Five-month-old infants selectively attend to novel people who sing melodies originally learned from a parent, but not melodies learned from a musical toy or from an unfamiliar singing adult, suggesting that music conveys social information to infant listeners. Here, we test this interpretation further in older infants with a more direct measure of…

Cumulative vocabulary models for infants and toddlers were developed from models of learning that predict trajectories associated with low, average, and high vocabulary growth rates (14 to 46 months). It was hypothesized that models derived from rates of learning mirror the type of exchanges provided to infants and toddlers by parents and…

Using data from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development (N = 1,364), the present study supports an agentic perspective; it demonstrates that mothers' depressive symptoms in infancy predict children's poor first-grade cognitive functioning because depressive symptoms…

Many organizations find selecting a leader to be highly challenging. Investigators have found and admit that the study of leadership is a very complex phenomenon that cannot be easily captured and explained in a manner that could lead to a final description about leadership or offer clear steps on how to choose the right leader. Among the many…

We evaluated the extent to which the externalizing behavior construct is self-organizing in the first 2 years of life. Based on dynamic systems theory, we hypothesized that changes in physical aggression, defiance, activity level, and distress to limitations would each be predicted by earlier manifestations of one another. These hypotheses were…

Research Findings: I examined the long-term association between the lexical and acoustic features of maternal utterances during book reading and the language skills of infants and children. Maternal utterances were collected from 22 mother-child dyads in picture book-reading episodes when children were ages 6-12 months and 5 years. Two aspects of…

Prosocial behavior in early childhood is a precursor to later adaptive social functioning. This investigation leveraged mother-reported, physiological, and observational data to examine children's prosocial development from age 2 to age 4 (N = 125). Maternal emotion socialization (ES) strategies and children's parasympathetic regulation have each…

The current study examined the influence of maternal characteristics on the development of infant smiling and laughter, a marker of early positive emotionality (PE) and how maternal characteristics and the development of infant PE contributed to subsequent maternal parenting. One hundred fifty-nine mothers with 4-month-old infants participated.…

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…

The Home Observation for Measurement of the Environment (HOME) scale has been shown to be a significant predictor of later cognitive outcomes in many cultures. Therefore identifying factors associated with HOME could be used to promote child development. Maternal psychological well-being is often overlooked although critical in the creation of…

The overwhelming majority of research on environmental influences has concentrated on the social environment, to the relative neglect of the physical environment. This neglect is justified by an unvalidated hypothesis, namely that the physical environment must be mediated by social parameters in order to influence development. Two studies were…

Examined Bowlby's proposition that early experiences and the adaptations to which they give rise influence later development, even beyond the influence of current circumstances or very recent adaptation. Groups whose adaptation were similar during preschool years but consistently different earlier were defined and compared. Results supported…

Findings of a study on the relation between 6-year-olds' attachment security and their mental representations of attachment relationships are reported. It was expected that infants whose attachment behavior seemed disorganized would be fearful of their attachment figures and experience themselves as helpless, and that these conditions would be…

Discusses the concept of temperament interactions in the context of statistical interaction. Categorizes temperament interactions that involve temperament as an independent variable, as a dependent variable, or as both. Describes use of hierarchical multiple regression for the analysis of temperament interactions. (Author/CI)

Predictions about the role of contingency, imitation, and affect sharing in the development of social awareness were tested in infants during natural, imitative, and yoked conditions with their mothers at 5 and 13 weeks of age. Results showed that at both ages, infants of highly attuned mothers gazed, smiled, and vocalized positively more during…