The current study addressed whether mothers' explicitly expressed and implicitly held attitudes towards infant crying (n = 71) differ with each other and how these two types of attitudes relate to mothers' depressive symptoms during the transition to parenthood. Neither mothers' explicit nor implicit attitudes towards infant crying predicted…

Child's crying is the stimuli serving the development of a child-parent relationship through evoking child-oriented and parent-oriented parental reactions. Individual differences in parental reactions to crying have been partly explained by parental and child's temperament. We conducted two studies to verify the predicting effects of temperamental…

The aim of this longitudinal study was to examine the association of infant fussing and crying with self-regulation in toddlerhood and the preschool years, as well as the moderating role of maternal sensitivity therein. When children (n = 149, 53.69% boys) were 6 months old, parents reported on their fussing and crying using a cry diary, and…

This study examined the predictive significance of maternal sensitivity in early childhood for electrophysiological responding to and cognitive appraisals of infant crying at midlife in a sample of 73 adults (age = 39 years; 43 females; 58 parents) from the Minnesota Longitudinal Study of Risk and Adaptation. When listening to an infant crying,…

This study explored first-time fathers' perceived child care skill over the transition to parenthood, based on face-to-face interviews of 152 working-class, dual-earner couples. Analyses examined the associations among fathers' perceived skill and prenatal perception of skill, child care involvement, mothers' breastfeeding, maternal gatekeeping,…

This study investigates individual differences in the contribution of specific maternal regulatory behaviors to the mother-infant dyad's regulation of infant distress response. Additionally, we examined the stability of infants' stress responses and the stability of specific maternal soothing behaviors. The sample included 128 mother-infant dyads…

Examined cardiac response and ratings of subjective aversiveness to recordings of unfamiliar infant cries in 60 primiparous women at 32 weeks' gestation. Mothers who prenatally rated the crying recordings as more aversive postnatally described their infants as more fussy and unpredictable. Women who showed greater cardiac acceleration to the cries…

A study investigated the performance of high- and low-risk (for child abuse) mothers on cognitive measures in a cry (crying infant) and no-cry condition. High-risk mothers had lower conceptual ability, cognitive flexibility, and problem-solving skills. The difficulty high-risk mothers have in using feedback to modify their behavior is discussed.…