Emotion regulation is essential to cognitive, social, and emotional development and difficulties with emotion regulation portend future socioemotional, academic, and behavioral difficulties. There is growing awareness that many developmental outcomes previously thought to begin their development in the postnatal period have their origins in the…

The paper reports on a study which tested whether infants high in negative affectivity are differentially susceptible to observed coparenting behavior in relation to their subsequent social-emotional development. Data came from a longitudinal study of 182 US dual-earner, primiparous couples and their infant children. At nine-months postpartum,…

Faces convey important information about the social environment, and even very young infants are preferentially attentive to face-like over non-face stimuli. Eye-tracking studies have allowed researchers to examine which features of faces infants find most salient across development, and the present study examined scanning of familiar (i.e.,…

This experiment investigated social referencing as a form of discriminative learning in which maternal facial expressions signaled the consequences of the infant's behavior in an ambiguous context. Eleven 4- and 5-month-old infants and their mothers participated in a discrimination-training procedure using an ABAB design. Different consequences…

Objective: No previous longitudinal study has examined the impact of comorbid maternal personality disorder (PD) and depression on child development. We set out to examine whether maternal PD and depression assessed at 2 months post partum would be independently associated with adverse developmental outcomes at 18 months of age. Method: Women were…

The Still-Face Paradigm (SFP) designed by Tronick, Als, Adamson, Wise, and Brazelton (Tronick, E., Als, H., Adamson, L., Wise, S., & Brazelton, T. B. (1978). Infants response to entrapment between contradictory messages in face-to-face interaction. "Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, 17", 1-13) has been used for…

Two studies were conducted to examine (1) 1- to 3-day-old infants' imitation of their mothers, and (2) mothers' imitation of their newborn infants. For the infant imitation study, 30 mothers and their infants served as subjects. Two observers stood behind the mother to view the infant's face while the mother presented one of the following…

The stability of eight attachment behaviors was investigated in two samples of infants. One sample observed at 10 and 14 months of age, the other sample at 14 and 18 months. For each testing period, the infants were observed during two sessions: (a) in the presence of the mother; and (b) before, during, and after a brief separation experience.…

Presents a descriptive analysis of infant-adult face-to-face interaction, as well as the data for analyses of the relations between the two partners and the contribution of each one during the interaction. Subjects were five infants (aged 80-92 days) and their mothers. (MP)

Infants participated in a nonsocial contingency task immediately after a social interaction with their mothers. The amount of time mothers and infants spent in a state of vocal turn-taking predicted individual differences in infants' subsequent performance on the contingency task. (PCB)

Study supported in part by Research Grant MH-13703-01 from the National Institute of Mental Health.

Discusses the significance of emotional communication and social referencing of the mother by her infant as determinants of the infant's affective reactions to other social figures in the environment. (PCB)

Studies the effects of mothers' presence and absence on two infants from birth to two years. (AJ)

To investigate the nature of young infants' social competence, the effect of depressed maternal expression during face-to-face interaction was examined. An experimental analogue of maternal depression was employed. Subjects were 12 female and 12 male infants, ages 96 to 110 days, and their mothers. (Author/RH)

Interaction between mother and first-born child before and after the birth of a second child was studied in 41 families, using home observations and interview techniques. (MP)