mois

Intensive mental health treatment for neglecting and/or abusive parents: Outcome and impact on the quality of early parents child interactions