Year: 1999
Type: article
Study design: Observational Study
Abstract: As part of an observation in a longitudinal project, 42 pairs of mothers and their 10 months infants were observed in a separation episode.Mother's 1) actions 2) utterances 3) degree of affect attunement to the infant, and the infant's 1) degree of distress during a 30 second separation, and 2) upon reunion were coded and analyzed.The main results were: 1) Fifty percent of the infants showed intense distress during separation; among them 33.3% remained in intense to medium distress after reunion, while 66.7% of them showed no distress at all, 2) Four categories of utterances by the mothers upon reunion were observed in response to infant distress: labeling infant feeling, apologizing and excusing, assuring and/or soothing, and distracting by asking questions, 3) Sixty-eight point eight percent of the mothers of infants observed with some degree of distress showed affect attunement, 4) Twelve mothers (28.6%) made apologies and/or excuses to their infants who showed some degrees of distress, 5) Eight of the nine mothers (88.8%) who made apologies and/or excuse showed medium to high degrees of affect attunement during reunion.Mothers' response by apologies and/ or excuses was contrasted with strategies used'by Western mothers.
Authors: Nobuko Hoshi, Shing-Jen Chen
Language: English
Subfield: Social Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W1522279094