The recognition that adverse childhood experiences have long-term negative effects parallels the explosion of evidence demonstrating how early experience gets into the body and brain. This knowledge, in turn, has significant implications for treatment of emotional and behavioral problems in early childhood. In this article, I offer a guide to…

Around the end of the first year of life, infants develop a social referencing ability -- using emotional information from others to guide their own behavior. Much research on social referencing has focused on changes in behavior in response to emotional information. The present study was an investigation of the changes in neural responses that…

Adult-infant interactions operate simultaneously across multiple domains and at multiple levels -- from physiology to behaviour. Unpackaging and understanding them, therefore, involve analysis of multiple data streams. In this study, we tested physiological responses and cognitive preferences for infant and adult faces in adult females and males.…

As humans, we are attuned to the moods and emotions of others. This understanding of emotions enables us to interpret other people's actions on the basis of their emotional displays. However, the development of this capacity is not well understood. Here we show a developmental pattern in 10- and 14-month-old infants' sensitivity to others'…

This article challenges traditional approaches to emotion as a discreet biological or dialectic process in the early years. In doing so the proposition is made that emotion is an answerable social act of meaning-making and self-hood. Inspired by Bakhtinian philosophy, which resists separating emotion from cognition or the individual from their…

Fifteen-month-old infants detected a violation when an actor performed an action that did not match her preceding vocal cue: The infants looked reliably longer when the actor expressed a humorous vocal cue followed by a sweet action or expressed a sweet vocal cue followed by a humorous action, than when the vocal cue was followed by a matching…

Most infants with more than 6 weeks of crawling experience completely avoid the deep side of a visual cliff (Campos, Bertenthal, & Kermoian, 1992; Gibson & Walk, 1960). However, some experienced crawlers do move onto the transparent surface suspended several feet above the ground. An important question is whether these "nonavoiders" lack wariness…

Infants' visual preference for infant-directed (ID) faces over adult-directed (AD) faces was examined in two experiments that introduced controls for emotion. Infants' eye movements were recorded as they viewed a series of side-by-side dynamic faces. When emotion was held constant, 6-month-old infants showed no preference for ID faces over AD…

Differences in infant distress and regulatory behaviors based on the quality of attachment to mother, emotion context (frustration versus fear), and whether or not mothers were actively involved in the emotion-eliciting tasks were examined in a sample of ninety-eight 16-month-old infants and their mothers. Dyads participated in the Strange…

Our goal in the present study was to examine the effects of maternal smoking during pregnancy on infant self-regulation, exploring birth weight as a mediator and sex as a moderator of risk. A prospective sample of 218 infants was assessed at 6 months of age. Infants completed a battery of tasks assessing working memory/inhibition, attention, and…

In this study, relations between emotional resonance responses to another's distress, emotion regulation, and self-other discrimination were investigated in infants three-, six-, and nine-months-old. We measured the emotional reactions to the pain cry of a peer, along with the ability to regulate emotions and to discriminate between self and other…

The current study examined the influence of maternal characteristics on the development of infant smiling and laughter, a marker of early positive emotionality (PE) and how maternal characteristics and the development of infant PE contributed to subsequent maternal parenting. One hundred fifty-nine mothers with 4-month-old infants participated.…

We examined two aspects of temperamental approach in early infancy, positive reactivity and anger, and their unique and combined influences on maternal reports of child surgency and attention focusing at 4 years of age. One hundred and fourteen infants were observed for their positive reactions to novel stimuli at 4 months, and their anger…

Using electrocardiogram data with 78 six-month-old infants, this study examined the presence or absence of brief orienting bradycardia during the onset of maternal arm-restraint and subsequent differences between infants on behavioral organization during restraint. Results showed that 45 of the infants exhibited brief episodes of bradycardia at…

Early in the first year of life infants exhibit equivalent performance distinguishing among people within their own race and within other races. However, with development and experience, their face recognition skills become tuned to groups of people they interact with the most. This developmental tuning is hypothesized to be the origin of adult…