Child rearing.

The purpose of the current study is to examine emotional and behavioral
interdependence within the triadic family system. Interdependence was assessed over
time between 17 participant groups of mothers, fathers and preschoolers. Responses of
each parent and preschooler were observed during story recitations that were chosen to
elicit positive or negative responses; observations included measures of attention,
external affect, and affective congruency. Parental self-report ratings of expressivity,
negative emotions, and child temperament were compared to observations during story
recitations, as well. Some father-child interactions appeared to be affected by story
condition. However, parent gender had little effect on parent-child interactions overall in
regards to child consistency. The findings suggest that children drive the interactions
more so than parents. Further research with a larger sample size is needed to fully examine the emotional and behavioral interdependence between parents and
preschoolers.

Jealousy is understood as a system of physiological, behavioral, and emotional
responses, yet few studies have examined these aspects of jealousy simultaneously in
infants. Further, jealousy paradigms have not been examined as a potential stressor in
infancy and thus typical cortisol reactivity and regulation patterns in response to jealousy
paradigms have not been observed. In addition, the contribution of attachment security to
infant expressions of jealousy has been vastly understudied. The present study seeks to
fill the current gaps in the infant jealousy literature by investigating quantitative and
qualitative changes in infant jealousy across the first two years of life. Data was collected
longitudinally and mother- infant dyads were asked to participate when infants were 12-
months and 24-months of age. Associations between behavioral jealousy responses,
baseline EEG activity, stress reactivity and attachment security were examined.
Differences in approach behaviors and behavioral arousal were found across conditions and were consistent with previous studies (Hart & Carrington, 2002; Mize & Jones,
2012). Findings relating to EEG activity pointed to a relationship between left EEG
asymmetry and global approach behaviors across time. Cortisol reactivity was found to
be associated with attachment security but reactive cortisol concentrations compared to
baseline cortisol concentrations do not indicate that the paradigm was an effective
stressor. Attachment security was found to be associated with proximity behaviors in 12-
month olds but not 24-month olds. Finally, a linear regression revealed that attachment
security, EEG asymmetry, and cortisol reactivity at 12-months are significant predictors
of behavioral jealousy responses at 24-months. Changes in behavioral and physiological
measures across time indicate that jealousy continues to develop during the second year
of life but may have different underlying processes than the processes that contribute to
jealousy expression in 12-month-olds.