Sex differences in neonatal eye contact time.

Joan Hittelman · Robert Dickes

64 citations0/0 files storedMerrill-palmer Quarterly

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

No open-access location is known for this record yet.

Literature note Cite in a project Citation map

Child and Animal Learning Development Infant Development and Preterm Care Infant Health and Development

Abstract

In recent years, the expanding field of infancy research has wit nessed a major shift in focus from the study of discrete mother and infant behaviors to that of an interactive systems approach to the mother-infant dyad, with increasing emphasis on the infant's contri bution to the interaction (Bell, 1971; Lewis & Rosenblum, 1974). As a result of this change, researchers have attempted to identify vari ables in the newborn's behavior that could influence the baby's social environment. It has also been suggested that subtle sex differences in the infant may very well be influencing the mother's handling of the baby (Hittelman, 1975; Korner, 1974; Olley, 1973). The purpose of this paper is to study the relationship between the infants' sex and their capacity to maintain eye contact. Neonatal eye contact is an important variable to study since it has been shown to have a profound impact on the development of maternal attachment (Greenman, 1963, Klaus, Kennel, Plumb, & Zuehlke, 1970; Robson, 1967; Wolff, 1963) and on infant attachment as well (Brazelton, Tronick, Adamson, Als, & Weise, 1975). Eye contact is one of the earliest social behaviors under the infant's control. Immediately after birth newborns are capable of maintaining visual fixation and pursuit (Brazelton, 1973; Hershenson, 1964; Wolff, 1965) and making visual discriminations (Fantz, 1958). Visual pursuit is a highly reliable be havior with a wide range of individual differences (Bartens, Birns, & Ronch, 1971). Friedman (1972) has concluded that newborn infants have the ability to process and regulate visual impact by turning their eyes away from a stimulus or visually searching for it. Commenting on a similar phenomenon, Brazelton (1973) has reported that new borns may turn their head to look at an examiner's face and attend

Paper brief

Loading…

Cite this work

Citation unavailable for this work.

BibTeX RIS CSL-JSON

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Citations in this library

Citation map →

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 64 citations exist upstream.

References

1974The origins of reciprocity : The early mother-infant interaction 1974Mother and infant at play: The dyadic interaction involving facial, vocal, and gaze behaviors.1967THE ROLE OF EYE‐TO‐EYE CONTACT IN MATERNAL‐INFANT ATTACHMENT 1965Visual behavior in a dyad as affected by interview content and sex of respondent.1975Early Mother‐Infant Reciprocity 1971Stimulus control of parent or caretaker behavior by offspring.1967Stimulus-schema discrepancy and attention in the infant 1973Effects of age, sex, and task on visual behavior during dyadic interaction.

Cited by

2004Here's Looking at You, Kid! A Longitudinal Study of Perceived Gender Differences in Mutual Gaze Behavior in Young Infants 2007Gender‐related differences in neonatal imitation 2017Male and Female Balance Sheet 2016Experience-independent sex differences in newborn macaques: Females are more social than males 2017Women Know Better What Other Women Think and Feel: Gender Effects on Mindreading across the Adult Life Span

Explore the map →

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.

Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.