The author argues that infants frequently give us hints that they are capable of fundamentally spiritual experiences. Three such experiences are presence, joy, and awareness of others' awareness. When babies begin to sense disapproval or anger in their caregivers, they begin a search for love that includes the development of a False Self and a…

The author presents an overview of basic concepts of early childhood temperament and argues that child behavior is the result of the interplay between nature and culture. Due to inconsistencies in the field, temperament research and clinical application can be challenging for early childhood practitioners to interpret and apply to their daily…

Despite the need for leadership in the infant-family field, few professionals who work with, study, develop policies for, or advocate for young children and their families have opportunities to develop leadership skills because developing leadership is not usually a focus of regular academic preparation, on-the-job-training, and professional…

This paper looks at how the capacity for separateness arises, and some of the ways in which gender is thought about in relation to this. A link is made with technical considerations about the stance we as therapists take with our patients. In particular, therapists often choose or are prodded into a role that is more empathic or more…

Syntactic knowledge is widely held to be partially innate, rather than learned. In a classic example, it is sometimes argued that children know the proper use of anaphoric "one," although that knowledge could not have been learned from experience. Lidz et al. [Lidz, J., Waxman, S., & Freedman, J. (2003). What infants know about syntax but couldn't…

This study examined infants' enumeration of puppet jumping tasks. In Experiment 1, 5-7-month-old infants were familiarized to a puppet jumping two or three times, and tested with both numbers of jumps. Infants looked significantly longer at the new number, replicating Wynn [Psychol. Sci. 7 (1996) 164]. To probe further the stability of infants'…

This study utilized retrospective video analysis to distinguish sensory-motor patterns in infants with fragile X syndrome (FXS) (n=11) from other infants [i.e., autism (n=11), other developmental delay (n=10), typical (n=11)] at 9-12 months of age. Measures of development, autistic features, and FMRP were assessed at the time of entry into the…

A personal attitudes model (i.e., infant feeding choices are based on personal attitudes primarily) and a structural factors model (i.e., feeding choices are shaped by the structural contexts of women's lives, as much as personal attitudes) of women's breastfeeding behavior were tested by surveying a longitudinal sample of 548 mostly European…

This study investigated the effects of familiarization and attention on event-related potential (ERP) correlates of recognition memory in infants. Infants 4.5, 6, or 7.5 months of age were either familiarized with 2 stimuli that were used during later testing or presented 2 stimuli that were not used later. Then, infants were presented with a…

Play is a powerful avenue for a young child's learning. Child-development and brain-research experts agree that children are active meaning-makers from birth. Babies arrive in this world with the capacity to respond, imitate, initiate, explore, and eventually engage in symbolic processes. Play is young children's natural learning mechanism. Play…

Humans, infants and adults alike, automatically mimic a variety of behaviors. Such mimicry facilitates social functioning, including establishment of interpersonal rapport and understanding of other minds. This fundamental social process may thus be impaired in disorders such as autism characterized by socio-emotional and communicative deficits.…

Visual search studies with adults have shown that stimuli that contain a unique perceptual feature pop out from dissimilar distractors and are unaffected by the number of distractors. Studies with very young infants have suggested that they too might exhibit pop-out. However, infant studies have used paradigms in which pop-out is measured in…

Sequences of notes contain several different types of pitch cues, including both absolute and relative pitch information. What factors determine which of these cues are used when learning about tone sequences? Previous research suggests that infants tend to preferentially process absolute pitch patterns in continuous tone sequences, while other…

The ability to understand references to the absent enables conversation to move beyond the here-and-now to matters distant in both space and time. Such understanding requires appreciating the relation between language and communicative intent: one must recognize speakers' intentions to use language to converge on a shared conversational focus that…

Purpose: Given the importance of education-based approaches in stimulating breastfeeding, the paper aims to investigate the feasibility and efficacy of discussing breastfeeding with school children. Design/methodology/approach: Two workshops about breastfeeding and on the view of the human being as a mammal were carried out in schools in Brazil.…