Used home observations and laboratory procedures with 85 Chilean mothers and infants to examine the association between infants' chronic undernutrition and maternal sensitivity, sociodemographic variables, and infants' play and problem solving. Found that maternal sensitivity was correlated with maternal education, maternal weight, marital…

Observed face-to-face interactions between 39 mothers and their first and second-born two-month olds to evaluate within-family differences in maternal affective behavior toward siblings. Found that mothers were more positive with second-borns than firstborns, and second-borns were more positive than firstborns. Siblings' affective behaviors were…

Used questionnaire and observations from 94 nonclinical mother-adolescent dyads to examine whether the inverse relationship between maternal emotional distress and responsiveness was mediated by mothers' parenting efficacy and parental perspective taking. Found that maternal emotional distress was associated with lower levels of mother- and…

Examined associations between children's early experiences in family disputes and later conflict management with close friends. Found that argument used by mothers and siblings that considered children's needs was positively associated with children's later constructive argument and resolution techniques. Mothers' use of argument predicted…

Studied 715 twins and singletons to document heritable influences on temperament during toddler and preschool ages. Found substantial shared environmental influence on positive affect and additive genetic influence on emotion regulation. Intraclass correlations from many scales showed no evidence of "too-low" dizygotic correlations that implied…

Two studies examined psychometric properties of a new criterion Q-sort for children's emotion regulation and autonomy. Multitrait-multimethod matrix and factor analyses indicated impressive convergence among the emotion regulation Q-scale and established affect regulation measures. The new scale was not discriminable from measures of related…

Examined the influence of emotion, audience, gender, and age on fifth, eighth, and eleventh graders' reported emotion management, emotional self-efficacy, and expectancies. Found that eighth graders regulated emotion most and expected the least maternal support. Children expressed greater self-efficacy and regulation for sadness than for anger.…

This study examined the relationship between smile type (basic, Duchenne, duplay) and play type (object, physical, vocal, book reading) during parent-infant videotaped interactions at home. Loglinear analyses revealed that different types of smiles occurred during different types of play more often than expected if distributed equally. Different…

A four-year longitudinal study examined relationship between phonological skills of 100 Chinese children and the children's success in reading. Findings indicated that prereading phonological skills assessed at age 3 predicted the children's reading performance in Chinese two and three years later, even after controlling for the effects of age,…

Four studies examined 2- and 3-year olds' word order and verb morphology productivity. Findings indicated that younger children neither used nor comprehended word order with novel transitive verbs. Older children comprehended and used word order to mark verbs' agents and patients. Children as young as 25 months added "-ing" but not "-ed" to verb…

Examined phonological short-term memory and new word learning in 5-year olds. Found that learning sound structures of new words was significantly, and to some degree independently, associated with aspects of phonological memory skill and vocabulary knowledge. Learning of familiar word pairs was linked with current vocabulary knowledge, not with…

Two experiments examined 6-month olds' ability to categorize natural infant-directed utterances. Infants heard seven different tokens from one class of utterance (comforting, approving). Findings indicated that infants who later heard a test stimulus from the unfamiliar class showed response recovery, whereas those who heard a novel stimulus from…

Two experiments examined role of affective correspondence between signal and outcome in 4-month olds' associative learning. Found that only when consoling infant-directed speech signaled the sad face did infants' visual interest in a checkerboard increase. Arousing infant-directed speech signaling either the smiling or sad face produced positive…

Tested a model linking family financial resources to adjustment among African American 6- to 9-year olds with single, rural, Southern mothers. Found that inadequate financial resources related to mothers' depression and low self-esteem. Self-esteem was linked with family routines and mother-child relationship quality. Child self-regulation…

Parents who were identical twins, fraternal twins, or adopted siblings completed questionnaires assessing attitudes toward parenting and specific parenting practices, the emotional atmosphere of the home, and parental personality. Model-fitting results implicated modest genetic effects on affect-related aspects of parenting, such as parental…