No description available.

Participants will: Develop an appreciation for the centrality of the caregiver infant relationship in the young child’s mental health and development Gain information about the impact of traumatic events on infants and young children across developmental domains, including early brain development Be able to identify the core components of the infant court approach Learn how the infant court approach addresses the impact of trauma in the lives of young children and their parents as well as promotes healthy attachment and development Be able to describe Tennessee’s development of infant courts through its two pilot projects and legislative initiative.

It is becoming increasingly clear that infants’ and toddlers’ temperament may play a central role in their cognitive and linguistic functioning. Research has found, for example, that at 21 months of age, children’s “attentional focus” moderates the extent that environmental distractions prevent them from learning novel words or solving nonlinguistic problems. The purpose of the present investigation was to explore the extent that dimensions of temperament moderate the performance of 15-month-olds on two typical nonlinguistic problemsolving tasks in the presence of environmental distractions. Forty-two 15-month olds visited the lab and were presented two tasks: “feed bear” and “make a rattle.” Infants were familiarized with the two sets of props initially, and then were presented models of desired action sequences. Half the children experienced a distraction during the feed bear task, the remaining were distracted during make a rattle. For each task, four dependent variables were scored: number of target actions performed, variety of target actions performed, longest chain of target actions performed, and number of pairs of actions performed in order. Temperament was measured via maternal report using the Early Child Behavior Questionnaire. Multivariate analyses revealed that children’s performance varied as a function of task [F(5, 24) = 5.42, p = .001]. The distractions also attenuated the effects of the model for both feed bear [univariate Fs(1, 40) = 4.21 to 9.22, ps = .047 to .018] and make a rattle [univariate Fs (1, 40) = 4.08 to 6.08, ps = .050 to .018]. Interactions of these effects with temperament were many, but complex. For example, low intensity pleasure moderated distracter effects, but only for feed bear [Fs(1, 27) = 5.19 to 9.73, ps = .031 to .004]. In other analyses, toddlers low in perceptual sensitivity benefited more from the model than did children high on that dimension [F’s(1, 28) = 3.71 to 6.67, p’s = .064 to .015)]. A number of additional temperament related findings also obtained. There is considerable reason to continue explorations into potential roles that temperament may play in infants’ cognitive and language development. Results from the present study extend previous findings to the 15-month age period, which, to our knowledge, has not been investigated in previous research. The present results also suggest that roles played by temperament may be exceptionally complex, and highlight the multifaceted internal and external experiences through which children must navigate to become competent thinkers and communicators in an adult world.

No description available.

No description available.

Beginning in the late 1960's (e.g., Bell, 1968), a considerable literature has emerged documenting the impact of children's characteristics on their own care and biopsychosocial outcomes. Yet, surprisingly little research has focused on the impact of the child on the experimental setting. It is well known in the infant literature that infant emotional states contribute to their own attrition, and even cognitive performance (e.g., Fagen et al., 1991). Less well known is the extent that infant characteristics contribute to experimenter social engagement. In the present investigation, we explored whether two experimenters responded to infants differently as a function of infant temperament. Sixty- 334 five infants (37 girls) visited the lab at M = 15.38 months (SD = 1.99). Mothers completed the Infant Behavior Questionnaire - Revised (IBQ-R) and a demographic assessment. Temperament measures derived from the IBQ-R were reduced to three overarching superdimensions (negative affectivity, effortful control, and surgency) from 14 subdimensions. Infants participated in a Brooks and Meltzoff (2005) type gaze-following procedure. On Trial 1, either of two experimenters sitting directly across from the infant established eye-contact by calling the child's name, said "Look!", then turned their head to look at a target object on the infant's left for 8 seconds. On Trial 2, experimenters followed the same procedure but looked to the infant's right. Trial 3 was the same as Trial 1. On Trials 4-6, experimenters followed a right-left-right pattern, with the exception that an Elmo videotape played on a monitor behind and above the experimenter as soon as the experimenter looked at the target object. Trials 4-6 were designed to test gazefollowing under conditions of distraction. The two experimenters did not differ statistically from one another in looking to the target object on any trial (see Table 1; t's <= 1.60, p's => .12); although, due to procedural requirements looking time for both experimenters differed as a function of distraction condition [F(1, 57) = 98.53, p = .000; see Table 1]. Nevertheless, during a procedural fidelity check, and despite both experimenters being blind to children's temperamental status, we found that experimenter looking time to the target objects in the control condition was correlated with both effortful control and surgency (see Table 2). These correlations were carried primarily by the subdimensions of duration of orientation and perceptual sensitivity, respectively. Evaluating the correlations separately by experimenter showed that both experimenters appeared to be susceptible to infant temperament. These results raise the possibility that even highly trained experimenters, blind to child temperament status, may be responsive to child characteristics when implementing experimental protocols. Obviously, in the present case, when experimenters remained visually engaged with target objects for longer periods of time for certain children, those children had greater opportunity to demonstrate gazefollowing. In principle, children high in effortful control and surgency could demonstrate longer gaze-following not as a direct effect of their temperament, but as an indirect effect of their temperament mediated through an experimenter. Future experimental researchers may wish to include temperament instruments as standard protocol to test for experimenter fidelity.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

This study follows a Vygotskian approach to investigate the influence and relatedness of several "scaffolding" behaviors for mother-infant dyads of both typically developing infants and infants with disabilities and how early intervention may influence the dyads through the home visiting process. For this primarily low-income sample, maternal participation during play did not enhance the infants' play. The relation of infant level of play with maternal education, income, and the maternal involvement variables of level of play and use of scaffolding varied with the disability status of the infant. Home visitor support of mother-infant interaction did not appear to influence maternal involvement during play, except that mothers of infants with disabilities whose home visitors spent more time with just the infant played at a higher level.