Reflection in thought and action: Maternal parenting reflectivity predicts mind‐minded comments and interactive behavior

Recent research has identified mothers' mental reflective functioning and verbal mind‐minded comments as important predictors of subsequent infant attachment security. In the present study, we examine associations between mothers' (N = 95) parenting reflectivity expressed in an interview and observed parenting behavior, including verbal mind‐minded comments and interactive behavior during interaction with their 7‐month‐old infants. Parenting reflectivity was coded from the Working Model of the Child Interview. Maternal behavior was assessed via observations of mother–infant interaction during free play and structured teaching tasks. Both maternal appropriate mind‐minded comments as well as other indicators of maternal interactive behavior were coded. Parenting reflectivity was positively correlated with mind‐minded comments and behavioral sensitivity. Hierarchical multiple regression analyses indicated that parenting reflectivity contributed to maternal behavior beyond the contributions of mothers' educational status and depression symptoms. Discussion emphasizes the importance of individual differences in parental capacity to accurately perceive and mentalize their infants' experience, and the consequences of these differences for caregiving behavior.     

Lip-read me now, hear me better later: cross-modal transfer of talker-familiarity effects

There is evidence that for both auditory and visual speech perception, familiarity with the talker facilitates speech recognition. Explanations of these effects have concentrated on the retention of talker information specific to each of these modalities. It could be, however, that some amodal, talker-specific articulatory-style information facilitates speech perception in both modalities. If this is true, then experience with a talker in one modality should facilitate perception of speech from that talker in the other modality. In a test of this prediction, subjects were given about 1 hr of experience lipreading a talker and were then asked to recover speech in noise from either this same talker or a different talker. Results revealed that subjects who lip-read and heard speech from the same talker performed better on the speech-in-noise task than did subjects who lip-read from one talker and then heard speech from a different talker.     

Children’s use of multiple and variable addition strategies in a game context

Developmental and contextual effects on children’s addition strategies were assessed in preschool, kindergarten and first‐grade children’s strategy use while playing a board game (‘Chutes and Ladders’), using one or two dice to compute moves. Children of all ages displayed multiple‐ and variable‐strategy use, and there was a progression toward more sophisticated strategy use with age. Different patterns of strategy use in the two‐dice condition were observed as a function of whether children began the game with one versus two dice and for children who could recognize (as opposed to having to count) die roles of ‘5’ and ‘6’ in the one‐die condition. An examination of latencies indicated that more noncounting (start‐up) time was required to execute the MIN than the SUM strategy. Children showed significantly greater speed and accuracy when adding numbers during the game than in the math problems that followed. The findings reflect young children’s flexible use of strategies and extend Siegler’s adaptive strategy choice model to the development of simple addition strategies in an everyday context.     

Face and mouth inversion effects on visual and audiovisual speech perception

Three experiments examined whether image manipulations known to disrupt face perception also disrupt visual speech perception. Research has shown that an upright face with an inverted mouth looks strikingly grotesque whereas an inverted face and an inverted face containing an upright mouth look relatively normal. The current study examined whether a similar sensitivity to upright facial context plays a role in visual speech perception. Visual and audiovisual syllable identification tasks were tested under 4 presentation conditions: upright face-upright mouth, inverted face-inverted mouth, inverted face-upright mouth, and upright face-inverted mouth. Results revealed that for some visual syllables only the upright face-inverted mouth image disrupted identification. These results suggest that upright facial context can play a role in visual speech perception. A follow-up experiment testing isolated mouths supported this conclusion.     

Affective communication differences between distressed and nondistressed mother-adolescent dyads

An assessment technique of having mothers and young adolescents describe in brief written form what they like and dislike about each other was evaluated. Distressed dyads (N=38) produced responses that were rated significantly more negative (Demanding, Personal Attack, Anger and Hostility, Complaining About Unfairness or Disrespect) and less positive (Good Relationship, Appreciation of Other, Complimentary, and Enjoyment) than nondistressed dyads (N=40). Evidence of reliability was reported. Ratings of the written responses correlated significantly with independently obtained codings of taperecorded interactions, thus offering support for validity of the method.The authors wish to thank Diane Follingstad and Peter Kilmann for their comments on an earlier draft.     

