The literature on infants' perception of facial and vocal expressions, combined with data from studies on infant-directed speech, mother-infant interaction, and social referencing, supports the view that infants come to recognize the affective expressions of others through a perceptual differentiation process. Recognition of affective expressions changes from a reliance on multimodally presente...

The control of overt visual attention relies on an interplay of bottom-up and top-down mechanisms. Purely bottom-up models may provide a reasonable account of the looking behaviors of young infants, but they cannot accurately account for attention orienting of adults in many natural behaviors. But how do humans learn to incorporate topdown mechanisms into their control of attention? The phenome...

Skilled behavior requires a balance between previously successful behaviors and new behaviors appropriate to the present context. We describe a dynamic field model for understanding this balance in infant perseverative reaching. The model predictions are tested with regard to the interaction of two aspects of the typical perseverative reaching task: the visual cue indicating the target and the ...

Background: Between one-quarter and one-third of infants aged six months to five years have sleeping problems. Infants' night sleep patterns, in particular problematic night waking with crying, are a common concern for parents. Many factors can influence the development of infants’ night sleep patterns and sleep problems, including parental interaction. Objectives: To examine the associations b...

As Iverson (this issue) points out, it is ironic that motor development has been relegated to peripheral ‘Cinderella’ status in developmental psychology. After all, for those researchers who view psychology as the study of behavior, motor development is the stuff of the science. All behaviors – walking, talking, looking, laughing, reaching, playing, sleeping, breathing – are motor behaviors. An...

People often speak of children as being "spoiled" and many parents worry about the possibility of spoiling their infants and children. Many pediatricians, however, are uncomfortable with this term because it is a poorly defined and derogatory expression. Some would even deny that infants and children can be spoiled. Avoiding the use of the expression spoiled can create difficulties in communica...

This study aimed to identify the age of emergence and subsequent order of preverbal social behaviors, which have not yet been fully clarified. This was accomplished using 16 items of social behaviors extracted from the Modified Checklist for Toddlers with Autism (MCHAT). The Japanese version of the M-CHAT was completed voluntarily by the parents of 318 infants aged 8–20 months. The 16 social be...

OBJECTIVE Mothers of children at risk for type 1 diabetes report engaging in preventive behaviors. The purpose of this study is to further document these actions in an international, longitudinal sample and examine variables that predict whether mothers engage in these behaviors. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS This study examined an international sample (from Finland, Germany, Sweden, and the U....

BACKGROUND As a group, bottle-fed infants are at higher risk for rapid weight gain compared with breast-fed infants. However, little is known about individual differences in feeding behaviors of bottle-feeding infants, as well as maternal and infant characteristics associated with bottle-feeding outcomes. METHODS We conducted a 2-day, within-subject study of 21 formula-feeding dyads; the with...

Behavioral and facial thermal responses were recorded in twelve 3- to 4-month-old infants during the Still-Face Paradigm (SFP). As in the usual procedure, infants were observed in a three-step, face-to-face interaction: a normal interaction episode (3 min); the "still-face" episode in which the mother became unresponsive and assumed a neutral expression (1 min); a reunion episode in which the m...