A caregiver is the primary environment of children during their early life, and the bidirectional process of emotional communication between caregivers and infants influences infants' emotional development. When infants express their emotions within the bidirectional interaction between caregivers and infants, the infants' emotional expression serves a communicative function. During this bidirectional interaction, the caregivers respond to the infants' emotional cues as well as initiate behaviors that encourage the infants' positive emotional responses to enhance their emotional communication. Furthermore, these caregiving behaviors are influenced by culture as caregivers internalize their cultural values, which, in turn, affect the infants' development of emotional expressions and lead to cultural differences in the infants' emotional development. This dissertation aimed to identify and compare the relationship between parenting behaviors (responsiveness to infants' emotional cues and encouragement of infants' positive emotional responses) and infants' emotional expressions in the United States and South Korea. The first study focused on a cultural comparison of maternal responsiveness as an infant-elicited aspect of emotional communication and its relationship with infants' emotional expressions. This study revealed that Korean mothers are more responsive than U.S. mothers. When infants' intensities of positive and negative emotional expressions were compared, U.S. infants showed more intense expressions than Korean infants for positive emotions, while Korean infants showed more intense expressions than U.S. infants for negative emotions. Furthermore, culture was found to have a moderating effect on the relationship between maternal responsiveness and infants' intensity of emotional expression: In the U.S. sample, mothers being more responsive were associated with infants expressing positive emotion more intensely whereas in the Korean sample, more responsive mothers were related with infants expressing positive emotion less intensely.The second study focused on the mother-generated aspect of emotional communication and explored the behavior mothers initiate to elicit and heighten infants' positive emotions. In this study, these behaviors were called emotion-arousing behaviors. Specific emotion-arousing behaviors in both the United States and South Korea were identified. When mothers' emotion-arousing behaviors in each culture were compared in terms of the duration of these behaviors, Korean mothers showed emotion-arousing behaviors more than U.S. mothers. In addition, cultural-specific relationships between the mothers' emotion-arousing behaviors and the infants' positive emotional expressions were found.The findings of this dissertation advance our understanding of the reciprocal effects mothers and infants have on each other and the influence of culture on the bi-directional relationship between parenting behaviors and infants' emotional expressions.
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