Attachment research has shown the emergence of individual differences in the security of infant-mother attachment during the first year of life as well as their importance for later social-emotional development. A biobehavioral perspective may help settle disagreements about the validity and interpretation of 12-month-old infants' different behavioral patterns of attachment assessed by Ainswort...

Stepfamilies face a series of unique opportunities and challenges in their development. This article provides an overview of an emotionally focused family intervention for stepfamilies. Common stepfamily concerns are considered using attachment theory as a relational framework for conceptualizing the impact of structural change and loss on stepfamily adjustment. Problem patterns are understood ...

A wide range of data have demonstrated the Disorganized attachment pattern can be scored reliably, has good discriminant validity vis a vis important alternative interpretations, and is related to significant developmental outcomes. The challenge now is to understand Disorganized attachment in terms of developmental mechanisms and activating conditions. Ideally, this would involve understanding...

ADOPTION AND ATTACHMENT THEORY BEYOND INFANCY AND EARLY CHILDHOOD Three trends of attachment research could be identified in the adoption field. The first was focused on the comparisons between attachment patterns of adopted children and those of their non-adopted peers. It indicates a higher probability of insecure and disorganized patterns among the adoptees (Van den Dries et al., 2009). The ...

Abstract Mourning constitutes an important human emotion, which might cause—among other things—major depressive symptoms when lasting for too long. To date, no study investigated whether mourning is related to specific psychophysiological activation patterns. Therefore, we examined physiological reactions induced by iconographic mourning-related stimuli in comparison neutral and attachment heal...

Mourning constitutes an important human emotion, which might cause—among other things—major depressive symptoms when lasting for too long. To date, no study investigated whether mourning is related to specific psychophysiological activation patterns. Therefore, we examined physiological reactions induced by iconographic mourning-related stimuli in comparison neutral and attachment healthy adult...

MENTAL REPRESENTATIONS, SOCIAL EXCLUSION, AND NEUROBIOLOGICAL PROCESSES IN BORDERLINE PERSONALITY DISORDER: A MULTI-LEVEL STUDY By Jeffrey Kendall Erbe, M.Sc., M.Phil. Advisers: Eric Fertuck, Ph.D. and Diana Diamond, Ph.D. Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) is an ongoing public health crisis. Poor developmental quality of differentiation-relatedness of object representations and attachment i...

Title of Document: BRIDGING THE ATTACHMENT TRANSMISSION GAP WITH MATERNAL MIND-MINDEDNESS AND INFANT TEMPERAMENT Laura Jernigan Sherman, Master of Science, 2009 Directed By: Professor Jude Cassidy, Psychology The goal of this study was to test (a) whether maternal mind-mindedness (MM) mediates the link between maternal attachment (from the Adult Attachment Interview) and infant attachment (in t...

Repeated interactions between infant and caregiver result in either secure or insecure relationship attachment patterns, and insecure attachment may affect individual emotion-regulation and health. Given that oxytocin enhances social approach behavior in animals and humans, we hypothesized that oxytocin might also promote the subjective experience of attachment security in humans. Within a 3-we...

The present study investigates the relationship between the attachment dimensions (anxious vs. avoidance) and the cognitive performance of individuals, specifically whether the attachment dimensions would predict the working memory (WM) performance. In the n-back task, reflecting the WM capacity, both attachment related and non-attachment related words were used. Participants were randomly assi...