The psychology of the neonate: Analysis of sequential-temporal patterns in neonatal behaviour

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Although human development is a continuous process of growth from conception to death, distinct developmental stages, such as infancy, childhood and adolescence, are recognised.This stage view of development has had a practical impact on the organisation of social, educational, mental health and medical services. However, the stage for neonates (infants in the first four weeks of life) is absent from the field of psychology. Unlike psychologists, medical professionals demarcated this stage in the mid-twentieth century, although they considered newborns as being reactive, not responsive, social beings. Whether or not newborns are 'social' continues to be debated and the debates might prevent the field from recognising the stage of neonatal, and from exploring the behaviour of the neonate. The proposed project uses the databases of two previously completed projects for secondary analysis. ESRC RES-000-22-1887 investigated imitation in 133 newborn infants, while ESRC RES-062-23-1779 investigated responses to the still face paradigm in 322 neonates. Both projects used a block-designed, statistical approach to analyse the behavioural changes in groups of newborns. However, a temporally sensitive approach is needed to address the current debates on 'intentionality' and 'sociality'. The temporal relationship between the behavioural elements and events are ignored in such block-designed analysis, therefore it is not known how individual responses evolve over time, how they appear in the context of the behaviour of the experimenter and the other responses of the neonate. Such temporal analyses of the behaviour of newborns have not been performed before because of the issues regarding access to a large number of newborns, the experimental-statistical difficulties of the descriptive analytic methods, the conflict between a large sample and the need of individual descriptive analysis, and the expertise that state-of-art time-series work requires.The secondary analysis of data from these already collected datasets-which represent probably the largest neonatal behavioural database to date-provides a unique opportunity to explore the temporal and structural patterns and sequencing rules of the newborns' behaviours.The project aims to analyse video and, in part, heart rate recordings from 205 newborns. Stage 1 of the project employs descriptive, frame-by-frame behavioural analysis of the arm, finger, facial, mouth, eye movements, postural positions and the states of the newborn (n=40), then visualizes the changes of these behaviours and interprets the emerging patterns. Stages 2 and 3 involve learning and employing lag-sequential analytic techniques in 75 newborns using the Observer and the Theme systems (Noldus, 2009; Magnusson, 2000) and the General Sequential Querier (GSEQ) programs (Bakeman & Quera,1995). Computerized algorithms will help detect patterns in the behaviour that are repeated sets of events that occur repeatedly in the same order and in which the temporal distance between the consecutive parts is similar over the repetitions. Stage 4 co-analyses the behavioural and the psychophysiological changes, displaying the psychophysiological data along the behavioural responses to the still face (n=30), the imitation (n=30) paradigms and a control condition (n=30). Such analysis could also address the possible role of 'arousal' mechanisms in the responses of the neonates to social situations. Stage 5 involves integrating the quantitative, qualitative, behavioural and psychophysiological results and evaluating them using multiple frameworks. The resulting wealth of data and the emerging patterns could transform our understanding of the neonate and the neonatal stage of development and have a significant effect on how we treat newborns and how we advise the parents of newborns. The knowledge on patterns of neonatal behaviour and responses might facilitate the emergence of a 'neonatal psychology' with a sound empirical foundation.