Is infant looking behavior in ambiguous situations best described in terms of information seeking (social referencing) or as attachment behavior? Twelve-month-old infants were assigned to 1 of 2 conditions (Study 1); each infant’s mother provided positive information about an ambiguous toy and an experimenter provided positive information. In Study 2, 12-month-old infants were assigned to 1 of ...

For almost three decades, the association between paternal sensitivity and infant-father attachment security has been studied. The first wave of studies on the correlates of infant-father attachment showed a weak association between paternal sensitivity and infant-father attachment security (r = .13, p < .001, k = 8, N = 546). In the current paper, a meta-analysis of the association between pat...

Objective: Several research studies have explored the correlation between postpartum depression and a weak mother-infant bond. However, fewer studies have analyzed how other postpartum mental health conditions, such as childbirth-related post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), or important personal characteristics such as adult attachment styles, affect the quality of the mother-infant bond. The...

Differences in infant distress and regulatory behaviors based on the quality of attachment to mother, emotion context (frustration versus fear), and whether or not mothers were actively involved in the emotion-eliciting tasks were examined in a sample of 98 16-month-old infants and their mothers. Dyads participated in the Strange Situation, a limiting task designed to elicit infant frustration,...

underlying developmental research are often only implicit, yet they guide data collection and interpretation of results. For example, a number of researchers have provided data concerning intercorrelations among behaviors presumed to be indices of attachment (e.g., Coates, Anderson & Hartup 1972; Maccoby & Feldman 1972). Noting that such "index" behaviors do not intercorrelate highly, do not sh...

In a variety of species, development of attachment to a caregiver is crucial for infant survival and partly mediated by the endogenous opioids. Functional mu-opioid receptor gene polymorphisms are present in humans (OPRM1 A118G) and rhesus macaques (OPRM1 C77G). We hypothesized that rhesus infants carrying a gain-of-function OPRM1 77G allele would experience increased reward during maternal con...