Depression in mothers is consistently associated with reduced caregiving sensitivity and greater infant negative affect expression. The current article examined the real-time behavioral mechanisms underlying these associations using Granger causality time series analyses in a sample of mothers (N = 194; 86.60% White) at elevated risk for…

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…

Caregivers' sensitive responses to infant cry have long-term consequences for adaptive child development. Although mounting evidence suggests that parents who experience high emotionality to infant cry respond less sensitively to infant cry, there is a dearth of knowledge on potential mechanisms underlying individual differences in emotionality to…

Pamela High, MS, MD, co-director of the Infant Behavior, Cry and Sleep Clinic at the Brown Center for the Study of Children at Risk, discusses the phenomena of infant crying and the impact it has on families. In most cases, infant crying will peak and resolve in the early months, but infant irritability can increase the risk of maternal…

Origins of mothers' and fathers' beliefs about infant crying were examined in 87 couples. Parents completed measures of emotion minimization in the family of origin, depressive symptoms, empathy, trait anger, and coping styles prenatally. At 6 months postpartum, parents completed a self-report measure of their beliefs about infant crying. Mothers…

Objective: Managing a crying infant is a challenge universally faced by new parents. This study examined whether parental interpretations, feelings, and behaviors following exposure to a 2-minute videotaped segment of a crying infant varied as a function of child physical abuse (CPA) risk and exposure to cues of hostility (i.e., hostile priming).…

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…

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…

While infant behaviour is influenced by maternal care, infant crying and dysregulated sleep can reciprocally affect maternal mood. The temperament and behaviour of two 4-12-months-old infant cohorts admitted with their mothers to a residential parenting program were examined using behaviour charts and the Short Infant Temperament Questionnaire…

Infant crying signals distress to potential caretakers who can alleviate the aversive conditions that gave rise to the cry. The cry signal results from coordination among several brain regions that control respiration and vocal cord vibration from which the cry sounds are produced. Previous work has shown a relationship between acoustic…