Ratings were made of videotaped verbal and nonverbal (smiling) behavior of parents in interaction with their children. The sample included 20 families containing a disturbed child and 20 normal control families. An interaction was predicted and confirmed (p = .05) between parent sex and facial expression; that is, when a father smiled, he was making a friendlier or more approving statement than when he was not smiling; for mothers, there was no difference in the evaluative content of verbal messages when she was smiling versus when she was not smiling. This pattern was found to be unrelated to child disturbance. The findings were, however, limited to middle-class families because the majority of lower-class mothers in this sample did not smile at all.
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