Eighty-one adolescent and young mother-infant dyads have been divided into two groups with/without traumatic experiences in maternal history to examine the effect of maternal traumatic experiences on the quality of mother-infant relationship. At infant 3 months, mother-infant interaction was video-recorded. Results showed that adolescent and young…

This study examined the stability of three patterns of infant regulatory behavior identified in the face-to-face still-face (FFSF) paradigm at 3 and 9 months--social-positive oriented, distressed-inconsolable, and self-comfort oriented--and whether variations in infants' heart-rate were correlated with them. Although some studies have examined the…

Fragmented sleep is common in infancy. Although night awakening is known to decrease with age, in some infants night awakening is more persistent and continues into older ages. However, the influence of fragmented sleep on development is poorly known. In the present study, the longitudinal relationship between fragmented sleep and psychomotor…

Prosocial behavior in early childhood is a precursor to later adaptive social functioning. This investigation leveraged mother-reported, physiological, and observational data to examine children's prosocial development from age 2 to age 4 (N = 125). Maternal emotion socialization (ES) strategies and children's parasympathetic regulation have each…

Despite the abundance of research on attachment and on the effects of separation, very little research examines the actual processes of separation occurring daily when mothers leave their children (age 6-18 months) in out-of-home group care. In the current study, this everyday process of separation was observed for three months…

Background: Emotion regulation (ER) has been conceptualized as an ongoing process of the individual's emotion patterns in relation to moment-to-moment contextual demands. In contrast to traditional approaches of descriptively quantizing ER, we employed a dynamic approach to ER by examining key transitions in infants of clinically depressed and…

Using a longitudinal, prospective adoption design, the authors of this study examined the effects of the environment (adoptive parents' depressive symptoms and responsiveness) and genetic liability of maternal depression (inferred by birth mothers' major depressive disorder [MDD]) on the development of fussiness in adopted children between 9 and…

In the study presented, the development of different fear regulation behaviors and their associations with preceding maternal sensitivity and depression is addressed. A sample of 64 mother-child pairs was examined at the children's ages of 4, 12, and 30 months. Four-month negative reactivity and 12- and 30- month behavioral inhibition and fear…

Quantifies behavioral periodicities or cycles during face-to-face interaction between three- and five-month-old term and preterm infants and their mothers. Compares the temporal organization of social interaction between term and preterm infants. Spectral and cross-spectral techniques showed the existence of periodicities. Differences were found…

Is infant looking behavior in ambiguous situations best described in terms of information seeking (social referencing) or as attachment behavior? Twelve-month-old infants were assigned to 1 of 2 conditions (Study 1); each infant's mother provided positive information about an ambiguous toy and an experimenter provided positive information. In…

This project hoped to specify the role of early, mother-infant separation in determining later maternal behavior. Clinically, the results suggest that such a separation should be avoided whenever possible and should be minimized when separation is unavoidable. (Authors)

Analyzed effects of modeling and contingent praise on infant imitation of three responses: motor-with-toy, motor-without-toy, or vocal. Found a systematic increase in the percentages of training and probe models matched by the three 12- to 14-month-olds following introduction of model-and-praise treatment conditions. Nonmatching responses did not…

Portions of this paper were presented at the 1967 meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development, New York.

Sixty infants (ages 11 to 26 weeks) were divided into 3 groups (healthy, preterm healthy, and preterm sick). Ten minutes of infant-parent interaction were videotaped, and mothers viewed the tapes and identified infant behaviors they interpreted. Differences in behavioral interpretations among mothers are identified, as are correlations among…

Examines the validity of a maternal rating scale for pacifier-attachment in a laboratory setting. Once mothers' abilities to assess their children's attachment behavior were ascertained, a second study was designed to contrast the patterns of attachment to pacifiers, blankets, and hard objects in children between 1.5 and 63 months. (Author/MP)