The study of infants' interactive style and social stress response to repeated stress exposures is of great interest for developmental and clinical psychologists. Stable maternal and dyadic behavior is critical to sustain infants' development of an adaptive social stress response, but the association between infants' interactive style and social…

The current study examined the relations between individual differences in attention to emotion faces and temperamental negative affect across the first 2 years of life. Infant studies have noted a normative pattern of preferential attention to salient cues, particularly angry faces. A parallel literature suggests that elevated attention bias to…

Adults often attribute internal dispositions to other people and down-play situational factors as explanations of behavior. A few studies have addressed the origins of this proclivity, but none has examined emotions, which rank among the more important dispositions that we attribute to others. Two experiments (N = 270) explored 15-month-old…

Our goal in the present study was to examine the effects of maternal smoking during pregnancy on infant self-regulation, exploring birth weight as a mediator and sex as a moderator of risk. A prospective sample of 218 infants was assessed at 6 months of age. Infants completed a battery of tasks assessing working memory/inhibition, attention, and…

Thirty infants at 1;1 and their mothers were videotaped while playing for 18 minutes. Experimental stimuli were presented in three communicative intent contexts--proto-declarative, proto-imperative, and ambiguous--to elicit infant communicative bids that did and did not contain gestures. Mothers' responses were analyzed, and their verbal responses…