The study of dyadic interaction plays a major role in infancy research. To advance conceptually-informed measurement of dyadic interaction and integration across studies, we examined factor structure of individual parents' and infants' measures and dyadic measures from face-to-face interactions in two samples of 6-mo-old infants and their parents: mothers from a demographically heterogeneous sa...

We investigated the maternal care patterns of rhesus macaque mothers who physically abuse their infants, and compared their infants' behavior to that of nonabused infants. Parametric and multidimensional scaling analyses indicated that abusive mothers have a distinct parenting style characterized by high rates of rejection and contact-breaking from their infants. Compared to control infants, ab...

To document the trajectory of motor and vocal behaviors in real and developmental time, researchers observed infants at each of 4 biweekly naturalistic play sessions over the transition to crawling. An exhaustive and mutually exclusive coding scheme documented every vocalization and posture. Odds ratios of the likelihood of a given posture-vocalization dyad revealed that vocalization and crawli...

This study introduces a peri-urban context of poverty to the study of child development in Africa in contrast to the more typical assessments in middle-class and rural contexts. Spot observations were used to assess universal caregiving behaviors toward seventy-six 3-month-old infants. Results show that middle-class infants experienced distal parenting behaviors instantiated by mothers, whereas...

OBJECTIVE This study examined the contributions of maternal bids for joint attention, relationship quality, and infant characteristics, to individual differences in infants' parallel and joint attention. METHOD Fifty-two 10-month-olds and their mothers were assessed in order to investigate concurrent predictors of infant parallel attention, responding to joint attention, and initiating joint ...

Evidence for paternal kin recognition and paternally biased behaviors is mixed among primates. We investigate whether infant handling behaviors exhibit paternal kin biases in wild white-faced capuchins monkeys (Cebus capucinus) by comparing interactions between infants and genetic sires, potential sires, siblings (full sibling, maternal, and paternal half-siblings) and unrelated handlers. We us...

Mothers whose infants varied in early biological characteristics (born at term, n = 120; born at very low birth weight [VLBW], n = 144) were randomized to a target group (n = 133) or developmental feedback comparison group (n = 131) to determine whether learning responsive behaviors would facilitate infant development. The target condition included videotaped examples, problem-solving activitie...

OBJECTIVE The Child-Adult Medical Procedure Interaction Scale-Infant Version (CAMPIS-IV) was used to examine the influence of adult and infant behaviors on infant distress following injections. METHODS In this naturalistic observation study, videotaped interactions of 49 infants, parents, and nurses were coded using the CAMPIS-IV. A series of three lag sequential analyses were used to examine...

The ability to understand that goals and other intentional relations are attributes of individual people is of fundamental importance to social life. It enables us to predict and interpret actions on-line by relating a person's prior and current behaviors, and distinguishing them from the behaviors of other persons. In this paper, we consider the origins of the ability to mark goals as attribut...

There have been many rich, naturalistic studies documenting prelinguistic communicative abilities that suggest that the ntegration of alternating eye gaze, vocal behaviors, and nonverbal gestures are indicative of intentional communication (e.g., ates, Camaioni, & Volterra, 1975; Bates, Benigni, Bretherton, Camaioni, & Volterra, 1979; Dore, 1974; Ninio & Bruner, 1978; revarthen & Hubley, 1978)....