This study examined both differential patterns and the stability of infants' (N = 70) distress reactivity across mother and stranger arm-restraint conditions when infants were 6 and 9 months of age. Reactivity measures included observational variables for the rise, intensity, and duration of infant distress as well as motor activities associated…

This study examined the developmental course of infants' attentional preferences for 3 types of infant-directed affective intent, which have been shown to be commonly used at particular ages in the first year of life. Specifically, Kitamura and Burnham (2003) found mothers' tone of voice in infant-directed speech is most comforting between birth…

The relations of childhood fearfulness (observed and adult reported) and adult-reported shyness at 18 (n = 256) and 30 (n = 230) months of age were assessed. Fear was positively related to shyness concurrently and longitudinally, but slightly more consistently at 18 months. The moderating roles of observed maternal sensitivity and children's sex…

Cultural variation in durations, relations, and contingencies of mother-infant person- and object-directed behaviors were examined for 121 nonmigrant Latino mother-infant dyads in South America, Latina immigrants from South America and their infants living in the United States, and European American mother-infant dyads. Nonmigrant Latina mothers…

Two experiments examined toddlers' performance on a new task designed to examine the development of body self-awareness. The new task was conceived from observations by Piaget (1953/1977) and theoretical work from Povinelli and Cant (1995) and involved a toy shopping cart to the back of which a small mat had been attached. Children were asked to…

Research has identified associations between indicators of social disadvantage and the presence of child sleep problems. We examined the longitudinal development of infant sleep in families experiencing high (n = 58) or low (n = 64) levels of psychosocial adversity, and the contributions of neonatal self-regulatory capacities and maternal settling…

Developmental studies of face processing have revealed age-related changes in how infants allocate neurophysiological resources to the face of a caregiver and an unfamiliar adult. We hypothesize that developmental changes in how infants interact with their caregiver are related to the changes in brain response. We studied 6-month-olds because this…

Using four-dimensional (4D) ultrasonography, arm and hand movements toward the face were examined in 27 human fetuses at 19 to 35 weeks of gestation, thereby enabling the continuous monitoring of their faces and other surface features such as the extremities. More than half of the observed arm movements resulted in the hand touching the mouth…

We used an encoder version of cascade correlation to simulate Younger and Cohen's (1983, 1986) finding that 10-month-olds recover attention on the basis of correlations among stimulus features, but 4- and 7-month-olds recover attention on the basis of stimulus features. We captured these effects by varying the score threshold parameter in cascade…

From Aesop to Sun Tzu, the importance of working together has long been acknowledged. Yet as long as cooperation has existed, so have the difficulties associated with it. Pooling two fields might mean twice the power, but this union also brings twice the jargon, twice the competing theories, and twice the head butting. Nonetheless, in this…

This study examined unique associations of multiple distal context variables (family socioeconomic status [SES], maternal employment, and paternal parenting) and proximal maternal (personality, intelligence, and knowledge; behavior, self-perceptions, and attributions) and child (age, gender, representation, language, and sociability)…