Developmental trajectories of adolescent internalizing symptoms and parental responses to distress.

Parents' responses to their children's negative emotions are a central aspect of emotion socialization that have well-established associations with the development of psychopathology. Yet research is lacking on potential bidirectional associations between parental responses and youth symptoms that may unfold over time. Further, additional research is needed on sociocultural factors that may be related to the trajectories of these constructs. In this study, we examined associations between trajectories of parental responses to negative emotions and adolescent internalizing symptoms and the potential role of youth sex and racial identity. Adolescents and caregivers (N = 256) completed six assessments that spanned adolescent ages 13-18 years. Multivariate growth models revealed that adolescents with higher internalizing symptoms at baseline experienced increasingly non-supportive parental responses over time (punitive and distress responses). By contrast, parental responses did not predict initial levels of or changes in internalizing symptoms. Parents of Black youth reported higher minimization and emotion-focused responses and lower distress responses compared to parents of White youth. We found minimal evidence for sex differences in parental responses. Internalizing symptoms in early adolescence had enduring effects on parental responses to distress, suggesting that adolescents may play an active role in shaping their emotion socialization developmental context.

Maternal depressive symptoms and child behavior problems: Attachment security as a protective factor.

Maternal depressive symptoms (MDS) have been linked to both child internalizing and externalizing behavior problems. Theory suggests that child attachment security may be a protective factor against the negative effects of MDS. This study examined child attachment security as a buffer of the link between MDS and child internalizing and externalizing behavior problems at two time points in a predominantly African American sample. Participants included mothers (N = 164; Mage = 29.68 years; 76% African American) and their preschool-aged children (60% girls; Mage = 44.67 months) recruited from four Head Start centers in low-income neighborhoods in Baltimore, Maryland. MDS were concurrently associated with child internalizing and externalizing behavior problems at both time points. No significant main effects of child attachment security on behavior problems emerged; however, child attachment moderated the association between MDS and child internalizing behavior problems at Time 2, such that MDS predicted greater child internalizing problems when attachment security was low, and the effect was attenuated when attachment security was high. No interaction emerged for child externalizing problems. Findings suggest that secure attachment in early childhood can serve as a protective factor in the context of parental risk. We discuss implications for intervention and the intergenerational transmission of psychopathology.

Maternal Depressive Symptoms and Preschoolers' Helping, Sharing, and Comforting: The Moderating Role of Child Attachment.

Maternal depressive symptoms (MDS) are inconsistently associated with lower rates of child prosocial behavior. Studies typically examine prosocial behavior as a unitary construct rather than examining its multiple dimensions, and rarely consider how the quality of the parent-child relationship could influence this association.Objective: The current study examines whether the security of the parent-child attachment relationship moderates the association between MDS and children's helping, sharing, and comforting behaviors.Method: Participants were 164 low-income, majority African American mothers and their preschool-aged children recruited from Head Start centers. Mothers reported the frequency of depressive symptoms at baseline; child attachment security and helping, sharing, and comforting behavior were observationally assessed 5 to 8 months later.Results: Moderation analyses revealed a positive main effect of security (but not MDS) on children's comforting behavior, a main effect of MDS on sharing, and no main effects of MDS or security on children's helping behaviors. Significant interactions between MDS and security predicted comforting and (marginally) helping behaviors, such that MDS were associated with both more helping and more comforting behavior only when children were more secure. No such interaction was observed for sharing.Conclusions: These findings suggest that children may adapt to maternal depressive symptoms in prosocial ways, but that this depends at least in part on the quality of the parent-child relationship, underscoring the importance of examining attachment quality as a moderator of parental influences on children's social-emotional development. We discuss potential explanations for these findings, as well as their implications for intervention.

Working toward anti-racist perspectives in attachment theory, research, and practice.

