The effectiveness of maternal regulatory attempts in the development of infant emotion regulation
This study addressed these gaps by: (1) examining the differential effectiveness of maternal regulatory attempts (MRAs; behavioral strategies initiated by mothers to assist infants with regulating emotional states) in reducing 12- to 24-month-old infants' frustration during a toy removal task; and (2) assessing whether maternal mind-mindedness (mothers' attunement to their infant's mental state) predicted mothers' selection of MRAs. Multilevel modeling revealed that distraction and control were the most effective MRAs in reducing infant negative affect across 5-s intervals (N = 82 dyads;M infant age = 18 months; 45 ...
Source: Infancy - April 11, 2024 Category: Child Development Authors: Shira C. Segal,
Margaret C. Moulson Tags: RESEARCH ARTICLE Source Type: research
2 ‐Year‐olds’ free play during the COVID‐19 pandemic
AbstractFree play is a natural activity in toddlerhood, depending on environmental conditions like available objects and the social environment. The COVID-19 pandemic and its consequences for parents ’ mental health held the potential to change toddlers’ play environment. This cross-sectional study investigated 2-year-olds’ (N = 97) free play with objects, and aspects of caregiver mental well-being in three cohorts during the pandemic in Germany. Caregivers reported their positive mental health (PMH), threat perception, perception of current family situation from negative to positive, and workload. We categorized t...
Source: Infancy - March 26, 2024 Category: Child Development Authors: Katharina Tisborn,
Sabine Seehagen Tags: RESEARCH ARTICLE Source Type: research
Caregiver encouragement to act on objects is related with crawling infants' receptive language
AbstractThe progression from crawling to walking in infancy is associated with changes in infant language development. One possible explanation for such change is the infant's language environment. Prior research indicates that caregivers use more action directives with walking infants compared to crawling infants, but the relations of such parental speech with infant vocabulary is unknown. Here, we present findings from day-long home audio recordings (Study 1) and laboratory observations (Study 2) of same-aged crawling and walking infants to explore how caregiver language, specifically action directives, were associated w...
Source: Infancy - March 26, 2024 Category: Child Development Authors: Lukas D. Lopez,
Eric A. Walle Tags: RESEARCH ARTICLE Source Type: research
Better in sync: Temporal dynamics explain multisensory word ‐action‐object learning in early development
AbstractWe investigated the temporal impact of multisensory settings on children's learning of word-object and action-object associations at 1- and 2-years of age. Specifically, we examined whether the temporal alignment of words and actions influenced the acquisition of novel word-action-object associations. We used a preferential looking and violation of expectation task in which infants and young children were first presented with two distinct word-object and action-object pairings either in a synchronous (overlapping in time) or sequential manner (one after the other). Findings revealed that 2-year-olds recognized both...
Source: Infancy - March 24, 2024 Category: Child Development Authors: Ricarda Bothe,
Sarah Eiteljoerge,
Leonie Trouillet,
Birgit Elsner,
Nivedita Mani Tags: REGISTERED REPORT STAGE 2 Source Type: research
Parental sensitivity and intrusiveness with mothers and fathers: Associations between parental behavioral activation/inhibition and infant temperament
AbstractUnderstanding the factors contributing to sensitive parenting is crucial to optimize infant social and emotional functioning. Research has supported the association between parents' personality and parenting quality, but findings are inconsistent when examining various global personality measures. Further, it is likely that the interaction between parent-level (e.g., personality) and infant-level characteristics (e.g., temperament) are more strongly associated with caregiving quality. Most studies examining predictors of parenting quality have only included mothers, compared to fathers. The current study examined t...
