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Background

Child interaction with adults and the social environment plays a central role in early development: indeed it is the quality of interaction with a primary caregiver that is crucial for children’s social (Black & Logan, 1995; Cole, Hall, & Radzich, 2009), emotional and cognitive growth (Bornstein & Lamb, 2015; Leclère et al., 2014; Harrist & Waugh, 2002). Some features of this interaction have been defined:“responsiveness”(Ainsworth, Bell, & Stayton, 1974),“reciprocity”(Belsky, Rovine, & Taylor, 1984),“rhythmicity”,“mutuality”(Tronick, Als, & Brazelton, 1977; Maccoby & Martin, 1983),“turn-taking”,“shared affect”(Leclère et al., 2014). The concept of the dyadic synchrony between mother (or another primary caregiver) and child underlies all these definitions; synchrony is characterized by a continuous dynamic and reciprocal adaptation of the temporal structures of behavior and emotion that are shared between interactive partners. For example, three different levels of interaction describe the mother-infant relationship: a) the behavioral level, focused on the “dyad” as an interacting system of bidirectional nature; b) the emotion-affective level, which considers the rhythm between partners and the ability of partners to show attunement to each other’s rhythm; c) biological level: an emerging domain based on biological correlates of behaviorally synchronic phenomena, such as interbrain synchronization (Dumas, Nadel, Soussignan, Martinerie, & Garnero, 2010). This paper explores the first two levels.