This study examines and compares prominent characteristics of maternal responsiveness to infant activity during home-based naturalistic interactions of mother-infant dyads in New York City, Paris, and Tokyo. Both culture-general and culture-specific patterns of responsiveness emerged. For example, in all 3 locales infants behaved similarly, mothers also behaved similarly with respect to a hiera...

Maternal stress and anxiety during pregnancy are related to negative developmental outcomes for offspring, both physiological and psychological, from the fetal period through early adolescence. This robust relationship is likely to be partly explained by alterations in fetal neurodevelopmental programming, calling for further examination of neurophysiologically-based cognitive markers that may ...

Parents of children with hearing impairment tend to exhibit “depression” a known stress related response. Mothers of hearing impaired child are more prone than fathers to experience depression [1,2]. In addition, these mothers are found to be less successful in cultivating language and psychological development of their children. The study aimed to measure pre and post cochlear implantation (CI...

OBJECTIVE Environmental pollutants, especially environmental toxins (ET), may have the potential to disrupt neurodevelopmental pathways during early brain development. This study was designed to test our hypothesis that mothers with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) children would have less knowledge about ET and more chance to be exposed to ET than mothers with healthy children (MHC). METHODS O...

The adaptive benefits of maternal investment into individual offspring (inherited environmental effects) will be shaped by selection on mothers as well as their offspring, often across variable environments. We examined how a mother's nutritional environment interacted with her offspring's nutritional and social environment in Xiphophorus multilineatus, a live-bearing fish. Fry from mothers rea...

The project studied videotaped unstructured play sessions between 16 Downs Syndrome (DS) infants (aged 6 months and 12 months) and their mothers, to investigate the relationship between maternal attention-directing strategies and the infants' response to toys. A comparison group consisted of 16 high-risk premature infants matched by mental and motor age. At 6 months, the DS infants spent more t...

Mothers are attracted by infant cues of a variety of different modalities. To clarify the possible neural mechanisms underlying maternal attraction to infant odor cues, we used near-infrared spectroscopy to examine prefrontal cortex (PFC) activity during odor detection tasks in which 19 mothers and 19 nulliparous females (nonmothers) were presented with infant or adult male odors. They were ins...

This study investigated the influence of maternal socialization (i.e., maternal support, discussion of emotion, negative affect) on children's emotional understanding in 24 neglectful mother-child dyads and a matched control group. Mothers and children were administered an interaction task. Mothers were also assessed for negative emotional experience, and children were assessed for emotional un...