This study establishes a sequence of developing mental state understandings in infants. We used three violation-of-expectation paradigms to assess fifty-seven 16-month-olds' ability to (a) infer an actress's intention from her prior repeated approaches to an object, (b) recognize her emotion by watching her facial-emotional display, and (c) deduce…

Studies investigating imitation are usually conducted with adult models in Western contexts; therefore, the influence of cultural context and the model's age on infants' imitation is largely unknown. This study assessed deferred imitation in 9-month-old infants from the German middle-class ("N" = 44) and the ethnic group of Nso in rural…

The aim of this report was to investigate the associations between attachment state of mind, romantic attachment style, and indices of maternal functioning in two relational spheres: the mother-child relationship (i.e., maternal sensitivity and child attachment security) and the marital relationship (i.e., mothers' and their partners' marital…

Children's socialization environments reflect cultural models of parenting. In particular, Euro-American and Chinese families have been described as following different socialization scripts. The present study assesses parenting behaviors as well as parenting ethnotheories with respect to three-month-old babies in middle-class families in Los…