An intensive longitudinal investigation of maternal and infant touching patterns across context and throughout the first 9-months of life.

Touch is a central component of mothers' and infants' everyday interactions and the formation of a healthy mother-infant relationship. Twelve mothers and their full-term infants from the Midwest, USA participated in the present study, which examined the quality and quantity of their touching behaviors longitudinally at 1-, 3-, 5-, 7-, and 9-months postpartum and within two normative interaction contexts (face-to-face, floor play). Findings revealed that mothers' and infants' individual touch patterns, varied according to context, infant age (time), and the specific type of touch examined.

Abstractness emerges progressively over the second year of life.

words, terms not referring to here and now, are acquired slowly in infancy. They are difficult to acquire as they are more detached from sensory modalities than concrete words. Recent theories propose that, because of their complexity, other people are pivotal for abstract concepts' acquisition and use.

Better or Worse: a Study of Day-to-Day Changes over Five Months of Rosen Method Bodywork Treatment for Chronic Low Back Pain.

Background: Fluctuations of good days and bad days-in physical symptoms and emotional states-are common for individuals with chronic illness. This pilot study examines these fluctuations during bodywork treatment.

Purpose: We analyzed changes in daily self-reports over a period of five months for five individuals who received weekly treatments of Rosen Method Bodywork (RMB), which uses touch and words to enhance body awareness of physical sensations and emotional states.

Interdyad differences in early mother-infant face-to-face communication: real-time dynamics and developmental pathways.

A microgenetic research design with a multiple case study method and a combination of quantitative and qualitative analyses was used to investigate interdyad differences in real-time dynamics and developmental change processes in mother-infant face-to-face communication over the first 3 months of life. Weekly observations of 24 mother-infant dyads with analyses performed dyad by dyad showed that most dyads go through 2 qualitatively different developmental phases of early face-to-face communication: After a phase of mutual attentiveness, mutual engagement begins in Weeks 7-8, with infant smiling and cooing bidirectionally linked with maternal mirroring. This gives rise to sequences of positive feedback that, by the 3rd month, dynamically stabilizes into innovative play routines.

Effects of social games on infant vocalizations*.

The aim of the present study was to examine the contextual effects of social games on prelinguistic vocalizations. The two main goals were to (1) investigate the functions of vocalizations as symptoms of affective arousal and symbols of social understanding, and (2) explore form-function (de)coupling relations between vocalization types and game contexts. Seventy-one six-month-olds and sixty-four twelve-month-olds played with their mothers in normal and perturbed tickle and peek-a-boo games.

Self and other dialogue in infancy: normal versus compromised developmental pathways.

Dialogical Self Theory, co-regulation, and foundational movement analysis are used to present a description of the development of the dialogical self during the first five months of life using observations of two mother-infant dyads. Susan and her mother illustrate normative emergence of the dialogical self. Susan's I-positions emerge through positive interactions with her mother, for example, through body positioning and dialogue in a flexible yield-push pattern.

Applying machine learning to infant interaction: the development is in the details.

The face-to-face interactions of infants and their parents are a model system in which critical communicative abilities emerge. We apply machine learning methods to explore the predictability of infant and mother behavior during interaction with an eye to understanding the preconditions of infant intentionality. Overall, developmental changes were most evident when the probability of specific behaviors was examined in specific interactive contexts.

A longitudinal investigation of maternal touching across the first 6 months of life: age and context effects.

The types of touch used by 12 mothers with their 1-, 3- and 5.5-month-old infants were examined longitudinally during two different interaction contexts lasting 5 min each. Changes in maternal touching as a function of infants' age and interaction context were revealed.

The interactive development of social smiling.

Infant smiles emerge even in the absence of visual feedback, but their interactive development and intensification appear to be dependent on experiences of visually mediated interaction. Although neonatal smiling has no clear emotional content, social smiling emerges out of attentive engagement with an interactive caregiver. This process illustrates the dynamic systems postulate that real-time interaction is a window on developmental process.

Alive communication.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a theoretical model, based on a dynamic systems perspective and the metaphor of aliveness in communication. Traditional concepts and methods for the study of communication are relatively static and based on the metaphor of signal and response. These traditional methods lend themselves to relatively simplified measures of frequencies and durations, sequences and co-occurrences: a model of objectified communication.

Effects of normal and perturbed social play on the duration and amplitude of different types of infant smiles.

Different types of smiling varying in amplitude of lip corner retraction were investigated during 2 mother-infant games--peekaboo and tickle--at 6 and 12 months and during normally occurring and perturbed games. Using Facial Action Coding System (FACS), infant smiles were coded as simple (lip corner retraction only), Duchenne (simple plus cheek raising), play (simple plus jaw drop), and duplay (Duchenne plus jaw drop). In addition, again using FACS, the amplitude of lip corner retraction was coded on a 5-point scale.

Developmental changes in the relationship between the infant's attention and emotion during early face-to-face communication: the 2-month transition.

Weekly observations documented developmental changes in mother-infant face-to-face communication between birth and 3 months. Developmental trajectories for each dyad of the duration of infant facial expressions showed a change from the dominance of Simple Attention (without other emotion expressions) to active and emotionally positive forms of attention to the mother toward the end of the 2nd month. The results support an overlapping waves model, rather than a stage model, of developmental change.

Stability and transitions in mother-infant face-to-face communication during the first 6 months: a microhistorical approach.

In this study the authors attempted to unravel the relational, dynamical, and historical nature of mother-infant communication during the first 6 months. Thirteen mothers and their infants were videotaped weekly from 4 to 24 weeks during face-to-face interactions. Three distinct patterns of mother-infant communication were identified: symmetrical, asymmetrical, and unilateral.

Social regulatory effects of infant nondistress vocalization on maternal behavior.

This study investigated the social regulatory function of infant nondistress vocalization in modulating maternal response. Thirteen infants and their mothers were observed weekly in a face-to-face interaction situation from 4 to 24 weeks. After the occurrences and the speech quality of infant nondistress vocalization were identified, maternal contingent responses to these vocalizations were also coded.

Developmental changes in mother-infant face-to-face communication: birth to 3 months.

This study documented the growth of the earliest form of face-to-face communication in 16 mother-infant dyads, videotaped weekly during a naturalistic face-to-face interaction, between 1 and 14 weeks, in 2 conditions: with the infant in the mother's arms and with the infant semi-reclined on a sofa. Results showed a curvilinear development of early face-to-face communication, with a significant increase occurring between Week 4 and Week 9 depending on the dyad. After 2 months, trajectories diverged into 2 groups: I whose duration of face-to-face communication continued to increase and I whose duration peaked and then began to decrease.