Informed by recent feminist critiques of the notion of depression, we explored how a group of South African low-income mothers who have been diagnosed with depression subjectively describe and explain their psychological distress. Working within a feminist materialist-discursive framework, we focused both on the explicit content of what the women were saying and on the implicit or underlying discourses that informed their narratives. Our findings suggest that respondents often subjectively experienced their psychological distress as anger, which was also articulated in violence directed at their children. This suggests that not only does the diagnosis of depression serve to medicalize the distress of participants, but it may simultaneously serve to obscure their anger at having to mother in adverse conditions. In exploring reasons for their anger, we found that participants were frustrated with trying to live up to idealized notions of motherhood in impoverished contexts.

Although contagious yawning occurs commonly in adulthood, previous studies reported it to be uncommon in children below 4-5 years. However, these studies did not regulate eye contact, a factor that can induce contagious yawning. We therefore investigated whether a cue to make eye contact would influence contagious yawning, particularly in young children. Fifty-six children between the ages of 3 and 16 watched video clips of models either yawning or opening their mouths. Contagious yawning was observed from the age of 3 years, and was negatively correlated with age. Whereas children older than 8 years caught yawns only after the yawning clips, children under the age of 8 years yawned contagiously following both yawn and control clips. Additionally, frequent imitation occurred in children below the age of 8 years. Poor general attention skills or reduced attention to specific facial features (e.g. the eyes) may be responsible for the reduced yawn contagion previously described in young children.