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The Caregiver–Infant Dyad as a Buffer or Transducer of Resource Enhancing or Depleting Factors That Shape Psychobiological Development
Author(s) -
Tronick Ed
Publication year - 2017
Publication title -
australian and new zealand journal of family therapy
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.297
H-Index - 19
eISSN - 1467-8438
pISSN - 0814-723X
DOI - 10.1002/anzf.1274
Subject(s) - dyad , psychology , meaning (existential) , resource (disambiguation) , function (biology) , social psychology , computer science , psychotherapist , biology , computer network , evolutionary biology
Infants must be seen as a component of a dyadic – a two‐part – communicative system in which the infant and adult mutually regulate and scaffold their engagements with each other and with the world of things. In interactions they communicate their individual needs, intentions, and meaning about themselves in the world and in relation to the other; they respond to each other's meanings. In this view, generally referred to as the Mutual Regulation Model ( MRM ), infants have the capacity to express their sense of themselves in the world and the capacity to respond to the expressed needs and intentions of the other person. The MRM operates in a messy reparatory manner with both positive and negative effects related to its successful function. A critical addition to the MRM , the buffer‐transducer model (BTM) of the dyad, is presented. The BTM attempts to understand the effects of events, including micro and macro events as well as trauma, that either enhance or deplete and divert the needed resources of the infant for growth and development.