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…

Maternal singing is considered vital to infant well-being. This study focuses on vocal emotion expressions in infant-directed singing among mothers in war conditions. It examines the questions: (a) how traumatic war events and mental health problems are associated with the content and valence of vocal emotion expressions and (b) how these emotion…

Emotion regulation is essential to cognitive, social, and emotional development and difficulties with emotion regulation portend future socioemotional, academic, and behavioral difficulties. There is growing awareness that many developmental outcomes previously thought to begin their development in the postnatal period have their origins in the…

Objective: No previous longitudinal study has examined the impact of comorbid maternal personality disorder (PD) and depression on child development. We set out to examine whether maternal PD and depression assessed at 2 months post partum would be independently associated with adverse developmental outcomes at 18 months of age. Method: Women were…

Investigated 4-month-olds' responsiveness to others' affective expressions in the context of a peekaboo game. Found differential patterns of visual attention and affective responsiveness to happiness/surprise, anger, fear, and sadness. Findings underscore importance of contextual information for facilitating recognition of emotion expressions and…

Reports on a portion of a long-term investigation carried out to determine the prognostic significance of newborn behavioral assessments for later development and behavior, in terms of identifying a subpopulation which would be a high risk group. (Author/SDH)

This document reports a study investigating the effects of father absence on measures of cognitive, social, and motivational development in infancy. The sample included 54 black infants, 27 of whom were classified "father-absent." This classification was based on two indices, (1) a dichotomy of father-absent or father-present based on…

An investigation of the short term stability of infants' responses to strangers was conducted. Ss were 60 randomly chosen full-term family-reared infants, 30 boys and 30 girls, selected to fit into three age groups of 8, 10 and 12 months. The experimental design was such that the order of first, second, and third visits was counter-balanced…

The ability to form secure attachments during early childhood promotes a lifetime of emotional health. This article describes emotional milestones for babies (i.e., activities that promote self-comfort and self-control), as well as for toddlers. In the case of toddlers, a profound emotional milestone that is accomplished during the first year is…

This selective bibliography cites ERIC documents describing research on infants. Entires are taken from "Research in Education (RIE)" and "Current Index to Journals in Education (CIJE)," 1972 through 1974. Descriptor (index) terms used to search the ERIC system include: Infants, Infancy, and Infant Behavior. (Author/CS)

Observation indicates that affect is experienced prior to organized thought. After five months emotional responses are increasingly differentiated and independent of physical state. All childhood learning is propelled by affect. Adults who work with children must recognize their emotions to facilitate their acquisition of skills and knowledge.…

This volume consists of reports of individual studies and surveys of research work on mother-infant interactions. It is divided into two parts. The first section presents a wide range of studies on mother-infant relations as exhibited in the behavior of animals. The second part, concerning human behavior, includes studies on the natural history of…

Because of the sparcity of research on infants' response to social events, especially different categories of people, infants between 8 and 18 months of age were introduced to five different social events: strange adult male and female, strange 4-year-old female, mother, and self. The infants' responses indicated that approach affects stimulus…

Reviews six books on child cognitive and emotional development. The books address the following topics: the assessment of cognitive competence; children's theories of mind; early grammatical development; the psychological consequences of parental belief systems for children; the role of culture in human development; and perspectives from…

Papers and discussants' comments from a symposium on issues concerning infants' reactions to strangers are presented. Researchers agreed that there is a developmental shift in infant behavior at 7 to 9 months of age when the infant becomes more cautious in approaching strangers. However, investigators hypothesize that the presence of the mother,…