Recent social movements have illuminated systemic inequities in U.S. society, including within the social sciences. Thus, it is essential that attachment researchers and practitioners engage in reflection and action to work toward anti-racist perspectives in the field. Our aims in this paper are (1) to share the generative conversations and debates that arose in preparing the Special Issue of Attachment & Human Development, "Attachment Perspectives on Race, Prejudice, and Anti-Racism"; and (2) to propose key considerations for working toward anti-racist perspectives in the field of attachment. We provide recommendations for enriching attachment theory (e.g. considering relations between caregivers' racial-ethnic socialization and secure base provision), research (e.g. increasing the representation of African American researchers and participants), and practice (e.g. advocating for policies that reduce systemic inequities in family supports). Finally, we suggest two relevant models integrating attachment theory with perspectives from Black youth development as guides for future research.

Attachment perspectives on race, prejudice, and anti-racism: Introduction to the Special Issue.

Central to attachment theory is the idea that behavior in close relationships can best be understood in context. Although decades of research have illuminated cross-cultural patterns of caregiving and attachment, there remains a critical need to increase research with African American families, examine the specific sociocultural context of systemic anti-Black racism, and integrate the rich theory and research of Black scholars. The goal of this special issue is to bring together attachment researchers and scholars studying Black youth and families to leverage and extend attachment-related work to advance anti-racist perspectives in developmental science. The papers in this special issue, highlighted in the introduction, illuminate pathways of risk and resilience in Black children, adolescents, and families and point to the protective power of relationships (and the limits of such protection) for mental and physical health. We highlight critical questions to guide ongoing dialogue and collaboration on this important topic.

Attachment and attitudes toward children: effects of security priming in parents and non-parents.

The present two-study investigation is the first to examine whether experimentally boosting attachment security (security priming) affects attitudes in the parenting domain for both parents and non-parents. Mothers (n = 72) and childless undergraduates (n = 82) were randomly assigned to a neutral or a secure prime condition and then completed measures of implicit attitudes (a child-focused version of the Go/No-Go Association Task) and explicit attitudes (self-reported) toward children. Following the priming manipulation, mothers in the secure prime condition had more positive implicit attitudes toward their child compared to mothers in the neutral prime condition. Security priming also increased mothers' positive explicit attitudes toward their children, but only among mothers who scored high on self-reported attachment-related avoidance. No priming effects emerged among non-parents. These results provide the first evidence for a causal link between parental attachment security and parental attitudes toward children.

Pathways linking attachment and depressive symptoms for Black and White adolescents: do race and neighborhood racism matter?

Decades of evidence demonstrate that insecure attachment is associated with increased risk for depressive symptoms. Yet research has focused on predominantly White samples, with little attention to whether developmental pathways vary by social-contextual factors like racial identity and neighborhood racism. This study examines whether longitudinal links between attachment style and depressive symptoms differ for White and Black American adolescents or by exposure to neighborhood racism (N = 171, Mage at Time 1 = 14 years). Multigroup measured variable path analyses controlling for gender and household income revealed that attachment avoidance predicted relative increases in depressive symptoms for White adolescents, but not for Black adolescents. Links between attachment style and depressive symptoms did not differ based on exposure to neighborhood racism. Experiences of neighborhood racism were associated with greater attachment avoidance but not anxiety. Results highlight the importance of examining attachment in different socioecological contexts to illuminate the unique pathways characterizing Black youth development.

Mothers' Attachment Style as a Predictor of Breastfeeding and Room-Sharing Practices.

