The present study examined fathers' daily parenting hassles and coping strategies to (a) determine their association with fathers' emotional expressiveness and (b) predict their sons' development of socioemotional competence. Fathers of 148 preschool-aged boys reported on their parenting hassles, coping strategies, and emotional expressiveness;…

Emergent themes from this special issue on parent-child co-sleeping are featured in this concluding article. Each of the pieces in this collection addressed one or more of the following themes: methodologies for studying parent-infant co-sleeping, physical and social characteristics of the child's sleep environment, associations between sleep…

Using Ecological Systems Theory and stage sequential modelling procedures for detecting mediation, this study examined how early developmental contexts impact preschoolers' performances on a measure of sustained attention and impulse control. Data from 1273 European-American and African-American participants in the NICHD Study of Early Child Care…

This special issue is dedicated to research that adopts the microgenetic method in order to investigate change as it is happening. In this commentary we reflect on the diversity of the articles included in this special issue, and examine how the findings from these articles relate to five critical features of change: path, rate, breadth,…

This study examined solitary sleeping and co-sleeping arrangements in families with a young child. Data were obtained from questionnaires completed by two independent samples, one of mothers (N = 100) and one of fathers (N = 38) of preschool-aged children. Types of family sleep arrangements included children who slept in their own room from…

The perception of colour in an embedded field is affected by the surround colour. This phenomenon is known as chromatic induction. In the present study we investigated whether the colour perception by infants aged 5-7 months could be affected by the surround colour. In Experiments 1 and 2 each stimulus was composed of an array of six squares in…

Children's understanding of the cardinal significance of counting is often assessed by the "give x" task, in which they are categorized as "counters" or "grabbers". Previous research indicates a sudden stage-like shift, implying insight into a principle. Employing a microgenetic approach, the present study was designed to explore whether this…

This study assessed the development of spontaneous analogical transfer from story problems to physical tasks by examining the effects of practice alone, without intervention or explicit prompting. Participants were 216 children aged 5-8 years. The microgenetic technique was incorporated with each age group by following them for six consecutive…

The aim of this study was to establish the nature of the relations between inhibitory control (IC) and false belief understanding (FBU). Twenty-eight children, participating in an experimental condition, were tested on a battery of FBU and IC tasks every four weeks for six phases of testing. A control group of 14 children completed the battery…

Current individual-based, process-oriented approaches (dynamic systems theory and the microgenetic perspective) have led to an increase of variability-centred studies in the literature. The aim of this article is to propose a technique that incorporates variability in the analysis of the "shape" of developmental change. This approach is…

Infancy and early childhood sleep-wake behaviours from current and retrospective parental reports were used to explore the relationship between sleeping arrangements and parent-child nighttime interactions at both time points. Children (N = 45) from educated, middle-class families, mostly breastfed in infancy, composed a convenience sample that…

The study of infant communication during mother-infant interactions has largely focused on infants' distal behaviours, while neglecting their more proximal behaviours, such as touch. Yet, touch is an important modality through which infants and mothers communicate; it is also a vital means through which infants self-regulate and explore their…

Socio-emotional behaviour is in part sex-related in humans, although the contribution of the biological and socio-cultural factors is not yet known. This study explores sex-related differences during the earliest communicative exchange, the neonatal imitation in 43 newborn infants (3-96 hours old) using an index finger extension imitative gesture.…

Two experiments with 3 1/2- to 6 1/2-year-old children showed that theory-of-mind development is associated with the growth of episodic memory. Episodic memory was assessed by manipulating informational conditions such that they permit or prevent the formation of episodic memories in terms of re-experiencing the recalled event. Only experienced…

Efforts to integrate accounts of scaffolding with Karmiloff-Smith's (1992) RR model have produced renewed interest in the language that tutors use to guide activity, since this provides a mechanism by which redescription of learners' representations might be achieved. The present research examined the impact of two forms of parental input,…