This study examines the infant-father attachment in infants born preterm (<?1500?g at birth and/or?<?37 weeks gestation) in comparison to full-term infants. The infant-father attachment was assessed using the Strange Situation Procedure at a (corrected) age of 15 months. We found at least half of preterm and full-term infants (50.0% and…

Applying an eye-tracking technique, we tested early verb understanding in 48 infants aged 9 and 10 months. Infants saw two objects presented side by side and heard a verb that referred to a common action with one of these objects (e.g., eating relating to a banana). The verbs were spoken by the parent in an interrogative manner in order to elicit…

Based on the concept of educational quality of the home learning environment, stimulating and responsive family time is crucial for children's development. In turn, time use depends on the developmental stages in childhood. International studies indicate that family patterns of time use are associated with a family's resources (i.e. level of…

Infants' language exposure largely involves face-to-face interactions providing acoustic and visual speech cues but also social cues that might foster language learning. Yet, both audiovisual speech information and social information have so far received little attention in research on infants' early language development. Using a preferential…

The aim of the present study was to examine differences in emotion expression and emotion regulation in emotion-eliciting situations in early adolescence from a bio-psycho-social perspective, specifically investigating the influence of early mother-infant attachment and attachment disorganization on behavioural and adrenocortical responses. The…

This article addresses the socialization of emotion expression in infancy. It argues that in order to adequately understand emotion development we need to consider the appraisal of emotion expression through caregivers in mundane, everyday interactions. Drawing on sociocultural and Bakhtinian theorizing, it claims that caregivers' appraisals of…

Most studies of infant cognition focus on group data from single domains. Yet, without the multi-domain testing of the same infants longitudinally, such data cannot be used to evaluate whether the timing of cognitive change occurs in a domain-general or a domain-specific way. We present the results of a longitudinal study pooling data from three…

This study analyzed German and Nso mothers' auditory, proximal, and visual contingent responses to their infants' nondistress vocalizations in postnatal Weeks 4, 6, 8, 10, and 12. Visual contingency scores increased whereas proximal contingency scores decreased over time for the independent (German urban middle-class, N = 20) but not the…

Child rearing is a universal task, yet there are differing solutions according to the dynamics of socio-cultural milieu in which children are raised. Cultural models of what is considered good or bad parenting become explicit in everyday routine practices. Focusing on early mother-infant interactions in this article we examine the discursive…

Cultures differ with respect to parenting strategies already during infancy. Distal parenting, i.e., face-to-face context and object stimulation, is prevalent in urban educated middle-class families of Western cultures; proximal parenting, i.e., body contact and body stimulation, is prevalent in rural, low-educated farmer families. Parents from…

This study investigates whether attachment quality at ages 1, 6 and 16 is related to autonomy and relatedness behavior in adolescence. In a follow-up of the Regensburg Longitudinal Study, forty-three 16-year-old adolescents and their mothers were assessed in a revealed differences task and a planning a vacation task. Attachment was assessed during…

In this longitudinal study, the authors addressed intracultural variation on fathers' interactions with their 3-month-old infants, their ideas about parental care, and the timing of their children's self-recognition at the age of 18-20 months. Participants were 24 middle-class German fathers and their firstborn children. Two behavioral clusters…

For every five healthy babies and infants, there is at least one who brings unusual stresses for its parents with behaviors such as inconsolable crying, sleep disorders, refusal to eat, chronic moodiness, incessant demands for attention, fearful clinging, or tantrums. Available for the first time in English, this influential German collection…

Forty-nine German 12-month-old infants and their mothers were videotaped in Ainsworth's Strange Situation; a measure of quality of attachment relationships. Forty-six of these infants were videotaped again at 18-months with their fathers. Results are compared to American samples and discussed in terms of parental attempts to cope with the demands…

Videotaped 10 West African Nso and 10 German mother-infant interactional sequences and conducted discussion groups about videotaped mother-infant interactions to investigate conceptions of motor stimulation and developmental goals. Results highlighted different perceptions of good parenting. Nso women focused significantly more on motor handling,…