OBJECTIVE To evaluate childhood experiences (neglect and abuse), temperament and childhood and adolescent psychopathology as risk factors for avoidant and borderline personality disorders in depressed outpatients. METHOD One hundred and eighty depressed outpatients were evaluated for personality disorders. Risk factors of childhood abuse, parental care, temperament, conduct disorder symptoms,...

Temptation pervades modern social life, including the temptation to engage in infidelity. The present investigation examines one factor that may put individuals at a greater risk of being unfaithful to their partner: dispositional avoidant attachment style. The authors hypothesize that avoidantly attached people may be less resistant to temptations for infidelity due to lower levels of commitme...

Firstborn children's reactions to mother-infant and father-infant interaction after a sibling's birth were examined in an investigation of 224 families. Triadic observations of parent-infant-sibling interaction were conducted at 1 month after the birth. Parents reported on children's problem behaviors at 1 and 4 months after the birth and completed the Attachment Q-sort before the birth. Latent...

Beginning in infancy, people can be characterized in terms of two dimensions of attachment insecurity: attachment anxiety (i.e., fear of rejection and abandonment) and attachment avoidance (distancing oneself from close others, shunning dependency; Bowlby, J., 1969/1982. Attachment and loss: Vol. 1. Attachment, 2nd ed., Basic Books, New York). The capacity for emotion regulation varies with att...

Adult attachment style is a key for understanding emotion regulation and feelings of security in human interactions as well as for the construction of the caregiving system. The caregiving system is a group of representations about affiliative behaviors, which is guided by the caregiver's sensitivity and empathy, and is mature in young adulthood. Appropriate perception and interpretation of inf...

In the current study we aimed to examine the association between attachment styles towards father and mother, perfectionistic self-promotion (PSP), socially prescribed perfectionism (SPP), and binge eating symptoms in a sample of 328 late adolescents (mean age 17.1 years). It was examined whether anxiously and avoidantly attached adolescents would differentially cope with their insecure feeling...

Differences in infant distress and regulatory behaviors based on the quality of attachment to mother, emotion context (frustration versus fear), and whether or not mothers were actively involved in the emotion-eliciting tasks were examined in a sample of 98 16-month-old infants and their mothers. Dyads participated in the Strange Situation, a limiting task designed to elicit infant frustration,...

Health anxiety involves persistent worry about one’s health and beliefs one has an illness or may contract a disease. The interpersonal model of health anxiety (Noyes et al., 2003) is a conceptual framework linking insecure attachment to health anxiety. The present study, clarified the contribution of insecure attachment to health anxiety by studying two key dimensions of insecure attachment: a...

The purpose of this study was to examine patterns of comorbidity of DSM-III-R anxiety disorders and personality disorders (PD). Two-hundred subjects were independently interviewed with the Structured Clinical Interview for DSM-III-R (SCID) and the Personality Disorder Examination (PDE) face-to-face by two experienced clinicians. One-hundred and forty-six also completed the Personality Diagnosit...

Some people maintain direct, face-to-face contact during interaction. whereas others avert their gaze or turn their face while interacting. Research on individual differences in gaze avoidance. while sparse. falls into two areas. One concerns the personality and psychopathology correlates of gaze aversion, and the other concerns social judgments made of people who avert their gaze during intera...