Infant sensitivity to social contingency moderates the predictive link between early maternal reciprocity and infants' emerging social behavior.

The scientific study of love underscores the importance of dyadic reciprocity in laying the foundation for infants' social development. While research establishes links between early reciprocity and children's social capacities, some infants appear to benefit from reciprocity more than others. A central feature of reciprocity is its contingent structure, that is, the extent to which maternal behaviors are temporally associated with and contingent upon infants' dynamically changing cues.

Maternal contingent responsiveness moderates temperamental risk to support adaptive infant brain and socioemotional development across the first year of life.

In the first few months of life, infants display intriguing individual differences in how they react to novel stimuli in their environment. Infant "negative reactive" tendencies have been robustly linked to resting brain activity profiles that confer risk for maladaptive socioemotional outcomes. The present study examines whether and how caregiver behavior in early infancy may interact with infant negative reactivity to alter the extent to which such tendencies predict risk-related brain activity profiles.

Intergenerational transmission of maternal prenatal anxiety to infant fearfulness: the mediating role of mother-infant bonding.

Purpose: This study is the first to directly investigate the mechanistic role of maternal bonding toward her infant in the early intergenerational pathway of risk from maternal anxiety to infant fearfulness.

Methods: Mothers (N = 216; M=32.78) reported on their anxiety and bonding at four time-points between pregnancy and ten-months postpartum.

The importance of differentiating between cold and hot response inhibition in the parenting context, when examining associations with harsh parenting.

Harsh parenting (HP) entails physical and verbal expressions of anger and aggression toward children, usually observed as response to child negative emotionality. Abundant previous research has indicated the detrimental negative impacts of HP on children's developing behavioral, cognitive social, and emotional capacities, highlighting the need for examining its determinants. Among other determinants, previous research has suggested the importance of parents' cognitive regulatory capacity for inhibiting inappropriate behavioral responses (response inhibition; RI).

Persistent symptoms of maternal post-traumatic stress following childbirth across the first months postpartum: Associations with perturbations in maternal behavior and infant avoidance of social gaze toward mother.

Recent literature identifies childbirth as a potentially traumatic event, following which mothers may develop symptoms of Post-Traumatic-Stress-Following-Childbirth (PTS-FC). The current study examines whether stable symptoms of PTS-FC during the early postpartum period may impose risk for perturbations in maternal behavior and infant social-engagement with mother, controlling for comorbid postpartum internalizing symptoms. Mother-infant dyads (N = 192) were recruited from the general population, during the third trimester of pregnancy.

Prospective risk from prenatal anxiety to post traumatic stress following childbirth: The mediating effects of acute stress assessed during the postnatal hospital stay and preliminary evidence for moderating effects of doula care.

Objective: Growing literature has identified childbirth as a potentially traumatic event, following which mothers may develop symptoms of Post-Traumatic-Stress-Following-Childbirth. The current study is the first to prospectively examine a pathway of risk from mothers' prenatal trait-anxiety, to Acute-Stress-Immediately-Following-Childbirth, and later symptoms of Post-Traumatic-Stress-Following-Childbirth, in a low-risk community sample. Auxiliary analyses explored whether doula care during childbirth moderated risk.

Initial Evidence for Symptoms of Postpartum Parent-Infant Relationship Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (PI-ROCD) and Associated Risk for Perturbed Maternal Behavior and Infant Social Disengagement From Mother.

Infant socioemotional development and underlying brain maturation occur primarily within the context of early caregiver-infant relationships. Perinatal research demonstrates detrimental impact of postpartum pathology, including postnatal onset of maternal OCD-on the mother-infant relationship. The present study is the first to examine postnatal onset of a particular dimension of OCD symptoms focusing on close interpersonal relationships (relationship-OCD, i.

A machine learning approach to identifying pregnant women's risk for persistent post-traumatic stress following childbirth.

