The IFEEL pictures: Transcultural aspects of importing a new method

In infant psychiatry the mother's sensitivity toward understanding and obse rving her newborn infant's emotional states seems to be of importance for t he mental development of the child. To study this matter, we imported a new method (the IFEEL pictures) into Scandinavian culture and studied Finnish mothers' responses in the IFEEL test, which consists of 30 infant facial ph otographs. Compared with pre-war Croatian mothers, Finnish mothers reported less distress, joy, interest, passivity, and sadness but more shyness and disgust. Compared with American mothers, the Finnish mothers saw less distr ess and more surprise. We also paid attention to linguistic and methodologi c aspects in adapting this new assessment method to Finnish culture. The IF EEL method seems to be a useful assessment when evaluating mothers' observa tions of pictures of infants' emotional states.