This study examined parental romantic attachment security as a mediator of prospective associations between hostile interparental conflict and parental discipline (i.e., power-assertive, permissive, and inductive discipline) for mothers and fathers of young children. Furthermore, this study utilized a novel, automatic assessment of romantic…

Although numerous individual studies have attempted to link child-parent attachment and prosociality, a systematic picture of that relationship requires a meta-analytic approach that considers different dimensions of prosociality and potential moderators. The current meta-analysis examined 41 studies drawn primarily from North America and Europe…

Observational studies have shown that caregiver sensitivity predicts child language skills. These studies, however, have entirely relied on between-family designs (single parent-child dyad per family), which cannot rule out the contribution of shared family confounds (e.g., genetics, books in home). The current study investigates whether observed…

Research suggests foster children are at risk for poor language skills. One intervention, attachment and biobehavioral catch-up (ABC), was shown to successfully improve not only young foster children's attachment to their parents, but also their receptive vocabulary skills (Bernard et al., 2017; Raby et al., 2019). Given that language acquisition…

The present study examined mothers' emotional availability (EA) during daytime free play and bedtime as a mediator of linkages between maternal nighttime sleep and infant-mother attachment. Participants included 153 mothers (85% White) with infants (53% female). When infants were 1, 3, 6, 9, and 12 months, maternal sleep was assessed using…

Attachment theory postulates that there is a particular style of caregiving that, because of its interaction with our evolved psychology, is most likely to result in healthy psychological development. Attachment research has been criticized because most studies have been conducted with Western populations. Critics argue this has (a) overemphasized…

From his first attempts to explain attachment phenomena in the 1940s through his "Attachment and Loss" trilogy (Bowlby, 1969/1982, 1973, 1980), John Bowlby reformulated the theoretical underpinnings of attachment theory several times. He initially attempted to explain attachment phenomena in psychoanalytic terms. Then he invoked…

A growing body of literature shows that adherence to some aspects of Western masculinity norms, including the suppression of emotional vulnerability, avoidance of seeking support from others, and exaggerated physical toughness, is associated with poorer psychological and social outcomes. While existing research suggests that parental gender…

Past meta-analyses show that both child-mother and child-father attachment insecurity are independently and jointly associated with more externalizing behaviors in children. Little is known, however, on the ways that different types of insecure attachment independently and jointly predict the development of externalizing behaviors over time.…

Cross-sectional studies have shown that greater friendship satisfaction in adulthood is associated with many positive outcomes (Chopik, 2017; Gillespie, Frederick, et al., 2015). However, the developmental antecedents of satisfaction with close friends in adulthood have not been examined using prospective data. We do not know, for example, whether…

Attachment anxiety is a form of attachment insecurity characterized by chronic worries about rejection and need for reassurance. Given the critical role a sense of security plays in maintaining healthy relationships, individuals high in attachment anxiety tend to struggle in romantic relationships, which carries serious implications for their…

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…

The current study investigated the intergenerational transmission of attachment in Sapporo, Japan, using the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI) and the Strange Situation Procedure (SSP). This is the first SSP study in Sapporo in three decades, after a study in the mid-1980s reported controversial results. The SSP distributions found in the current…

Eisenberg, Cumberland, and Spinrad (1998; Eisenberg, Spinrad, & Cumberland, 1998) included parent-child attachment as a key dimension of the early emotion socialization environment. We examined processes linking children's early attachment with social regulation and adjustment in preadolescence in 102 community mothers, fathers, and children.…

Rapidly growing research on parental mind-mindedness, a tendency to treat one's young child as a psychological agent and an individual with a mind, internal mental states, and emotions, has demonstrated significant links among parents' mind-mindedness, their parenting, and multiple aspects of children's development. This prospective longitudinal…