Maternal contingent responsiveness moderates temperamental risk to support adaptive infant brain and socioemotional development across the first year of life.

In the first few months of life, infants display intriguing individual differences in how they react to novel stimuli in their environment. Infant "negative reactive" tendencies have been robustly linked to resting brain activity profiles that confer risk for maladaptive socioemotional outcomes. The present study examines whether and how caregiver behavior in early infancy may interact with infant negative reactivity to alter the extent to which such tendencies predict risk-related brain activity profiles. In the present study, 51 mothers (all White; age