Sex Differences in Neonatal Stress Reactivity

The question of whether a sexually dimorphic stress reaction exists prior to extensive socialization was addressed by examining sex differences in physiological and behavioral stress reactivity, in healthy, term neonates, after a mildly stressful behavioral assessment procedure. The Neonatal Behavior Assessment Scale (NBAS; Brazelton, 1973) was administered to 18 male and 18 female neonates. Heart rate (HR), salivary cortisol, and behavioral states were assessed before and after the exam. Sex differences included higher cortisol response in males and a greater change in HR and higher NBAS motor performance cluster score in females. Salivary cortisol, HR change, NBAS cluster scores, and behavioral states after NBAS provided 100% discrimination between male and female infants. These findings suggest that there are neonatal sex differences in behavioral and physiological stress reactivity prior to socialization.     

The relationship between neonatal characteristics and three-month mother-infant interaction in high-risk infants

The behavior of 4 groups of infants--healthy term, healthy preterm, sick preterm, and sick full-term--was assessed in the neonatal period using the Neonatal Behavioral Assessment Scale (NBAS). At 3 months postterm, infants and their mothers were observed and videotaped in a free-play session. Both the NBAS and mother-infant interaction data were analyzed to assess the effects of maturity (term vs. preterm), illness (sick vs. healthy), and their interaction. Results revealed that illness of the infant affected both NBAS performance and maternal behavior during the interaction at 3 moths. Infants who were ill performed poorly on the NBAS orientation dimension; this dimension was found to be significantly associated with maternal and infant behaviors at 3 months. These data demonstrate an association between early infant characteristics and subsequent mother and child interactive behaviors. They also identify postnatal illness as an important influence on the development of the mother-infant dyad.     

The effects of within-group and between-group methodologies in the study of perceptions of infant crying

Recent studies have indicated that various infant cry patterns can be reliably distinguished when directly compared with other infant cry patterns. The purpose of this study was to compare the effects of this within-group method of cry presentation (in which listeners are exposed to 2 types of cry patterns) with the effects of a between-group methodology (in which listeners are exposed to only 1 type of infant cry pattern). 4 groups of adult listeners rated the tape-recorded cries of low- and high-risk infants on 4 Likert-type scale items during experimental phases. In phase 1, subjects were exposed to either the cries of low-risk or high-risk infants but not both. In phase 2, subjects were exposed to both low-risk and high-risk infant cries. In phase 3, subjects were exposed to the cries they heard in phase 1. Whereas all scale items differentiated the low- and high-risk infant cries during the within-group analyses of phase 2, all scale items did not differentiate low- and high-risk infant cries during the between-group phase of the experiment. The specific pattern of results indicate that within-group methods of cry presentation accentuate the perceptual distance among cry types and may actually create many reliable differences that would not be found in between-group comparisons.     

Item Parameter Drift in a Time-Varying Predictor

The current simulation study examined the effects of Item Parameter Drift (IPD) occurring in a short scale on parameter estimates in multilevel models where scores from a scale were employed as a time-varying predictor to account for outcome scores. Five factors, including three decisions about IPD, were considered for simulation conditions. It was revealed that IPD occurring in a relatively shorter scale led to a substantial increase in the amount of relative bias in parameter estimates. The bias was more prominent in the estimates of level-2 time-varying predictors relative to those of level-1 time-varying predictors. Regarding the decisions about IPD, keeping items exhibiting IPD was more appropriate than removing them based on the results from relative bias of standard errors of estimates. Based on the findings, it can be concluded that removing items exhibiting IPD may lead to an increase of Type II errors due to the underestimation of parameter estimates and overestimation of standard errors. The applied example showed findings consistent with those in the simulation study.     

