This article examines the quality of maternal mind-mindedness among adult and adolescent mothers, using an assessment of the appropriateness and emotional valence of maternal mind-related comments while interacting with their infants. Twenty-nine adult mothers and 69 adolescent mothers participated in two assessments with their 18-month-old…

The aim of the present study was to demonstrate that mother avoidance in infants at the age of 12 months can be predicted by the infants' differential vocal engagement to mother versus a female stranger at the age of 3 months. Differential engagement in favor of the mother was supposed to relate to low future avoidance. The vocal behavior of 26…

Lethal intergroup conflict has been part of the human experience ever since our species emerged on the African savannah. Modern evolutionary thinking suggests that children's development could have evolved a variety of responses to it, some of which are highlighted upon considering, from the field of behavioural ecology, life-history theory and,…

There are many postulates of a relation between quality of attachment with theory of mind and language functions (e.g., de Rosnay & Hughes, 2006). The current study examined in longitudinal design how different patterns of attachment are associated with usage of internal state language at ages 17, 23, 30 and 36 months. Transcripts of mother-child…

This study examined associations between infant-mother attachment, assessed using Ainsworth's Strange Situation at 12-months, and mother-child narrative co-construction in 110 Israeli mothers and their 71/2 year-old children to examine aspects of Bowlby's (1973) notion of "Goal-Corrected Partnerships". Narrative co-constructions were…

The actor-partner interdependence model (APIM) is a model of dyadic relationships that integrates a conceptual view of interdependence with the appropriate statistical techniques for measuring and testing it. In this article we present the APIM as a general, longitudinal model for measuring bidirectional effects in interpersonal relationships. We…

Internal working models of attachment (IWMs) are presumed to be largely "unconscious" representations of childhood attachment experiences. Several instruments have been developed to assess IWMs; some of them are based on self-report and others on narrative interview techniques. This study investigated the capacity of a self-report measure, the…

The present study examined the socialisation of children's narrative ability across the preschool period, exploring the association between children's and mothers' narrative style and children's attachment security. Fifty-six children and their mothers engaged in past event memory conversations about everyday shared past experiences when the…

This longitudinal study examined the extent to which dimensions of infant negative temperament in the first year predicted IQ at age 3, and whether these associations depended on the quality of the infant-mother attachment relationship. In a sample of 63 infant-mother dyads, mothers completed Rothbart's (1981) IBQ when infants were 4 and 12…