MARIE-LUISE FRIEDEMANN 2563 Esch, Ann Arbor, Michigm 48 104, U.S.A. and KATHLEEN A. EMRICH 16206 Riverside Drive, Livonia, Michigan 48154, U.S.A. Introduction and review of literature The emergence of stable sleep-wake patterns among infants reflects a wide range of individual differences with regard to the number of hours the infant sleeps per 24 hr, as well as the age at which the infant begins to sleep through the night. This study investigates certain social-psychological variables thought to influence this process, e.g. the relationship of the mothers’ preference for a particular sleep-wake pattern and the subsequent sleep-wake pattern that her infant exhibits. Of special interest is the process by which maternal preferences for particular schedules and the actual sleep-wake patterns converge or diverge over time. Past research on infant sleep-wake patterns can be roughly classified into three categories. One area of research has focused on the nature of sleep stages in infancy compared to those observed in adults, e.g. rapid eye movements (REM) stages of sleep (Dreyfus-Brisac, 1974; Kleitman, 1963; Parmelee, Akiyama and Schulte, 1967; Prechtl and Lenard, 1967; Weinmann, 1971). A second area of research consists of basically parametric studies, i.e. studies designed to obtain baseline figures of normal infant sleeping rates across early developmental stages (Hellbrugge, Lange and Rutenkranz, 1959). A third area of research, one that is most directly relevant to this study, has focused on the emergence of infant sleep patterns, particularly in regard to how infants achieve a characteristically adult sleep-wake pattern with day-night differentiation. For obvious reasons, clinical research has primarily concentrated on the one aspect of the infant sleepwake pattern that is of greatest concern to the parents of newborns: the infant sleep disturbance syndrome, which is usually defined as a failure of the infant (older than 12 weeks) to sleep through the entire 12 a.m. and 5 a.m. period at least once a week (Bernal,