The current study investigated factors contributing to mother's early perception of her infant's difficult temperament. One hundred and twenty-four mother-infant dyads participated in the study. Mother's perception of the infant's temperament was assessed with the Infant Characteristics Questionnaire (ICQ). The influence of mother-infant interaction, mother's mental health and parenting stress were investigated. Mother-infant interaction was videotaped during a face-to-face interaction and analysed using the Global Rating Scale. Mother's mental health was assessed through a structured interview (Structured Clinical Interview for DSM-IV, SCID) and parenting stress was examined by a questionnaire (Parenting Stress Index). First, the difficulty scale of the ICQ was used as a continuous variable and factors contributing to mother's perception of her infant's temperament as more or less difficult were examined. Secondly, infants were categorized into difficult and non-difficult, and factors increasing the infant's risk of being perceived as difficult were examined. The model including mother's mental health and parental distress accounted for 24% of the variance in perceived infant difficulty, with parental distress in particular being an influential contributor. When infants categorized as difficult were examined, mother's intrusiveness and infant's poor interactive behaviour in early mother-infant interaction as well as parental distress significantly increased the infant's risk of being perceived as difficult.

Together, these results implicate serotonin system genes in early cognitive development and suggest variations in the early-emerging cognitive capacities as a potential developmental precursor of individual differences in emotion regulation and vulnerability to affective disorders.

To examine the ontogeny of emotion—attention interactions, we investigated whether infants exhibit adult-like biases in automatic and voluntary attentional processes towards fearful facial expressions. Heart rate and saccadic eye movements were measured from 7-month-old infants (n = 42) while viewing non-face control stimuli, and neutral, happy, and fearful facial expressions flanked after 1000 ms by a peripheral distractor. Relative to neutral and happy expressions, fearful expressions resulted in a greater cardiac deceleration response during the first 1000 ms of face-viewing and in a relatively long-lasting suppression of face-to-distractor saccades. The results suggest that the neural architecture for the integration of emotional significance with automatic attentional orienting as well as more voluntary attentional prioritization processes is present early in life.

The results suggest that interactional issues between a mother and her infant are related to the child's subsequent physical health. Children with recurrent or chronic health problems may have relationship difficulties with which they need help. Also, early avoidant behaviour of the infant should be regarded as an indicator of the infant's distress with possibly adverse outcomes in the child's physical health, among other consequences.

This study examined child and parental factors in infancy and toddlerhood predicting subclinical or clinical levels of internalizing and externalizing problems at 5 years of age. Ninety-six children and their families participated. They were assessed when the children were 4-10 weeks old (T1), 2 years (T2) and 5 years old (T3). Child risks (difficult temperament, health problems, early emotional and behavioral problems), parental risks (psychopathology, parenting stress and perception of the child) and family risks (socio-economic status, quality of marital relationship and family violence) were examined. At 5 years, internalizing problems were predicted by family violence during the child's infancy and parenting stress at age 2. Externalizing problems were predicted by psychiatric problems of the mother before pregnancy and child's externalizing problems at 2 years of age. When interventions aiming at preventing emotional and behavioral problems in children are considered, these issues should be recognized early and effective intervention initiated.