632 RELATIONS BETWEEN STATE AT 6 WEEKS AND FRUSTRATION REACTIVITY AT 5 AND 10 MONTHS Samuel P. Putnam, Norman Turk, and Cynthia A. Stifter, PhD Department of Human Development and Family Studies, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA 16802 When faced with physical limitations, such as being dressed or placed into a car seat, infants may respond in a variety of ways. Some children placidly accept the brief confinement while others fuss over the restriction and struggle to escape. Temperament theorists suggest that negative reactivity should be relatively stable over time. However, few studies have successfully predicted susceptibility to frustration from behavior during early infancy. In the present study, we examined general negativity at six weeks and its relation to negative responses to a more specific stimulus at 5 and 10 months. One explanation for the relative paucity of findings in this area may be methodological. Researchers concerned with the prediction of later behavior from early infancy have typically relied either on behavior checklists and questionnaires filled out by parents or on brief observations. Critics of parental reports point out the confounding influence of parental biases, differential interpretation of items, and social desirability (Rothbart & Bates, in press). Although direct observation may overcome these shortcomings, this approach may yield unreliable results, due to the limited time and constrained circumstances in which observations take place. An approach which alleviates concerns associated with these methods is the completion of a state diary. When infants were six weeks of age, parents were asked to continuously record their infant’s state (crying, fussing, contentment, sleeping, or feeding) for four consecutive days. This technique allows for an considerably accurate record of infant state over an extended period of time (Barr, Kramer, Boisjoly, McVey-White, & Pless, 1988). The current study relates state at six weeks of age with negative reactivity displayed by infants at 5 and 10 months while an experimenter holds the child’s arms to his or her sides. While the diary method results in a general measure of state and does not indicate the reason for an infant’s distress, it is reasonable to expect concordance between the amount of time an infant fussed and cried during the second month and frustration to a specific stressor later in the first year. Preliminary results indicate that this is indeed the case. Children who spent relatively large amounts of time fussing at six weeks reacted more negatively to the arm restraint procedure at 5 and 10 months than did children who fussed little during early infancy. Amount of crying during the evening hours was especially predictive of frustration in later months. In addition, reactivity to arm restraint was highly stable from 5 to 10 months.