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PubMed1993

Predicting preschool behavior problems from temperament and other variables in infancy.

There is uncertainty about the relationship between difficult temperament in infancy and reported problem behaviors later in childhood. In this study data from a large, representative community cohort (total N studied = 1583) were used to determine whether preschool behavior problems (at age 4 to 5 years) could be predicted from difficult temperament and other variables in infancy. Maternal ratings of difficult temperament on the Revised Infant Temperament Questionnaire predicted only 17.5% of those with preschool behavior problems, a percentage not significantly greater than the 14% of the total sample rated as having problems. There was some improvement in prediction when difficult temperament was added to other variables such as male sex (28%). However, mothers' overall rating of temperament was a more powerful predictor of preschool behavior problems, both alone (26.0%) and in combination with other variables such as perinatal stress (36.8%), male sex (29.5%), and non-Australian parent (29.4%). Similarly, maternal reports of infant behavior problems was a more powerful predictor of preschool behavior problems both alone (21.8%) and in combination with male sex (24.6%), low socioeconomic status (26.1%), non-Australian parent (21.8%), and nurse's overall rating of temperament (21.8%). The best consistent predictor of later problems was the combination of mothers' overall rating of temperament and maternal reports of infant behavior problems (27.0%), especially when combined with other infant variables such as perinatal stress (35.3%), male sex (31.5%), and non-Australian parent (30.0%).(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)

Australia↗
PubMed2000

Negative reactivity and attachment: Down syndrome's contribution to the attachment-temperament debate.

This longitudinal study investigated the relation between negative reactivity and attachment in children with Down syndrome (DS). Specifically, we examined whether extremely low negative reactivity is associated with the enactment and organization of attachment behaviors. To address this issue 30 infants with DS (13 female, 17 male) were observed in Ainsworth's Strange Situation at 19 and 27 months. The intensity and duration of distress reactions were coded in 15-s intervals throughout each Strange Situation episode. Children's distress intensity during separations from caregivers was used to place children into Low versus Moderate/High Negative Reactivity groups. In addition, ratings of infants' social interactive behaviors (contact maintenance, proximity seeking, distance interaction, resistance, and avoidance) were made for each episode and used to assess the quality of infants' attachment relationships. The data indicated that there are high rates of Type A and D insecure attachments within the DS population at each age studied. However, low negative reactivity was not consistently related to the activation of the attachment behavioral system, or associated with insecure attachment relationships. Alternative explanations for the high rate of insecure attachments are discussed.

Affect↗
PubMed1975

Infants' visual attention to pattern arrangement and orientation.

When 2 stimuli were presented side by side, 4-5-month-old infants looked longer at a visual target that differed from a previously exposed standard target. This reaction to the discrepant target indicated that infants could detect a change involving the arrangement of the constituent elements and the orientation of the standard pattern. When infants were given the opportunity to view paired targets that were both different from the previously exposed standard, there was no evidence that orientation was a less dimension than pattern arrangement. Instead, the infants' fixation behavior seemed to be a function of the relative discrepancy of the paired test stimuli from the previously exposed standard pattern.

Attention↗
PubMedDate not supplied

A case study of infant massage outcomes.

This article describes a case study of infant massage for a neonate in a neonatal intensive care unit (NICU). Infant massage is grounded in the theory of touch. In an NICU, the infant's tactile experiences can be uncomfortable or painful. This can lead to touch aversion. It is possible that providing pleasurable touch experiences through infant massage can help to develop touch acceptance. It is important to first assess the infant's readiness for massage according to his or her need and response. Infant massage as a complementary therapy in the NICU is demonstrated here in a photo-study of "Nicholas." The initial uncertainty and gradual acceptance by Nicholas of the massage experience is clearly depicted. At the end of the massage, Nicholas was relaxed and asleep in a semi-fetal position. The behavioral change in this infant indicates that he made a transition from touch aversion to touch acceptance.

Humans↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Rhythms and rhymes: developing communication in very young blind and multihandicapped children.

