Infant mental health is strongly connected to an infant's relationship with a responsive, warm, and available caregiver. However, maternal mental illness reduces a mother's ability to detect and respond to changes in her infant's expressions and communication, which may have important consequences for infant attachment and emotion regulation. The…

While the role of early maternal parenting practices in the development of executive functions (EFs) has received considerable attention in the literature, little is known about how specific parenting behaviours may be related to EFs within different racial groups. Therefore, the present study examines the joint impact of specific maternal…

Research Findings: This study used a within-group research design and person-centered analytic methods to identify multidimensional profiles of parenting styles, parenting practices, and related emotional factors in a sample of 274 African American mothers recruited from Head Start programs in the northeastern and southeastern United States.…

The study evaluates a social-communication-based approach to autism intervention aimed at improving the social interaction skills of children with autism spectrum disorder. We report preliminary results from an ongoing randomized controlled trial of 51 children aged 2 years 0 months to 4 years 11 months. Participants were assigned to either a…

Anxious and nonanxious mothers were compared on theoretically derived parenting and family environment variables (i.e., overcontrol, warmth, criticism, anxious modeling) using multiple informants and methods. Mother-child dyads completed questionnaires about parenting and were observed during an interactional task. Findings reveal that, after…