Quality of Toddler-Mother Attachment in Children with Down Syndrome: Limits to Interpretation of Strange Situation Behavior

Researchers studying social-emotional development have argued that primary attachment relationships, established by the end of the first year of life, are important organizing factors that influence the trajectory of development throughout childhood. Central to this argument is a dimension of "attachment security," along which attachments differ. For normally developing infants and toddlers, attachment security is assessed using the Ainsworth Strange Situation. However, it is not clear that this procedure is appropriate for evaluating attachment security in atypical populations. In this report, 3 samples of children with Down Syndrome (total N = 138) were assessed using the Strange Situation. The procedures were scored according to traditional protocols. Although the 3 samples differed with respect to chronological and developmental age, they showed basic similarity with respect to attachment variables. However, developmentally younger children were more difficult to classify using the standard scoring rules. Scores and classifications for the sample were compared to scores from a sample of normally developing children tested at about 12 months of age. Significant differences with respect to the distributions of cases to classification categories and with respect to the interactive scale scores suggest that the Strange Situation may be measuring different aspects of behavior for children with Down Syndrome, even when they are tested at similar developmental age levels.     

Origins of language delay in abused infants

This paper presents a reanalysis of data collected in a study of abusing mother-infant pairs, emphasizing the failure of infants with a history of physical abuse to develop appropriate language skills. Bayley Mental Development indices of abused infants decreased with age. This decrease was attributable largely to the failure of abused infants to pass verbal items. None of the abused children had any verbal communication skills. Results are discussed in relation to patterns of maternal ignoring and lack of verbal stimulation.     

Do images influence assessment in anatomy? Exploring the effect of images on item difficulty and item discrimination

Anatomists often use images in assessments and examinations. This study aims to investigate the influence of different types of images on item difficulty and item discrimination in written assessments. A total of 210 of 460 students volunteered for an extra assessment in a gross anatomy course. This assessment contained 39 test items grouped in seven themes. The answer format alternated per theme and was either a labeled image or an answer list, resulting in two versions containing both images and answer lists. Subjects were randomly assigned to one version. Answer formats were compared through item scores. Both examinations had similar overall difficulty and reliability. Two cross‐sectional images resulted in greater item difficulty and item discrimination, compared to an answer list. A schematic image of fetal circulation led to decreased item difficulty and item discrimination. Three images showed variable effects. These results show that effects on assessment scores are dependent on the type of image used. Results from the two cross‐sectional images suggest an extra ability is being tested. Data from a scheme of fetal circulation suggest a cueing effect. Variable effects from other images indicate that a context‐dependent interaction takes place with the content of questions. The conclusion is that item difficulty and item discrimination can be affected when images are used instead of answer lists; thus, the use of images as a response format has potential implications for the validity of test items. Anat Sci Educ © 2012 American Association of Anatomists.     

Use of the Bayley Scales to characterize abilities of premature infants

The Bayley Scales of Infant Development were administered to 92 white, middle-class infants, half of them premature and half full-term, at 1 year of age from term to determine whether this instrument is useful in characterizing the abilities of premature infants. Although both full-term and premature infants achieved mental and motor development scores within the average range, full-term infants attained significantly higher scores on both the Mental and Motor Scales. Both groups scored significantly lower on motor than mental functioning; however, the difference was significantly greater for premature infants. As a group, premature infants also evidenced greater variability in their performance on both the Mental and Motor Scales, and they showed greater intra-individual variability in performance of motor ability. Furthermore, premature infants were less likely to succeed on items testing eye-hand coordination, imitation, and vocalization. Preselected perinatal risk variables accounted for a significant amount of variance in both mental and motor ability of premature infants.     

Neurobehavioral Syndromes in Cocaine-exposed Newborn Infants

The effects of fetal cocaine exposure on newborn cry characteristics were studied in 80 cocaine-exposed and 80 control infants. The groups were stratified to be similar on maternal demographic characteristics and maternal use of other illegal substances and alcohol during pregnancy. The hypothesis was that excitable cry characteristics were related to the direct effects of cocaine, while depressed cry characteristics were related to the indirect effects of cocaine secondary to low birthweight. Structural equation modeling (EQS) showed direct effects of cocaine on cries with a longer duration, higher fundamental frequency, and a higher and more variable first formant frequency. Indirect effects of cocaine secondary to low birthweight resulted in cries with a longer latency, fewer utterances, lower amplitude, and more dysphonation. Cocaine-exposed infants had a lower birthweight, shorter length, and smaller head circumference than the unexposed controls. Findings were consistent with the notion that 2 neurobehavioral syndromes, excitable and depressed, can be described in cocaine-exposed infants, and that these 2 syndromes are due, respectively, to direct neurotoxic effects and indirect effects secondary to intrauterine growth retardation.     