Hemispheric specialization for speech perception in language deficient kindergarten children

Twenty right-handed kindergarten children with superior language skills and twenty with deficient language skills (as defined by performance on an elicited sentence repetition task) were tested (1) for hemispheric specialization for speech perception with a dichotic CV syllable task and (2) for relative manual proficiency by means of a battery of hand tasks. Reading readiness and aspects of other cognitive abilities were also assessed. The superior children evidenced a mean right-ear advantage of 14.5%, which is consistent with normal values reported by other investigators using the same stimuli. The language deficient group evidenced essentially no mean ear advantage (0.5) with half of these subjects exhibiting left-ear superiority. The findings suggest relationships among cerébral dominance, language proficiency (including reading readiness), and general cognitive functioning.     

Audiovisual investigation of the loudness-effort effect for speech and nonspeech events.

There is some evidence that loudness judgments of speech are more closely related to the degree of vocal effort induced in speech production than to the speech signal's surface-acoustic properties such as intensity. Other researchers have claimed that speech loudness can be rationalized simply by considering the acoustic complexity of the signal. Because vocal effort can be specified optically as well as acoustically, a study to test the effort-loudness hypothesis was conducted that used conflicting audiovisual presentations of a speaker that produced consonant-vowel syllables with different efforts. It was predicted that if loudness judgments are constrained by effort perception rather than by simple acoustic parameters, then judgments ought to be affected by visual as well as auditory information. It is shown that loudness judgments are affected significantly by visual information even when subjects are instructed to base their judgments only on what they hear. A similar (though less pronounced) patterning of results is shown for a nonspeech "clapping" event, which attests to the generality of the loudness-effort effect previously thought to be special to speech. Results are discussed in terms of auditory, fuzzy logical, motor, and ecological theories of speech perception.     

Mother and infant affective involvement states and maternal depression

This study shows two different dimensional types of maternal depression, one dull and slow, the other stressed and irritable. When the quality of the infant attachment to mother is assessed, it is noted that the dimensional aspect of the maternal depression can be of some importance in the quality of the attachment. In fact, children are more inclined to develop an insecure–ambivalent attachment to their stressed depressed mothers, while children of slow depressed mothers are more insecure–avoiding. Thus, the dimensions of maternal depression can be an indicator of the type of insecure attachment of the infant at one year of age. We have also found that insecure children of depressed mothers express very little joy in the course of face-to-face interactions. A parallel can be established between the characteristics of the different affective dimensions of the maternal depression, the affective involvement state level of the partners, their synchrony or non-synchrony, the affective expression of the baby, and the type of insecure attachment to the mother. Thus, affective interaction may be an indicator of the child's development, both to assess the interaction and to evaluate the type of attachment shown by the child, indicating that previous interactive patterns have been internalized. © 1997 Michigan Association for Infant Mental Health     

Hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis function and the metabolic syndrome X of obesity

Obesity has negative health consequences related to fat distribution, particularly the central or visceral accumulation of fat. The major complications associated with visceral obesity, termed the "Metabolic Syndrome of Obesity," or "Syndrome X," are type II diabetes, hypertension, and dyslipidemia. As with certain mood disorders, the syndrome may be a consequence of neuroendocrine perturbations typically associated with chronic stress. Our work with bonnet macaque monkeys provides an animal model for the relationship between early stress, behavioral and hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis dysregulation, and Syndrome X. During their infant's first half-year, mothers face a variable foraging demand (VFD), in which ample food varies unpredictably in the difficulty of its acquisition, and the offspring show persistent abnormalities in systems known to modulate stress and affective regulation. Early work on the bonnet macaque noted the emergence of a sample of spontaneously obese subjects as they matured. Using the VFD model, the current study showed that there was a clear relationship between early cerebrospinal fluid corticotropin-releasing factor levels and subsequently measured body mass index, supporting the hypotheses regarding the interactive roles of early experience and HPA axis dysregulation in the ontogeny of both metabolic and mood disorders.