
Carol GeorgeMills College · Department of Psychology
Carol George
PhD
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Publications (102)
Families are core to human well-being. Therapeutic intervention may be needed in the context of family disruptions. Attachment theory conceptualizes parents as the secure base and safe haven that support children’s optimal development. Parents who have experienced their own attachment difficulties or traumas may not provide quality caregiving neces...
Objective: We aimed to develop and validate Australian guidelines to support accurate assessment of preschool attachment by researchers and by child clinical psychologists and allied practitioners.
Method: The Australian Preschool Attachment Scales (APAS) were developed through grounded item generation and validated with data from 121 Australian p...
Editorial: Neuroscience of Human Attachment Volume II
Anna Buchheim1*, Carol George2, Harald Gündel3
1 Institute of Psychology, University of Innsbruck, Innsbruck, Austria
2 Department of Psychology, Mills College, Oakland CA, USA
3 Department of Psychosomatic Medicine and Psychotherapy, Ulm University,
Ulm, Germany
*Correspondence:
Prof....
This study was designed to explore the intergenerational roots of shame in the context of attachment. The sample comprised sixty-nine mothers with four- and five-year-old children (54 girls, M = 58 months) drawn from a study of parenting risk. The mothers (age range 25–48) were culturally diverse, educated, partnered, and middle to upper-middle cla...
Examining degrees of stability in attachment throughout early childhood is important for understanding developmental pathways and for informing intervention. Updating and building upon all prior meta-analyses, this study aimed to determine levels of stability in all forms of attachment classifications across early childhood. Attachment stability wa...
Psychopathology poses a risk for optimal parenting. The current study explored antenatal caregiving representations as markers for later risk of nonoptimal maternal behavior among mothers with severe mental illness. Sixty-five mothers diagnosed with psychosis, bipolar disorder, depression (psychopathology group), and nonclinical controls participat...
Examining degrees of stability in attachment throughout early childhood is important for understanding developmental pathways and for informing intervention. Updating and building upon all prior meta-analyses, this study aimed to determine levels of stability in all forms of attachment classifications across early childhood. Attachment stability wa...
Connected Emotions Study • The Connected Emotions Study was designed to examine the intergenerational transmission of caregiving. • The purpose of the current study is to investigate the impact of attachment trauma and pathological mourning on the intergenerational transmission of mother-child attachment. • There is an established and intergenerati...
International Attachment Conference 2019, Vancouver, BC Study's Purpose ▪ Investigate young children's responses to infant crying as influenced by the children's caregiving patterns and their maternal maltreatment risk. ▪ Understand the relations between response to crying, attachment, and maltreatment risk.
Objective: The study explores predictors of antenatal caregiving representations among mothers with a history of severe mental illness (SMI).
Background: Attachment research has demonstrated that multifactorial assessment of antenatal caregiving representations predicts later maternal behaviour and child attachment. However, the field lacks researc...
The child’s attachment system is complemented by a separate and reciprocal caregiving system in the
parent, which guides parents’ protective responses to the child. Disruptions in the caregiving system
may lead to disorganized caregiving; however, the study and knowledge of disorganized caregiving
is still very incomplete and has been limited to la...
Objective: Examine connections between mothers’ adult attachment and subjective birth experience in the context of parity and mode of delivery.
Background: Research has established a clear connection between adult attachment and birth experience. This study extended previous research with an in-depth self-report attachment measure examining differe...
The central aim of this study was to investigate the contributions of attachment trauma and complicated grief to maternal caregiving and children’s attachment risk. There is an established robust association between maternal risk adult attachment representations (unresolved) and dysregulated (disorganized) children’s attachment patterns. However, c...
Crying is the infant’s most fundamental communication of distress. Crying is also noxious and demanding; averse responses lead to caregiver withdrawal, anger, and insensitivity. Child abuse studies showed averse responses to infant crying in abusive mothers; young abused children (ages 1-3 years) already responded to infant cries with hostility and...
