The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of a handicapping condition on mother-infant interactions and, to investigate the conditions under which coordinated attention to an object and a person is demonstrated. This study provides a unique opportunity to make across-mother and within-mother comparisons of mother-infant interactions in two sets of fraternal twins. In each set, one...

Adult attachment style is a key for understanding emotion regulation and feelings of security in human interactions as well as for the construction of the caregiving system. The caregiving system is a group of representations about affiliative behaviors, which is guided by the caregiver's sensitivity and empathy, and is mature in young adulthood. Appropriate perception and interpretation of inf...

The way a mother responds to her infant is vital for the development of a healthy child-caregiver attachment. Specific delivery types have been linked to important neurohormonal activity that can interfere with a parent’s acquistion of thoughts and behaviors facilitating healthy parenting (Swain et al., 2008). James Swain and colleagues (2008) discovered mothers who deliver vaginally (VD), comp...

Socioeconomic status (SES) is strongly related to parental behaviors and the quality of parent-child interactions. We examined whether through maternal behaviors, SES linked joint attention (JA), an important form interactions predicting language development. At 12 months, 50 mother-infant dyads were video-recorded during 5-min free play. coded for (sensitivity, cognitive stimulation, positive ...

This study tested Bowlby and Ainsworth's hypothesis that a hierarchy of caregivers exists whereby infants prefer one caregiver over another when distressed. We examined parent gender (mother vs. father), primary caregiver status (defined as the parent who spent most time with the infant and performed most of the caregiving tasks), and role of toddlers' history of attachment security with each p...

In this first behavior genetic study on infant-father attachment, we estimated genetic and environmental influences on infant-father attachment behaviors and on temperamental dependency, both assessed with the Attachment Q-Sort (AQS; B. E. Vaughn & E. Waters, 1990; E. Waters, 1995). Mothers of mono- and dizygotic twins (N = 56 pairs) sorted the AQS with a focus on the infant's behaviors in the ...