Source: Infancy - March 22, 2024 Category: Child Development Authors: Lauren G. Bailes,
Diane M. Lickenbrock,
Alyssa R. Swift,
Logan J. Rios Tags: RESEARCH ARTICLE Source Type: research
Prenatal influences on postnatal neuroplasticity: Integrating DOHaD and sensitive/critical period frameworks to understand biological embedding in early development
AbstractEarly environments can have significant and lasting effects on brain, body, and behavior across the lifecourse. Here, we address current research efforts to understand how experiences impact neurodevelopment with a new perspective integrating two well-known conceptual frameworks – the Developmental Origins of Health and Disease (DOHaD) and sensitive/critical period frameworks. Specifically, we consider how prenatal experiences characterized in the DOHaD model impact two key neurobiological mechanisms of sensitive/critical periods for adapting to and learning from the post natal environment. We draw from both anim...
Source: Infancy - March 7, 2024 Category: Child Development Authors: Emma T. Margolis,
Laurel J. Gabard ‐Durnam Tags: REVIEW ARTICLE Source Type: research
Developmental change in English ‐learning children's interpretations of salient pitch contours in word learning
AbstractTo efficiently recognize words, children learning an intonational language like English should avoid interpreting pitch-contour variation as signaling lexical contrast, despite the relevance of pitch at other levels of structure. Thus far, the developmental time-course with which English-learning children rule out pitch as a contrastive feature has been incompletely characterized. Prior studies have tested diverse lexical contrasts and have not tested beyond 30 months. To specify the developmental trajectory over a broader age range, we extended a prior study (Quam& Swingley, 2010), in which 30-month-olds and...
Source: Infancy - March 1, 2024 Category: Child Development Authors: Carolyn Quam,
Daniel Swingley Tags: RESEARCH ARTICLE Source Type: research
Early gesture use predicts children ’s language development in South Korea: New evidence supporting the cross‐cultural importance of pointing
In this study, we add to the growing body of international research by examining gesture use by 31 mothers and their 14-month-old infants (12 girls) in South Korea and investigate the gestures used during interaction, and whether early gesture use at 14 months predicts Korean children’s lat er language skills at 36 months. The results showed that in addition to using gestures observed in other cultural contexts, Korean mother-child dyads used culturally specific gesture (i.e., bowing), showing an early sign of socialization that starts with preverbal children. In addition, Korean infa nts’ index-finger pointing, but ...
Source: Infancy - February 27, 2024 Category: Child Development Authors: So Yeon Shin,
Meredith L. Rowe,
Hyun Suk Lee Tags: RESEARCH ARTICLE Source Type: research
Sustained looking at faces at 5 months of age is associated with socio‐communicative skills in the second year of life
AbstractEfficiently processing information from faces in infancy is foundational for nonverbal communication. We studied individual differences in 5-month-old infants' (N = 517) sustained attention to faces and preference for emotional faces. We assessed the contribution of genetic and environmental influences to individual differences in these gaze behaviors, and the association between these traits and other concurrent and later phenotypes. We found an associati on between the mean duration of looking at a face (before looking away from it) at 5 months and socio-communicative abilities at 14 months (β = 0.17, 95% ...
Source: Infancy - February 16, 2024 Category: Child Development Authors: Charlotte Viktorsson,
Ana Maria Portugal,
Mark J. Taylor,
Angelica Ronald,
Terje Falck ‐Ytter Tags: RESEARCH ARTICLE Source Type: research
A longitudinal study examining the associations between prenatal and postnatal maternal distress and toddler socioemotional developmental during the COVID ‐19 pandemic
AbstractElevated psychological distress, experienced by pregnant women and parents, has been well-documented during the COVID-19 pandemic. Most research focuses on the first 6-months postpartum, with single or limited repeated measures of perinatal distress. The present longitudinal study examined how perinatal distress, experienced over nearly 2 years of the COVID-19 pandemic, impacted toddler socioemotional development. A sample of 304 participants participated during pregnancy, 6-weeks, 6-months, and 15-months postpartum. Mothers reported their depressive, anxiety, and stress symptoms, at each timepoint. Mother-report...
