Individual participant data (IPD) meta-analysis on the intergenerational transmission of unresolved loss and abuse.
This project contains a document preregistering a research project that uses secondary data investigating the antecedents of adult attachment representations.
Trained judges reliably apply a classification of “dismissing” to adults who appear to defensively distance themselves from the emotional content of the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI) by idealizing and/or downplaying the importance of... more
Trained judges reliably apply a classification of “dismissing” to adults who appear to defensively distance themselves from the emotional content of the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI) by idealizing and/or downplaying the importance of their childhood relationships with parents. One way to confirm whether those who use such “deactivating” discourse strategies are actually avoiding discussion of malevolent early experiences, as is assumed by attachment researchers, is by seeking convergent evidence that such individuals show subtle signs of emotional distress when recounting childhood memories. This paper reports relevant data from a cross-cultural extension of research by Dozier and Kobak (1992) demonstrating a link between deactivating discourse in the AAI and electrodermal response, a specific physiological indicator of covert arousal. More specifically, results of physiological change-score and growth curve analyses in the current study suggest that deactivation in the AAI is di...
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Retrospective self-report assessments of adults’ childhood experiences with their parents are widely employed in psychological science, but such assessments are rarely validated against actual parenting experiences measured during... more
Retrospective self-report assessments of adults’ childhood experiences with their parents are widely employed in psychological science, but such assessments are rarely validated against actual parenting experiences measured during childhood. Here, we leveraged prospectively acquired data characterizing mother–child and father–child relationship quality using observations, parent reports, and child reports covering infancy through adolescence. At age 26 years, approximately 800 participants completed a retrospective measure of maternal and paternal emotional availability during childhood. Retrospective reports of childhood emotional availability demonstrated weak convergence with composites reflecting prospectively acquired observations ( R2s = .01–.05) and parent reports ( R2s = .02–.05) of parenting quality. Retrospective parental availability was more strongly associated with prospective assessments of child-reported parenting quality ( R2s = .24–.25). However, potential sources o...
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Waters, Ruiz, and Roisman (2017) recently published evidence based on the Minnesota Longitudinal Study of Risk and Adaptation (MLSRA) that sensitive caregiving during childhood is associated with higher levels of secure base script... more
Waters, Ruiz, and Roisman (2017) recently published evidence based on the Minnesota Longitudinal Study of Risk and Adaptation (MLSRA) that sensitive caregiving during childhood is associated with higher levels of secure base script knowledge during the Adult Attachment Interview (AAIsbs). At present, however, little is known about the role of variation in atypical caregiving, including abuse and/or neglect, in explaining individual differences in AAIsbs. This study revisited data from the MLSRA (N = 157) to examine the association between experiencing abuse and/or neglect in the first 17.5 years of life and secure base script knowledge measured at ages 19 and 26 years. Several aspects of abuse and/or neglect experiences were assessed, including perpetrator identity, timing, and type. Regressions revealed that childhood abuse and/or neglect was robustly associated with lower AAIsbs scores in young adulthood, above and beyond previously documented associations with maternal sensitivit...
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This study examined the predictive significance of maternal sensitivity in early childhood for electrophysiological responding to and cognitive appraisals of infant crying at midlife in a sample of 73 adults (age = 39 years; 43 females;... more
This study examined the predictive significance of maternal sensitivity in early childhood for electrophysiological responding to and cognitive appraisals of infant crying at midlife in a sample of 73 adults (age = 39 years; 43 females; 58 parents) from the Minnesota Longitudinal Study of Risk and Adaptation. When listening to an infant crying, both parents and nonparents who had experienced higher levels of maternal sensitivity in early childhood (between 3 and 42 months of age) exhibited larger changes from rest toward greater relative left (vs. right) frontal EEG activation, reflecting an approach-oriented response to distress. Parents who had experienced greater maternal sensitivity in early childhood also made fewer negative causal attributions about the infant's crying; the association between sensitivity and attributions for infant crying was nonsignificant for nonparents. The current findings demonstrate that experiencing maternal sensitivity during the first 3½ years of...