Intro: Recent literature identifies childbirth as a potentially traumatic event, following which mothers may develop symptoms of Post-Traumatic-Stress-Following-Childbirth (PTS-FC). Especially when persistent, PTS-FC may interfere with mothers' caregiving and associated infant development, underscoring the need for accurate predictive screening of risk. Drawing on recent developments in advanced statistical modeling, the aim of the current study was to identify a set of prenatal indicators and prediction rules that may accurately identify pregnant women's risk for developing symptoms of PTS-FC which persist throughout the early postpartum period.

Moderating the Risk for Attention Deficits in Children with Pre-Adoptive Adversity: The Protective Role of Shorter Duration of out of Home Placement and Children's Enhanced Error Monitoring.

Early institutional-deprivation has been found to increase risk for inattention/hyperactivity (ADHD). Notably, studies suggest that children with a history of adversity evidencing an enhanced ERP (the error-related-negativity; ERN) may be protected against attention problems. However, such protective effects of the ERN have been studied in children whom typically experienced residential instability.

Preventing risk for posttraumatic stress following childbirth: Visual biofeedback during childbirth increases maternal connectedness to her newborn thereby preventing risk for posttraumatic stress following childbirth.

Objective: Mounting evidence indicates the detrimental impact of posttraumatic stress following childbirth (PTS-FC). Nevertheless, research on preventive strategies is scarce. We recently reported that ultrasound visual biofeedback during second stage of labor was associated with immediate beneficial medical outcomes (increased pushing efficacy, decreased perineal tearing), as well as greater feelings of maternal connectedness toward her newborn immediately postlabor.

Does intention matter? Relations between parent pointing, infant pointing, and developing language ability.

Infants' pointing is associated with concurrent and later language development. The communicative intention behind the point-i.e.

The association between mothers' and daughters' positive affect is moderated by child cardiac vagal regulation.

Introduction: Extensive research has supported the importance of children's positive affect in fostering prosperous psychosocial adjustment. Children's positive affect is believed to be significantly shaped by their environment in general and their caregivers' positive affect in particular. The current study investigates the role of child cardiac vagal regulation, a psychophysiological marker for social engagement, in shaping the association between maternal positive affect and child positive affect.

Promoting Healthy Child Development via a Two-Generation Translational Neuroscience Framework: The Filming Interactions to Nurture Development Video Coaching Program.

In this article, we focus on applying methods of translational neuroscience to two-generation, family-based interventions. In recent years, a small but growing body of evidence has documented the reversibility of some of the neurobiological effects of early adversity in the context of environmental early interventions. Some of these interventions are now being implemented at scale, which may help reduce disparities in the face of early life stress.

Early childhood behavioral inhibition, adult psychopathology and the buffering effects of adolescent social networks: a twenty-year prospective study.

Background: We examined whether the temperament of behavioral inhibition is a significant marker for psychopathology in early adulthood and whether such risk is buffered by peer social networks.

Methods: Participants (N = 165) were from a prospective study spanning the first two decades of life. Temperament was characterized during infancy and early childhood.

Neural activation during the processing of ambiguous fearful facial expressions: an ERP study in anxious and nonanxious individuals.

Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were recorded from anxious and nonanxious participants during performance on a fear detection task. Sequential presentation of gradually increasing fear cues from neutral to fearful allowed an examination of anxiety-related differences in the neural activation patterns corresponding to participants' overt detection of fear in ambiguous stimuli as well as the activation patterns corresponding to stages of fear processing preceding overt fear detection. While centro-parietal Late Positive Potential (LPP) amplitude of nonanxious participants was significantly modulated by increases in stimulus fear intensity preceding overt fear detection, no such LPP sensitivity was detected in anxious participants.

Life-threatening danger and suppression of attention bias to threat.

Objective: Life-threatening danger is assumed to produce, in tandem, increases in both vigilance toward threat and stress-related symptoms, but no data test the validity of this assumption. The authors examined associations, in real time, among imminent life-threatening danger, stress-related symptoms, and vigilance.

Method: Symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), depression, and anxiety were measured in a civilian population (N=131) as a function of war-related stress, operationalized as the time available for seeking cover from rocket attack.