Communicative behaviours develop in early infancy. Blind and multihandicapped infants are at risk in developing social signal behaviours that serve the purpose of signalling the attention of adults and engaging adults in shared interactions and social routines. Primary intersubjectivity or adult-infant interaction has been shown to provide the matrix in which communicative behaviours are acquired. The social routine is one form of adult-infant interaction in which mutuality and shared attention to the same event is developed. The results of this study indicate that very young blind and multihandicapped children can develop intentional and communicative behaviours in the course of social routines based on traditional nursery rhymes. Of particular interest were the youngest subjects who were 15 months-2 years and 3 months at the start of the study. These subjects demonstrated a variety of social responses to interaction with adults. Their responsiveness was expressed in the modalities that were most accessible to them. The physically handicapped children used vocalization as a primary mode of communication, while the physically active depended on physical gestures and postures.

Blindness↗
PubMed1988

Adaptational features of mothers' risk and prevention appraisals after the birth of high-risk infants.

Sixty-seven mothers were interviewed at the time of their child's discharge from a newborn intensive care unit and 6 months after hospital discharge. After 6 months, mothers who had done more to prevent adverse pregnancy outcomes, had been more optimistic about the outcomes of their pregnancy, and saw their infant's complications as more avoidable reported greater concurrent mood disturbance and/or more distress ensuing from their child's hospitalization. Mothers' risk and prevention appraisals also played a role in their attitudes toward future childbearing, independent of mothers' reproductive history, the severity of the infants' medical condition, and the infant's behavioral difficulty at 6 months. The single most important predictor of mothers' expectations of future pregnancies, however, was whether the child was first born.

Adult↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Infant stress and parent responsiveness: regulation of physiology and behavior during still-face and reunion.

This study examined infant response and recovery from a social challenge and parent responses. Behavioral and physiological responses were measured from forty-three 5- and 6-month-olds infants during a modified still-face procedure that used an additional still-face reunion sequence. Results confirm the hypothesis that infants of more responsive parents show more regulation than infants of less responsive parents. Infants of more responsive parents showed greater regulation of heart rate and negative affect during the final episode of the procedure than infants of less responsive parents. In addition, this procedure elicited a cortisol response (from .22 microg/dl to .31 microg/dl). Findings suggest important links between parent behavior and infant stress reactivity and regulation.

Adaptation, Psychological↗
PubMed2004

Enhancing prehension in infants and children: fostering neuromotor strategies.

Learning to reach for and manipulate objects requires considerable neuromotor control and flexibility. Through environmental and object exploration individual neuromotor strategies expand, and prehensile skills improve, as infants and children overcome constraints. Infants and children with prehensile deficits often have difficulty exploring objects and the environment, thus, may not sufficiently develop the strategies needed to expand their prehensile skills. This article reviews neuromotor factors that influence prehension development, discusses limitations to prehensile function and provides guidelines that can be used to examine and enhance prehensile behaviors in infants and young children based on a task-oriented approach addressing impairments, motor strategies and function.

Adaptation, Physiological↗
PubMed2000

Disorganized infant, child, and adult attachment: collapse in behavioral and attentional strategies.

This presentation focuses on the disorganized/disoriented (Group D) categories of infant, child, and adult attachment. The infant D category is assigned on the basis of interruptions and anomalies in organization and orientation observed during Ainsworth's strange situation procedure. In neurologically normal low-risk samples, D attachment is not substantially related to descriptions of infant temperament, and usually appears with respect to only one parent. At six, former D infants are often found to be role-inverting (D-Controlling) towards the parent, while drawings and separation-related narratives (D-Fearful) suggest continuing states of fear and disorganization. In adults, marked lapses in reasoning and discourse surrounding the discussion of loss or abuse during the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI) causes a transcript to be assigned to Unresolved/disorganized (U/d) adult attachment status, which predicts infant D attachment. Bowlby's theory is extended, with the proposal that certain forms of frightening parental behavior will arouse contradictory biologically channeled propensities to approach and to take flight from the parent. Maltreated infants are therefore highly likely to be disorganized. Also identified are subtler forms of frightening parental behavior (including dissociative behavior and anomalous forms of frightened behavior) that appear to lead to infant disorganization. This suggests that infant D attachment may at times represent a second-generation effect of the parent's own continuing unresolved responses to trauma. Infant D attachment predicts disruptive/aggressive and dissociative disorders in childhood and adolescence, while U/d adult attachment appears frequently in psychiatric and criminal populations. Clinical implications are discussed.

Adolescent↗
PubMed2005

Action experience alters 3-month-old infants' perception of others' actions.

