In this commentary, I delineate several questions raised by the Hammond and Drummond (2019) paper: (a) to why there seems to be an association between state positive emotion and prosocial behavior in young children, and if and how early positively tinged prosocial behavior provides a pathway to (b) later prosocial behavior more generally…

Prior studies of mother-infant interaction have generally used a variable-centered approach to associate face-to-face communication with psychosocial outcomes. Herein, we use a person-centered approach to identify clusters of infants who exhibit similar behavioral profiles during face-to-face communication with their mothers. Four infant…

There is increasing evidence that attachment representations abstracted from childhood experiences with primary caregivers are organized as a cognitive script describing secure base use and support (i.e., the "secure base script"). To date, however, the latent structure of secure base script knowledge has gone unexamined--this despite…

In light of emerging evidence suggesting that the affective quality of parent-child relationships may relate to individual differences in young children's executive functioning (EF) skills, the aim of this study was to investigate the prospective associations between attachment security in toddlerhood and children's EF skills in kindergarten.…

Children who experience early and extensive child care, especially center-based care, are rated by teachers as having more externalizing behavior problems than are other children. This association is reduced, but not eliminated, when care is of high quality, and it varies by socioeconomic disadvantage and the type of behavior assessed. We examine…

The aim of this study was to examine the developmental significance of the newly developed dimensional approach to attachment state of mind by investigating its capacity to predict individual differences in the quality of two caregiving behaviors--maternal sensitivity and maternal autonomy support--that are linked to numerous important child…

Nighttime sleep awakenings and infant and family characteristics were measured longitudinally in more than 1,200 infants when the infants were 6, 15, 24, and 36 months old. By 6 months of age, the majority of children slept through the night, awakening their mothers only about once or twice per week. However, not all children followed this…

This study is the first to examine the latent structure of individual differences reflected in the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI; C. George, N. Kaplan, & M. Main, 1985), a commonly used and well-validated measure designed to assess an adult's current state of mind regarding childhood experiences with caregivers. P. E. Meehl's (1995)…

Compares attachment relationships of infants at 12 months to their visual self-recognition at both 18 and 24 months. Individual differences in early attachment relations were related to later self-recognition. In particular, insecurely attached infants showed a trend toward earlier self-recognition than did securely attached infants. (Author/NH)

Attachment researchers claim that individual differences in how adults talk about their early memories reflect qualitatively distinct organizations of emotion regarding childhood experiences with caregivers. Testing this assumption, the present study examined the relationship between attachment dimensions and physiological, facial expressive, as…

Relations between maternal depression and attachment among 50 infant-mother and 54 preschooler-mother dyads were examined using several attachment measures. Attachment insecurity was found to be significantly associated with maternal depression among infants and preschoolers. Children without unitary, coherent attachment strategies tended to have…

This study applied Meehl's taxometric techniques for distinguishing latent types from late continua to Strange Situation data on 1,139 fifteen-month-olds from the NICHD Study of Early Child Care. Results indicated that variation in attachment patterns was largely continuous, not categorical. Implications of dimensional models for individual…

Advocates renewed efforts toward assessing attachment on a single continuum of emotional security. Contends that theory is essential to guide attachment assessment and that the constructs of secure base and emotional security provide the needed conceptual foundation. Addresses challenges to the scoring of attachment on a security continuum.…