Emergence of amae crying in early infancy as a possible social communication tool between infants and mothers

Amae is defined as “wishing to be loved (Scheidlinger (1999). The Journal of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis, 27(1), p. 91)”. Amae crying is known as crying of infants when seeking intimate emotional communication with caregivers. The objective of this study was to delineate when and how amae crying emerges in early infancy. Crying episodes of four infants were observed bimonthly, in the natural context of their homes, from birth to 6 months of age, for approximately 60 min per session. Crying episodes (total = 275) as determined by two coders were analyzed with respect to several behavioral measures. Results indicated that amae crying emerged at the age of 2 months, and consistently accounted for 30–40% of the total crying episodes after the ages of 3 months. Amae crying could be accurately identified when infants were not in acute discomfort and had already got the attention of their mothers. At such times, infants did not shed tears, cried with a fussy voice, and frequently looked at their mothers. Mothers responded to amae crying more promptly than they did to other types of crying behaviors. It is concluded that 3 months of age, when infants probably begin to use crying as a social communication tool is a major turning point for crying behavior from the perspective of its biological and social roles. It is suggested that amae crying might play an important role in strengthening and encouraging mother–infant interactions.     

Dyadic co-regulation,affective intensity and infant's development at 12 months: A comparison among extremely preterm and full-term dyads

Extremely low gestational age children (ELGA, born below 28 weeks of GA) represent the most at-risk preterm group in terms of survival, developmental sequelae and rates of impairment and cognitive delays. However, the impact of an extremely preterm birth on mother–infant co-regulation and affective intensity which may affect early infant's development has not been investigated. Based on a relational dynamic system approach, our study aimed to investigate the quality of co-regulation and affective intensity during spontaneous play interaction in 20 mother–infant ELGA dyads compared to 20 full-term (FT) dyads at 12 months (corrected age for ELGA infants). Relationships between the quality of dyadic co-regulation and the infant's level of cognitive, motor and language development were also investigated. The quality of dyadic co-regulation was assessed using the Revised Relational Coding System (R-RCS) by Fogel et al. (2003), the mothers’ and infants’ affective intensity was coded using a coding system by Lunkenheimer, Olson, Hollenstein, Sameroff, and Winter (2011). Infants’ development was assessed using the Bayley Scales (BSID-III, 2006). With respect to FT dyads, ELGA dyads were characterised by less frequent symmetric and more frequent unilateral co-regulation patterns and by less positive and more neutral affective intensity of both infants and mothers. Cognitive, motor and language scores were lower in ELGA infants than in FT infants. Symmetrical co-regulation was related to motor scores in ELGA infants, and to cognitive scores in FT infants. Our findings contribute to the literature by demonstrating the difficulties of ELGA mother–infant dyads at 12 months in sharing the symmetric co-regulation and positive affective intensity and how symmetric co-regulation is strictly related to motor development in ELGA infants. Based on these findings, intervention programmes to foster joint attention, active involvement and positive affective intensity in ELGA dyads and infants’ development in the first year of life should be designed.     

Early adolescents’ personality and life satisfaction: A closer look at global vs. domain-specific satisfaction

We examined relations between US early adolescents’ major personality traits and global life satisfaction (LS) and satisfaction in five specific domains (i.e., family, friends, school, self, living environment). A sample of 344 7th graders completed the Adolescent Personal Style Inventory (Lounsbury et al., 2003), which assesses the Big Five traits of neuroticism, extraversion, openness, agreeableness, and conscientiousness. Furthermore, participants completed the Students’ Life Satisfaction Scale (Huebner, 1991) and the Multidimensional Students’ Life Satisfaction Scale (Huebner, Zullig, & Saha, 2012), assessing global and domain-specific satisfaction, respectively. Neuroticism (inversely), and conscientiousness, agreeableness, and extraversion (positively) were uniquely associated with early adolescents’ global LS, with neuroticism showing the strongest association. With respect to domain-specific satisfaction, neuroticism (inversely) and conscientiousness (positively) were uniquely related to satisfaction in all five domains. Extraversion displayed the strongest, unique (positive) association with friend and self-satisfaction reports. Openness displayed the strongest, unique (positive) association with school satisfaction. Agreeableness demonstrated a unique (positive) association with family satisfaction. The results demonstrated the importance of neuroticism in understanding early adolescents’ global LS, while the personality variables revealed varying patterns of relationships with domain-specific satisfaction reports.     

