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Introduction
Skills and Expertise
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January 1994 - present
Publications
Publications (234)
Children who have experienced adversity, including abuse and neglect, are at elevated risk for both sleep problems and psychopathology. Sleep disturbance may be one pathway by which early adversity confers risk for psychopathology. Previous studies with such children have found associations between sleep difficulties and internalizing and externali...
This paper is based on a symposium on mentoring in infant mental health that took place at the 18th World Association for Infant Mental Health (WAIMH) conference. The symposium commemorated Robert N. Emde who was one of the founders of the field of Infant Mental Health, and devoted much of his career to mentorship. From an IMH perspective, mentorin...
Cognitive science has demonstrated that we construct knowledge about the world by abstracting patterns from routinely encountered experiences and storing them as semantic memories. This preregistered study tested the hypothesis that caregiving‐related early adversities (crEAs) shape affective semantic memories to reflect the content of those advers...
Dante Cicchetti, the architect of developmental psychopathology, has influenced so many of us in profound ways. One of his many contributions was in demonstrating the power of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) to study the effects of Child–Parent Psychotherapy (CPP). These RCTs have shed light on causal mechanisms in development. Following Cicche...
Young children are traumatized by abuse, neglect, exposure to disasters and wars, parental and caregiver loss, as well as witnessing domestic violence and substance use. This exposure effects brain and biological development, social-emotional, and cognitive development. Trauma-informed interventions and mental health treatments have been developed...
We examined the long-term causal effects of an evidence-based parenting program delivered in infancy on children’s emotion regulation and resting-state functional connectivity (rs-fc) during middle childhood. Families were referred to the study by Child Protective Services (CPS) as part of a diversion from a foster care program. A low-risk group of...
Maternal substance use may interfere with optimal parenting, lowering maternal responsiveness during interactions with their children. Previous work has identified maternal autonomic nervous system (ANS) reactivity to parenting‐relevant stressors as a promising indicator of real‐world parenting behaviors. However, less is known about the extent to...
Prenatal opioid exposure has been associated with developmental problems, including autonomic nervous system dysregulation. However, little is known about the effects of prenatal opioid exposure on the autonomic nervous system beyond the first days of life, particularly across both the parasympathetic and sympathetic branches, and when accounting f...
Prior research suggests that attachment-based interventions, including Attachment and Biobehavioral Catch-up (ABC), may be less effective at enhancing parenting quality among parents who self-report having an insecure attachment style. The current study tested whether effects of ABC on parental behavior were moderated by categorical and dimensional...
Responsive, nurturing parenting helps infants and young children develop secure, organized attachments as well as adequate self-regulatory capabilities. However, when parents experience challenges, they often have difficulty providing responsive, nurturing care. In this article, we provide an overview of interventions that have been developed to en...
Positive associations have been found between cortical thickness and measures of parasympathetic cardiac control (e.g., respiratory sinus arrhythmia, RSA) in adults, which may indicate mechanistic integration between neural and physiological indicators of stress regulation. However, it is unknown when in development this brain-body association aris...
Objective:
Early adverse parenting predicts various negative outcomes, including psychopathology and altered development. Animal work suggests that adverse parenting might change amygdala-prefrontal cortex (PFC) circuitry, but work in humans remains correlational. The present study leverages data from a randomized controlled trial examining the ef...
Background:
Prenatal opioid exposure has been associated with developmental deficits during infancy, but the literature is limited by simple group comparisons and lack of appropriate controls. Previously published research with the current sample documented unique associations between prenatal opioid exposure and developmental outcomes at three an...
Pregnant women who are use opioids disproportionately experience chronic stress, such as poverty and trauma, compared to healthy pregnant women. Past research has shown mothers using opioids experience challenges in providing sensitive caregiving to their infants. One of the mechanisms potentially responsible could be dysregulation of the HPA axis....
This study investigated emotion transmission among peers during middle childhood. Participants included 202 children (111 males; race: 58% African American, 20% European American, 16% Mixed race, 1% Asian American, and 5% Other; ethnicity: 23% Latino(a) and 77% Not Latino(a); Mincome = $42,183, SDincome = $43,889; Mage = 9.49; English-speaking; fro...
The COVID-19 pandemic necessitated dramatic shifts in the delivery and evaluation of attachment-based home-visiting services. The pandemic disrupted a pilot randomized clinical trial of modified Attachment and Biobehavioral Catch-Up (mABC), an attachment-based intervention adapted for pregnant and peripartum mothers with opioid use disorders. We tr...
Although children display strong individual differences in emotion expression, they also engage in emotional synchrony or reciprocity with interaction partners. To understand this paradox between trait-like and dyadic influences, the goal of the current study was to investigate children’s emotion expression using a Social Relations Model (SRM) appr...
The goal of the current study was to investigate whether children's social information processing (SIP) predicts their conversations with peers, including both their remarks to peers and peers' remarks to them. When children (N = 156; 55% male; United States; Representation by Race: 60% African American, 18% Mixed race, 15% European American, 7% Ot...
Background
States, territories, non-profits, and tribes are eligible to obtain federal funding to implement federally endorsed evidence-based home visiting programs. This represents a massive success in translational science, with $400 million a year allocated to these implementation efforts. This legislation also requires that 3% of this annual fu...
Little is known about whether postnatal intervention enhances autonomic regulation among infants at risk for dysregulation due to prenatal opioid exposure. The present study evaluated the effects of modified Attachment Behavioral Catch‐up (mABC) on autonomic regulation for opioid‐exposed infants in a pilot randomized clinical trial. We hypothesized...
The goal of the current study was to investigate the contribution of both trait-like individual differences and dyadic processes to the content of children's conversations. Fifty-two groups typically consisting of four same-sex unfamiliar nine-year-old children (N = 202) interacted in all possible dyads, resulting in six dyads per group. Each dyad...
