Attachment Theory and Mindfulness

We initiate a dialog between two central areas in the field of psychology today: attachment theory/research and mindfulness studies. The impact of the early mother-infant relationship on child development has been well established in the literature, with attachment theorists having focused on the correlation between a mother’s capacity for self-regulation and connection (e.g., attunement) with children’s health and developmental outcomes. Because the transition to parenthood is often a stressful one, research has also focused on the importance of the mother’s external and internal support (e.g., self-awareness, recognition of needs) in promoting healthy mother-infant relationships. One promising field in relation to increased internal support is mindfulness, a practice shown to increase emotional regulation while decreasing stress and anxiety. Described as non-judgmental, present-moment awareness, mindfulness has received significant empirical attention over the past three decades and has recently been theorized as an important contributing factor in healthy mother–child relationships. Recognizing the potentially beneficial effects of mindfulness training on healthy attachment, this article reviews relevant literature in presenting a case for exploratory and empirical research into the dynamic relationship between mindfulness, attachment style, maternal health, and children’s development. Grounds for this convergence, as well as suggestions for future research, are presented.     

Intensity of smiling and attractiveness as facial signals of trustworthiness in women

Facial attractiveness is associated with a variety of positive social characteristics including trustworthiness. Variations in smiling, such as the appearance of the Duchenne marker and increased intensity of expression, have likewise been linked with positive judgments of trustworthiness. The study investigated the interaction of the effects of models' attractiveness and their smiling intensity on impressions of perceived trustworthiness. Participants rated the attractiveness and expressivity of neutral, low intensity, and high intensity smiling images of 45 women models. These images were also presented to a second group of participants who rated trustworthiness. Repeated measures analysis of covariance of the effects of attractiveness and manipulated smile intensity on trustworthiness indicated a main effect for smile intensity: increased smile intensity was associated with greater trustworthiness. Attractiveness also contributed to rated trustworthiness independently of smiling intensity. Results suggested there is an additional contribution of facial expression in creating social impressions of trustworthiness.     

The length of the retention interval,forgetting, and subjective similarity

A long retention interval tends to result in the poor retention known as forgetting. A high subjective similarity between stimuli frequently produces their poor retention. Thus, a long retention interval may increase the subjective similarity between stimuli (the RIISS hypothesis), and this increase may produce forgetting. To examine this hypothesis, college students made speeded same-different discriminations between two lines or tones of different lengths or frequencies that were 400 ms or 3,300 ms apart, and they rated the similarity of these stimuli. The long interval produced poorer overall performance as expected, but also produced poorer performance on different than same stimuli, implying that it increased the subjective similarity between the initial and subsequent stimuli, and it also increased rated similarity, in support of the RIISS hypothesis. The position that stored stimuli lose less common information than distinctive information explains RIISS evidence better than does perturbation theory.     

Confirming the Factor Structure of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder Symptoms in Adult, Nonclinical Samples

Three separate models have been proposed to describe the factor structure of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in the past 20 years. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders-III (DSM-III, 1980) proposed 3 separate factors of inattention, hyperactivity, and impulsivity. The DSM-III-R (1987) proposed a single factor. The DSM-IV (1994) described the disorder as having 2 factors: hyperactivity/impulsivity and inattention. The following 2 studies employed confirmatory factor analysis to compare each of these models and 3 alternative models. University students completed questionnaires that assessed each of the 18 symptoms listed in the DSM-IV for ADHD. The 3-factor model fit the data significantly better than each of the other models in both studies. These findings suggest that a 3-factor model of inattention, hyperactivity, and impulsivity describes adult ADHD symptoms better than current alternatives.     

Targets' Awareness of Expectations and Behavioral Confirmation in Ongoing Interactions

Participants engaged in a getting-acquainted interaction over an intercom after one participant (the perceiver) was provided with a positive (extraverted) or relatively negative (introverted) expectation about the other participant (the target). After completing evaluations of each other and the interaction, participants interacted for a second time. Prior to this second interaction, however, targets were made aware of the perceivers' initial expectation, told that it had been confirmed by their own behavior, and given a randomly assigned attribution (either dispositional or situational) about the perceived cause of their confirmatory behavior. Results demonstrated that targets made aware of dispositionally attributed and relatively negative expectations were more likely to increase in expectation-disconfirming behavior, compared to targets made aware of situationally attributed and relatively negative expectations, who were themselves more likely to continue to confirm the expectations. Implications for the study of behavioral confirmation of expectations and other interpersonal processes are discussed.     

A right visual field advantage for visual processing of manipulable objects

Information about object-associated manipulations is lateralized to left parietal regions, while information about the visual form of tools is represented bilaterally in ventral occipito-temporal cortex. It is unknown how lateralization of motor-relevant information in left-hemisphere dorsal stream regions may affect the visual processing of manipulable objects. We used a lateralized masked priming paradigm to test for a right visual field (RVF) advantage in tool processing. Target stimuli were tools and animals, and briefly presented primes were identical to or scrambled versions of the targets. In Experiment 1, primes were presented either to the left or to the right of the centrally presented target, while in Experiment 2, primes were presented in one of eight locations arranged radially around the target. In both experiments, there was a RVF advantage in priming effects for tool but not for animal targets. Control experiments showed that participants were at chance for matching the identity of the lateralized primes in a picture?Cword matching experiment and also ruled out a general RVF speed-of-processing advantage for tool images. These results indicate that the overrepresentation of tool knowledge in the left hemisphere affects visual object recognition and suggests that interactions between the dorsal and ventral streams occurs during object categorization.     

Predictors of Stress Generation in Adolescents in Mainland China

The current longitudinal study examined whether the personality vulnerabilities of self-criticism and dependency prospectively predicted stress generation in Chinese adolescents. Participants included 1,116 adolescents (588 girls and 528 boys), aged 15 to 18 years from rural, urban and ultra-urban mainland China. Participants completed self-report measures of personality, depressive and anxious symptoms and participated in a clinical interview assessing lifetime history of depression. The occurrence of negative life events was measured using a contextual-threat interview every 6-months for a total period of 18-months. Logistic regression analyses showed that after controlling for past depressive episodes and current depressive and anxious symptoms, self-criticism was prospectively associated with the occurrence of interpersonal stress generation, but not noninterpersonal stress generation. Dependency also predicted interpersonal stress generation, although only in girls and not boys. In line with previous Western findings, girls reported more interpersonal stress generation. Analyses across 3 levels of urbanization revealed several significant differences including higher reported interpersonal stress generation in urban girls than urban boys and overall higher levels of negative life events in ultra-urban youth. In sum, findings from the current study suggest that the stress generation process may be generalizable to Chinese youth.     

Daily depression and cognitions about stress: evidence for a traitlike depressogenic cognitive style and the prediction of depressive symptoms in a prospective daily diary study

The authors examined the stability and dynamic structure of negative cognitions made to naturalistic stressors and the prediction of depressive symptoms in a daily diary study. Young adults reported on dispositional depression vulnerabilities at baseline, including a depressogenic cognitive style, dysfunctional attitudes, rumination, neuroticism, and initial depression, and then completed short diaries recording the inferences they made to the most negative event of the day along with their experience of depressive symptoms every day for 35 consecutive days. Daily cognitions about stressors exhibited moderate stability across time. A traitlike model, rather than a contextual one, explained this pattern of stability best. Hierarchical linear modeling analyses showed that individuals' dispositional depressogenic cognitive style, neuroticism, and their daily negative cognitions about stressors predicted fluctuations in daily depressive symptoms. Dispositional neuroticism and negative cognitive style interacted with daily negative cognitions in different ways to predict daily depressive symptoms.