Mothers speak less to infants during detected real-world phone use.

The current study is the first to document the real-time association between phone use and speech to infants in extended real-world interactions. N= 16 predominantly White (75%) mother-infant dyads (infants aged M = 4.1 months, SD = 2.

Auditory chaos classification in real-world environments.

Background & Motivation: Household chaos is an established risk factor for child development. However, current methods for measuring household chaos rely on parent surveys, meaning existing research efforts cannot disentangle potentially dynamic bidirectional relations between high chaos environments and child behavior problems.

Proposed Approach: We train and make publicly available a classifier to provide objective, high-resolution predictions of household chaos from real-world child-worn audio recordings.

Maternal contingent responses to distress facilitate infant soothing but not in mothers with depression or infants high in negative affect.

Depression in mothers is consistently associated with reduced caregiving sensitivity and greater infant negative affect expression. The current article examined the real-time behavioral mechanisms underlying these associations using Granger causality time series analyses in a sample of mothers ( = 194; 86.60% White) at elevated risk for depression and their 3-month-old infants (46.

Infant crying predicts real-time fluctuations in maternal mental health in ecologically valid home settings.

Exposure to infant crying is a well-established predictor of mothers' mental health. However, this association may reflect many potential mechanisms. Capturing dynamic fluctuations in mothers' states simultaneously with caregiving experiences is necessary to identify the real-time processes influencing mental health.