According to attachment theory, children develop representations of caregiving in the context of their relationships with attachment figures. Research has established associations between children’s developmental risk and maternal adult attachment and caregiving. The primary aim of this study was to fill in a gap in the risk literature to examine t...
Purpose
To assess whether the Adult Attachment Projective (AAP) Picture System is a reliable and face valid measure of internal working models of attachment in adults with intellectual disabilities (ID).
Design/methodology/approach
The AAPs of 20 adults with ID were coded blind by two reliable judges and classified into one of four groups: secur...
The present study explored the Danish cross-cultural validity of the Caregiving Experiences Questionnaire (CEQ), a new measure of caregiving representations in parent-child relationships. Low-risk Danish mothers (N = 159) with children aged 1.5–5 years completed the CEQ and predictive validity measures of parenting stress and child behavior problem...
Maternal self-efficacy predicts sensitive and responsive caregiving. Low maternal self-efficacy is associated with a higher incidence of postpartum depression. Maternal self-efficacy and postpartum depression can both be buffered by social support. Maternal self-efficacy and postpartum depression have both been linked independently, albeit in separ...
Maternal self-efficacy predicts sensitive and responsive caregiving. Low maternal self-efficacy is associated with a higher incidence of postpartum depression. Maternal self-efficacy and postpartum depression can both be buffered by social support. Maternal self-efficacy and postpartum depression have both been linked independently, albeit in separ...
Background: There is a consensus within the trauma field for the necessity of a three-phase treatment programme for complex posttraumatic stress disorder (CPTSD). This pilot study focuses on the stabilisation phase, the goal of which is the development of psychological resources and the reduction of disabling symptoms.
Objective: To test the effica...
The contribution of attachment to human development and clinical risk is well established for children and adults, yet there is relatively limited knowledge about attachment in adolescence due to the poor availability of construct valid measures. The Adult Attachment Projective Picture System (AAP) is a reliable and valid instrument to assess adult...
Professionals and parents alike have an intuitive sense of what attachment is and it is often assumed that children who are receiving services, rehabilitation, or in intervention programmes have parents who cannot provide for their children's basic attachment needs. The chapter delineates an attachment theory approach to provide professionals with...
In the last few decades, there has been an increase of experimental research on automatic unconscious processes concerning the evaluation of the self and others. Previous research investigated implicit aspects of romantic attachment using self-report measures as explicit instruments for assessing attachment style. There is a lack of experimental pr...
Attachment is central to the development of children’s regulatory processes. It has been associated with developmental and psychiatric health across the life span, especially emotional and behavioral regulation of negative affect when stressed (Schore, 2001; Schore and Schore, 2008). Assessment of attachment patterns provides a critical frame for u...
Individuals with borderline personality disorder (BPD) are characterized by emotional instability, impaired emotion regulation and unresolved attachment patterns associated with abusive childhood experiences. We investigated the neural response during the activation of the attachment system in BPD patients compared to healthy controls using functio...
Introduction: Early research examining the link between parenting and children’s attachment
proposed that the parents' state of mind regarding attachment explained the intergenerational
transmission from parent to child. Continued exploration of this model showed, however, that this
transmission mechanism is not robust in families with insecure chi...
Child maltreatment models view risk as a complex constellation of factors that emphasize especially parents’ trauma experiences, emotion regulation problems, and high parenting stress. Attachment research has shown that mothers’ representations of childhood attachment and caregiving “assaults” places their children at developmental risk. Yet little...
This study tested a moderated media/on model in which postpartum depression mediated the relation between attachment trauma and maternal self-efficacy, with emotional support as a moderator.
Child maltreatment models view risk as a complex constellation of factors that emphasize especially parents' trauma experiences, emotion regulation problems, and high parenting stress. Attachment research has shown that mothers' representations of childhood attachment and caregiving "assaults" places their children at developmental risk. Yet little...
Clinicians know from experience that adults with intellectual disabilities (ID) are at risk for sub-optimal parental attachments and maltreatment from within and outside of the family. Until now, thinking about attachment in this population has been broad brush and has lacked a coherent conceptual framework to understand the role attachment plays i...