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Why are some adults secure or insecure in their relationships? The authors review four lessons they have learned from longitudinal research on the developmental antecedents of adult attachment styles. First, although adult attachment... more
Why are some adults secure or insecure in their relationships? The authors review four lessons they have learned from longitudinal research on the developmental antecedents of adult attachment styles. First, although adult attachment appears to have its origins in early caregiving experiences, those associations are weak and inconsistent across measurement domains. Second, attachment styles appear to be more malleable in childhood and adolescence than in adulthood, leading to asymmetries in socialization and selection processes. Third, early experiences do not determine adult outcomes. Fourth, there is still a lot to learn, and future research requires examining relationship-specific attachment patterns, the distinction between distal and proximal factors, and interactions between relational and genetic vulnerabilities.
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Parents' attachment representations and child-parent attachment have been shown to be associated, but these associations vary across populations (Verhage et al., 2016). The current study examined whether ecological factors may explain... more
Parents' attachment representations and child-parent attachment have been shown to be associated, but these associations vary across populations (Verhage et al., 2016). The current study examined whether ecological factors may explain variability in the strength of intergenerational transmission of attachment, using individual participant data (IPD) meta-analysis. Analyses on 4,396 parent-child dyads (58 studies, child age 11-96 months) revealed a combined effect size of r = .29. IPD meta-analyses revealed that effect sizes for the transmission of autonomous-secure representations to secure attachments were weaker under risk conditions and weaker in adolescent parent-child dyads, whereas transmission was stronger for older children. Findings support the ecological constraints hypothesis on attachment transmission. Implications for attachment theory and the use of IPD meta-analysis are discussed.
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Do infants expect individuals to act prosocially toward others in need, at least in some contexts? Very few such expectations have been uncovered to date. In three experiments, we examined whether infants would expect an adult alone in a... more
Do infants expect individuals to act prosocially toward others in need, at least in some contexts? Very few such expectations have been uncovered to date. In three experiments, we examined whether infants would expect an adult alone in a scene with a crying baby to attempt to comfort the baby. In the first two experiments, 12- and 4-month-olds were tested using the standard violation-of-expectation method. Infants saw videotaped events in which a woman was performing a household chore when a baby nearby began to cry; the woman either comforted (comfort event) or ignored (ignore event) the baby. Infants looked significantly longer at the ignore than at the comfort event, and this effect was eliminated if the baby laughed instead of cried. In the third experiment, 8-month-olds were tested using a novel forced-choice violation-of-expectation method, the infant-triggered-video method. Infants faced two computer monitors and were first shown that touching the monitors triggered events: O...
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This study used data from the Minnesota Longitudinal Study of Risk and Adaptation (N = 267) to investigate whether abuse and neglect experiences during the first 5 years of life have fading or enduring consequences for social and academic... more
This study used data from the Minnesota Longitudinal Study of Risk and Adaptation (N = 267) to investigate whether abuse and neglect experiences during the first 5 years of life have fading or enduring consequences for social and academic competence over the next 3 decades of life. Experiencing early abuse and neglect was consistently associated with more interpersonal problems and lower academic achievement from childhood through adulthood (32-34 years). The predictive significance of early abuse and neglect was not attributable to the stability of developmental competence over time, nor to abuse and neglect occurring later in childhood. Early abuse and neglect had enduring associations with social (but not academic) competence after controlling for potential demographic confounds and early sensitive caregiving.
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Previous research suggests that the experience of abuse and neglect in childhood has negative implications for physical health in adulthood. Using data from the Minnesota Longitudinal Study of Risk and Adaptation (N = 115), the present... more
Previous research suggests that the experience of abuse and neglect in childhood has negative implications for physical health in adulthood. Using data from the Minnesota Longitudinal Study of Risk and Adaptation (N = 115), the present research examined the predictive significance of childhood physical abuse, sexual abuse, and physical/cognitive neglect for multilevel assessments of physical health at midlife (age 37-39 years), including biomarkers of cardiometabolic risk, self-reports of quality of health, and a number of health problems. Analyses revealed that childhood physical/cognitive neglect, but not physical or sexual abuse, predicted all three health outcomes in middle adulthood, even when controlling for demographic risk factors and adult health maintenance behaviors. We discuss possible explanations for the unique significance of neglect in this study and suggest future research that could clarify previous findings regarding the differential impact of different types of a...
