Mothers' and toddlers' coordinated joint focus of attention: variations with maternal dysphoric symptoms.

This investigation compared the attention patterns of 40 toddlers and their mothers with or without dysphoric symptoms in a situation that allowed both common and independent foci of attention. Mother-toddler dyads with a dysphoric mother spent a smaller proportion of the session engaged in attention to an activity in common than did dyads with nondysphoric mothers. In addition, even when primarily attending elsewhere, nondysphoric mothers more extensively time-shared their attention between their child and a competing activity than did dysphoric mothers. Thus, dysphoric mothers appear to attend to an event in common with their children less frequently than do nondysphoric mothers in terms of both their primary focus of attention and their attentiveness to the child when primarily attending to a competing event.