Attachment & Human Development最新文献

Brett Kahr has referred to the death of Mary Main as the loss of "the queen of attachment research." However, how well is Main's work actually known? In this portrait and tribute, I argue that Main's transformative contributions have become a taken-for-granted part of the basic environment of attachment research, but that readers have faced obstacles in understanding and responding to their strengths and limitations. Drawing from interviews with Main, in this paper I describe some of her early life experiences and mental and physical health challenges, which she felt had influenced what was possible for her in her research. I then highlight less well-known aspects of her ideas regarding the role of attention within attachment strategies, the nature of disorganised attachment, the implications of alarming caregiving behaviours, and what is ultimately measured by the Adult Attachment Interview. My goal throughout is to help reader see both how much Main's rich and exciting works still have to teach, and identify their many loose threads still to follow.

Among Mary Main's many vital contributions to the field of attachment is the idea that human infants develop adaptive conditional strategies in the service of maintaining proximity to a secure base in light of a particular caregiving history. In this tribute paper, we describe Main's original theorizing, which delineated three types of conditional strategies: a primary secure base strategy and two secondary strategies of minimizing or maximizing the naturally occurring output of the attachment behavioral system, using a variety of cognitive, affective, and behavioral means. We review the large body of evidence for minimizing and maximizing strategies in infancy, childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. Across a range of studies - including age groups and methodologies extending well beyond Main's original work with infants - there is remarkable convergence of findings that support Main's ideas. We conclude with several promising directions in implementing Main's groundbreaking ideas to enrich future research and clinical applications.

Our memories reflect professional meetings and our private relationship with Mary Main for over more than 50 years, working, travelling jointly, and celebrating together. Klaus met Mary Main at Mary Ainsworth's lab in 1973 in Baltimore. Mary Main's and our own longitudinal studies both started at the same time in which attachment research became a focus of several research groups. Still unpublished research results were eagerly shared. Mary supported our wider view of attachment by emphasizing the importance of exploratory play, enthusiasm, expression, and quality of communication. She also explored infants' unexpected avoidance of their mothers. Some infant's resisted traditional classification and were described as disorganized/ disoriented by her. Later in Regensburg, Mary trained our research group in assessing memories of attachment experiences of young adults. When Klaus retired in 2003, Mary gave a warm review of a long time of mutual devotion in the service of attachment development.

This article examines Mary Main's impact on attachment research in Israel and vice versa, focusing on her contributions: the disorganized attachment classification (D) and the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI). Israeli research spans Jewish and Arab populations, individuals with special needs, and trauma-affected groups, testing the Normativity, Sensitivity, and Competence hypotheses. While confirming traditional findings, some studies revealed deviations, possibly influenced by Israel's unique sociocultural/historical context. Some studies found an overrepresentation of disorganized and ambivalent attachment classifications, possibly linked to regional conflicts. The absence of a distinction between these two classifications in certain outcomes, especially disrupted maternal communication-a precursor to D-challenges the clear-cut classifications found in Western studies. Finally, a Holocaust Project provides unique insights, identifying the absence of intergenerational transmission of an unresolved state of mind from Holocaust survivors to descendants and revealing distinctive AAI classifications, namely, Absence of Attachment Representations and Failed Mourning, all inviting further study.

Mary Main's written work profoundly changed the direction of attachment research through her publications and through her teachings. The current study describes the scientific impact of her her published and unpublished work. We identified 85 such works. Web of Sciences contained k = 7,571 citations to these works from by 13,398 unique authors. The topics of citing work clustered around clinical psychological research, early dyadic relationships, romantic attachment, traumatic experiences, and the adult attachment interview itself. Based on co-citation patterns, Main shared an intellectual space with authors known for developmental psychopathology and child development, parent-child relationships, adult attachment, psychodynamic theorizing, and reciprocity in interaction and infant mental health. We discuss the impact of the "move to the level of representation" and how new ties with researchers unfamiliar with these ideas will be important to realize unused potential in the ideas and methods given to the field by Mary Main.

Disorganized attachment is a risk for mental health problems, with increasing work focused on understanding biological mechanisms. Examining late childhood brain morphology may be informative - this stage coincides with the onset of many mental health problems. Past late childhood research reveals promising candidates, including frontal lobe cortical thickness and hippocampal volume. However, work has been limited to Western samples and has not investigated mediation or moderation by brain morphology. Furthermore, past cortical thickness research included only 33 participants. The current study utilized data from 166 children from the GUSTO Asian cohort, who participated in strange situations at 18 months and MRI brain imaging at 10.5 years, with 124 administered the Child Behaviour Checklist at 10.5 years. Results demonstrated disorganization liked to internalizing problems, but no mediation or moderation by brain morphology. The association to internalizing (but not externalizing) problems is discussed with reference to the comparatively higher prevalence of internalizing problems in Singapore.

As family forms become increasingly diverse, their underrepresentation in attachment research is glaring. Although attachment theory aims to explain the influence of early relationships, studies have disproportionately focused on mothers. Even when other attachment figures are considered, the research is typically limited to fathers in biparental mother-father families. In this piece, we report on the wide variety of family configurations worldwide, and how children experience care from multiple attachment figures. Drawing from the Child Attachment Studies Catalogue and Data Exchange (CASCADE), we assess the current state of attachment research with regard to diverse family configurations. Out of the available records in CASCADE, only four of 2,320 studies (0.2% of available studies) involved samples of diverse families. We conclude by issuing an explicit call for research that acknowledges and explores diverse family forms and propose strategies to improve reporting and research practices to promote more inclusivity of diverse family forms.

We tested the generalizability of the sensitivity-security link in a sample of 35 preschooler-mother dyads from a low socioeconomic district in Lima, Peru. We first describe maternal sensitivity and attachment security at two timepoints during early childhood. Second, we investigated the stability of attachment security and maternal sensitivity over a time span of one year. Third, we tested the association between sensitivity and security at each timepoint. Finally, we investigated whether changes in maternal sensitivity predict changes in child security. The results indicated that sensitivity and security were lower than scores reported in the literature for middle-class samples. T2 maternal sensitivity scores were significantly higher than T1 sensitivity scores, and no significant differences were found between T1 and T2 security. Sensitivity and security were associated at both timepoints, after controlling for socio-demographic variables. One-tail test indicated that changes in maternal sensitivity were associated with changes in child security.

Acknowledged researchers have highlighted the potential pitfalls of using attachment theory to guide decision-making in child protection (CP) cases. This study explores how attachment theory is applied in expert assessments in Norwegian CP decision-making processes, analyzing 285 independent expert reports. Independent experts were mandated to assess the child's attachment quality to the caregiver in one third of the reports. In almost two thirds of the reports, experts weighted the child's attachment quality to the caregiver in their concluding evaluation. Few expert assessments included the employment of attachment measures. When descriptively comparing older and newer reports, there were more newer reports that mandated the experts to assess the child's attachment quality, but fewer newer reports where the experts weighted the child's attachment quality in the concluding evaluation. Our results illustrate that the criticism of an overconfindent use of attachment theory is also relevant for independet expert assessment in CP cases.