BACKGROUND It is clear that early social interaction follows from mother-infant interaction after pregnancy. Many researchers have illuminated this interaction in the first years of life. Most common mother-infant interaction is the attachment behavior of an infant. The Japan Children's Study (JCS) development psychology group hypothesis is that the early mother-infant interaction will predict ...

BACKGROUND Allomaternal nursing, common in several species of social mammals, also has been reported in nonhuman primates. However, the function of this behavior in enhancing infant survivorship remains poorly understood. METHODOLOGY AND PRINCIPAL FINDINGS The study was conducted on a free-ranging group of the Yunnan snub-nosed monkey (Rhinopithecus bieti) in the Baimaxueshan Natural Reserve....

Male black tufted-ear marmosets (Callithrix kuhlii) contribute to the rearing of their offspring. Here we evaluated predictions of hypotheses suggesting that (1) T and E2 influence infant-care behavior in male marmosets, (2) levels of T and E2 are modulated by paternal experience, and (3) paternal behavior and levels of T and E2 in male marmosets covary with stress. We observed the behavior of ...

The current study examined associations between attachment state of mind measured prenatally (N = 259) and maternal behavior in the reunion episode of the still-face procedure when infants were six months of age both as a main effect and in conjunction with infant negative affect. Using a dimensional approach to adult attachment measurement, dismissing and preoccupied states of mind were negati...

The Support of Oral Feeding for Fragile Infants (SOFFI) method of bottle-feeding rests on quality evidence along with implementation details drawn from clinical experience. To be clear, the SOFFI Method is not focused on the amount of food taken in but on the conduct of the feeding and the development of competent infant feeding behavior that, consequently, assures the intake of food necessary ...

As a social species, humans evolved to detect information from the social behavior of others. Yet, the mechanisms used to evaluate social interactions, the brain networks implicated in such recognition, and whether individual differences in own social behavior determine response to similar behavior in others remain unknown. Here we examined social synchrony as a potentially important mechanism ...

As part of ongoing studies on the neurobiology of socioemotional behavior in the nonhuman primate, we examined the development of mother-infant interactions in 24 macaque monkeys who received either bilateral amygdala or hippocampus ibotenic acid lesions, or a sham surgical procedure at 2 weeks of age. After surgery, the infants were returned to their mothers and reared with daily access to sma...

Jeffrey Fagen (1993, this issue) has misunderstood our main point about reinforcement as a central principle of behavior change (Gewirtz & Pelaez-Nogueras, 1992, p. 1414) and the issue of description versus explanation in the use of the objective reinforcement term or of a subjective term such as contingency expectancy. He argued that reinforcement cannot explain some findings of his and his co...

From birth, human infants are immersed in a social environment that allows them to learn by leveraging the skills and capabilities of their caregivers. A critical pre-cursor to this type of social learning is the ability to maintain interaction levels that are neither overwhelming nor under-stimulating. In this paper, we present a mechanism for an autonomous robot to regulate the intensity of i...