Speech directed towards young children ("motherese") is subject to consistent systematic modifications. Recent research suggests that gesture directed towards young children is similarly modified (gesturese). It has been suggested that gesturese supports speech, therefore scaffolding communicative development (the facilitative interactional theory). Alternatively, maternal gestural modification may be a consequence of the semantic simplicity of interaction with infants (the interactional artefact theory). The gesture patterns of 12 English mothers were observed with their 20-month-old infants while engaged in two tasks, free play and a counting task, designed to differentially tap into scaffolding. Gestures accounted for 29% of total maternal communicative behaviour. English mothers employed mainly concrete deictic gestures (e.g. pointing) that supported speech by disambiguating and emphasizing the verbal utterance. Maternal gesture rate and informational gesture-speech relationship were consistent across tasks, supporting the interactional artefact theory. This distinctive pattern of gesture use for the English mothers was similar to that reported for American and Italian mothers, providing support for universality. Child-directed gestures are not redundant in relation to child-directed speech but rather both are used by mothers to support their communicative acts with infants.

The present study examined weight gain in a stressful environment (i.e., following compulsory enrollment in the Greek Army). It was predicted that higher levels of mindfulness and selfcompassion would relate negatively to weight gain, whilst negative automatic thoughts and intolerance of uncertainty would positively relate to weight gain. This research also explored the strength of independent variables when predicting weight gain, plus the additional contribution of self-compassion when controlling for the effect of mindfulness on weight gain. Ninety-seven military recruits completed the psychological scales on the first day of enrollment. Their height and weight were measured at baseline and after five weeks to record weight gain. Results revealed that 43 participants gained weight, while 54 lost weight. Those who lost weight reported significantly higher scores in mindfulness and self-compassion, whereas those who gained weight reported significantly higher scores in negative automatic thoughts and intolerance of uncertainty. Furthermore, negative automatic thoughts and intolerance of uncertainty did not significantly predict weight gain, after mindfulness and self-compassion were taken into account. Also, self-compassion uniquely contributed to the negative prediction of weight gain, once mindfulness was taken into account. This research concluded that negative cognition may play a role in weight gain; however, mindfulness and self-compassion may be more useful traits in predicting weight gain, given that once they are taken into account, negative cognition stop being significant predictors.

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Research indicates that children do not typically understand the connection between counting and cardinality for several months after learning to count, yet parents speak to 3-year-olds as though they already understood the significance of counting. The present research was designed to investigate mothers' awareness of the discrepancy between children's procedural and conceptual mastery of counting. In Study 1 mothers of a hundred 3-to 4 1 / 2 -year-olds completed an anonymous questionnaire asking them to anticipate how their child would respond to a series of real-life vignettes based on widely used experimental measures of cardinal understanding. Most anticipated that their child, irrespective of age, would (1) understand the significance of the last word of a count, and (2) be able accurately to give a specified non-subitizable number of objects. Comparison with the performance of 54 children from the same local population supported the hypothesis that parents overestimate children's understanding of the cardinal significance of counting. Mothers reported a range of impromptu numberrelated activities in which their child had recently participated at home; most of these involved simple procedural counting. In Study 2, 35 mothers of 3-to 4 1 / 2 -year-olds completed a modified questionnaire concerning procedural aspects of counting as well as cardinality; their responses were then compared with the performance of their own children. Again, mothers overestimated their children's cardinal understanding, but this was shown not to be a result of a general tendency to overestimate their counting abilities. It is suggested that preschoolers' counting generally occurs during joint activities in which caregivers may be unaware of the support that they provide, and, provided that the jointly executed count procedures are error-free, parents implicitly assume a 'common knowledge' regarding the cardinal significance of counting.

The effect of maternal support on the development of counting and cardinality was examined by observing 18 mother-child dyads engaged in two procedurally similar, but conceptually different tasks in a longitudinal design consisting of three phases (32, 38 and 44 months). At 32 and 38 months of age in both the supported and a similar unsupported condition the children were more successful in the count task than in the give 'x' task, which requires knowledge of the relationship between counting and cardinality. Observations of mother-child interactions found that whilst maternal support for the count word sequence was similar in the two tasks the way mothers focused their child's attention on the objects in the set differed between the tasks. It is argued that social biases as well as cognitive ones constrain the development of cardinal understanding.