One of the most striking pieces of evidence in attachment research is that attachment security is transmitted from 1 generation to the next. Although there has been an enormous advance in the understanding of this process, this area of research suffers from some significant gaps, as for example the transmission across 3 generations when…

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…

We investigated the influence of biological immaturity and attachment security on linguistic development and tested whether maternal language mediated the impact of security on the child's linguistic abilities. Forty mother-child dyads were followed longitudinally, with the child's attachment security assessed at 24 months of age through trained…

The secure-base phenomenon is central to the Bowlby/Ainsworth theory of attachment and is also central to the assessment of attachment across the lifespan. The present study tested whether mothers' knowledge about the secure-base phenomenon, as assessed using a recently designed wordlist prompt measure for eliciting attachment-relevant stories,…