Adult attachment styles,early relationships,antenatal attachment,and perceptions of infant temperament: A study of first‐time mothers

We explored the relative contributions of first‐time mothers’romantic attachment styles and early relations with their own mothers to the prediction of infant temperamental difficulty. A mediating role for mother's attachment to the unborn baby was assumed. In a prospective longitudinal study of 115 mothers of healthy babies, a structural model was delineated according to a conception of maternally reported infant temperament as a reflection of basic aspects of the mother's personality and mother‐infant relationships. Mothers’experiences with their own mothers as supportive and nonintrusive differentiated between securely and insecurely attached participants. Security of attachment was found to facilitate antenatal attachment and perceptions of the 4‐month‐old infant as easier. Findings indicate that the effects of the mothers’romantic attachment styles on their perceptions of temperamental difficulty are mediated by their antenatal attachment. Moreover, the pattern of findings obtained suggests a link among mothers’history of relationships, romantic attachment styles, and caregiving characteristics that is congruent with evolutionary theoretical assumptions.     

Self‐ and maternal representations,relatedness patterns,and problem behavior in middle childhood

The present study investigated the association between children’s representations of their mothers’ and teachers’ reports of children’s problem behavior. The research team conducted semistructured narrative interviews with a community sample of 203 Israeli 9‐ to 11‐year‐old children. Ten months later, researchers collected teachers’ reports of children’s internalizing and externalizing problems. This study investigated whether children’s self‐representation narratives and their maladaptive relatedness stances questionnaire scores mediated this association. Results indicated that children reporting benevolent representations of their mothers exhibited lower levels of problem behavior. More positive self‐representations and lower levels of skewness in children’s relatedness stances to their mothers both mediated this association. This article includes a discussion of these results in light of factors contributing to maladjustment in middle childhood.     

Social representations and group membership: shared and diffused parental ideas in three Israeli settings

The study investigates how the characteristics of subgroups within a culture are related to the structure of parental ideas held by their members. Two subsets of social representations were suggested—shared parental ideas (SPI) which are largely common to members of a group and serve the goals of individuals as group members as well as the goals of the group itself, and—diffused parental ideas (DPI) which are dispersed within social groups, and are instrumental in achieving individual goals. The respondents were kibbutz and two subgroups of urban parents with high and low levels of education (N=299) which differed in the extent of exposure to mainstream compared to group-specific parental ideas, the desirability of the group as indicated by its social status and the permeability of group boundaries. The findings were specific to the research task: only small differences in SPI and DPI were found among groups in a sorting task of child-rearing items; but major differences were found in their responses to a similar set of items organized as a Likert-style questionnaire. Only DPI and no SPI were found in the questionnaires of urban parents with low levels of education. In contrast, two similar clusters of SPI were identified in the kibbutz and among urban parents with high education. Another set of ideas was recognized as DPI in the kibbutz. The findings suggest that the Israeli urban parents with a low education did not share the parental ideas with each other, or with urban-high and kibbutz parents, whereas similar parental ideas prevailed in the kibbutz and among middle-class urban parents. Hypotheses were formulated regarding the group characteristics that foster the construction of SPI versus DPI by group members.     

Social Psychology,Moral Character,and Moral Fallibility*

In recent years, there has been considerable debate in the literature concerning the existence of moral character. One lesson we should take away from these debates is that the concept of character, and the role it plays in guiding our actions, is far more complex than most of us initially took it to be. Just as Gilbert Harman, for example, makes a serious mistake in insisting, plain and simply, that there is no such thing as character, defenders of character also make a mistake to the extent that they imply there is no problem raised by the psychological literature for either the concept of character or the nature of character‐based ethics. My hope for this paper is to avoid both of these mistakes by first, exploring exactly what is the concept of character that is so firmly rooted in our philosophical and everyday thinking; and second, exploring the implications of the psychological literature for this appropriately understood concept of character. In so doing, I will come to a resolution that vindicates the existence of character, while at the same time calls attention to the real and serious problem suggested by the psychological evidence. This, we will see, is a problem of moral motivation.