Examined intergenerational transmission of hostile parenting, moderating effects of child negative emotional reactivity, and links between second generation (G2) hostile parenting and G3 problem behaviors. Found that G1 mothers' hostile parenting when target participant was an adolescent (G2) predicted G2 hostile parenting toward their young child…

Examined effect of maternal support on the development of counting and cardinality in young children at 32, 38, and 44 months of age. At the two earlier times, children were more successful at counting than determining cardinal relationships in both supported and unsupported contexts. Findings suggest that both social and cognitive biases contain…

Investigated concurrent and longitudinal relations between attributions and negative behavioral interactions between 177 fathers and young adolescents. Found that children's attributions about father played a significant role in negative interactions within and across time. Father's earlier negative interactions with their children predicted…

Two studies addressed the normative aspects of attachments to mothers and fathers in middle childhood. Using both cross-sectional and longitudinal comparisons, we tested the hypothesis that children show no changes in perceptions of availability of attachment figures across the later middle childhood years, but do utilize attachment figures less…

This research examined associations among demographic variables, parenting strategies, and a theory-of-mind battery including measures of perception, desire, belief, and emotion understanding in preschoolers. After controlling for children's cognitive ability and age, regression analyses found that maternal education related positively with…

Investigated attachment security and behavior in 34 physically disabled infants and 26 non-disabled infants using convergent, categorical, and continuous (Attachment Behavior Q-Set) measures of relationship, based on the same set of home observations. Proportions of attachment classifications were identical for each group, but insecure disabled…

The present study compares conceptions about parenting in two cultural communities that may be expected to hold different views on parent-child relationships. Sociodemographically diverse samples of 46 Northern German and 39 West African Nso women evaluated parenting behavior observed in 10 Nso and 10 German videotaped mother-infant interaction…

Two studies examined the influence of maternal discourse style and security of attachment on preschoolers' emotion understanding. Findings indicated that neither predicted 3-year-olds' emotion understanding. Secure attachment predicted higher emotion understanding among 5-year-olds, especially in the context of maternal use of elaborative…

Examined validity of the California Attachment Procedure (CAP), which does not involve mother-child separations. Overall, toddlers were more likely to be classified as secure in the CAP than in the Strange Situation (SS) test. The CAP yielded higher rates of security, particularly for children in day care, and security in the CAP correlated more…

This study explored the relation of children's emotional functioning to children's behavior during individual planning and mother's and children's behaviors during joint planning. Participants were 118 mothers and their second-grade children. Mothers rated children on their emotional intensity and children rated themselves on their use of emotion…

This study examined Taiwanese-Canadian mothers' conceptions of personal freedom in everyday situations for their children and the influence of acculturation on their beliefs. Forty mothers of six- to eight-year-old children participated in a semistructured interview and sorting task. Interview responses revealed that, regardless of acculturation,…

Explored fathers' specific contribution to their children's attachment representation at various ages. Found fathers' play sensitivity to be a better predictor of the child's long-term attachment representation than the early infant-father security of attachment. (Author)

Examined anger regulation/display in family interaction when children were age 6 and child antisocial behavior longitudinally to age 7. Found that parents' ability to modulate their emotions/negative behavior and children's ability to down-regulate anger related to increased child anger latency. Hazard for child anger increased as parents'…

Role reversal is a relationship disturbance in which a parent looks to a child to meet a parent's need for comfort, parenting, intimacy or play, and the child attempts to meet these needs. The current study examined, within a developmental psychopathology framework, the effect of father and mother role reversal with toddlers on the development of…

Recent years have seen the emergence of accounts of the origins of the Disorganized attachment relationship in early mother-infant interaction, each building on the pioneering work of Main and Hesse--dysfunctional emotional processes figure prominently in all these accounts. This paper applies a framework based on two complementary theories of…