Parent-infant bonding: another look.

While previous reviewers of the literature on early parent-infant contacts assume existing experiments are adequate tests of the sensitive period hypothesis, this review asserts that the hypothesis has not been tested on three counts: (1) there are no systematic studies of initial mother-infant contacts, (2) the majority of the studies confound timing and amount of contact, and (3) failure to consider underlying mechanisms resulted in the omission of designs and dependent measures that could address the appropriate questions.