Emotion regulation from infancy to toddlerhood: Individual and group trajectories of full-term and very-low-birthweight preterm infants.

Adaptive emotion regulation begins with infants operating jointly with their parents to regulate their emotions, which fosters the development of independent regulation. Little is known about when or how this transition occurs, or the impact of factors such as parental availability or premature birth status. The current study examined the use of self-soothing, attentional distraction, and dyadic regulation in full-term and healthy very-low-birthweight (VLBW) preterm infant-mother dyads at 5 ½, 12, and 18 months of age.

Caregiver Emotional Availability, Caregiver Soothing Behaviors, and Infant Pain During Immunization.

Objective: To determine whether caregivers with more extreme emotional availability scores enact different levels of soothing behaviors and whether infants of these caregivers differ in their pain scores across the first year of life.

Methods: Cross-sectional analyses (analyses of variance and multivariate analyses of variance) were conducted with parent-infant dyads at 2, 4, 6, and 12 months of age who had extreme caregiver emotional availability scores. Pain scores were examined using a minimum clinically significant difference.