Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development

This commentary applauds the authors of the monograph, The Mother-Child Attachment Partnership in Early Childhood: Secure Base Behavioral and Representational Processes, for their thorough and elegant exploration of the development of attachment working models in the preschool years in relation to maternal sensitivity and attachment representations, mother-child co-constructions of attachment-relevant stories, and children's own secure base behavior. These findings are set against a backdrop of children's memory development, with the recommendation that future research delves even younger to explore the development of attachment working models in children under 3 years...

Attachment relationships are formed, organized, and elaborated through interactions between an attachment figure and her/his child. The parent-child codetermination process that establishes their relationship in infancy extends and expands during the preschool years. A child's developing ability to use her/his mother as a secure base requires support, time, and practice during early childhood. Moreover, experiences with attachment figures provide information that children use to build internal representations of their relationship...

Using the secure base construct, the evidence presented indicates that interactional experience continues to be a central factor in the organization of mother-child attachment relationships. The parent-child codetermination process that establishes their relationship in infancy expands during the preschool years. Furthermore, with the increasingly relevant role of language, parent-child verbal communication during this time plays an important part in structuring children's attachment behavior and knowledge...

This study focused on the role of maternal co-construction skills in building attachment relevant representations in early childhood. Thirty-four mothers and their 4- to 5-year-old children were presented with two co-construction tasks, one an attachment storytelling task, the other an affect discussion task about emotion-laden situations. Maternal co-construction skills were assessed with several scales that scored the quality of the co-construction partnership, the mother's skill in prompting elaboration, and helping build an explanatory framework...

In order to examine the interplay between behavioral and cognitive representations of attachment during early childhood, we compiled both behavior-based and more cognitive-based attachment measures for this age range. The behavior-based measures were observational Q-set methodologies already established in the literature. Measures of attachment representations for the children and mothers were narrative-based procedures, that is, established storytelling tasks for obtaining attachment narratives from children and adults...

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This study investigated the associations among maternal sensitivity, maternal secure base script co-construction skills, and children's secure base behavior during early childhood. Maternal sensitivity and children's secure base behavior were assessed in naturalistic settings among 81 mother-child dyads when the children were approximately 3.5 years old. Maternal co-construction skills were also assessed at that age via a joint mother-child storytelling task. Maternal sensitivity and secure base behavior were assessed again when children (N = 74) were about 5...

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This study examined the link between mothers' and children's script-like representations of attachment and the role of maternal co-construction skills in facilitating script knowledge in their children. Fifty-nine children recruited from preschools in Bucharest, Romania (age range 4 to 5 years) completed a shortened version of the Attachment Story Completion Task (ASCT) to assess their secure base script knowledge whereas their mother's script knowledge was assessed with the Attachment Script Assessment (ASA)...

The chapters in this monograph describe the transition of attachment representations from a predominantly sensorimotor, in the moment, experience for the infant/toddler to internalized, mental representations of attachment that are transportable to new social contexts, in which attachment figures may not be present. The chapters focus on means that parents use to help their child effect this transition in terms of both behavioral support for the child's secure base behavior and for cognitive skills that underlie the child's construction of mental models of attachment...

Previous studies have shown that mothers with high script scores are better at providing secure base support in naturalistic settings. In the current study, we examine whether maternal script knowledge guides mothers' expectations and judgments of mother-child interactions, providing a bridge between their knowledge and behavior. Forty mothers were asked to use a new Parental Secure Base Q-set designed to characterize a typical mother-child play day at a park. Furthermore, video clips from mother-child joint storytelling sessions, already scored for maternal co-construction skills (from Chapter IV), were presented...

This article investigated two central questions about mother-child attachment relationships during early childhood: (1) the association between maternal sensitivity and child attachment behavior (Study 1) and (2) the link between child attachment behavior and representations (Study 2). In Study 1, maternal sensitivity and child security were assessed in naturalistic contexts among 74 middle-class dyads, when children were about 3.5 and again 5.5 years of age, using the Maternal Behavior with Preschoolers Q-set (MBPQS) and the Attachment Q-set (AQS), respectively...

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We live in an increasingly pharmacological and medical world, where children and adults frequently encounter alleged treatments for an enormous range of illnesses. How do we come to understand what heals and why? Here, 15 studies explore how 1,414 children (ages 5-11) and 882 adults construe the efficacies of different kinds of cures. Developmental patterns in folk physics, psychology, and biology lead to predictions about which expectations about cures will remain relatively constant across development and which will change...

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Lockhart and Keil have written an interesting monograph focusing on the development of reasoning about medicine, a relatively underexplored area of research with potentially broad implications with respect to the design of more-effective medical interventions. In a set of 15 studies with well over 2,200 participants, they examine how children and adults combine aspects of biological and psychological reasoning to create working models of medicine. Lockhart and Keil explore developmental changes in reasoning about illness and its treatment using medicines in terms of dualism (e...

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