Subjective appraisal of infant crying.

How families appraise difficult situations contributes to later adaptive functioning. We have observed in both research and practice that when appraising their infants' crying, mothers often compared their own infants' crying to actual or supposed much worse infants. They typically appraised their infants to be crying less than average infants. This phenomenon, defined in the social psychology literature, is called downward comparison. Secondary analysis of an established data set was used to assess the extent of downward comparison and the identification of excessive crying among a sample of 193 primiparous mothers. Mothers appraised their own infants' crying to be less than that of the expected average infant. Mothers who identified their infants as excessive criers made less robust downward comparisons than did mothers who did not identify their infants as excessive criers. Nursing interventions that focus on supporting mothers' positive appraisal and promoting knowledge of infant behaviors, particularly infant crying, are proposed.