@article {309970,
	title = {A cross-cultural comparison of the development of the social smile: a longitudinal study of maternal and infant imitation in 6- and 12-week-old infants.},
	journal = {Infant Behav Dev},
	volume = {35},
	year = {2012},
	month = {2012 Jun},
	pages = {335-47},
	abstract = {<p>Social smiling is universally regarded as being an infant{\textquoteright}s first facial expression of pleasure. Underlying co-constructivist emotion theories are the assumptions that the emergence of social smiling is bound to experiences of face-to-face interactions with caregivers and the impact of two developmental mechanisms--maternal and infant imitation. We analyzed mother-infant interactions from two different socio-cultural contexts and hypothesized that cross-cultural differences in face-to-face interactions determine the occurrence of both of these mechanisms and of the frequency of social smiling by 12-week-old infants. Twenty mother-infant dyads from a socio-cultural community with many face-to-face interactions (German families, M{\"u}nster) were compared with 24 mother-infant dyads from a socio-cultural community with few such interactions (rural Nso families, Cameroon) when the infants were aged 6 and 12 weeks. When infants were 6 weeks old, mothers and their infants from both cultural communities smiled at each other for similar (albeit very short) amounts of time and used imitated each other{\textquoteright}s smiling similarly rarely. In contrast, when infants were 12 weeks old, mothers and their infants from M{\"u}nster smiled at and imitated each other more often than did Nso mothers and their infants.</p>
},
	keywords = {Adult, Age Factors, Child Development, Cross-cultural comparison, Female, Fixation, Ocular, Humans, Imitative Behavior, Infant, Infant Behavior, Infant, Newborn, Longitudinal Studies, Male, Mother-Child Relations, Reproducibility of Results, Smiling, Social Behavior, Statistics, Nonparametric},
	issn = {1934-8800},
	doi = {10.1016/j.infbeh.2012.03.002},
	author = {W{\"o}rmann, Viktoriya and Holodynski, Manfred and K{\"a}rtner, Joscha and Keller, Heidi}
}