Non-organic failure to thrive: Implications of placement through analysis of videotaped interactions

This paper presents 6-month follow-up on a group of 16 infants hospitalized during the first months of life for non-organic failure to thrive (N-O FTT) and their mothers. Eight of these infants were placed in foster care and eight were returned home with their parents following hospitalization. The effects of placement on infant outcomes were examined through comparison of developmental scores and weight percentile changes, and the implications of foster care placements for mother-infant interactions were examined through analysis of patterns of interaction in videotaped sessions of feeding and play six months after hospital discharge. This analysis snowed that (1) mothers in both groups failed to make significant progress in resolving their own emotional or psychological conficts through treatment available; (2) weight and developmental status of the infants did not improve as expected in either group, and finally that (3) the patterns of interaction between mother and infant showed little change over time, and, regardless of placement at home or in foster care, remained concerning.     

A Two-Step Latent Profile Method for Identifying Invalid Respondents in Self-Reported Survey Data

Insincere respondents can have an adverse impact on the validity of substantive inferences arising from self-administered questionnaires (SAQs). The current study introduces a new method for identifying potentially invalid respondents from their atypical response patterns. The two-step procedure involves generating a response inconsistency (RI) score for each participant and scale on the SAQ and subjecting the resulting scores to latent profile analysis to identify classes of atypical RI respondent profiles. The procedure can be implemented post–data collection and is illustrated through a survey of school climate that was administered to N = 52,102 high school students. Results of this screening procedure revealed high levels of specificity and expected levels of concordance when contrasted with the results of traditionally used methods of screening items and response time. Contrasts between valid and invalid respondents revealed similar patterns across the three screening procedures when compared across external measures of academics and risk behaviors.     

Prenatal Risk and Infant Regulation: Indirect Pathways via Fetal Growth and Maternal Prenatal Stress and Anger

Pathways from maternal tobacco, marijuana, stress, and anger in pregnancy to infant reactivity and regulation (RR) at 9 months of infant age were examined in a low‐income, diverse sample beginning in the first trimester of pregnancy, with fetal growth and postnatal stress/anger as potential mediators, and infant sex as a moderator. Participants were 247 dyads (173 substance‐exposed infants). There were no direct effects of prenatal risk on RR and no moderation by sex. However, there were significant indirect effects on RR via poor fetal growth and higher postnatal anger. The study adds to the sparse literature on joint effects of tobacco and marijuana, and highlights the role of fetal growth and maternal anger as important pathways from prenatal risk to infant RR.     

Cross-cultural differences in maternal perceptions of cries of low- and high-risk infants

The tape-recorded cries of low- and high-risk newborn infants were rated by 150 inner-city Anglo-American, Black-American, and Cuban-American mothers during the hospital lying-in period following childbirth. Half of each cultural group was primiparous and half was multiparous. The mothers rated the cries along 4 perceptual and 6 caregiving response scale items. Reliable differences were found between low- and high-risk infant cries on all perceptual responses with the effects of culture and parental experience affecting the degree of differences. Generally, Anglo-American mothers found the cries more distressing, urgent, arousing, and sick sounding than Black-American mothers, while Cuban-American mothers showed similarities to both Black- and Anglo-American mothers depending on the scale items. The ratings on the caregiving response scale items paralleled cultural differences found on the perception scale items and previous reports of the mother-infant interaction patterns of other Anglo-, Black-, and Cuban-American samples. The results are discussed as being important in developing nonethnocentric views of the functional significance of the behaviors of the infant at risk, yet as providing evidence of the cross-cultural significance of the cry sound of the infant at risk.     

