Parents commonly vocalize to infants to mitigate their distress, especially when holding them is not possible. Here we examined the relative efficacy of parents' speech and singing (familiar and unfamiliar songs) in alleviating the distress of 8- and 10-month-old infants (n = 68 per age group). Parent-infant dyads participated in 3 trials of the…

In previous studies, older as compared with younger individuals were more strongly motivated to regulate their momentary affect toward pleasant and calm states. Whether these motivational differences are also reflected in regulatory behavior and whether this behavior is efficient in terms of affect change, however, is unclear. To address these…

The links among mothers' compassionate love for their child, autonomic nervous system activity, and parenting behavior during less and more challenging mother-child interactions were examined. Mothers expressed and reported less negative affect when they exhibited autonomic patterns of increased parasympathetic dominance (high parasympathetic…

Examined arousal regulation as a function of levels of prenatal cocaine exposure in 4-month-olds, using a "still face" procedure. Found that, independent of several other factors, a greater percentage of heavily cocaine-exposed infants, compared to unexposed infants, showed less enjoyment during "en face" play with their mothers and continued to…