Journal
JOURNAL OF CROSS-CULTURAL PSYCHOLOGY
Volume 43, Issue 2, Pages 171-197Publisher
SAGE PUBLICATIONS INC
DOI: 10.1177/0022022110388563
Keywords
cultural psychology; child/adolescent development; social development
Categories
Funding
- Intramural NIH HHS [Z99 HD999999] Funding Source: Medline
Ask authors/readers for more resources
This study uses country and regional contrasts to examine culture-common and community-specific variation in mother-infant emotional relationships. Altogether, 220 Argentine, Italian, and U.S. American mothers and their daughters and sons, living in rural and metropolitan settings, were observed at home at infant age 5 months. Both variable- and person-centered perspectives of dyadic emotional relationships were analyzed. Supporting the notion that adequate emotional relationships are a critical and culture-common characteristic of human infant development, across all samples most dyads scored in the adaptive range in terms of emotional relationships. Giving evidence of community-specific characteristics, Italian mothers were more sensitive, and Italian infants more responsive, than Argentine and U.S. mothers and infants; in addition, rural mothers were more intrusive than metropolitan mothers and rural dyads more likely than expected to be classified as midrange in emotional relationships and less likely to be classified as high in emotional relationships. Adaptive emotional relationships appear to be a culture-common characteristic of mother-infant dyads near the beginning of life, but this relational construct is moderated by a community-specific (country and regional) context.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available