A longitudinal study was conducted to assess (1) the validity of the Denver Prescreening Developmental Questionnaire (DPDQ) in a predominantly black, lower socioeconomic population, and (2) the effect of an educational package in increasing parental accuracy in responses to the DPDQ. Randomly selected mothers of 127 infants enrolled in a follow-up…

This study focused on two questions: (1) is there a difference between social and mechanical non-social causality in infancy? and (2) do infants use information about contact between objects in inanimate, mechanical causal sequences more than they use it in situations where a social event is to be caused? Forty-eight 10- to 10.9-month-old infants…

This demonstration study examines the affective reactions of infants when they imitate or fail to imitate play behavior modeled by an adult. Subjects were twenty-four 18-month-old and twenty-four 24-month-old male and female infants. Each infant visited the laboratory twice with an inter-session interval of 48 hours. At each session, the infant…

This research correlates maternal sociodemographic and psychological data and dimensions of maternal behavior at four and twelve months with dimensions of infant adjustment and competence at twelve months. Interviews of 321 low-income mothers were completed during the third trimester of pregnancy, at four months and at twelve months.…

This study was designed to determine if the failure of previous investigations to find habituation and response to novelty in infants younger than 2 months of age was because the stimuli used were too complex or because a constant number of trials rather than an individual criterion of habituation was used. A total of 24 infants between 5 and 6…

This paper presents a system for synthesizing the educational objectives of infant curricula and illustrates the procedure by reviewing the synthesis of several specific objectives of the Carolina Infant Curriculum. Five sources are used in the synthetic process: (1) consumer opinions, (2) developmental theory, (3) developmental facts, (4)…

This paper explores the effects of infant predominant state of arousal upon very early mother-infant interaction, through observation of a group of 20 healthy 3-day-old nursery roommates and their mothers during hospital feeding sessions. In an experimental procedure involving a modified time-sampling technique, two observers simultaneously…

This study tests the proposition that selective behaviors of both mother and infant during feeding are predictors of weight gain during the first month of life. Forty normal mother-neonate pairs were studied, and the target behaviors were examined using an adaptation of the techniques developed by Brown and Bakeman (in which approximately 60…

The interactive creation of an attachment bond of affective communication between the psychobiologically attuned primary caregiver and the infant is central to human emotional development. These emotional transactions directly influence the experience-dependent maturation of the infant's early developing right hemisphere, which is in a growth…

This study examined behavioral development during the first year of life of 41 infants diagnosed with cerebral palsy, hypotonia, or hypertonia. The KID Scale, an empirically normed, caregiver-report inventory which covers behavior in five domains (cognitive, motor, language, self help, and social) was administered at about 5, 9, and 12 months…

Despite previous research indicating that early negative child behavior and the quality of parent-child relationships are predictive of later externalizing problems, few investigators have attempted to trace these antecedents back to infancy. In a sample of 100 infants from low-income families, infant persistence and maternal responsiveness were…

This paper presents a study of the looking and looking away or gaze alternation behavior of both full term and preterm infants in the presence of varying degrees of facial animation. The faces used in the study included, in increasing order of animation, a Raggedy Ann doll's face, a moving and talking doll's face, a mother's less animated face…

The purpose of this study was to examine Anglo-American and Mexican-American parents' attitudes about infant socialization. Occupational status of fathers was used to identify participants' social class, and mothers and fathers were interviewed in English or Spanish 9 weeks after the birth of their first child. Attitudes were examined regarding…

Developmental kinesics is the acquisition of nonverbal conversational behavior by the child. Semiotics is the study of what behavior means. Together they express the relationship of content and expression. Physiologically, verbal language and paralanguage represent the vocal-auditory mode, while kinesics represents the gestural-visual mode.…

This paper presents results of a generalizability assessment of two sets of scales designed to evaluate the quality of verbal and nonverbal interactions between parent and child. The Nursing Child Assessment Feeding Scale (NCAFS) and Nursing Child Assessment Teaching Scales (NCATS) were developed as part of a longitudinal study aimed at…