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The interplay between child characteristics and parenting is increasingly implicated as crucial to child health outcomes. This study assessed the joint effects of children's temperamental characteristics and maternal sensitivity on children's weight status. Data from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development's Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development were utilized. Infant temperament, assessed at child's age of 6 months by maternal report, was categorized into three types: easy, average, and difficult. Maternal sensitivity, assessed at child's age of 6 months by observing maternal behaviors during mother-child semi-structured interaction, was categorized into two groups: sensitive and insensitive. Children's height and weight were measured longitudinally from age 2 years to Grade 6, and body mass index (BMI) was calculated. BMI percentile was obtained based on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's BMI charts. Children, who had a BMI ≥ the 85th percentile, were defined as overweight-or-obese. Generalized estimating equations were used to analyze the data. The proportions of children overweight-or-obese increased with age, 15.58% at 2 years old to 34.34% by Grade 6. The joint effects of children's temperament and maternal sensitivity on a child's body mass status depended on the child's age. For instance, children with difficult temperament and insensitive mothers had significantly higher risks for being overweight-or-obese during the school age phase but not during early childhood. Specific combinations of child temperament and maternal sensitivity were associated with the development of obesity during childhood. Findings may hold implications for childhood obesity prevention/intervention programs targeting parents.

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The word and non-word learning abilities of toddlers were tested under various conditions of environmental distraction, and evaluated with respect to children's temperamental attentional focus. Thirty-nine children and their mothers visited the lab at child age 21-months, where children were exposed to fast-mapping word learning trials and nonlinguistic sequential learning trials. It was found that both word and nonword-learning was adversely affected by the presentation of environmental distractions. But it was also found that the effect of the distractions sometimes depended on children's level of attentional focus. Specifically, children high in attentional focus were less affected by environmental distractions than children low in attentional focus when attempting to learn from a model, whereas children low in attentional focus demonstrated little learning from the model. Translationally, these results may be of use to child health-care providers investigating possible sources of cognitive and language delay. Temperament, Distraction, and Learning in ToddlerhoodThe fields of temperament and cognitive development have followed long and productive paths, even though they seem to have done so in relative isolation from one another. Temperament researchers have made strides in identifying the nature of early temperament and its potential biological underpinnings, and they have identified a host of social-emotional sequelae of early individual differences in temperament (e.g., Guerin, Gottfried, Oliver, & Thomas, 2003;Molfese & Molfese, 2000). Cognitive development researchers have also made significant strides toward understanding basic mechanisms underlying attention (e.g., Colombo, 2004;Richards, 2004;Rose, Feldman, & Jankowski, 2004;Ruff & Rothbart, 1996) and memory (e.g., Bauer, 2004;Hayne, 2004), among other cognitive domains. Unfortunately, few researchers have undertaken empirical efforts to document interrelations between temperament and basic cognition (e.g., Wolfe & Bell, 2004); although Fagen and colleagues have amply demonstrated that aspects of temperamental fussiness (i.e., affective distress) negatively impact children's performance on cognitive tasks (Fagen, Ohr, Fleckenstein, & Ribner, 1985;Fagen, Ohr, Singer, & Fleckenstein, 1987;Fleckenstein & Fagen, 1994). Much would be gained were researchers able to link individual differences in cognitive function to individual differences in any of a number of domains of temperament, because such an effort would likely inform a better understanding of intra domain individual differences.To the extent that temperament-cognitive relationships have been examined, a major focus seems to have been on temperament-language relationships (specifically vocabulary, e.g., Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Wallace E. Dixon, Jr., Department of Psychology, East Tennessee State University, P.O. Box 70649, Johnson City, TN,37614. E-mail: dixonw@etsu.edu.. Author Note This work was supported by a NIH/NICHD Grant HD043865 to the first au...

Individual differences in child temperament have been associated with individual differences in language development. Similarly, relationships have been reported between early nonverbal social communication (joint attention) and both temperament and language. The present study examined whether individual differences in joint attention might mediate temperament-language relationships. Temperament, language, and joint attention were assessed in 51 21-month-olds. Results indicated an inverse relationship between aspects of temperamental difficulty, including low executive control and high negative affect, and language development. Temperamental aspects of negative affect were also inversely predictive of joint attention. However, the utility of a model in which joint attention mediates the relationship between temperament and language during the second year was not supported.A growing body of literature has revealed relationships between children's temperament and their language development. Researchers have linked specific temperamental dimensions such as attention span and positive emotionality to both productive and receptive language, and they have done so repeatedly across multiple lab settings (Dixon & Smith, 2000;Karrass, 2002;Matheny, 1989;Morales, et al., 2000a;Slomkowski, Nelson, Dunn, & Plomin, 1992). The general finding has been that children with aspects of temperamental easiness (i.e., affective positivity, long attention span) tend to be relatively linguistically advanced. Although the correlational nature of these studies makes it premature to draw conclusions with respect to directions of effect, a bidirectional influence seem reasonable. For example, just as heightened linguistic sophistication may contribute to ease of interpersonal communication and relatively positive affect as a result of successful communication, so too might temperamental positive affect contribute to increased opportunities for language acquisition. In the present article, we focus on the potential impact of temperament on language, and consider ways in which temperament might be expected to influence language development.Following the assumption that temperament contributes to language development, we must ask how it would do so. Rieser-Danner (2003) has postulated that temperament may have both direct and indirect impacts on language and cognitive functioning. In terms of a direct route of influence, children's difficult temperaments might simply limit the extent to which they can process linguistically relevant information during language acquisition events. This possibility is consistent with Rothbart and Bates (1998), who suggested that the attentional components of temperament form part of an overarching behavioral control system, which, as a function of anterior brain maturation, becomes increasingly weighted through early development with modulating dimensions of temperament associated with emotionality. Thus, when children are Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Wallace Dixon, Depa...