Simulating the Use of Disclosed Items in Computerized Adaptive Testing

Regular use of questions previously made available to the public (i.e., disclosed items) may provide one way to meet the requirement for large numbers of questions in a continuous testing environment, that is, an environment in which testing is offered at test taker convenience throughout the year rather than on a few prespecified test dates. First it must be shown that such use has effects on test scores small enough to be acceptable. In this study simulations are used to explore the use of disclosed items under a worst-case scenario which assumes that disclosed items are always answered correctly. Some item pool and test designs were identified in which the use of disclosed items produces effects on test scores that may be viewed as negligible.     

Prosodic correlates of stress in babbling: an acoustical study

Prelinguistic babbling often seems remarkably speech-like, not because it has recognizable words but because it seems to have adult-like prosody. To quantify this impression, we compared disyllabic sequences from five infants and five adults in terms of the use of frequency, intensity, and duration to mark stress. Significantly larger values for the three acoustic variables were observed on stressed than on unstressed syllables independent of syllable position for both groups. Adults showed the correlates of utterance final syllables--lower f0, lower intensity, and longer duration; infants showed only decrease in intensity. Ratios for stressed to unstressed syllables and participation of the three variables in stress production in individual disyllables were highly similar in both groups. No bias toward the English lexical trochaic stress pattern was observed. We conclude that infants in English environments produce adult-like stress patterns before they produce lexical items, which specify stress. Acoustic and perceptual analyses are used to explore stress marking by prelinguistic infants in an English language environment. Results show that infants employ the three acoustic correlates of stress in individual syllables in a manner largely similar to that of adult speakers, although they do not show second-syllable declination effects or an English language trochaic stress bias.     

Effects of Assigning Raters to Items

Student responses to a large number of constructed response items in three Math and three Reading tests were scored on two occasions using three ways of assigning raters: single reader scoring, a different reader for each response (item-specific), and three readers each scoring a rater item block (RIB) containing approximately one-third of a student's responses. Multiple group confirmatory factor analyses indicated that the three types of total scores were most frequently tau-equivalent. Factor models fitted on the item responses attributed differences in scores to correlated ratings incurred by the same reader scoring multiple responses. These halo effects contributed to significantly increased single reader mean total scores for three of the tests. The similarity of scores for item-specific and RIB scoring suggests that the effect of rater bias on an examinee's set of responses may be minimized with the use of multiple readers though fewer than the number of items.     

Psychophysiological and perceptual responses to infant cries varying in pitch: comparison of adults with low and high scores on the Child Abuse Potential Inventory.

Based on their scores on the Child Abuse Potential (CAP) Inventory, 30 nonparent adults were classified as either having high CAP scores (n = 15) or low CAP scores (n = 15). Subjects' heart rate and skin conductance were assessed as they listened to audio-taped presentations of four "normal" phonated infant cries and four high-pitched, hyperphonated infant cries. Subjects also rated the cries on several perceptual items. Results showed that both groups of subjects found hyperphonated cries more aversive, distressing, urgent, arousing, and sick than phonated cry sounds. Similarly, all listeners' showed higher skin conductance levels (SCL) in response to hyperphonated than phonated cries. SCL became attenuated over time in response to phonated, but not hyperphonated, cries. Adults in the high-CAP group, showed marginally higher heart rates than low-CAP adults following presentation of all infant cry sounds and responded to phonated cries with marginally higher skin conductance levels than low-CAP adults. The responses of high-CAP nonparent adults are similar to those of parents with histories of physically abusive interactions with their infants.     

Social gaze in preterm infants may act as an early indicator of atypical lateralization

Visual field biases have been identified as markers of atypical lateralization in children with developmental conditions, but this is the first investigation to consider early lateralized gaze behaviors for social stimuli in preterm infants. Eye-tracking methods with 51 preterm (33 male, 92.1% White) and 61 term-born (31 male, 90.1% White) infants aged 8–10 months from Edinburgh, UK, captured the development of visual field biases, comparing gaze behavior to social and non-social stimuli on the left versus right of the screen. Preterm infants showed a significantly reduced interest to social stimuli on the left versus right compared to term children (d = .58). Preterm children exhibit early differential orienting preferences that may be an early indicator of atypical lateralized function.