OBJECTIVE: To prospectively assess breastfeeding and room-sharing practices during the infant's first 6 months and investigate whether mothers' own adult attachment style predicts the initiation and course of these recommended parenting behaviors. METHOD: This study included 193 mother-infant dyads living in the Netherlands. Diary methodology was used to generate 27 weekly measures of breastfeeding and room-sharing during the infant's first 6 months. Multilevel mixed effects models were used to examine trajectories of breastfeeding and room-sharing and to test whether mothers' own adult attachment style predicted the initiation and course of these behaviors, adjusting for covariates. RESULTS: Most (86%) mothers initiated breastfeeding immediately after birth and the rates of breastfeeding declined steadily over the 6 months (b = -2.47, SE = 0.19, p < .001). Mothers with higher attachment avoidance showed faster decreases in breastfeeding than less avoidant mothers (b = -1.07, SE = 0.21, p < .001). Sixty-four percent of mothers engaged in room-sharing after birth which also decreased steadily over the 6 months (b = -3.51, SE = 0.21, p < .001). Mothers' attachment style did not predict the initiation or course of room-sharing. CONCLUSIONS: Given the major implications of breastfeeding and room-sharing for infants' health, safety, and development, the pediatrics community has issued clear guidelines encouraging these behaviors. Yet many new parents do not adhere to the recommended practices. This study identifies mothers' adult attachment style as a predictor of breastfeeding over time that could be incorporated into interventions for parents.

Secure Base Provision: A New Approach to Examining Links Between Maternal Caregiving and Infant Attachment.

This observational study addressed a critical gap in the understanding of the precursors of infant attachment by examining whether a new conceptualization of maternal caregiving behavior, secure base provision (SBP), explained variance in attachment above and beyond variance explained by sensitivity. Participants included 83 low-socioeconomic status (SES), 4.5-month-old infants (56% male) and their mothers. Infant-mother dyads completed laboratory tasks at 4.5 months and three 30-min home visits between 7 and 9 months, then returned to the laboratory at 12 months for an attachment assessment. Maternal sensitivity did not significantly predict infant attachment security. SBP significantly predicted infant attachment, over and above sensitivity, with an effect size eight times larger than that of sensitivity in meta-analytic findings for low-SES families.

Attachment Security Priming Decreases Children's Physiological Response to Threat.

Ninety 6- and 7-year-olds (49.3% White, mostly middle class) from greater Washington, DC were randomly assigned to a subliminal priming condition (secure, happy, or neutral) to determine if attachment security priming decreases physiological, expressive, and self-reported fear reactions to threatening stimuli. Dispositional attachment security was also assessed. Secure priming and attachment security each decreased electrodermal reactivity, increased vagal augmentation, and decreased fearful facial expressions compared to control conditions. Examination of a statistical interaction between security priming and child attachment indicated that, although secure children had increased vagal augmentation and fewer fearful expressions than insecure children, the effects of priming were constant across secure and insecure children. There were no priming or attachment effects associated with children's self-reported fear.

Parent-Infant Room Sharing During the First Months of Life: Longitudinal Links With Behavior During Middle Childhood.

Current recommendations encourage parent-infant room sharing for the first 6 months of life. This longitudinal study (N = 193) is the first to examine long-term relations of early room sharing with three domains of child behavior: sleep, behavior problems, and prosocial behavior. Information on room sharing was collected daily for infants' first 6 months. At ages 6, 7, and 8 years, outcomes were assessed with maternal and teacher questionnaires and behavioral observations. Early room sharing was not related to sleep problems or behavior problems. Additionally, more weeks of room sharing were positively related to higher maternal ratings of child sleep quality and more prosocial behavior. In conclusion, early room sharing appears to be related to positive, but not negative, behavior outcomes in middle childhood.

Helping, Sharing, and Comforting in Young Children: Links to Individual Differences in Attachment.

Although attachment theory has long posited a link between early experiences of care and children's prosocial behavior, investigations of this association have not embraced the multifaceted nature of prosociality. This study is the first to assess associations between child attachment and independent observations of helping, sharing, and comforting. Attachment quality in 3- to 5-year-old children (N = 137) was linked to all three prosocial behaviors. Additionally, bifactor analyses revealed distinct associations between attachment and children's general prosocial dispositions and their specific abilities to meet the unique challenges of helping and, marginally, comforting. These findings underscore the importance of considering multiple explanations for links between attachment and prosocial behavior and provide novel insights into sources of variation in children's prosociality.

