Socioeconomic status affects oral and manual exploration across the first year.

Oral and manual exploration are part of the foundation of problem solving and cognition in infancy. How these develop in an at-risk population, infants in poverty, is unknown. The current study tested exploratory behaviors longitudinally at 6, 9, and 12 months in infants from high- and low-socioeconomic (SES) families. Oral exploration consisted of passive and active mouthing and looks after active mouthing. Manual exploration consisted of frequency of fingering, rotating, and transferring the object. High-SES infants replicated the trajectory previously reported in the literature, showing a decrease in mouthing and fingering and an increase in rotating and transferring (e.g., Palmer, 1989). In contrast, low-SES infants showed no change in any of the manual exploratory behaviors over the first year, thus demonstrating reduced overall levels of exploration as well as a different developmental trajectory. Results are discussed in terms of attention, potential physiological mechanisms, and implications for later problem solving.

Parasympathetic and sympathetic reactivity moderate maternal contributions to emotional adjustment in adolescence.

A burgeoning literature supports the role of autonomic nervous system (ANS) functioning as an index of physiologic sensitivity to the environment, but extant research is limited in its focus on single branches of the ANS, childhood samples, and solely negative environmental factors. This study seeks to address these limitations by exploring whether reactivity in the parasympathetic (PNS) and sympathetic (SNS) nervous systems jointly moderate the prospective contributions of both positive (maternal involvement) and negative (maternal psychological control) aspects of the family environment to developmentally relevant outcomes in adolescence (depressive symptoms and emotion regulation). At Wave 1, adolescents (n = 352, 52% female, M age = 15.27, SD = 1.04; 65% White) and their parents completed a problem-solving discussion task, during which adolescent ANS activation was continuously monitored, and reports of maternal involvement, maternal psychological control, adolescent depressive symptoms, and adolescent emotion regulation were obtained. Adolescent depressive symptoms and emotion regulation were assessed again 1 year later (Wave 2). Results indicated that PNS and SNS reactivity jointly moderated the prospective contributions of maternal involvement and maternal psychological control to depressive symptoms and emotion regulation. Specifically, adolescents who exhibited reciprocal SNS activation appeared to be most sensitive to both positive and negative parenting environments. Adolescents exhibiting coinhibition or coactivation profiles of autonomic reactivity were comparatively unreactive to parenting. This study corroborates the notion that consideration of multiple physiological systems is critical to our understanding of biological processes in the development of emotional functioning in adolescence. (PsycINFO Database Record

Socialization of coping in a predominantly female sample of caregivers: Contributions to children's social adjustment in middle childhood.

This study applied a short-term longitudinal design to examine whether socialization of coping, observed in real time, predicted social adjustment (i.e., friendship quality and social problems) in middle childhood. Further, this study explored whether socialization of coping contributed to children's social adjustment independent of other aspects of parenting (i.e., positive involvement, autonomy support). Parents' (primarily mothers') coping suggestions were observed while children completed a challenging star-tracing task, and children and parents reported on children's social adjustment at baseline and at a 6-month follow-up. Results revealed that primary control engagement suggestions predicted fewer social problems, and disengagement suggestions predicted lower friendship quality. These results demonstrate that coping suggestions observed in the context of a cognitive stressor help to explain individual differences in children's social development during middle childhood above and beyond other aspects of parenting. (PsycINFO Database Record