Despite official endorsement of attachment principles in nursery work, these are often not translated into nursery practice. One possible reason for this is that staff training does not sufficiently address the personal implications and anxieties that children's attachments may entail for practitioners. Working from a psychoanalytic perspective on…

Background: Attachment theory's original formulation was substantially driven by Bowlby's (1969/1982) quest for a meaningful model of the development of psychopathology. Bowlby posited that aberrant experiences of parenting increase the child's risk of psychopathological outcomes, and that these risks are mediated by the quality of the attachment…

Background: Some young children reared in profoundly depriving institutions have been found to show autistic-like patterns, but the developmental significance of these features is unknown. Methods: A randomly selected, age-stratified, sample of 144 children who had experienced an institutional upbringing in Romania and who were adopted by UK…

A theoretical model of children's dependency on teachers and other caregivers in elementary school was tested and supported in this study. Based on attachment theory and social-cognitive theory, parental intrusiveness and children's separation anxiety were hypothesized to heighten dependent behaviors with school caregivers. Families of children in…

Research has demonstrated that experiences with attachment to and psychological separation from parents predict men's reports of masculine gender-role stress and conflict. This article extends the literature by examining possible variations in these links that may be accounted for by men's core personality characteristics. The author hypothesizes…

It was examined whether secure infant-mother attachment contributes to emotionally congruent and organized mother-child dialogues about emotions in later years. The attachment of 99 children was assessed using the Strange Situation at the age of 1 year and their emotion dialogues with their mothers were assessed at the ages of 4.5 and 7.5 years.…

This study on sensitivity and attachment included 55 toddlers and their parents. Samples included children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), mental retardation, language delay, and typical development. Children were diagnosed at 4 years of age. Two years before diagnosis, attachment was assessed with the Strange Situation procedure, and…

Insecure mental representations of attachment, a nearly invariant feature of cluster B personality disorders, have never previously been studied in twins. We conducted the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI) on 33 pairs of monozygotic (MZ) female twins reared together as an initial exploration of causal influences on mental representations of…

The goal of this study was to use task analysis to verify that the attachment injury resolution model described in this article discriminates resolved from nonresolved couples. Twenty-four couples with an attachment injury received, on average, 13 sessions of emotionally focused therapy (EFT). At the end of treatment, 15 of the 24 couples were…

Reviews phenomena associated with social separation from attachment objects in nonhuman primates. Evaluates four theoretical treatments of separation in light of existing data: Bowlby's attachment-object-loss theory, Kaufman's conservation-withdrawal theory, Seligman's learned helplessness theory, and Solomon and Corbit's opponent-process theory.…

Discusses the conflict between situational influences and stable individual differences in attachment behavior and attempts to resolve this conflict by examining the functions, outcomes, and context sensitivity of attachment behavior and the underlying behavioral control systems that organize it. (JMB)

Asserts that John Bowlby's model of grief is inadequate to account for phenomena associated with most grief. Also examines work of Freud and the Freudians, and works of Parkes, Raphael, and Worden. Suggests possible modifications in the Bowlby model by reviewing the work of Attig, Lopata, and Marris. (Author/NB)

Provides an overview of the rapidly expanding area of human-animal bonding. The historical background of human-animal bonding, the current multidisciplinary interest in companion animals, and theoretical perspectives are reviewed. The article examines programmatic and legislative developments in which social workers have participated and presents…

Investigates the relationship between the infant's attachment to the mother and the mother's perception of support from the father. Mothers who receive positive support from fathers tend to have infants with secure attachment. (AS)