Attachment and physical health: introduction to the special issue.

Over the last 40 years, researchers have made considerable progress identifying the ways in which attachment security shapes individuals' social and emotional functioning. In recent years, new investigations have shed light on connections between attachment and physiological systems in the body. The goal of this special issue is to focus attention on how attachment may be related to biological markers that relate to physical health, including inflammation, cortisol, and cardiometabolic risk. The papers in this special issue, highlighted in this introduction, demonstrate that these links may exist across the lifespan. We conclude with several examples of extensions of this work might emerge in the years to come.

A preliminary investigation of attachment style and inflammation in African-American young adults.

Individuals' social experiences are associated with their mental health, physical health, and even mortality. Over the last 30 years, researchers have examined the ways in which these social experiences might be associated with chronic inflammation - a component underlying many of the chronic diseases of aging. Little research, however, has examined the role of adults' attachment style as a specific social component that might be associated with inflammation. In the present study, we utilized data from a sample of 59 African-American adults from the Maryland Adolescent Development in Context Study (MADICS) to examine the links between attachment avoidance and attachment anxiety and C-reactive protein (CRP) and interleukin (IL)-6. After controlling for demographic characteristics, body mass index, and depressive symptoms, attachment avoidance and anxiety were associated with IL-6 but not CRP. This study adds to the growing body of research identifying the wide range of social experiences associated with inflammation and further suggests that attachment relationship experiences may have implications for biological processes relevant to many chronic diseases of aging.

Stability of Attachment Style in Adolescence: An Empirical Test of Alternative Developmental Processes.

Few studies have examined stability and change in attachment during adolescence. This 5-year longitudinal study (a) examined whether prototype or revisionist developmental dynamics better characterized patterns of stability and change in adolescent attachment (at T1, N = 176; Mage  = 14.0 years, SD = 0.9), (b) tested potential moderators of prototype-like attachment stability, and (c) compared attachment stability in adolescence to stability in adulthood. The results supported the prototype model, which assumes that there is a stable, enduring factor underlying stability and change in attachment. Exploratory moderation analyses revealed that family conflict, parental separation or divorce, minority status, and male sex might undermine the prototype-like stability of adolescent attachment. Stability of attachment was lower in adolescence relative to adulthood.

Circle of Security-Parenting: A randomized controlled trial in Head Start.

Although evidence shows that attachment insecurity and disorganization increase risk for the development of psychopathology (Fearon, Bakermans-Kranenburg, van IJzendoorn, Lapsley, & Roisman, 2010; Groh, Roisman, van IJzendoorn, Bakermans-Kranenburg, & Fearon, 2012), implementation challenges have precluded dissemination of attachment interventions on the broad scale at which they are needed. The Circle of Security-Parenting Intervention (COS-P; Cooper, Hoffman, & Powell, 2009), designed with broad implementation in mind, addresses this gap by training community service providers to use a manualized, video-based program to help caregivers provide a secure base and a safe haven for their children. The present study is a randomized controlled trial of COS-P in a low-income sample of Head Start enrolled children and their mothers. Mothers (N = 141; 75 intervention, 66 waitlist control) completed a baseline assessment and returned with their children after the 10-week intervention for the outcome assessment, which included the Strange Situation. Intent to treat analyses revealed a main effect for maternal response to child distress, with mothers assigned to COS-P reporting fewer unsupportive (but not more supportive) responses to distress than control group mothers, and a main effect for one dimension of child executive functioning (inhibitory control but not cognitive flexibility when maternal age and marital status were controlled), with intervention group children showing greater control. There were, however, no main effects of intervention for child attachment or behavior problems. Exploratory follow-up analyses suggested intervention effects were moderated by maternal attachment style or depressive symptoms, with moderated intervention effects emerging for child attachment security and disorganization, but not avoidance; for inhibitory control but not cognitive flexibility; and for child internalizing but not externalizing behavior problems. This initial randomized controlled trial of the efficacy of COS-P sets the stage for further exploration of "what works for whom" in attachment intervention.