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The present study used data from the Minnesota Longitudinal Study of Risk and Adaptation (MLSRA) to investigate how multiple dimensions of childhood abuse and neglect predict romantic relationship functioning in adulthood. Several... more
The present study used data from the Minnesota Longitudinal Study of Risk and Adaptation (MLSRA) to investigate how multiple dimensions of childhood abuse and neglect predict romantic relationship functioning in adulthood. Several dimensions of abuse and neglect (any experience, type, chronicity, co-occurrence, and perpetrator) were rated prospectively from birth through age 17.5 years. Multimethod assessments of relational competence and violence in romantic relationships were conducted repeatedly from ages 20 to 32 years. As expected, experiencing childhood abuse and neglect was associated with lower romantic competence and more relational violence in adulthood. Follow-up analyses indicated that lower romantic competence was specifically associated with physical abuse, maternal perpetration, chronicity, and co-occurrence, whereas more relational violence was uniquely associated with nonparental perpetration. We discuss these novel prospective findings in the context of theory and ...
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The present report used data from the Minnesota Longitudinal Study of Risk and Adaptation to investigate the factor structure and childhood abuse and/or neglect related antecedents of adults' attachment states of mind in a high-risk... more
The present report used data from the Minnesota Longitudinal Study of Risk and Adaptation to investigate the factor structure and childhood abuse and/or neglect related antecedents of adults' attachment states of mind in a high-risk sample. Adult Attachment Interviews (AAIs) were collected when participants were age 26 years (N = 164) and Current Relationship Interviews (CRIs) were collected from participants (N = 116) and their romantic partners when target participants were between ages 20 and 28 years (M = 25.3 years). For both the AAI and the CRI, exploratory factor analyses revealed that (a) attachment state of mind scales loaded on two weakly correlated dimensions reflecting dismissing and preoccupied states of mind and (b) ratings of unresolved discourse loaded on the same factor as indicators of preoccupied states of mind. Experiencing any subtype of abuse and/or neglect, especially during multiple developmental periods, and experiencing multiple subtypes of abuse and/or...
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This investigation examined preoccupied attachment states of mind as both a risk factor for non-suicidal self-injury (NSSI) and as a mechanism by which prospectively assessed childhood experiences of abuse and neglect predicted the... more
This investigation examined preoccupied attachment states of mind as both a risk factor for non-suicidal self-injury (NSSI) and as a mechanism by which prospectively assessed childhood experiences of abuse and neglect predicted the frequency/severity of NSSI behavior up to age 26 years in 164 individuals (83 females) who were followed from birth in the Minnesota Longitudinal Study of Risk and Adaptation. Preoccupied (but not dismissing) states of mind regarding both childhood caregivers and adult romantic partners were correlated with more frequent/severe NSSI. Furthermore, preoccupied states of mind regarding caregivers partially accounted for the association between childhood abuse/neglect and NSSI. This work represents a rare prospective test of a developmental psychopathology framework for understanding NSSI behavior, in which atypical caregiving experiences are carried forward through attachment representations of caregivers that reflect behavioral risk.
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This meta-analytic review examines the association between early attachment (assessed at 1-5 years) and child temperament (assessed at birth-12 years), and compares the strength of this association with recently documented meta-analytic... more
This meta-analytic review examines the association between early attachment (assessed at 1-5 years) and child temperament (assessed at birth-12 years), and compares the strength of this association with recently documented meta-analytic associations between early attachment and social competence, externalizing behavior, and internalizing symptoms. Based on 109 independent samples (N = 11,440) of diverse socioeconomic and ethnic backgrounds, temperament was weakly associated with attachment (in)security (d = .14, CI [0.08, 0.19]) but modestly associated with resistant attachment (d = .30, CI [0.21, 0.40]). Temperament was not significantly associated with avoidant (d = .10, CI [-0.02, 0.19]) or disorganized (d = .11, CI [-0.03, 0.25]) attachment. Across developmental domains, early attachment security was more strongly associated with social competence and externalizing behaviors than internalizing symptoms and temperament.
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Although attachment theory claims that early attachment representations reflecting the quality of the child's "lived experiences" are maintained across developmental transitions, evidence that has emerged over the last... more
Although attachment theory claims that early attachment representations reflecting the quality of the child's "lived experiences" are maintained across developmental transitions, evidence that has emerged over the last decade suggests that the association between early relationship quality and adolescents' attachment representations is fairly modest in magnitude. We used aspects of parenting beyond sensitivity over childhood and adolescence and early security to predict adolescents' scripted attachment representations. At age 18 years, 673 participants from the NICHD Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development completed the Attachment Script Assessment from which we derived an assessment of secure base script knowledge. Measures of secure base support from childhood through age 15 years (e.g., parental monitoring of child activity, father presence in the home) were selected as predictors and accounted for an additional 8% of the variance in secure base scri...
