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…

Little is known about the origins of the pointing gesture. We sought to gain insight into its emergence by investigating individual differences in the pointing of 12-month-old infants in two ways. First, we looked at differences in the communicative and interactional uses of pointing and asked how different hand shapes relate to point frequency,…

Nighttime sleep awakenings and infant and family characteristics were measured longitudinally in more than 1,200 infants when the infants were 6, 15, 24, and 36 months old. By 6 months of age, the majority of children slept through the night, awakening their mothers only about once or twice per week. However, not all children followed this…

Background: Allelic variation in the promoter region of a gene that encodes tryptophan hydroxylase isoform 2 (TPH2), a rate-limiting enzyme of serotonin synthesis in the central nervous system, has been associated with variations in cognitive function and vulnerability to affective spectrum disorders. Little is known about the effects of this gene…

Background: Developing control of attention helps infants to regulate their emotions, and individual differences in attention skills may shape how infants perceive and respond to their socio-emotional environments. This study examined whether the temperamental dimensions of self-regulation and negative emotionality relate to infants' attention…

Relations between infant-mother attachment security at 15 months and infants' (N = 206) joint attention behaviors (a) with an experimenter at 8 and 15 months, and (b) with their mothers at 15 months were investigated. No concurrent or longitudinal relations were observed between attachment security and infants' tendency to respond to an…

What kind of featural information do infants rely on when they are trying to recognize a previously seen object? The question of whether infants use certain features (e.g., shape or color) more than others (e.g., luminance) can only be studied legitimately if visual salience is controlled, as the magnitude of feature values--how noticeable and…

Objective: To examine the underlying mechanisms of adults' intended caregiving responses to cry sounds in a behavioral genetic design and to investigate the role of cry pitch and perceived urgency in sensitive and harsh caregiving responses. Methods: The sample consisted of 184 adult twin pairs (18-69 years), including males and females, parents…

The purpose of the current study was to investigate the development of sleep-wake and melatonin diurnal rhythms over the first 3 months of life, and the potential effect of bed-sharing on their development. It was hypothesized that increased maternal contact through bed-sharing would affect the development of rhythms in human infants. Ten…

Acoustic properties of the cries of 14 infants were evaluated at both 2 and 4 weeks of age when the infants were lying in a supine position and when they were sitting upright in a car seat. In the upright position, infants' breathing was more rapid and showed less individual variability. The fundamental frequency of their cries increased in the…

Argues that there are important individual differences in infant responses to frustrating situations. These different patterns of behavior have important implications for subsequent responses to challenge. Also argues that these different coping responses are in part temperamentally based and that individual differences in temperament help us to…

Bruner's (1973) review of infant skill development is updated and extended by (a) placing it in the context of recent motor learning research; (b) discussing the concept of efference in its most recent conceptualization; and (c) explicating certain implicit themes relevant to a theory of infant motor intelligence. (ED)

Habituation to single female faces and to single geometric patterns was observed separately in two groups of infants who participated in two sessions separated by 10 days. Habituation was found to be distributed into three patterns and showed moderate but significant reliability between assessment sessions. (Author/RH)