An intervention facilitated 3-month-old infants' apprehension of objects either prior to (reach first), or after (watch first) viewing another person grasp similar objects in a visual habituation procedure. Action experience facilitated action perception: reach-first infants focused on the relation between the actor and her goal, but watch-first infants did not. Infants' sensitivity to the actor's goal was correlated with their engagement in object-directed contact with the toys. These findings indicate that infants can rapidly form goal-based action representations and suggest a developmental link between infants' goal directed actions and their ability to detect goals in the actions of others.

Attention↗
PubMed2006

Infants form associations between memory representations of stimuli that are absent.

Traditional models of learning assume that an association can be formed only between cues that are physically present. Here, we report that when two objects that had never appeared together were simultaneously activated in memory, young human infants associated the representations of those objects. Neither object was physically present at the time the association was formed. The association remained latent for up to 2 weeks, when the infants used it to perform a deferred imitation task. These findings reveal that what infants merely see "brings to mind" what they saw before and combines it in new ways. In addition to challenging a fundamental tenet of classic learning models, these findings have major theoretical and practical implications for early cognitive development. Every day, in the same manner, young infants probably form numerous associations between activated memories of objects that are physically absent, creating a potential knowledge base of untold dimensions.

Association↗
PubMed2001

[A study of the relation between providing healthcare information and behavior changes of people in Japan. Parental behavior changes after receiving information about the sudden infant death syndrome].

OBJECTIVE: Considering the lack of evidence concerning the relationship between providing healthcare information and behavior of people in Japan, we utilized a questionnaire to survey the parents of infants to evaluate behavior change after receiving information about the Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS). METHODS: A questionnaire about SIDS information was administered in 234 municipalities in Niigata, Gifu, Shizuoka, and Hiroshima Prefectures and in Yokohama City in November and December of 1999 to 14,879 parents who visited for the 18-month health examination of their children. The questionnaire did not ask for the participants' names. Logistic regression analysis was used to study the connection between behavior change and SIDS information sources. RESULTS: 10,900 parents returned the questionnaire to give a 73.3% response rate, 19.0% of these receiving information about SIDS risk factors from hospitals or clinics, 3.7% from public health centers, and 9.2% from their friends. More received information from the mass media such as TV programs, which provided the main source for 71.1% of the parents. The degree of behavior change was evaluated after adjustment for variables concerning a variety of information sources and other appropriate factors such as the age and sex of parents and the number of their children. We found that receiving information from hospitals or clinics significantly influences behavior changes for all kinds of risk factors. Information from public health centers, baby-care groups, and friends influenced behavior changes relevant to the risk factors for feeding methods, sleeping position, and parents' smoking. There was no relation between receiving information from the mass media and behavior change of parents. CONCLUSIONS: The mass media provide far more information than do medical facilities, public health centers, baby-care groups and personal contacts but the latter played much more effective roles in making parents change their baby care behavior. These results point to an obvious discrepancy between efficiency in providing information and the degree of behavior change elicited. We should thus take the source of information and the target population into consideration when we examine the best way to provide healthcare information for people in the future.

Adult↗
PubMed1981

The ontogeny of feeding in rats: V. Influence of texture, home odor, and sibling presence on ingestive behavior.

Terry-cloth texture, home odor, and the presence of siblings modulate the ingestive behavior of infant rats. Unlike warmth, which affects ingestion in pups until at least 15 days of age, the relative importance of these other cues varies with the age of the pup. At 3 days, ingestion is dependent on warmth but is not influenced by the other cues. At 6 days, texture and home odor enhance ingestive behavior (intake, activity, mouthing, and probing), but the presence of siblings has no effect. Home odor or terry-cloth texture did not alter the ingestive behavior of 12-day-olds, but the presence of siblings enhanced milk intake. Thus, during development, the external sensory controls for ingestion become progressively more complex. Warmth serves as a primary permissive cue for ingestion in developing pups, but as pups grow older, other types of cues (such as odor, texture, or social stimuli) also gain significance.

Aging↗
PubMed2002

Rational imitation in preverbal infants.

Here we show that if an adult demonstrates a new way to execute a task to a group of infants aged 14 months, the children will use this action to achieve the same goal only if they consider it to be the most rational alternative. Our results indicate that imitation of goal-directed action by preverbal infants is a selective, interpretative process, rather than a simple re-enactment of the means used by a demonstrator, as was previously thought.