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An emerging literature suggests that variation in Adult Attachment Interview (AAI; George, Kaplan, & Main, 1985) states of mind about childhood experiences with primary caregivers is reflected in specific linguistic features captured by... more
An emerging literature suggests that variation in Adult Attachment Interview (AAI; George, Kaplan, & Main, 1985) states of mind about childhood experiences with primary caregivers is reflected in specific linguistic features captured by the Linguistic Inquiry Word Count automated text analysis program (LIWC; Pennebaker, Booth, & Francis, 2007). The current report addressed limitations of prior studies in this literature by using two large AAI corpora (Ns = 826 and 857) and a broader range of linguistic variables, as well as examining associations of LIWC-derived AAI dimensions with key developmental antecedents. First, regression analyses revealed that dismissing states of mind were associated with transcripts that were more truncated and deemphasized discussion of the attachment relationship whereas preoccupied states of mind were associated with longer, more conflicted, and angry narratives. Second, in aggregate, LIWC variables accounted for over a third of the variation in AAI di...
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Increasing evidence suggests that attachment representations take at least two forms: a secure base script and an autobiographical narrative of childhood caregiving experiences. This study presents data from the first 26 years of the... more
Increasing evidence suggests that attachment representations take at least two forms: a secure base script and an autobiographical narrative of childhood caregiving experiences. This study presents data from the first 26 years of the Minnesota Longitudinal Study of Risk and Adaptation (N = 169), examining the developmental origins of secure base script knowledge in a high-risk sample and testing alternative models of the developmental sequencing of the construction of attachment representations. Results demonstrated that secure base script knowledge was predicted by observations of maternal sensitivity across childhood and adolescence. Furthermore, findings suggest that the construction of a secure base script supports the development of a coherent autobiographical representation of childhood attachment experiences with primary caregivers by early adulthood.
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A longstanding question for attachment theory and research is whether genetically based characteristics of the child influence the development of attachment security and its stability over time. This study attempted to replicate and... more
A longstanding question for attachment theory and research is whether genetically based characteristics of the child influence the development of attachment security and its stability over time. This study attempted to replicate and extend recent findings indicating that the developmental stability of attachment security is moderated by oxytocin receptor (OXTR) genetic variants. Using longitudinal data from over 550 individuals, there was no evidence that OXTR rs53576 moderated the association between attachment security during early childhood and overall coherence of mind ("security") during the Adult Attachment Interview at age 18 years. Additional analyses involving a second commonly investigated OXTR variant (rs2254298) and indices of individuals' dismissing and preoccupied attachment states of mind also failed to provide robust evidence for oxytonergic moderation of the stability in attachment security across development. The discussion focuses on research strateg...
Research Interests: Psychology, Cognitive Science, Developmental Psychology, Psychometrics, Adolescent, and 14 moreMedicine, Humans, Child, Female, Male, Interpersonal Relations, Oxytocin Receptor, Moderation, Genotype, Single Nucleotide Polymorphism, Genetic variation, Moderated mediation, Object Attachment, and Child preschool
In understanding the causes of adverse impact, a key parameter is the Black-White difference in cognitive test scores. To advance theory on why Black-White cognitive ability/knowledge test score gaps exist, and on how these gaps develop... more
In understanding the causes of adverse impact, a key parameter is the Black-White difference in cognitive test scores. To advance theory on why Black-White cognitive ability/knowledge test score gaps exist, and on how these gaps develop over time, the current article proposes an inductive explanatory model derived from past empirical findings. According to this theoretical model, Black-White group mean differences in cognitive test scores arise from the following racially disparate conditions: family income, maternal education, maternal verbal ability/knowledge, learning materials in the home, parenting factors (maternal sensitivity, maternal warmth and acceptance, and safe physical environment), child birth order, and child birth weight. Results from a 5-wave longitudinal growth model estimated on children in the NICHD Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development from ages 4 through 15 years show significant Black-White cognitive test score gaps throughout early development that...
