​Not only was the first weekend of May our first glimpse of summer it was also the weekend of the fifth annual ‘Impfest’ at Imperial Colleges South Kensington campus. The pPOD team were delighted to have been invited to have a stall and as a new member of the pPOD team I was particularly excited to showcase the attachment theory research that the team have been working on. The day proved to be exciting throughout with a chance to disseminate the Healthy Start, Happy Start and ACORN studies as well as to mingle with other researchers presenting an eclectic mix of vibrant, innovative projects from the best in science and art at Imperial. 

Our stall was made up of a range of educational activities which were demonstrated by members of the pPOD team much to the enjoyment of the Impfest visitors. Over the course of the weekend hundreds of people visited our stall with staff, students, alumni and members of the public enthusiastically wanting to learn about advances in attachment theories and how these are present in our research. We really enjoyed speaking to a vast range of people and answering your thought provoking questions.
Similarly to previous exhibitions such as ‘lates’ evening at the Science Museum in August our activities were based around attachment. We covered some of the early theories of attachment including: 

Harlow’s monkeys 1950’s experiment involving baby rhesus monkeys having a surrogate mothers; one made of wire and one covered in soft terry towelling cloth. Four of the monkeys could get milk from the wire monkey and four received food from the terry cloth mum. Results were that both groups of monkeys spent the most time with the soft mother even if she had no milk. The baby would eat from the wire monkey and then cling back onto the soft mother. Therefore the soft mother provided a sensitive response and the safe base that this surrogate produced was more important to the baby than food alone.
 
Goren and Colleagues 1975 a ground breaking study which highlights the significance of forming early attachments and relationships. The study found that by tracking new born babies eye movements that they start to develop a preference for looking at human faces over other objects or shapes in the first few hours after birth. 





A pin-the-feature-on-the-baby poster interaction, where members of the public were asked to choose which features they thought a baby would use to form close relationships. In fact a new born uses all of their feature to form attachments such as: gazing (eyes), crying, sucking, smiling and vocalizing (mouth), grasping, moving and clinging (body), listening to voice (ears), recognizing familiar smells (nose).
 
The atmosphere of the weekend was really positive and it was great to speak to such a vast range of people that were interested in our stall. The pPOD team would like to thank everyone involved in Impfest as we believe it was a great experience and another success story for the pPOD team to celebrate.

We hope you had fun because we certainly did and we look forward to seeing you next year!

Author: Emily Pearson

In April Ellen and Marina visited the lab of Dr Sheila van Berkel, a postdoctoral researcher based at the Centre for Child and Family studies at the University of Leiden (The Netherlands). Sheila and her team have been developing a new coding measure to assess coparenting behaviour in triadic interactions. Ellen and Marina are both interested in coparenting, which is defined as the relationship between two caregivers and describes the way they support and coordinate care for a child of whom they are both responsible.

Coparenting is assessed by recording two caregivers interacting with their child while playing together, completing a building task and then tidying up toys. These recordings are then coded to see how much each of the parents are enjoying the interaction, the amount they cooperate when they interact together, the amount one parent may block the other parent’s attempts at playing with the child and how much each parent participates in the interaction. Coding these key aspects of the coparenting relationship allows for researchers to gain an understanding of the quality of this relationship and how it manifests in day to day interactions.

The purpose of the trip was for Ellen and Marina to be trained in this coding measure and to ensure that both the UK and Dutch research teams were coding the videos the same way. After two days of watching videos, coding and discussions, the team reached a good level of reliability in their coding. Ellen and Marina can now use the coding scheme to code the videos being recorded in the research being carried out in the UK. This will lead to new insights in to the ways in which the coparenting relationship affects child development as well as coparent’s wellbeing and mental health.

In addition to learning about the coding scheme, they also had the chance to hear more about the innovative research being carried out in the Centre for Child and Family Studies. One of their current studies is investigating the ways in which parents interpret their child’s behaviour. Their research suggests that if the parent attributes responsibility to the child and interprets their child’s behaviour as hostile, this could linked to a higher risk of abuse. For example when a child knocks over a drink, the parent can either interpret this as the child doing this purposely to annoy them (the child is being naughty) or whether it was accidental (the child is being clumsy). In addition the team also presented on a newly developed version of the VIPP programme for use with children who are in foster care. This was especially interesting as both Ellen and Marina are involved on a trial (The Healthy Start Happy Start study) which is using a version of the same programme (VIPP-Co).

In addition to learning a lot from the team in Leiden Ellen and Marina also got the chance to explore Leiden. They also experienced Koningsdag (King’s Day), which is a national holiday in the Netherlands, and brought back lots if packets of Stroopwafel (syrup waffle biscuits) to remind them of their trip when coding hours of videos back in their office in London.

​Author: Ellen Grimås