Marjolijn Blom

Drawing stimulus from interpersonal acceptance‐rejection theory, this multicultural study examined relations between men's versus women's remembrances of maternal and paternal acceptance‐rejection in childhood and their current level of loneliness, as mediated by adults' self‐reported psychological maladjustment. Adults (N = 899) from five nations...

Parental acceptance-rejection theory (PARTheory) and attachment theory evolved independently but along parallel lines, creating many similarities but also significant differences. This article is the first attempt to describe these similarities and differences, and to test expected linkages between theories using attachment theory's Preschool Stran...

The developmental niche, a theoretical construct for the study of the child in cultural context, has been usefully applied to the analysis of environments of disabled individuals. In this article, the authors review the three components of the niche (settings of daily life, customs of care, and the psychology of the caretakers), with particular ref...

This paper explores teachers' ethnotheories of the ‘ideal student’ in five western societies: Italy, The Netherlands, Poland, Spain, and the US. Quantitative and qualitative methods are used to derive culture‐specific profiles of the ‘ideal student’ as described by kindergarten and primary school teachers in semi‐structured interviews (sample n's =...

The power of a mixed-methods approach combining anthropological and psychological theories and methods is demonstrated through the experiences of the International Study of Parents, Children, and Schools, a collaborative project involving teams of researchers from seven Western countries. The developmental niche framework of Super and Harkness prov...

Building on the Developmental Niche framework, the role of culture as a mediator for the development of pre- and early post-natal development of diurnal sleep rhythms and diurnal HPA-activity was investigated in two contrasting sites, the Netherlands and the US. There is little empirical research on culturally regulated diversity in normative bio-b...

Examined M. Main and E. Hesse's (1990) theory that frightening behavior is the causal link between unresolved loss and infant disorganization/disorientation. The home behavior of 11 low-risk mothers was observed when their infants were 10 or 11 mo old. The Adult Attachment Interview (C. George et al; 1984, 1985, 1996) was conducted with the mothers...

This study investigated whether frightening behavior can be naturalistically observed, and whether frightening behavior was linked to unresolved loss and infant disorganization. In this study, frightening (threatening, frightened, or dissociated) maternal behavior is proposed as the explanation of the association between maternal unresolved state o...