BACKGROUND Maternal love, which may be the core of maternal behavior, is essential for the mother-infant attachment relationship and is important for the infant's development and mental health. However, little has been known about these neural mechanisms in human mothers. We examined patterns of maternal brain activation in response to infant cues using video clips. METHODS We performed funct...

This paper reports on findings from a sample of 63 children at 6 years old, and 49 children at 11 years old, all from the same cohort who had been observed with mother in the Strange Situation at 1-year-old. At 6 and 11 years, the children responded to the task of providing verbal labels for line-drawn (caricatures of) emotion faces. The faces comprised the six basic emotions identified as such...

Attachment research has shown the emergence of individual differences in the security of infant-mother attachment during the first year of life as well as their importance for later social-emotional development. A biobehavioral perspective may help settle disagreements about the validity and interpretation of 12-month-old infants' different behavioral patterns of attachment assessed by Ainswort...

Infant rats must learn to identify their mother's diet-dependent odor. Once learned, maternal odor controls pups' approach to the mother, their social behavior and nipple attachment. Here we present a review of the research from four different laboratories, which suggests that neural and behavioral responses to the natural maternal odor and neonatal learned odors are similar. Together, these da...

This study examined stability and change in patterns of mother-infant interaction between 5 and 10 months and their relation to attachment security at 18 months. Cluster analysis was used to identify patterns of dyadic interaction. There was significant, but not substantial, stability in cluster membership from 5 to 10 months. For females, being in the most optimal cluster at 5 months related t...

Based on attachment theory, Emotionally Focused Th erapy (EFT) theorizes that attachment styles infl uence marital quality. Although research supports this relationship among young couples, no research has examined attachment styles and marital quality in midlife marriages. We examined this issue using data from 429 married people between the ages of 40 and 50. Results indicated that insecure a...

Relationships between attachment styles and the content and structure of mental representations of parents were investigated. Undergraduates completed 3and 4-category measures of attachment style and wrote descriptions of their parents. Securely attached participants' parental representations were characterized by differentiation, elaboration, benevolence, and nonpunitiveness. Representations b...

In a sample of 127 mother-infant dyads, this study examined the predictive significance of mothers' physiological and observed emotional responding within distressing and nondistressing caregiving contexts at 6 months for infant attachment assessed with Fraley and Spieker's (2003) dimensional approach and the categorical approach at 12 months. Findings revealed that a lesser degree of maternal ...