Cultural models and developmental agendas: implications for arousal and self-regulation in early infancy.

Parental ethnotheories—the shared, abstract, and often unconscious mental schema for understanding children, families, and the self as parent—organize parental behaviors. This paper focuses on parental ethnotheories and developmental agendas concerning the regulation of infant states of arousal, as expressed in interviews by 96 mothers in five cultural communities (in Italy, Korea, the Netherlands, Spain, and the United States). Transcriptions of the hour-long home interviews were coded for nine themes of child development and 34 related caretaking practices. A Salience Index was derived for each theme to reflect both the frequency of its occurrence in the interview and the number of practices associated with it. Statistical analysis of these indices demonstrates clear differences among the groups in how aspects of infant state are framed and which themes constitute culturally defined developmental agenda. Qualitative analysis elaborates the unique cultural frameworks used by these mothers. Each framework is fully adequate for managing the arousal states of infants and leading them to a more mature pattern of self-regulation, building a platform for their future engagement in the social, emotional, and educational life of their developmental niches. Cultural Models and Developmental Agendas From a developmental perspective, early infancy is a busy time for babies. Beyond surviving the biological vulnerability that comes with transition to life outside the womb, they must learn within the course of a few months how to feed, consolidate patterns of activity and rest in coordination with their caretakers, establish life-sustaining relationships with them, form mental representations for objects and experiences, and regulate their own responses to the sensory experiences generated by their environments of care. All of these developmental agendas are supported by maturational changes in the organization of states of arousal, a dimension of functioning that is often seen more as background than as “development” itself. Although the field of developmental psychology has given relatively little attention to state of arousal, or organizational state, its importance for understanding the behavior of newborns was established in the 1950s by Wolff (1959) and subsequently Prechtl and Beintema (1968). This recognition marked a turning point in infant research (Als, Tronick, Lester, & Brazelton, 1979; Korner, 1972). Researchers following in this tradition have examined organizational state both as a behavioral response and as a platform for other behaviors. Infant arousal as indexed by smiling, vocalization, and physiological measures has been shown to vary contingently with maternal response, both positively, as high levels of interaction lead to increased infant arousal (Symons & Moran, 1987), and negatively, in that deliberate simulation of non-responsive maternal behavior has been shown to result in disrupted infant arousal and affect (Cohen & Tronick, 1983). In the cognitive domain, the infant’s disposition to attend to information and to process experience is dependent on momentary state (Aslin & Fiser, 2005; Rothbart, Ziaie, O’Boyle, Eisenberg, & Fabes, 1992). Beyond these transient effects, organizational state is also a potent mediator of further experience, determining opportunities to engage in social activity, demonstrate competence, and acquire new skills. This is evident in the differential experience of infants of divergent temperamental dispositions (Super & Harkness, 1986b; Thomas 6 SARA HARKNESS, ET AL.