Adult↗
PubMed1978

The effects of therapy on the developmental scores of iron-deficient infants.

To test the hypothesis that iron deficiency in infants and children is associated with behavioral alterations, 24 infants with iron deficienty anemia, ages 9 to 26 months, were randomly assigned to a treatment and control group. Bayley Scales of Infant Development were administered before treatment with intramuscular iron or placebo; the test was readministered in five to eight days. Children treated with iron showed a significant increase in their scores on the Mental Development Index averaging a mean gain of 13.6 points in a mean time of 6.8 days. The treated group was found to become more alert and responsive and demonstrated improvement in tests of gross and fine motor coordination. These findings support the hypothesis that iron deficiency in infants produced developmental alterations and that these changes are rapidly reversible with iron therapy.

Anemia, Hypochromic↗
PubMed1991

Modification of sleep respiratory patterns by auditory stimulation: indications of a technique for preventing sudden infant death syndrome?

Sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) has been associated with premorbid respiratory irregularities that may contribute to the subsequent occurrence of SIDS (e.g. by chronic hypoxia). Conventional apnea alarms will detect periods of extended apnea but not other chronic respiratory irregularities that could contribute to SIDS. The effect of a brief, quiet, repetitive auditory stimulus on the sleep respiratory behavior of infant dogs and pigs was assessed. Stimulus presentation was associated with an increase in the sleep respiration rate irrespective of the stimulus presentation rate being faster or slower than the baseline respiratory rate, and irrespective of the pattern of presentation being regular or random. These results suggest that apnea monitoring systems may be improved by an additional function in which less extreme respiratory irregularities initiate the time-limited presentation of a quiet, repetitive, auditory stimulus, aimed at normalizing the respiratory pattern. This function could enhance the preventative role of the alarm systems by reducing the development of pathology that may promote some instances of SIDS.

Acoustic Stimulation↗
PubMed2004

Spanking in early childhood and later behavior problems: a prospective study of infants and young toddlers.

OBJECTIVE: To explore the relationship of spanking frequency before age 2 with behavior problems near time of entry into school. METHODS: Children who were younger than 2 years were followed up approximately 4 years later, after they had entered school. The likelihood of significant behavior problems at follow-up was estimated in multivariate analyses that controlled for baseline spanking frequency and other characteristics. Participants were mothers from a large-scale national study and their children. Statistical analysis included an ethnically diverse sample of 1966 children aged 0 to 23 months at baseline. Two dichotomous indicators of behavior problems were used. The first indicated that maternal rating of child behavior problems exceeded a threshold. The second indicated that a mother met with a school administrator to discuss her child's behavior problems. RESULTS: White non-Hispanic children who were spanked more frequently before age 2 were substantially more likely to have behavior problems after entry into school, controlling for other factors. For Hispanic and black children, associations between spanking frequency and behavior problems were not statistically significant and were not consistent across outcome measures. CONCLUSION: Among white non-Hispanic children but not among black and Hispanic children, spanking frequency before age 2 is significantly and positively associated with child behavior problems at school age. These findings are consistent with those reported in studies of children older than 2 years but extend these findings to children who are spanked beginning at a relatively early age.

Child↗
PubMed2004

The affective structure of supportive parenting: depressive symptoms, immediate emotions, and child-oriented motivation.

This study investigated the maternal concerns and emotions that may regulate one form of sensitive parenting, support for children's immediate desires or intentions. While reviewing a videotape of interactions with their 1-year-olds, mothers who varied on depressive symptoms reported concerns and emotions they had during the interaction. Emotions reflected outcomes either to children (child-oriented concerns) or to mothers themselves (parent-oriented concerns). Child-oriented concerns were associated with fewer negative emotions and more supportive behavior. Supportive parenting was high among mothers who experienced high joy and worry and low anger, sadness, and guilt. However, relations depended on whether emotions were child or parent oriented: Supportive behavior occurred more when emotions were child oriented. In addition, as depressive symptoms increased, mothers reported fewer child-oriented concerns, fewer child-oriented positive emotions, and more parent-oriented negative emotions. They also displayed less supportive behavior. Findings suggest that support for children's immediate intentions may be regulated by parents' concerns, immediate emotions, and depressive symptoms.

Adult↗