This longitudinal study investigated the effects of maternal emotional health concerns, on infants' home language environment, vocalization quantity, and expressive language skills. Mothers and their infants (at 6 and 12 months; 21 mothers with depression and or anxiety and 21 controls) provided day-long home-language recordings. Compared with controls, risk group recordings contained fewer mother-infant conversational turns and infant vocalizations, but daily number of adult word counts showed no group difference. Furthermore, conversational turns and infant vocalizations were stronger predictors of infants' 18-month vocabulary size than depression and anxiety measures. However, anxiety levels moderated the effect of conversational turns on vocabulary size. These results suggest that variability in mothers' emotional health influences infants' language environment and later language ability.

In English-speaking western cultures the punitive attitudes towards law-breakers is well documented. The present study examines the utility of predictors of punitive attitudes with online survey data obtained from a convenience sample of 566 Australian residents. After controlling for demographic variables, the study examines the utility of two theoretical models; the Crimedistrust model and the Racial-animus model, in predicting punitive attitudes. All three factors of the Crime-distrust model significantly predict punitive attitudes. The study extends the current literature through identifying the significance of negative perceptions of Indigenous Australians in predicting punitive attitudes to sentencing. Results suggest that community perception of Indigenous Australians is a significant predictor of punitive attitudes in addition to factors of the Crime-distrust model. Future research using a more representative sample of the Australian population is recommended to increase the confidence with which findings are interpreted.

Maternal depression and anxiety have been proposed to increase the risk of adverse outcomes of language development in the early years of life. This study investigated the effects of maternal depression and anxiety on language development using two approaches: (i) a categorical approach that compared lexical abilities in two groups of children, a risk group (mothers with clinical-level symptomatology) and a control non-risk group, and (ii) a continuous approach that assessed the relation between individual mothers’ clinical and subclinical symptomatology and their infants’ lexical abilities. Infants’ lexical abilities were assessed at 18 months of age using an objective lexical processing measure and a parental report of expressive vocabulary. Infants in the risk group exhibited lower lexical processing abilities compared to controls, and maternal depression scores were negatively correlated to infants’ lexical processing and vocabulary measures. Furthermore, maternal depression (not anxiety) explained the variance in infants’ individual lexical processing performance above the variance explained by their individual expressive vocabulary size. These results suggest that significant differences are emerging in 18-month-old infants’ lexical processing abilities, and this appears to be related, in part, to their mothers’ depression and anxiety symptomatology during the postnatal period.

In English-speaking Western society's punitive attitudes towards the sentencing of criminal offenders is

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