The purpose of the present chapter is to provide a comprehensive framework for understanding caregiving as a behavioral system in its own right—that is, as an organized set of behaviors guided by a representation of the current parent-child relationship (George & Solomon, 1989, 1996; Solomon & George, 1996, 2000). A unique contribution of this chap...
This presentation addressed the concepts and correlates of Bowlby’s model of pathological mourning with adult distress and caregiving
Childbirth is a major experience in a woman's life, but the relation between childbirth experiences and later mother-infant outcomes has been understudied. This study examined the relation between mode of delivery and subjective birth experience (e.g., perception of control, social support during labor and delivery), and mothers' descriptions of th...
The role of defensive exclusion (Deactivation and Segregated Systems) in the development of early relationships and related to subsequent manifestations of symptoms of eating disorders was assessed using the Adult Attachment Projective Picture System (AAP). Fifty-one DSM-IV diagnosed women with anorexia participated in the study. Anorexic patients...
The following case study is presented to facilitate an understanding of how the attachment information evident from Adult Attachment Projective Picture System (AAP) assessment can be integrated into a psychodynamic perspective in making therapeutic recommendations that integrate an attachment perspective. The Adult Attachment Projective Picture Sys...
Purpose: We explore the potential of the Adult Attachment Projective Picture System (AAP) as a measure of attachment state of mind in adults with intellectual disabilities. The AAP is a free response picture system method of assessing patterns of adult attachment with established validity and reliability in community and clinical samples.
Design/M...
Neuroimaging studies of depression have examined the effect of short-term, interpersonal or cognitive-behavioral psychotherapy. The effect of long-term, psychoanalytic treatment has not been assessed so far. In this study (Buchheim et al. 2012, PLoS One 7:e33745) recurrently depressed (DSM-IV) unmedicated outpatients (n= 16) and control participant...
Neuroimaging studies of depression have demonstrated treatment-specific changes involving the limbic system and regulatory regions in the prefrontal cortex. While these studies have examined the effect of short-term, interpersonal or cognitive-behavioural psychotherapy, the effect of long-term, psychodynamic intervention has never been assessed. He...
This article presents a Therapeutic Assessment (TA) case study of a woman recovering from 4 years of intense medical treatment for stage IV cancer. The inclusion and utility of using the Adult Attachment Projective Picture System (AAP) in the TA is highlighted. The client's attachment classification as unresolved helped identify that her current ex...
Borderline personality disorder (BPD) is a heterogeneous constellation of symptoms characterized by severe and persistent problems across interpersonal, cognitive, behavioral, and emotional domains of functioning [1, 2]. Diagnostic symptoms of BPD include: (1) frantic efforts to avoid abandonment, (2) a pattern of unstable and intense interpersonal...
This article summarizes the development and validation of the Adult Attachment Projective System (AAP), a measure we developed from the Bowlby-Ainsworth developmental tradition to assess adult attachment status. The AAP has demonstrated excellent concurrent validity with the Adult Attachment Interview (George, Kaplan, & Main, 1984/1985/1996; Main &...
Attachment with parents is central to a child's development. It is well established that the quality of this attachment in early childhood is a strong predictor of developmental and psychological functioning throughout the life span. One of the primary issues in custody evaluations is assessing the quality of the child's attachment to each parent a...
Infants, parental separation, custody, and overnight care: a vexed combination of issues and needs that has long perplexed the family law field. Carol George and Judith Solomon have conducted the only published observational study of infant attachment in light of postseparation overnight care arrangements. Here they revisit that study and bring mor...
Attachment theory defines an evolutionary-based relationship between a child and a parent figure. Attachment is a biologically based behavioral system that evolved in ways that influence and organize human motivational, emotional, and cognitive and memory processes. The relationship is conceived to develop initially in infancy and contribute to dev...
