Research suggests that women's autonomic nervous system responses to infant cries capture processes that affect their parenting behaviors. The aim of this study was to build on prior work by testing whether pregnant women's autonomic responses to an unfamiliar infant crying also predict their infants' emerging regulation abilities. Participants…

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…

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…