A large body of literature documents the adverse effects of maternal depression on the functioning and development of offspring. Although investigators have identified factors associated with risk for abnormal development and psychopathology in the children, little attention has been paid to the mechanisms explaining the transmission of risk from the mothers to the children. Moreover, no existing model both guides understanding of the various processes' interrelatedness and considers the role of development in explicating the manifestation of risk in the children. This article proposes a developmentally sensitive, integrative model for understanding children's risk in relation to maternal depression. Four mechanisms through which risk might be transmitted are evaluated: (a) heritability of depression; (b) innate dysfunctional neuroregulatory mechanisms; (c) exposure to negative maternal cognitions, behaviors, and affect; and (d) the stressful context of the children's lives. Three factors that might moderate this risk are considered: (a) the father's health and involvement with the child, (b) the course and timing of the mother's depression, and (c) characteristics of the child. Relevant issues are discussed, and promising directions for future research are suggested.

Risk for psychopathology in the children of depressed mothers: a developmental model for understanding mechanisms of transmission.

Many authors have speculated about a close relationship between vocal expression of emotions and musical expression of emotions. but evidence bearing on this relationship has unfortunately been lacking. This review of 104 studies of vocal expression and 41 studies of music performance reveals similarities between the 2 channels concerning (a) the accuracy with which discrete emotions were communicated to listeners and (b) the emotion-specific patterns of acoustic cues used to communicate each emotion. The patterns are generally consistent with K. R. Scherer's (1986) theoretical predictions. The results can explain why music is perceived as expressive of emotion, and they are consistent with an evolutionary perspective on vocal expression of emotions. Discussion focuses on theoretical accounts and directions for future research.

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Communication of emotions in vocal expression and music performance: different channels, same code?

There is ample empirical evidence for an asymmetry in the way that adults use positive versus negative information to make sense of their world; specifically, across an array of psychological situations and tasks, adults display a negativity bias, or the propensity to attend to, learn from, and use negative information far more than positive information This bias is argued to serve critical evolutionarily adaptive functions, but its developmental presence and ontogenetic emergence have never been seriously considered The authors argue for the existence of the negativity bias in early development and that it is evident especially in research on infant social referencing but also in other developmental domains They discuss ontogenetic mechanisms underlying the emergence of this bias and explore not only its evolutionary but also its developmental functions and consequences Throughout, the authors suggest ways to further examine the negativity bias in infants and older children, and they make testable predictions that would help clarify the nature of the negativity bias during early development

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Not All Emotions Are Created Equal: The Negativity Bias in Social-Emotional Development

In order to study face recognition in relative isolation from visual processes that may also contribute to object recognition and reading, we investigated CK, a man with normal face recognition but with object agnosia and dyslexia caused by a closed-head injury. We administered recognition tests of up right faces, of family resemblance, of age-transformed faces, of caricatures, of cartoons, of inverted faces, and of face features, of disguised faces, of perceptually degraded faces, of fractured faces, of faces parts, and of faces whose parts were made of objects. We compared CK's performance with that of at least 12 control participants. We found that CK performed as well as controls as long as the face was upright and retained the configurational integrity among the internal facial features, the eyes, nose, and mouth. This held regardless of whether the face was disguised or degraded and whether the face was represented as a photo, a caricature, a cartoon, or a face composed of objects. In the last case, CK perceived the face but, unlike controls, was rarely aware that it was composed of objects. When the face, or just the internal features, were inverted or when the configurational gestalt was broken by fracturing the face or misaligning the top and bottom halves, CK's performance suffered far more than that of controls. We conclude that face recognition normally depends on two systems: (1) a holistic, face-specific system that is dependent on orientationspecific coding of second-order relational features (internal), which is intact in CK and (2) a part-based object-recognition system, which is damaged in CK and which contributes to face recognition when the face stimulus does not satisfy the domain-specific conditions needed to activate the face system.

What is special about face recognition? nineteen experiments on a person with visual object agnosia and dyslexia but normal face recognition

The chapter begins by addressing the theoretical platform endorsed by the authors that consists of an integration of functionalist perspectives with dynamic systems and social contextualism. This integrated perspective entails a flexible approach to emotional behavior: Expressive behavior, action tendencies, and cultural influence on emotion meaning all have their place in understanding emotional development. The chapter goes on to examine early emotional development, highlighting the importance of emotion communication as evidenced in infants through their emotional signaling to caregivers, their social referencing to significant others, and their growing skills at affective sharing with others. The final half of the chapter examines the development of eight specific skills of emotional competence, emphasizing their social effectiveness and individual adaptiveness. We conclude with a discussion of future research directions, including what may be the relational limits of emotion, individual differences in emotional responsiveness to contextual cues, attention processes, and emotion-related goals, some of which may become interiorized with development.


Keywords:

adolescent development;
childhood development;
emotion;
emotional competence;
functionalism;
infanct development;
social context;
social effectiveness

Emotional Development: Action, Communication, and Understanding

Newborn differentiation of emotion and the relevance of prenatal experience in influencing responsiveness to emotion was tested by examining newborn responses to the presentation of a range of vocal expressions. Differential responding was observed, as indicated by an increase in eye opening behavior in response to the presentation of happy speech patterns. More importantly, differential responding was observed only when the infants listened to emotional speech as spoken by speakers of their maternal language. No evidence of discrimination was found in the groups of infants listening to the same vocal expressions in a novel language. The results suggest that as a consequence of prenatal exposure to the distinctive prosodic maternal speech patterns that specify different emotions and to the temporally related stimuli created by distinctive maternal physiological concomitants of emotion, the fetus learns to differentiate those emotional speech patterns typical of the infant's maternal language. © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Dev Psychobiol 35: 204–214, 1999

Prenatal experience and neonatal responsiveness to vocal expressions of emotion.

The human infant is born with limited sensory capacities. Such limitations are characteristic of early stages of development of all mammals. These limitations have been conceptualized as equivalent to sensory deprivation, and it has frequently been assumed that compensatory stimulation would therefore be advantageous. It is our contention that, during normal development, limitations provide an organizational framework which enhances perceptual development, and that providing additional stimulation to prematurely born infants may, in fact, be harmful. In addition to reviewing the literature on this issue, we present the results of several studies in which the effect of surgically opening the eyes of rat pups prior to the age of normal eye opening was examined. These studies found alterations in the patterns of homing consequent upon the early availability of visual input. Pups whose eyes were opened early failed to exhibit the transitions in behavior normally found to occur around the time of eye opening. Furthermore, the pups failed to respond differentially to olfactory stimuli which littermate controls successfully discriminated.

The role of developmental limitations of sensory input on sensory/perceptual organization.

14 – The Development of Lateral Differences in the Human Infant

Issues related to infant intersensory functioning are reviewed. The argument is offered that limitations of sensory inputs during early stages of development are necessary and provide structure and organization which determine behavioural characteristics at later stages. It is also suggested that infant organisms respond to the intensity of stimulation rather than organizational characteristics and that this is responsible for the form of sensory equivalence apparent during early development. A scheme for the investigation of sources of intersensory organization is presented which involves a prospective analysis of how consideration of the times of onset of sensory functions helps us to understand intra- and intersensory development. The advantages of this experimental approach are outlined.

Gerald Turkewitz

Papers

Prenatal experience and neonatal responsiveness to vocal expressions of emotion.

The role of developmental limitations of sensory input on sensory/perceptual organization.

14 – The Development of Lateral Differences in the Human Infant

Dynamic organization of intersensory function.

Changes in hemispheric advantage in processing facial information with increasing stimulus familiarization.