Research Interests: Marketing, Psychology, Applied Psychology, Developmental Psychology, Cognition, and 15 moreParenting, Adolescent, Medicine, Humans, Child, Business and Management, Female, Male, Aptitude, Longitudinal Studies, Maternal Behavior, European Continental Ancestry Group, Psychological Models, Neuropsychological Tests, and Child preschool
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,... more
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 that such basic information about the factor structure and distributional properties of these individual differences has important conceptual implications for our understanding of how representations of early experience are organized and generalized, as well as methodological significance in relation to maximizing statistical power and precision. In this study, we report factor and taxometric analyses that examined the latent structure of secure base script knowledge in 2 large samples. Results suggested that variation in secure base script knowledge-as measured by both the adolescent (N = 674) and adult (N = 714) versions of the Attachment Script Assessm...
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It is a widely held belief that racial groups have underlying essences. We hypothesized that bicultural individuals who hold this essentialist belief about race are oriented to perceive rigid interracial boundaries and experience... more
It is a widely held belief that racial groups have underlying essences. We hypothesized that bicultural individuals who hold this essentialist belief about race are oriented to perceive rigid interracial boundaries and experience difficulty passing between their ethnic culture and the host culture. As predicted, we found that the more strongly Chinese American participants endorsed an essentialist belief about race, the less effective they were in switching rapidly between Chinese and American cultural frames in a reaction time task (Study 1), and the greater emotional reactivity they exhibited (reflected in heightened skin conductance) while they talked about their Chinese and American cultural experiences (Study 2). Taken together, these findings suggest that essentialist beliefs about race set up a mind-set that influences how bicultural individuals navigate between their ethnic and host cultures.
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... The title of the symposium was The Origins and Organization of Adaptation and Maladaptation: A Festschrift Honoring the Work of Byron Egeland and Alan Sroufe on the Minnesota Parent-Child Longitudinal Study (MPCLS). ...
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This rejoinder addresses two interrelated concerns raised by Van IJzendoorn and Bakermans-Kranenburg (this volume): (1) the degree to which it is reasonable to expect some of the results reported here to replicate given the low rates of... more
This rejoinder addresses two interrelated concerns raised by Van IJzendoorn and Bakermans-Kranenburg (this volume): (1) the degree to which it is reasonable to expect some of the results reported here to replicate given the low rates of preoccupied and unresolved classifications in the SECCYD sample and (2) whether the results from the taxometric and factor analyses we report should be used to guide scholarly thinking about the latent structure of individual differences in AAI narratives.
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Research Interests: Psychology, Cognitive Science, Child Development, Infant Mental Health, Adolescent, and 12 moreProspective studies, Humans, Child, Infant, Dissociative disorders, Mothers, Newborn Infant, Longitudinal Studies, Maternal Behavior, Parent‐child Relations, Object Attachment, and Psychiatric Status Rating Scales
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This study evaluated whether the positive association between early autonomy-supportive parenting and children's subsequent achievement is mediated by... more
This study evaluated whether the positive association between early autonomy-supportive parenting and children's subsequent achievement is mediated by children's executive functions. Using observations of mothers' parenting from the NICHD Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development (N = 1,306), analyses revealed that mothers' autonomy support over the first 3 years of life predicted enhanced executive functions (i.e., inhibition, delay of gratification, and sustained attention) during the year prior to kindergarten and academic achievement in elementary and high school even when mothers' warmth and cognitive stimulation, as well as other factors (e.g., children's early general cognitive skills and mothers' educational attainment) were covaried. Mediation analyses demonstrated that over and above other attributes (e.g., temperament), children's executive functions partially accounted for the association between early autonomy-supportive parenting and children's subsequent achievement.
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ABSTRACT Developmental scientists tend to address questions about mechanism in ways that, ironically, are not especially developmental. More specifically, although we now have a great deal of data that suggest that childhood experiences... more
ABSTRACT Developmental scientists tend to address questions about mechanism in ways that, ironically, are not especially developmental. More specifically, although we now have a great deal of data that suggest that childhood experiences have implications for human development, we know little about the time course of such effects or the dynamic mechanisms that might sustain them. Why? Because longitudinal data are rarely analyzed in a manner that can probe the developmental mechanisms by which earlier experiences are carried forward over time. In this article, we explore this paradox in detail, propose a solution, and review a set of published examples that implement the solution with a focus on the predictive significance of early maternal sensitivity. We conclude with suggestions for work in this area.