Die Erfassung und Bewertung von Bindungsrepräsentationen hat in der Bindungstheorie und Bindungsforschung eine lange Tradition. Bereits Bowlby hatte Hansburgs (1972; Klagsbrun & Bowlby, 1976) Trennungs-Angst-Test modifiziert, um die Antworten fünfjähriger Kinder auf Fragen zu untersuchen, die ihnen zu verschiedenen Bildern gestellt worden waren. Au...
Repeated interactions between infant and caregiver result in either secure or insecure relationship attachment patterns, and insecure attachment may affect individual emotion-regulation and health. Given that oxytocin enhances social approach behavior in animals and humans, we hypothesized that oxytocin might also promote the subjective experience...
Disorganized attachment is a troubling relationship in which an infant or young child demonstrates extreme conflict, contradictory and disorganized behavior as they seek caretaking from a parent. When properly assessed and identified, behaviors associated with disorganized attachment suggest the presence of serious threats to healthy psychological...
The American Psychological Association Guidelines for Child Custody Evaluations in Divorce Proceedings (American Psychological Association, 1994) stresses the need for a multi-method evaluation, reasoning that by considering data from different approaches, we can best ensure the validity of our findings in making custody recommendations. One of the...
This commentary examines papers in this special issue on couple attachment from the behavioral systems perspective that serves as the foundation of John Bowlby's attachment theory.
Functional imaging studies have shown that individuals with borderline personality disorder (BPD) display prefrontal and amygdala dysfunction while viewing or listening to emotional or traumatic stimuli. The study examined for the first time the functional neuroanatomy of attachment trauma in BPD patients using functional magnetic resonance imaging...
Affective facial behavior of borderline patients during the Adult Attachment Projective Objective: In this study we investigated for the first time the facial activity of patients with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) compared to healthy controls during the Adult Attach-ment Projective (AAP). The AAP is a valid interview measure for assessing...
In this study we investigated for the first time the facial activity of patients with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) compared to healthy controls during the Adult Attachment Projective (AAP). The AAP is a valid interview measure for assessing adult attachment representation. The attachment system is activated by eight attachment-related pict...
We present quantitative findings and detailed case histories that reveal the links between mothers' representations of their own attachment relationships (assessed in the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI)) and their representations of themselves as caregivers (Caregiving Interview). The sample comprised 57 middle-class mother–kindergarten-age child...
This study describes the relation between internal working models of caregiving, child attachment, and maternal behavior in the home. Thirty-two mothers of 6-year-old children were observed in the home and subsequently interviewed regarding experiential and affective dimensions of parenting. Interviews were examined in order to assess the quality o...
Human attachment is defined as a biologically based behavioral system that influences motivational, cognitive, emotional, and memory processes with respect to intimate relationships (parents, life partner, own children). Recent neurobiological studies in this field have in common that they investigated social relationships by examining fMRI neuroim...
This exploratory study is the first to examine the neural correlates of attachment status in adults. The study examined the feasibility of assessing attachment narratives in the functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) environment by challenging subjects to tell attachment stories to specific attachment pictures from the Adult Attachment Projec...
George, West and Pettem developed a new measure, the Adult Attachment Projective (AAP) to assess attachment representation in adults. The AAP is comprised of a set of eight drawings, one neutral scene and seven scenes of attachment situations. Although the pictures were drawn as projective stimuli, the method of administration combines projective a...
The present research evaluated a conceptual model that links preoccupied attachment to dysthymic disorder in women. From an original community sample of 420 women, 129 women were identified with depressive symptomatology as assessed by the Centre for Epidemiological Studies Depression scale (CES-D). Twenty-four of these 129 women were diagnosed as...
In this paper, we describe the development of and our preliminary work to empirically validate the Adult Attachment Projective (AAP), a new adult attachment classification system that is based on the analysis of individuals' responses to a set of seven attachment-related drawings. The AAP classification system uses evaluations of three dimensions (...
Previous attachment writing about violence between intimate adult partners has implicated the role of insecure attachment. This paper proposes that insecure attachment is not sufficient to explain intimate partner violence. Instead, it is suggested that recent evidence leads to the conclusion that such violent behavior is best explained in terms of...
