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The infant’s distress response to brief maternal separation appears during the last quarter of the first year of life and diminishes during the second year. Its significance has been highlighted by a number of theorists working in the area of the attachment relationship between mother and child. Research from our laboratories on cerebral asymmetry and the development of emotion has begun to characterize both the developmental course of separation protest and variations in the intensity of the distress response. Data presented in this chapter indicate that the development of separation protest may be associated with the relative activation of certain regions in the cerebral hemispheres. Ten-month-old infants who exhibited distress at separation displayed greater right frontal activation during separation as compared to infants who did not protest. Differences in relative frontal activation during protest are …