ABSTRACT
This study examines and compares prominent characteristics of maternal responsiveness to infant activity during home-based naturalistic interactions of mother-infant dyads in New York City, Paris, and Tokyo. Both culture-general and culture-specific patterns of responsiveness emerged. For example, in all 3 locales infants behaved similarly, mothers also behaved similarly with respect to a hierarchy of response types, and mothers and infants manifest both specificity and mutual appropriateness in their interactions: Mothers responded to infants' exploration of the environment with encouragement to the environment, to infants' vocalizing nondistress with imitation, and to infants' vocalizing distress with nurturance. Differences in maternal responsiveness among cultures occurred to infant looking rather than to infant vocalizing and in mothers' emphasizing dyadic versus extradyadic loci of interaction. Universals of maternal responsiveness, potential sources of cultural variation, and implications of similarities and differences in responsiveness for child development in different cultural contexts are discussed.
Subject(s)
Cross-Cultural Comparison , Maternal Behavior , Mother-Child Relations , Personality Development , Adult , Attention , Female , France , Humans , Infant , Japan , Language Development , Social Environment , United States , Visual PerceptionABSTRACT
We report a controlled standardized behavioral assessment of 33 girls with true precocious puberty using the Child Behavior Checklist. Although a majority of the girls were reported not to have behavior problems, many were reported to have a dysphoric adjustment to their condition. Twenty-seven percent of the girls with true precocious puberty scored greater than 2 SD above the mean on the Total Behavior Problem scale 10 times the expected prevalence rate. They also scored significantly higher (P less than 0.01) than matched controls on both the internalizing or "overcontrolled symptom" and externalizing or "undercontrolled symptom" scales. Forty-eight percent scored greater than 2 SD above the mean on the Social Withdrawal scale. The high prevalence of reported problem behaviors in this sample may be related directly or indirectly to the precocious maturation mediated by biologic, psychologic, social, and environmental variables. Although elevated levels of sex steroids may directly contribute to increased aggressive and hyperactive behaviors, they may also be modified by social and environmental factors.