Source: Infancy - February 9, 2024 Category: Child Development Authors: Jennifer E. Khoury,
Leslie Atkinson,
Andrea Gonzalez Tags: RESEARCH ARTICLE Source Type: research
Issue Information
No abstract is available for this article. (Source: Infancy)
Source: Infancy - February 6, 2024 Category: Child Development Tags: ISSUE INFORMATION Source Type: research
COVID ‐19 pandemic effects: Examining prenatal internalizing symptoms and infant temperament
AbstractFor pregnant women, the COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in unprecedented stressors, including uncertainty regarding prenatal care and the long-term consequences of perinatal infection. However, few studies have examined the role of this adverse event on maternal wellbeing and infant socioemotional development following the initial wave of the pandemic when less stringent public health restrictions were in place. The current study addressed these gaps in the literature by first comparing prenatal internalizing symptoms and infant temperament collected after the first wave of the pandemic to equivalent measures in a p...
Source: Infancy - January 21, 2024 Category: Child Development Authors: Jennifer A. Mattera,
Nora L. Erickson,
Celestina Barbosa ‐Leiker,
Maria A. Gartstein Tags: RESEARCH ARTICLE Source Type: research
Attention control in preterm and term 5 ‐month‐old infants: Cross‐task stability increases with gestational age
AbstractCross-task stability refers to performance consistency across different settings and measures of the same construct. Cross-task stability can help us understand developmental processes, including how risks such as preterm birth affect outcomes. We investigated cross-task stability of attention control in 32 preterm and 39 term infants. All infants had the same chronological age at time of testing (5 months) but varied in gestational age (GA) at birth (30–42 weeks). Infants completed an experimental attention following task with a researcher and a naturalistic play observation with their mothers. Both preterm a...
Source: Infancy - January 20, 2024 Category: Child Development Authors: Oliver Perra,
Alice Winstanley,
Rebecca Sperotto,
Merideth Gattis Tags: RESEARCH ARTICLE Source Type: research
Comparing apples to manzanas and oranges to naranjas: A new measure of English ‐Spanish vocabulary for dual language learners
AbstractThe valid assessment of vocabulary development in dual-language-learning infants is critical to developmental science. We developed theDual Language Learners English-Spanish (DLL-ES) Inventories to measure vocabularies of U.S. English-Spanish DLLs. The inventories provide translation equivalents for all Spanish and English items on Communicative Development Inventory (CDI) short forms; extended inventories based on CDI long forms; and Spanish language-variety options. Item-Response Theory analyses applied to Wordbank and Web-CDI data (n = 2603, 12–18 months;n = 6722, 16–36 months; half female; 1% Asian, 3...
Source: Infancy - January 14, 2024 Category: Child Development Authors: Catherine S. Tamis ‐LeMonda,
George Kachergis,
Lillian R. Masek,
Sandy L. Gonzalez,
Kasey C. Soska,
Orit Herzberg,
Melody Xu,
Karen E. Adolph,
Rick O. Gilmore,
Marc H. Bornstein,
Marianella Casasola,
Caitlin M. Fausey,
Michael C. Frank,
Sus Tags: RESEARCH ARTICLE Source Type: research
What's the point? Infants' and adults' perception of different pointing gestures
In this study, we used a spatial cueing paradigm on an eye tracker to investigate whether and to what extent adults and 12-month-old infants orient their attention in the direction of pointing gestures with different hand shapes: index finger, whole hand, and pinky finger. Furthermore, we assessed infants' and their parents' pointing production. Results revealed that adults showed a rel iable cueing effect: shorter saccadic reaction times (SRTs) to congruent than incongruent targets, for all hand shapes. However, they did not show a larger cueing effect triggered by the index or any other finger. This contradicts previous ...
Source: Infancy - January 13, 2024 Category: Child Development Authors: Ebru Ger,
Stephanie Wermelinger,
Maxine de Ven,
Moritz M. Daum Tags: RESEARCH ARTICLE Source Type: research
