Aim: Educational practitioners are increasingly aware of trauma experiences in students as a factor in child disturbance and schooling problems. This discussion paper aims to clarify definitions of trauma and differentiate them from other adverse childhood experiences (ACE), describe trauma impact in terms of clinical outcomes (PTSD, emotional and…

This comment on the Special Issue contributions regarding the attachment network addresses the clinical implications of the findings from three perspectives: (1) the need to look beyond maternal influences on child developmental outcomes; (2) to be open to every seemingly peripheral influence on the child as this may have a central impact on the…

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…

This letter to the editor responds to an article by Nicola Brandaro and Biza Stenfert Kroese (2018) entitled "Can adults with Asperger's syndrome learn about positive attachment behaviors between parents and young babies through the use of a skill-training DVD." One of the authors of this letter is an autistic parent who has successfully…

This is an interview with Frans de Waal who gave the Kohlberg Memorial Lecture at the AME Conference in St. Louis in November 2017. Frans de Waal's research with non-human primates documents that primates share our tendencies towards fairness, reciprocity, loyalty, self-sacrifice, caring for others, strategies for conflict avoidance and for…

In this commentary, Sagi-Schwartz evaluates the article by Beckh and Becker-Stoll (2016) on attachment relationships with non-parental caregivers and how it may contribute to public child care. Beckh and Becker-Stoll first describe important background about research on early parent-child relationships, and how their nature and quality might…

Allan N. Schore has served on the clinical faculty of the Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences at UCLA's David Geffen School of Medicine since 1996 and has maintained a private clinical practice for more than four decades. He has contributed significant research to the disciplines of interpersonal neurobiology, affective…

This commentary discusses the articles that comprise this special issue on attachment in middle childhood. Central to this discussion is the distinction between verbal, strategic, and conscious responses to questionnaires as compared to verbal and nonverbal, automatic and largely unconscious responses to interviews. Both methods have been…

Culture has an important impact on attachment. This commentary highlights three aspects about culture and attachment in middle childhood: (1) the need to have a more sophisticated consideration of the implication of cultural values, (2) the need to incorporate the role of societal or political ecological contexts, and (3) the need to solve the…

In this commentary, Buchheim states that she recognizes that infant-parent relationship has been shown to be of particular significance to preterm infants' socioemotional development, and that preterm children have been reported to be at higher risk of developing attachment insecurity and disorganized attachment. In the feature paper on attachment…

In this commentary, Ahnert addresses the Beckh and Becker-Stoll's (2016) paper that characterized positive teacher-child relationships through high levels of closeness and low levels of conflict. Once teacher-child relationships are positively established, the children benefit the most in developmental domains which are considered typically weak…

In this commentary, Suess opines that comparing risk- and non-risk-groups, as is done in the study by Witting, Ruiz, and Ahnert (2016), is a favored approach in developmental psychopathology in order to learn more about underlying mechanisms of normal development, as well as developmental deviations. Witting and colleagues followed up this…

In this commentary, Spangler evaluates the Steele, Perez, Segal, and Steele report that arguede that reflective functioning in adolescence could not be predicted by quality of early infant attachment, but was associated with maternal (but not paternal) attachment representation, assessed before the adolescents' birth. Assuming that parental…

In this commentary, Soares and Baptista state that the Steele, Perez, Segal, and Steele (2016) article contributed with an informative study that adolescents' reflective functioning (RF) is predicted by maternal attachment representation, which was assessed even before the youth were born by using the Adult Attachment Interview. The authors assert…

In a country as diverse as Canada, spread over an incomprehensibly large land mass, the connections between citizens may require more imagination. One way that these connections have been traditionally imagined in Canada is through national myths, including the myth of the wilderness. This myth draws the Canadian identity out of an…