The hypothesis that the concurrent associations between friendship features and friendship satisfaction are moderated by security-related experiences within the family was examined with two sets of analyses conducted with a sample of fifth- and sixth-grade students (M = 10.87, SD = 0.73, range 10-13 years). The main hypothesis of the study was…

The aim of this short-term longitudinal study was to explore the moderating role of insecure mother--child attachment (i.e., ambivalent and avoidant) in the relations between shyness and indices of adjustment difficulties in early childhood. Participants were 360 children (200 boys and 160 girls, M[subscript age]=4.72 years, SD=0.63) attending…

Associations between security within the family, satisfaction of basic psychological needs, true-self behavior, and knowledge of true self, as well as levels of adjustment, were explored in a sample of early adolescents and midadolescents in Israel (N = 302, mean age = 14.19 years). Both security within the family and needs satisfaction were found…

The quality of the attachment bond between a child and a caregiver can have lasting effects on how the child perceives, interprets, and recalls events through the filtering of internal working models. Previous research has shown that secure children tend to recall emotional information better than insecure children. The current study examined the…

Attachment theorists suggest that attachment security with parents supports the quality of social adaptation in peer groups during early childhood, and numerous studies supporting this conjecture have been published. Most of these studies used enacted representations rather than mental representations of attachment security, and most studies…

Extending John Bowlby's hypothesis that dysfunctional anger is a predictable outcome of insecure attachments to parents, this study investigated the relationship between current parent-adolescent attachment and both the experience and expression of anger. Participants included 776 students (379 boys and 397 girls) in grades 8-12. As predicted by…

This multimethod study examined the association between family instability and children's internal representations of security in the family system within the context of maternal communications about disruptive family events. Participants included 224 kindergarten children (100 boys and 124 girls) and their parents. Parents reported on the…

The goal of the present study was to investigate how the quality of the mother-child relationship, social self-concept, and the quality of peer relationships predict girls' feelings of homesickness at a residential summer camp. We expected that children with secure attachments to their mothers, a more positive social self-concept, and better…

The intent of this study was to examine the development of peer interaction in low-income Mexican-heritage families in the United States. Eighty-eight children (44 girls) were observed and mothers interviewed when children were 14, 24, 36, and 54 months old. We used the Attachment Q-Set (Waters, 1990), the Peer Play Scale (Howes & Matheson, 1992),…