The effects of 4-hour delay of punishment (withdrawal of reward) on response inhibition was studied with 24 fourth-grade children. Results showed that verbal expression of the punishment contingency allows the 10-year-old child to profit from 4-hour delayed punishment as much as immediate punishment. (Author/JMB)

Differential looking and manipulation were assessed in 44 six-month-old infants who were presented with familiar and novel visual stimuli. The infants looked at the novel stimuli longer. (ST)

This study tested Salk's hypothesis that the human fetus is prenatally imprinted to the repetitive intermittent sound of the maternal heartbeat. The prediction that neonates would quiet most to their own mother's heart rate compared with the unfamiliar heart rate was not supported. (Author/CS)

Male and female nonparent adults rated tape-recordings of initial, middle, and final 10-second segments of pain and hunger cries on four 7-point Likert-type scale items describing how urgent, arousing, aversive, and sick cry segments sounded. Results suggest that different segments of cries resulting from the same stimulus provide different…

Examines the motivational or affective message and impact of infants' cries on nonparents, primiparous parents, and multiparous parents. Cries were organized into three levels (difficult, average, easy) by temperament ratings and spectographic analysis. Physiological and self-report responses to audiotapes of infants' cries were obtained from 36…

The reactions of 24 eight-month-old infants and their mothers were observed when approached in a standard laboratory situation by female strangers whose approach was either fast or slow. Mothers were significantly more "wary" than infants, particularly as the proximity of the stranger increased. (Author/RH)

Investigated whether facial expressions are reliable in producing the same emotional responses from infants (N=27) across situations designed to elicit the same emotion and whether they provide sufficient information to mediate consistent emotion judgments by raters. (JMB)

This training study investigates how children learn to refer to things unambiguously. Two hundred twenty-four children aged 2.6, 3.6, and 4.6 years were pre- and post-tested for their ability to request stickers from a dense array. Between test sessions, children were assigned to a training condition in which they (a) asked for stickers from an…

Parental supportiveness and protective overcontrol and preschoolers' parasympathetic regulation were examined as predictors of temperamental inhibition, social wariness, and internalizing problems. Lower baseline vagal tone and weaker vagal suppression were expected to mark poorer dispositional self-regulatory capacity, leaving children more…

Discusses the conflict between situational influences and stable individual differences in attachment behavior and attempts to resolve this conflict by examining the functions, outcomes, and context sensitivity of attachment behavior and the underlying behavioral control systems that organize it. (JMB)