Disorganized attachment in infancy: a review of the phenomenon and its implications for clinicians and policy-makers.

Disorganized/Disoriented (D) attachment has seen widespread interest from policy makers, practitioners, and clinicians in recent years. However, some of this interest seems to have been based on some false assumptions that (1) attachment measures can be used as definitive assessments of the individual in forensic/child protection settings and that disorganized attachment (2) reliably indicates child maltreatment, (3) is a strong predictor of pathology, and (4) represents a fixed or static "trait" of the child, impervious to development or help. This paper summarizes the evidence showing that these four assumptions are false and misleading. The paper reviews what is known about disorganized infant attachment and clarifies the implications of the classification for clinical and welfare practice with children. In particular, the difference between disorganized attachment and attachment disorder is examined, and a strong case is made for the value of attachment theory for supportive work with families and for the development and evaluation of evidence-based caregiving interventions.

Perceptions of parental secure base support in African American adolescents and young adults: A preliminary study of predictive links to adult C-reactive protein.

Within the field of relationship science there is increasing interest in the connections between close relationships and physical health. In the present study, we examined whether adolescents' (~12 years old) and young adults' (~20 years old) perceptions of their parents as a secure base prospectively predict C-reactive protein (CRP), a commonly used marker of inflammatory activity, at age 32 in a well-characterized sample of African Americans. We utilized existing data collected as part of the Maryland Adolescent Development in Context Study (MADICS) to construct measures of perceptions of parental secure base support (SBS), general parental support, and peer support in early adolescence and early adulthood. In the present study, SBS was operationalized as the perceived ability to depend on parents in times of need. Fifty-nine African American MADICS participants who reported on perceived support in early adolescence and early adulthood participated in a follow-up home visit at age 32 during which serum CRP was measured via a blood draw. After controlling for inflammation-related confounds (e.g., tobacco use, body mass index), adolescents' perceptions of parental SBS, but not peer support or general parental support, predicted lower CRP values at age 32 (b = -.92, SE = .34, p < .05). None of the support variables in early adulthood predicted CRP at 32 years. This study adds to a growing literature on relationships and health-related outcomes and provides the first evidence for a link between parental SBS in adolescence and a marker of inflammatory activity in adulthood.

When Parents and Adolescents Disagree About Disagreeing: Observed Parent-Adolescent Communication Predicts Informant Discrepancies About Conflict.

Adolescence is accompanied by increased stress in the parent-adolescent relationship, which frequently results in conflict. Researchers often rely on self-reports to measure conflict, but these reports are frequently discrepant from one another. In two studies, we examined the extent to which communication observed during parent-adolescent discussions of conflict were associated with discrepancies in reports about conflict. We also examined links between informant depressive symptoms and discrepancies. Across studies, observed parent-adolescent conflict behaviors consistently predicted absolute discrepancies in reports of conflict. Informant depressive symptoms sometimes predicted directional discrepancies in reports. Results suggest that informant discrepancies about conflict may stem, in part, from a lack of open communication in the relationship.

Parents' self-reported attachment styles: a review of links with parenting behaviors, emotions, and cognitions.

For decades, attachment scholars have been investigating how parents' adult attachment orientations relate to the ways in which they parent. Traditionally, this research has been conducted by developmental and clinical psychologists who typically employ the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI) to measure adult attachment. However, dating back to the mid-1990s, social and personality psychologists have been investigating how self-reported adult attachment styles relate to various facets of parenting. The literature on self-reported attachment and parenting has received less attention than AAI research on the same topic and, to date, there is no comprehensive review of this literature. In this article, we review more than 60 studies of the links between self-reported attachment styles and parenting, integrate the findings to reach general conclusions, discuss unresolved questions, and suggest future directions. Finally, we discuss the potential benefits to the study of parenting of collaborations among researchers from the developmental and social attachment research traditions.