Prior studies of mother-infant interaction have generally used a variable-centered approach to associate face-to-face communication with psychosocial outcomes. Herein, we use a person-centered approach to identify clusters of infants who exhibit similar behavioral profiles during face-to-face communication with their mothers. Four infant…

This study examined the relevance of infant temperament, parent personality and parenting stress for children's socio-emotional development, looking in addition for any differences between mothers and fathers. Participants, from a community sample, were 410 mothers and fathers reporting their personality (NEO Personality Inventory), child…

Eye tracking research has shown that infants develop a repertoire of attentional capacities during the first year. The majority of studies examining the early development of attention comes from Western, high-resource countries. We examined visual attention in a heterogeneous sample of infants in rural Malawi (N = 312-376, depending on analysis).…

Little is known about the origins of the pointing gesture. We sought to gain insight into its emergence by investigating individual differences in the pointing of 12-month-old infants in two ways. First, we looked at differences in the communicative and interactional uses of pointing and asked how different hand shapes relate to point frequency,…

Nighttime sleep awakenings and infant and family characteristics were measured longitudinally in more than 1,200 infants when the infants were 6, 15, 24, and 36 months old. By 6 months of age, the majority of children slept through the night, awakening their mothers only about once or twice per week. However, not all children followed this…

Background: Developing control of attention helps infants to regulate their emotions, and individual differences in attention skills may shape how infants perceive and respond to their socio-emotional environments. This study examined whether the temperamental dimensions of self-regulation and negative emotionality relate to infants' attention…

Objective: To examine the underlying mechanisms of adults' intended caregiving responses to cry sounds in a behavioral genetic design and to investigate the role of cry pitch and perceived urgency in sensitive and harsh caregiving responses. Methods: The sample consisted of 184 adult twin pairs (18-69 years), including males and females, parents…

The purpose of the current study was to investigate the development of sleep-wake and melatonin diurnal rhythms over the first 3 months of life, and the potential effect of bed-sharing on their development. It was hypothesized that increased maternal contact through bed-sharing would affect the development of rhythms in human infants. Ten…

Data support three conclusions: (1) that notable individual differences in the interaction patterns of mothers and Down syndrome children exist, (two) that maternal directiveness and sensitivity are separable dimensions of maternal style, and (3) that individual differences in mother/child interaction patterns may be related to mental development…

Individual differences in four separation-related behaviors, protest, following, and positive greetings or crying on reunion, were examined for 26 infants observed intensively at home during the fourth quarter-year, and considered in relation to one another, to other infant behaviors, and to maternal behavior. Contrary to Freudian and other…

Studies the effects of mothers' presence and absence on two infants from birth to two years. (AJ)

The purpose of this paper is to outline some application of the Markov Process to the study of state and state changes. The essence of this mathematical concept consists of the analysis of sequences of infant responses in interaction with its environment. Categories can be defined which reflect the joint occurrence of an infant's behavior (or…

Data indicate that the interventions provided differed in their effectiveness in calming newborns to a highly significant degree. (Authors)