This study was designed to investigate (1) the construct validity of a measure of the mother's internal representation of herself as a secure base in samples of married and divorcing mothers and infants, and (2) the relative contribution to infant security of this measure and a second representational measure, termed Psychological Protection, which...
Both the developmental and social personality approaches to the study of adult attachment are concerned with understanding those factors that describe an individual's quality of relational adaptation and risk for mental ill health. This paper examines the theoretical and methodological assumptions of these alternative models and how these assumptio...
Both the developmental and social personality approaches to the study of adult attachment are concerned with understanding those factors that describe an individual's quality of relational adaptation and risk for mental ill health. This paper examines the theoretical and methodological assumptions of these alternative models and how these assumptio...
This study represents the first systematic investigation of the effects on infant attachment to mother and to father of the increasingly common practice of overnight visitation (time-sharing) with the father in separated and divorced families. There were 145 infants (ages 12 to 20 months) and their mothers (and 83 fathers) who participated in the s...
Describes the mental representation of attachment disorganization in adults. This chapter begins with a discussion of segregated systems and Unresolved adult attachment. Next, the discriminating features of mental representations of disorganized attachment in children are highlighted. The question of whether or not the same broad representational m...
This volume begins by examining how the construct of disorganization corresponds to central elements of J. Bowlby's classic theory of attachment. In particular, disorganization is discussed as the consequence of the extreme insecurity that results from feared or actual separation from the attachment figure. The chapters investigate psychological an...
According to attachment theory, the child's attachment behavioral system is complemented by a reciprocal caregiving system in the parent. Going beyond current descriptions of caregiving as a set of discrete parental behaviors and attitudes that are related to attachment, we have sought to describe caregiving as a behavioral system that is organized...
The purpose of this paper is to present a preliminary framework for conceptualizing the caregiving behavioral system. Following Bowlby (1982), we propose that caregiving is organized within a goal-corrected behavioral system that is reciprocal to attachment. The set-goal of the system is to keep dependent offspring close or safe; its adaptive funct...
Attachment theory provides a rich theoretical framework for research and intervention in child abuse. This paper examines the central role of internal working models in the development of child-parent relationships. Mental representations of child attachment (in infancy and middle childhood), adult attachment and parental caregiving are discussed i...
The purpose of this study was to determine whether children classified as controlling in attachment differ from children classified into the traditional Ainsworth attachment categories in their symbolic representations of attachment and level of behavior problems. Sixty-nine middle-class kindergarten children and their mothers participated in a lab...
A. H. Kidd et al (see record
1992-34949-001) identified owners' ignorance of species-specific animal behaviors and their unrealistic expectations regarding the pet as reasons why many cats and dogs were adopted from humane societies and then rejected. The present study assessed whether better education (i.e., via their veterinarian) of prospective...
120 men and 223 women who were in the process of adopting a pet completed an inventory rating physical, emotional, and intellectual effects of roles that pets were expected to play. Ss who were parents also rated the expected roles of pets in their children's lives. Current or previous pet owners retained significantly more newly adopted pets than...
Reviews the book, Separation and the Very Young by James Robertson and Joyce Robertson (see record 1990-97167-000 ). This book is unique in that it chronologically traces the evolution of our understanding of the meaning of separation from the Robertson's perspective. The strength of the book is its documentation of intellectual and social history....
Examined responses to distress in agemates in observations of 10 abused toddlers (aged 1–3 yrs) and 10 unabused matched controls (aged 1–3 yrs) from families experiencing stress. Both groups of Ss were from disadvantaged families. Ss were observed in daycare settings. Nonabused, disadvantaged Ss responded to the distress of agemates with simple int...
10 abused toddlers (ages 1-3 years) and 10 matched controls from families experiencing stress were observed during social interactions with caregivers and with peers in their daycare settings. The abused infants more frequently physically assaulted their peers. They "harassed" their caregivers verbally and nonverbally, and they were the only infant...