A longitudinal comparison of maternal behaviour in German urban humans (Homo sapiens) and captive chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes).

Comparative perspectives are crucial in the study of human development, yet longitudinal comparisons of humans and other primates are still relatively uncommon. Here, we combined theoretical frameworks from cross-cultural and comparative psychology, to study maternal style in 10 mother-infant pairs of German urban humans (Homo sapiens) and 10 mother-infant pairs of captive chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes), during the first year of infants' development. We conducted focal observations of different behaviours (i.

Face to face interactions in chimpanzee () and human () mother-infant dyads.

Human mothers interact with their infants in different ways. In Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic (WEIRD) societies, face-to-face interactions and mutual gazes are especially frequent, yet little is known about their developmental trajectories and if they differ from those of other primates. Using a cross-species developmental approach, we compared mother-infant interactions in 10 dyads of urban humans from a WEIRD society () and 10 dyads of captive zoo-based chimpanzees (), when infants were one, six and 12 months old.

Bewitched to Be Happy? The Impact of Pretend Play on Emotion Regulation of Expression in 3- to 6-Year-Olds.

As a means of psychological distancing, pretend play may facilitate emotion regulation. Up to now, however, the empirical evidence for a relation between these two is not consistent. The present study examines the impact of pretend play on reflective emotion regulation of expression with a disappointing gift task using the strategy of role-taking.

Expressions as signs and their significance for emotional development.

For research on emotional development, defining emotions as psychological systems of appraisals, expressions, body reactions, and subjective feelings in all phases of ontogenesis raises tricky methodological issues. How can we measure single emotions when appraisals and feelings cannot be assessed from outside, when expressions do not seem to be tied unequivocally to single emotions, and feelings are sometimes decoupled from perceivable expressions? Furthermore, how does a restricted set of neonate emotions differentiate into a culturally modified set of adult emotions? This article presents an innovative answer to these issues by applying Vygotsky's culture-historical approach on the psychological significance of social signs to the analysis of emotion, expression, and their development. The core assumption is that humans learn to use emotional expressions as communicative signs that appeal to another person to regulate their interaction through emotions and as psychological signs that appeal to the self to regulate the self's actions through emotions.

Impaired predictability: enhanced fluctuations in the parenting behaviour of mothers of pre-school children with clinical diagnoses across three different play tasks.

Fluctuations in parenting behaviour are thought to be important for the development of child psychopathology. This study focusses on fluctuations in the parenting behaviour of mothers with 3-6-year-old children with a clinical diagnosis according to the International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems 10th Revision (ICD-10) (N = 39) and compared them with a control group of mothers with children without a clinical diagnosis (N = 41). In a laboratory setting, we compared the quality of mother-child interactions between both groups using three increasingly challenging co-operation tasks.

Felt or false smiles? Volitional regulation of emotional expression in 4-, 6-, and 8-year-old children.

The development of volitional emotion regulation of expression was examined with a modified disappointing gift paradigm and strategy for coding children's expressions. Forty-nine boys and 49 girls aged 4, 6, and 8 were motivated to volitionally deceive an observer by false smiling, regardless of whether they received an attractive, unattractive, or no gift. Ten naïve observers watched children's videotaped behavior in random order and judged the quality of emotion and type of gift.

A cross-cultural comparison of the development of the social smile: a longitudinal study of maternal and infant imitation in 6- and 12-week-old infants.

Social smiling is universally regarded as being an infant's first facial expression of pleasure. Underlying co-constructivist emotion theories are the assumptions that the emergence of social smiling is bound to experiences of face-to-face interactions with caregivers and the impact of two developmental mechanisms--maternal and infant imitation. We analyzed mother-infant interactions from two different socio-cultural contexts and hypothesized that cross-cultural differences in face-to-face interactions determine the occurrence of both of these mechanisms and of the frequency of social smiling by 12-week-old infants.

The miniaturization of expression in the development of emotional self-regulation.

This study tested an internalization model of emotional development proposing that emotional expression decreases during childhood in situations in which emotions serve only self-regulation. This model was tested by inducing joy and disappointment in solitary versus interpersonal conditions in 3 gender-matched, 20-member groups of 6-, 7-, and 8-year-olds. Results supported the model: Expression--but not self-reported feeling--decreased in solitary conditions as a function of increasing age, whereas both expression and feeling remained stable in the interpersonal condition.