Children's emerging regulation of conduct: restraint, compliance, and internalization from infancy to the second year.

We examined emergent regulation of conduct from infancy to the second year. Multiple observational measures at home and in the laboratory assessed, at 8-10 months, the child's restraint and attention (N = 112), and at 13-15 months, compliance to mother, internalization of her prohibition, and quality of motivation in the mother-child teaching context (N = 108). We replicated the findings previously reported for older children that supported our view of compliance and noncompliance as heterogeneous: Committed compliance was higher to maternal "don'ts" than "dos," with the reverse true for situational compliance; girls surpassed boys in committed compliance; and committed, but not situational, compliance related positively, and passive noncompliance negatively, to children's internalization of maternal prohibition. We extended previous work into three new directions: children's committed compliance and passive noncompliance in control contexts related predictably to their motivation in mother-child teaching contexts; restraint at 8-10 months predicted higher committed compliance at 13-15 months; and focused attention at 8-10 months was associated with contemporaneous restraint and modestly with committed compliance to maternal "dos" at 13-15 months.

Individual differences in emotionality in infancy.

In this multimethod investigation of early emotionality, we observed 112 8- to 10-month-olds' responses to standard procedures consisting of multiple brief episodes that elicited joy, fear, anger, and discomfort to aversive stimulation. We obtained parental reports about the infants' temperament and observed their emotional tone during naturalistic interactions with their mothers. Parameters of emotional response to the standard procedures (latency, discrete behaviors, and average and peak intensity across facial, vocal, and bodily channels) cohered strongly within each episode. To a lesser extent and with the exception of anger, they also cohered across episodes targeting the same emotion. The four emotions appeared orthogonal, except for the peak intensity of response, which cohered modestly across the 3 negative emotions. The emotionality measures converged to some extent: responses to the standard procedures and father-reported temperament related meaningfully to the infant's emotional tone in mother-child interactions. As predicted, infants' capacity for focused or effortful attention was modestly associated with better modulated negative emotionality.