No abstract

So far inferences on early moral development and higher order self conscious emotions have mostly been based on behavioral data. Emotions though, as far as arguments support, are multidimensional notions. Not only do they involve behavioral actions upon perception of an event, but they also carry autonomic physiological markers. The current study aimed to examine and characterise physiological signs that underlie self-conscious emotions in early childhood, while grounding them on behavioral analyses. For this purpose, the “mishap paradigm” was used as the most reliable method for evoking feelings of “guilt” in children and autonomic facial temperature variation were detected by functional Infrared Imaging (fIRI). Fifteen children (age: 39–42 months) participated in the study. They were asked to play with a toy, falsely informed that it was the experimenter's “favourite”, while being unaware that it was pre-planned to break. Mishap of the toy during engagement caused sympathetic arousal as shown by peripheral nasal vasoconstriction leading to a marked temperature drop, compared to baseline. Soothing after the mishap phase induced an increase in nose temperature, associated with parasympathetic activity suggesting that the child's distress was neutralized, or even overcompensated. Behavioral analyses reported signs of distress evoked by the paradigm, backing up the thermal observation. The results suggest that the integration of physiological elements should be crucial in research concerning socio-emotional development. fIRI is a non invasive and non contact method providing a powerful tool for inferring early moral emotional signs based on physiological observations of peripheral vasoconstriction, while preserving an ecological and natural context.

Maternal attunement with an infant's emotional states is thought to represent a distinctive feature of the human primary bond. It implies the mother's ability of empathizing with her child in order to fulfil the child's needs in an immediate and appropriate manner. Thus, it is particularly involved in stressful situations. By assuming that maternal attunement embodies a direct sharing of physiological responses with the child, we compared the autonomic response of mothers observing their own distressed child with those of other women observing an unknown child involved in an ecological distressful condition (mishap paradigm). The hypothesis was that the adult's response was more attuned with the child's response in the former group than in the latter group. The autonomic response was non-invasively evaluated through the recording of the thermal facial imprints by means of thermal infrared (IR) imaging. Nine mother-child dyads and 9 woman-unknown child dyads were studied. We found marked similarities between the facial temperature dynamics of women and children along the experimental procedure, thus providing evidence for a direct emotional sharing within the adult-child dyad. The evidence for common dynamics in the time course of the temperatures was assessed through correlation analysis and, nevertheless, resulted stronger in the mother-child dyads than in the other women-child dyads. In addition, temporal analysis showed a faster response in mothers than in other women, thus confirming our study hypothesis. Besides confirming the extraordinary capability of IR imaging to preserve ecological context in the study of social or non-verbal interactions, these results suggest that maternity appears to potentiate the emotional attunement with the child. Although based on preliminary results, this study opens new perspectives in the study of the factors modulating vicarious socio-emotional processes.

Between 10 and 24 months of age, children progress from communicating through conventional signals to communicating through symbols in a variety of situations. The present study investigates this transition analysing mother-child communication frames and the child's communicative acts, and tracing the developmental changes in both frames and communicative acts. Four children (2 girls, 2 boys) and their mothers were observed longitudinally and extensively, from 10 to 24 months of age, using a multiple case-study method. Through the detailed investigation of these single cases, clear developmental trajectories were found, showing that conventional frames and representational gestures 'bridge' the transition from attentional to symbolic communication. There were significant differences between dyads and children in the developmental trajectories for several frames and communicative acts. The results not only confirm previous findings on the development of verbal and gestural communication, but provide new insights into the transition to symbolic communication in the second year of life, first because of the use of frame analysis and second because of a focus on individual trajectories in development. Copyright # 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.Key words: communication; symbols; mother-child frames; developmental transition; multiple case study; longitudinal Between 10 and 24 months of age, children typically progress from communicating through conventional signals (vocal and gestural) to communicating through symbols (words and representational gestures) in a variety of situations.

Infant-directed speech (IDS) is a specific register that adults use to address infants, and it is characterised by prosodic exaggeration and lexical and syntactic simplification. Several authors have underlined that this simplified speech becomes more complex according to the infant's age. However, there is a lack of studies on lexical and syntactic modifications in Italian IDS during the first year of an infant's life. In the present study, 80 mother–infant dyads were longitudinally observed at 3, 6, 9, and 12 months during free-play interactions. Maternal vocal productions were subsequently coded. The results show an overall low lexical variability and syntactic complexity that identify speech to infants as a simplified register; however, the high occurrence of complex items and well-structured utterances suggests that IDS is not simple speech. Moreover, maternal IDS becomes more complex over time, but not linearly, with a maximum simplification in the second half of the first year.