Psychobiological Roots of Early Attachment

ABSTRACT— New laboratory research has revealed a network of simple behavioral, physiological, and neural processes that underlie the psychological constructs of attachment theory. It has become apparent that the unique features of early infant attachment reflect certain unique features of early infant sensory and motor integration, learning, communication, and motivation, as well as the regulation of biobehavioral systems by the mother–infant interaction. In this article, I will use this new knowledge to answer three major questions that have remained unsettled in our understanding of early human attachment: What creates an attachment bond? Why is early maternal separation stressful? How can early relationships have lasting effects? I will discuss the implications of these new answers for human infants and for the development of mental processes. Attachment remains useful as a concept that, like hunger, describes the operation of subprocesses that work together within the frame of a vital biological function.     

The game of “it”

Pastoral Psychology -     

Developing mechanisms of temperamental effortful control

Studies of temperament from early childhood to adulthood have demonstrated inverse relationships between negative affectivity and effortful control. Effortful control is also positively related to the development of conscience and appears as a protective factor in the development of behavior disorders. In this study, the development of attentional mechanisms underlying effortful control was investigated in 2- to 3-year-old children, as indexed by their performance in a) making anticipatory eye movements to ambiguous locations and b) resolving conflict between location and identity in a spatial conflict task. The ability to make anticipatory eye movements to ambiguous locations within a sequence was clearly present at 24 months. By 30 months, children could also successfully perform a spatial conflict task that introduced conflict between identity and location, and at that age, children's success on ambiguous anticipatory eye movements was related to lower interference from conflict in the spatial conflict task. Children's performance on the eye-movement task was correlated with performance and reaction time on spatial tasks, and both were related to aspects of effortful control and negative affect as measured in children's parent-reported temperament.     

The impact of family functioning on family racial socialization processes

This longitudinal study evaluated the relationship between family functioning and family racial socialization processes in a clinical sample of African American youth referred for drug abuse treatment. Participants were 77 African American adolescents and their parents. Results showed that participants assigned to structural ecosystems therapy experienced a greater increase in family racial socialization processes during treatment than participants assigned to the treatment as usual in community settings condition. Participants in structural ecosystems therapy also demonstrated a greater increase in family functioning than participants in community settings condition, and this improvement in family functioning mediated the relationship between treatment condition and family racial socialization processes. Research and clinical implications are discussed.     

Attention genes

A major problem for developmental science is understanding how the cognitive and emotional networks important in carrying out mental processes can be related to individual differences. The last five years have seen major advances in establishing links between alleles of specific genes and the neural networks underlying aspects of attention. These findings have the potential of illuminating important aspects of normal development and its pathologies. We need to learn how genes and experience combine to influence the structure of neural networks and the efficiency with which they are exercised. Methods for addressing these issues are central to progress in the decade ahead.     

The anterior cingulate gyrus and the mechanism of self-regulation

The midfrontal cortex, and particularly the anterior cingulate gyrus, appears active in many studies of functional imaging. Various models have competed to explain the functions of the anterior cingulate in relation to its patterns of activation. We believe that the concept of self-regulation is valuable in considering the role of the cingulate. The sensitivity of the cingulate to both reward and pain, and evidence for cingulate coupling to cognitive and emotional areas during task performance, support this identification. Self-regulation is a very broad concept that does not lend itself very well to specific models or tests, but it does provide a framework for examining development. We trace the role of the midfrontal cortex in evolution and infant development. Both genes and environment influence self-regulation. The presence of both genetic and environmental effects raises the issue of their interaction, which we discuss in relation to the dopamine 4 receptor gene and parenting methods. The role of the midfrontal cortex in self-regulation allows us to consider both brain networks common to all people and network efficiency underlying individual differences in behavior. This research was supported by NIMH Grant HD5801 to Georgia State University and by a grant from the Dana Foundation for the study of the arts.     

Predominance of ground over ceiling surfaces in binocular rivalry

The superiority of ground surfaces over ceiling surfaces in determining the representation of the visual world, demonstrated in several studies of visual perception and visual search, has been attributed to a preference for top-away projections resulting from ecological constraints. Recent research on binocular rivalry indicates that ecological constraints affect predominance relations. The present study considered whether there is a difference in predominance between ground and ceiling surfaces. In Experiment 1, we examined whether a ground surface would dominate a ceiling surface when one surface was presented to each eye. In Experiment 2, we used an eye-swapping paradigm to determine whether a ground surface would come to dominance faster than a ceiling surface when presented to the suppressed eye. The eye-swapping paradigm was used again in Experiment 3, but the ground and ceiling planes were replaced with frontal planes with similar variations in texture density. The results of these experiments indicate that ground surfaces are predominant over ceiling surfaces, with this predominance affecting both the dominance and suppression phases of binocular rivalry. This superiority of ground planes is independent of image properties such as the increase or decrease in texture density from the lower half to the upper half of the images.     

The influence of health locus of control on the patient-provider relationship

The physician-patient relationship is important to the successful delivery of health care. Health locus of control (HLOC) of the patient, the extent to which individuals attribute their health to their own actions or to external agents, may affect the patient-provider relationship. This study examined the influences of HIV and HLOC on trust in physician among a population of predominantly minority women and their family members. Powerful others HLOC demonstrated a positive relationship with trust in physician and chance HLOC had a negative relationship with trust in physician. HIV moderated both of these relationships.