ABSTRACT
Reciprocity was described by Brazelton in a paper published in 1974 (Brazelton et al., 1974) after he had carried out a frame-by-frame analysis of the ®lmed interactions between mothers and their babies. He had carried out the ®lming, however, in 1967 (Trevarthen, 1980), so the results were probably already known to interested child development researchers well before the publication of the 1974 paper. This was the ®rst time that the interaction was minutely recorded within the child development research tradition. Other child development researchers were astonished by the results and have developed various aspects of the idea, which will be described later. The surprise for the scienti®c community was to see how active and how organised the baby was in relating to its mother. `I had not realised, at least as a scientist, how expressive and how sensitive a baby could be' (Trevarthen, 1980, p. 317). The baby was not a passive object that simply experienced things happening to it. The baby was active both in eliciting the interaction and in regulating the interaction, from birth. This can be seen in a book (Murray & Andrews, 2000), the ®rst to include extensive frame-by-frame photographs of the interaction between an infant and his mother and father from birth. This, and other subsequent research, has established that a baby is born with far more social skills and acumen than anyone had previously realised.
