Exposure to infant crying is a well-established predictor of mothers' mental health. However, this association may reflect many potential mechanisms. Capturing dynamic fluctuations in mothers' states simultaneously with caregiving experiences is necessary to identify the real-time processes influencing mental health. In this study, we leveraged…

The goals of this study were to investigate (a) the dyadic relations of mothers' and children's perceptions of children's anxiety symptoms across development, (b) whether maternal perceptions of children's anxiety serve as a mediator of the association between maternal anxiety and child anxiety, and (c) whether sensitive/structured parenting…

Developmental theories suggest affect-biased attention, preferential attention to emotionally salient stimuli, emerges during infancy through coordinating individual differences. Here we examined bidirectional relations between infant affect-biased attention, temperamental negative affect, and maternal anxiety symptoms using a Random Intercepts…

Maternal anxiety and depression symptomatology are risk factors for the development of children's internalizing and externalizing behavior problems. However, it is still unclear whether chronic and transient symptoms relate differently to child behavior. The aim of this prospective longitudinal study (N = 193) was to investigate the associations…

This longitudinal study examined whether changes in maternal emotional distress (depressive, anxiety, and parenting-stress symptoms) predict changes over time in subjective and objective infant sleep. We recruited 226 Israeli expectant mothers (M age 28.8 ± 3.3), most representing the middle-upper socioeconomic class. Maternal depressive and…

Emotion-related socialization behaviors that occur during parent--child interactions are dynamic. According to Eisenberg, Cumberland, and Spinrad's (1998) model, ongoing parental reactions to emotions and discussions of emotion indirectly shape children's socioemotional competence throughout childhood and adolescence. Typically developing…

The effectiveness of Promoting First Relationships (PFR), a 10-week home visiting program with video feedback, was tested in a randomized controlled trial involving 252 mothers and their 8- to 12-week-old infants. Mothers were eligible if they initiated treatment after mental health screening (depression, anxiety, posttraumatic stress disorder…

We investigated the longitudinal associations among maternal pre- and postnatal depression, maternal anxiety, and children's language and cognitive development followed from 15 to 61 months. Furthermore, we assessed the protective role of children's early print experiences with books against the adverse effect of maternal depression on language…

Telomeres are the protective DNA-protein sequences appearing at the ends of chromosomes; they shorten with each cell division and are considered a biomarker of aging. Shorter telomere length and greater erosion have been associated with compromised physical and mental health and are hypothesized to be affected by early life stress. In the latter…

Deficits in executive function have been associated with internalizing problems in children. Yet little is known about the mechanisms that may explain this association. Using longitudinal data across elementary school years (N = 1,364), this study examined the role of peer difficulty and poor academic performance in understanding longitudinal…

Although research has demonstrated that both parents and peers influence adolescent development, it is not clear whether these relationships also serve as contexts for emotion socialization. In the current longitudinal study, we investigated whether maternal and peer emotion socialization were related to adolescent girls' daily emotions, emotion…

Emerging evidence suggests that prenatal stress does not solely undermine child functioning but increases developmental plasticity to both negative and positive postnatal experiences. Here we test this proposition using the Norwegian Mother and Child Cohort study while implementing an extreme-group (i.e., high vs. low prenatal stress) design (n =…

We examined the longitudinal relation between behavioral inhibition (BI) and social anxiety symptoms and behavior and the mediating role of emotion regulation (ER). Moreover, we investigated the influence of parenting behavior on the development of ER strategies. Participants were 291 children (135 male) followed longitudinally from 2 to 13 years.…

We aimed to test how deviations in a mother's own parenting stress (PS) levels across her child's transition to adolescence contribute to subsequent changes in her child's internalizing symptom levels. We tested both linear and curvilinear effects, as well as the extent to which a child's perception of his or her mother's attunement alters these…

Mindfulness in the parenting relationship has been proposed to help both parents and children better regulate stress, though this has not yet been shown at the physiological level. In this study, we tested relations between maternal mindfulness in parenting and both mothers' and their infants' hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis activity…