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This study, conducted in Germany, examines the role of maternal soothing strategies to explain the association of maternal self‐efficacy with infant regulation (crying and sleeping behavior). Questionnaire data of 150 mothers, living in Germany, with mixed ethnic and educational backgrounds were collected when infants were 3 and 7 months old. Two types of maternal soothing strategies were distinguished: close soothing, involving close physical and emotional contact, and distant soothing, involving physical and emotional distancing from the infant. A cross‐sectional SEM at 3 months indicated that maternal self‐efficacy is associated with reported infant regulation through distant soothing strategies. Low maternal self‐efficacy was associated with frequent maternal use of distant soothing, which in turn was related to reported infant regulation problems, that is, non‐soothability and greater crying frequency. Frequent use of close soothing was associated with reported infant sleeping behavior, that is, frequent night‐time awakenings. A longitudinal SEM further indicated that the effects of close soothing persisted at least until the infants' age of 7 months. The study showed how low maternal self‐efficacy, increased use of distant soothing, and reported early infant regulation problems are intertwined and that, due to their persisting positive effect on infant soothability, close soothing better supports infant development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Transition to parenthood is associated with various challenges for the couple's relationship, such as definition of new roles, lack of sleep, and less time spend as a couple. This can lead to an increased number of conflicts and decrease in marital relationship quality which not only poses a risk to the relationship itself but also to the socio-emotional development of the child during the first years of life. In contrast, a successful, resilient adaptation of the parents and their relationship to the new challenges is associated with development-promoting parent behavior such as high sensitivity, high parental engagement, and constructive conflict-resolution strategies. The mediation of the marital relationship quality and early childhood socio-emotional development through parent-child-processes, such as emotional security, emotional spillover, and model learning as well as coparenting, is presented taking into account the vulnerability-stress-adaptation-model and the family stress model. Subsequently, various options for strengthening marital relationship quality in the transition to parenthood are presented. Structural, state funding opportunities are considered as well as targeted clinical pedagogical prevention and intervention measures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Functional neuroimaging has been used to show that the developing auditory cortex of very young human infants responds, in some way, to sound. However, impoverished stimuli and uncontrolled designs have made it difficult to attribute brain responses to specific auditory features, and thus made it difficult to assess the maturity of feature tuning in auditory cortex. To address this, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to measure the brain activity evoked by naturalistic sounds (a series of sung lullabies) in two groups of infants (3 and 9 months) and adults. We developed a novel analysis method – inter-subject regression (ISR) – to quantify the similarity of cortical responses between infants and adults, and to decompose components of the response due to different auditory features. We found that the temporal pattern of activity in infant auditory cortex shared similarity with adults. Some of this shared response could be attributed to simple acoustic features, such as frequency, pitch, envelope, but other parts were not, suggesting that even more complex adult-like features are represented in auditory cortex in early infancy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Object categorization during ambiguous sensory stimulation generally depends on the activity of extrastriate sensory areas as well as top-down information. Both reflect internal representations of prototypical object knowledge against which incoming sensory information is compared. However, besides these general mechanisms, individuals might differ in their readiness to impose internal representations onto incoming ambiguous information. These individual differences might be based on what was referred to as 'Schema Instantiation Threshold' (SIT; Lewicki et al. []: Am Pshycol 47:796-801), defining a continuum from very rapid (low threshold) to a rather controlled application of internal representations (high threshold). We collected fMRI scans while subjects with low SIT ('internal encoders') and subjects with high SIT ('external encoders') made gender categorizations of ambiguous facial images. Internal encoders made faster gender decisions during high sensory ambiguity, showed higher fusiform activity, and had faster BOLD responses in the fusiform (FFA) and occipital face area (OFA) indicating a faster and stronger application of face-gender representations due to a low SIT threshold. External encoders made slower gender decisions and showed increased medial frontal activity, indicating a more controlled strategy during gender categorizations and increased decisional uncertainties. Internal encoders showed higher functional connectivity of the orbito-frontal cortex (OFC) to seed activity in the FFA which might indicate both more readily generated predictive classificatory guesses and the subjective impressions of accurate classifications. Taken together, an 'internal encoding style' is characterized by the fast, unsupervised and unverified application of primary object representations, whereas the opposite seems evident for subjects with an 'external encoding style'. Hum Brain Mapp, 2010. © 2010 Wiley-Liss, Inc. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]