Emotional availability and attachment across generations: variations in patterns associated with infant health risk status.

BACKGROUND: The presence of limits or distortions in the children's communicative behaviours (due to a chronic illness) may interfere with the possibility to build secure attachment relationships. Moreover, the distress that the atypical chronic illness condition brings to family life may interfere the intergenerational transmission of attachment. METHODS: This study evaluated the associations between maternal attachment representations, emotional availability and mother-child attachment in a clinical and in a comparison group. Forty infants (23 female) in their 14th month of life and their mothers participated in this study, 20 dyads with clinical infants (10 premature infants and 10 infants affected by atopic dermatitis) and 20 full-term and healthy comparison infants. The Adult Attachment Interview, the Emotional Availability Scales (EAS) and the Strange Situation Procedure were used to assess, respectively, the security of mothers' attachment representations, the emotional availability and the quality of mother-child attachment. RESULTS: We found that the two groups (clinical vs. comparison) did not differ with respect to the Adult Attachment Interview and the Emotional Availability Scales measures. A significant difference was found in the distribution of the infant-mother attachment patterns, with a higher incidence of insecure infants in the clinical group. In the typically developing group, more secure maternal attachment representations predicted more emotional availability in mother-infant interactions, which predicted more secure infant-mother attachments. However, we did not find similar support for intergenerational transmission of attachment in the clinical group. CONCLUSIONS: We speculate that constant concerns about the child's health condition and communicative difficulties of clinical infants may hamper or even mitigate the intergenerational transmission of attachment.

[Parricide, abuse and emotional processes: a review starting from some paradigmatic cases]. / Parricidio, abusi e processi emozionali: una rassegna partendo da alcuni casi paradigmatici.

The authors of this study tackle the complex subject of parricide, which is a rare and often brutal form of homicide. Parricide has a high emotional impact on public opinion and on our collective imagination, especially in light of the fact that the perpetrators are often minors.. Three striking cases of parricide, taken from various documented sources and judicial files from the "N. Fornelli" Juvenile Penal Institute (Bari, Italy), are presented here. A review of the literature on the topic has revealed differences between parricides committed by adults and those committed by minors. In the end, the complex issues underlying such an unusual crime are connected to abuses and maltreatment that minor perpetrators of parricide have suffered, especially the emotional processes that are activated.

Temporal relationships between gaze and vocal behavior in prelinguistic and linguistic communication.

This work reports longitudinal evaluation of the temporal relationships between gaze and vocal behavior addressed to interactive partners (mother or experimenter) in a free-play situation. Thirteen children were observed at the ages of 1;0 and 1;8 during laboratory sessions, and video recordings of free-play interactions with mother and a female experimenter were coded separately for children's vocal behavior (vocalizations and words) and gaze toward their interactive partners. The difference between the observed and expected co-occurrence of these two communicative behaviors was evaluated by transformation into z-scores. The most important findings are related to differences in the temporal relationship observed at age 1;0 between gaze and vocalizations and at age 1;8 between gaze and words. At the earlier age, the infants who exhibited greater coordination between gaze and vocal behavior than was expected by chance (z-score > +1.96) preferred to look at the interlocutor at the beginning of the vocal turn. Instead, when they were older and began to produce words, they frequently looked at the interlocutor at the end of the vocal turn. These results are interpreted as referring to characteristics of conversational competence in the prelinguistic and lingustic periods. Moreover, looking at the interlocutor at the beginning of the vocal turn at age 1;0 was found to be related to language production at age 1;8, highlighting a significant relationship between conversational competence during the prelinguistic period and language acquisition.