Research
Interests
Participants
in my research are mothers and their infants at home or in hospital.
Fine-grained audio and video analyses are performed on "natural interactions"
taking place between mother and infant.
- Maternal Mood and Infant
Emotional Development (funded by the Children’s Research Fund
2003-2005)
In this project, carried out in collaboration with the Department of Child Health, the question of effects of postnatal mood disturbance on the infant’s (3,6,and 9 months old) emotional development is tested longitudinally.
- Mother-infant Interaction while
reading picture books
The effect of postnatal depression on maternal (verbal, paralinguistic and behavioural aspects) and infant behaviour when reading picture books is tested.
- Prenatal
Development in relation to maternal stress and depression
This project, carried out in collaboration with the Aberdeen Scanning department, examines infant movement at 12, 16 and 24 weeks gestation in relation to maternal mental state.
- Mother-infant interaction:
conversations with a pre-verbal partner
Recent findings are that mothers of premature compared with mothers of babies born at term address their children with more complex language. At two months of age term infants vocalize more compared with premature infants. The simplified register of maternal child-directed speech enhances the frequency of infant vocalizations. Furthermore, maternal speech varies depending on the context. They speak with higher pitch during play compared with non-play situations and they frame the contexts differently, by using different types of speech.
- Cradling in relation to
maternal pitch
This study concerns the left-side cradling bias and examines whether mothers cradling their infants to the right or left speak with different pitch.
Links to Sites of Interest
European Society of Developmental Psychology
International
Society for Infant Studies
Babyplace
Stanford
SRCD Website