Social referencing in infants of mothers with symptoms of depression

The present study examined the acquisition of social referencing skills in infants of mothers with symptoms of depression (n = 44). We aimed to determine if a short discrimination training could facilitate infants’ social referencing. Mothers were instructed to pose either joyful or fearful facial expressions to cue infants’ approach/avoidance responses toward an ambiguous object. Maternal expressions were correlated with pleasant or unpleasant events occurring after the infant's response. The results showed that after the intervention, infants looked at their mothers more frequently and reached or avoided the ambiguous object based on the preceding maternal expression. The results suggest that discrimination training procedures can establish social referencing in infants of mothers with symptoms of depression.     

Early—but modest—gender differences in focal aspects of childhood temperament

The best evidence for gender differences in child temperament is in the broad areas of effortful control and surgency, and to an extent negative affectivity, domains that encompass temperament dimensions of inhibitory control, activity level, and shyness. We examined the influence of child gender in a methodologically comprehensively assessed twin sample. We used mother, father, and Laboratory Temperament Assessment Battery (Lab-TAB) ratings to assess temperament in 3 year-olds. Boys had higher levels of activity level and lower levels of shyness and inhibitory control than girls across all methods of assessment. Then, more rigorous testing showed that patterns of mean gender differences for opposite-sex twin pairs in our sample were very consistent with overall sample gender differences and the magnitude of these gender differences was consistent across assessment methodology. We then asked: are these more gendered dimensions of temperament associated with one another, and are associations different across gender? The answer to both questions is, yes. Shyer children have lower activity level and higher inhibitory control, and those with higher inhibitory control are less active. Gender differences did appear in the intercorrelations between parent ratings of shyness and inhibitory control with only girls showing significant associations within and across these dimensions.     

Maladaptive daydreaming: Evidence for an under-researched mental health disorder

This study explores the recently described phenomenon of Maladaptive Daydreaming (MD) and attempts to enhance the understanding of its features. It documents the experiences of 340 self-identified maladaptive daydreamers who spend excessive amounts of time engaged in mental fantasy worlds, in comparison to 107 controls. Our sample included a total of 447 individuals, aged 13–78, from 45 countries who responded to online announcements. Participants answered quantitative and qualitative questions about their daydreaming habits and completed seven questionnaires assessing mental health symptoms. Findings demonstrated that MD differs significantly from normative daydreaming in terms of quantity, content, experience, controllability, distress, and interference with life functioning. Results also demonstrated that Maladaptive Daydreamers endorsed significantly higher rates of attention deficit, obsessive compulsive and dissociation symptoms than controls. In sum, findings suggested that MD represents an under-acknowledged clinical phenomenon that causes distress, hinders life functioning and requires more scientific and clinical attention.     

Early Parenting Intervention: Family Risk and First-time Parenting Related to Intervention Effectiveness

The effects of cumulative risk and parity on the effectiveness of a home based parenting intervention were tested in a randomized controlled trial with 237 families with 1- to 3-year-old children screened for high levels of externalizing behavior. The intervention was aimed at enhancing positive parenting and decreasing externalizing behaviors. The results showed that cumulative risk was not associated with either change in child externalizing behaviors or change in positive parenting. When intervention effectiveness was compared for primiparas (i.e., first-time mothers) versus multiparas (i.e., mothers with more than one child), we found that intervention mothers of first-born children displayed an increase in their use of positive discipline strategies as compared to first-time mothers in the control group, whereas a similar effect for multiparas was absent. Among multiparas we found an intervention effect on sensitivity, with control group mothers showing an increase in sensitivity, whereas the intervention group showed a constant level of sensitivity over time. These results suggest that parity may be a moderator of intervention effectiveness. Implications for investigating moderators of intervention effectiveness are discussed.     

How counting represents number: what children must learn and when they learn it

This study compared 2- to 4-year-olds who understand how counting works (cardinal-principle-knowers) to those who do not (subset-knowers), in order to better characterize the knowledge itself. New results are that (1) Many children answer the question "how many" with the last word used in counting, despite not understanding how counting works; (2) Only children who have mastered the cardinal principle, or are just short of doing so, understand that adding objects to a set means moving forward in the numeral list whereas subtracting objects mean going backward; and finally (3) Only cardinal-principle-knowers understand that adding exactly 1 object to a set means moving forward exactly 1 word in the list, whereas subset-knowers do not understand the unit of change.