In molti contesti professionali, compreso quello del Tribunale per i minorenni, si fa riferimento alla teoria dell'attaccamento e alla relativa ricerca, con fraintendimenti ampiamente diffusi che spesso si traducono in applicazioni scorrette. La finalità di questa dichiarazione di consenso è, pertanto, quella di migliorarne la comprensione, contras...
Attachment-based interventions have been shown to be successful in enhancing parental sensitivity and child outcomes (Dozier & Bernard, 2019; van Ijzendoorn et al., 2022). However, widespread community implementation of attachment-based interventions faces the challenge of reaching diverse populations. Most interventions are originally developed in...
Sattler et al. (Global Implement Res Appl 2:12–21, 2022) raise several challenges to implementing the evidence-based
intervention Attachment & Biobehavioral Catch-up (ABC) with Spanish-speaking, Latinx families. As the team working in
the community dissemination of ABC, in this commentary response, we outline the ABC approach for reaching populatio...
Given the impact of implementation fidelity on community-based outcomes, it is important to understand how fidelity may change over time as providers learn an intervention. Attachment and Biobehavioral Catch-up is an evidence-based early intervention that assesses fidelity during weekly supervision. Providers are first trained in the infant model,...
Co-occurring adversities are common for young children with child protective services (CPS) involvement, with high rates of intimate partner violence (IPV) exposure in this population. Despite extensive research linking childhood IPV exposure to later psychopathology, fewer studies have examined the prospective associations between IPV exposure and...
This study investigated middle childhood resting electroencephalography (EEG) and behavioral adjustment in 35 internationally adopted children removed from early caregiving adversity between 6 and 29 months of age. Older age of adoption was associated with more immature or atypical profiles of middle childhood cortical function, based on higher rel...
Background:
Prenatal opioid exposure predisposes infants to adverse development of regulatory systems and jeopardizes their long-term health outcomes. While sensitive caregiving promotes healthy development of emotional and physiological regulation and may remediate risks associated with prenatal opioid exposure, mothers with opioid use disorder o...
https://librospremisa.com/es/inicio/1738-parentalidad-y-teor%C3%ADa-del-apego-volumen-ii-dificultades-de-la-parentalidad-formas-de-intervenci%C3%B3n.html
Experiencing sensitive caregiving is associated with the development of healthy autonomic nervous system regulation in children. In a randomized trial of the Attachment and Biobehavioral Catch-up (ABC) intervention with families involved with Child Protective Services (CPS), receiving ABC in infancy was associated with higher resting respiratory si...
Las experiencias tempranas son clave como cimientos de las trayectorias de desarrollo. Sufrir adversidad temprana está relacionado con dificultades en regular el comportamiento, las emociones y la fisiología. Las intervenciones que promueven la sensibilidad parental pueden proteger a los niños de las consecuencias negativas de la adversidad tempran...
A key goal for implementation science is the identification of evidence-based consultation protocols and the active ingredients within these protocols that drive clinician behavior change. The current study examined clinicians’ self-coding of fidelity as a potential active ingredient of consultation for the Attachment and Biobehavioral Catch-up (AB...
Given that human infants are almost fully reliant on caregivers for survival, the presence of parents who provide sensitive, responsive care support infants and young children in developing the foundation for optimal biological functioning. Conversely, when parents are unavailable or insensitive, there are consequences for infants’ and children’s a...
La théorie et les recherches sur l’attachement sont utilisées dans de nombreux cadres d’application, y compris dans les tribunaux compétents en matière familiale [1], mais les incompréhensions sont fréquentes et sources d’erreurs lorsqu’il s’agit de les mettre en pratique. L’objectif de cet article de consensus est donc d’accroître la compréhension...
During the COVID-19 pandemic, home visiting services for families with young children pivoted to continue providing services virtually. One such service was Attachment and Biobehavioral Catch-up (ABC), a brief prevention/intervention program targeting increased parental sensitivity. Seventy families participated in a sensitivity assessment before a...
Early exposure to intimate partner violence (IPV) places children at risk for ongoing emotional difficulties, including problems with self-regulation and high levels of internalizing symptoms. However, the impact of IPV exposure on children's error monitoring remains unknown. The present study utilized electroencephalography (EEG) to examine the im...
Parents of infants and young children who experience harsh circumstances are among those most vulnerable to the added stressors associated with COVID-19. Home visiting models have been shown to enhance outcomes for parents and infants when delivered in person, but in many parts of the world, the pandemic rendered in-person home visits difficult or...
Maintaining treatment fidelity when implementing evidence-based interventions is a significant challenge. The inability to deliver in-person services due to the COVID-19 pandemic critically challenged the foundation of implementation fidelity for home visiting programs across the globe. The Attachment and Biobehavioral Catch-Up (ABC) program is an...
The COVID-19 pandemic has significantly disrupted research activities globally. Researchers need safe and creative procedures to resume data collection, particularly for projects evaluating infant mental health interventions. Remote research is uniquely challenging for psychophysiological data collection, which typically requires close contact betw...
La teoría y la investigación sobre el apego se utilizan en muchos contextos aplicados, incluidos los juzgados de familia, pero hay malentendidos muy extendidos y que a veces dan lugar a aplicaciones erróneas. El objetivo de este documento de consenso es, por lo tanto, mejorar la comprensión, contrarrestar la desinformación y dirigir el uso de la te...
The COVID-19 pandemic has posed significant challenges to delivery of preventive and mental health services, and providers have rapidly transitioned to telehealth service provision. Factors such as sudden isolation, financial strain, and physical and mental health stress presented unique challenges for providers and families and highlight the need...
Attachment and Biobehavioral Catch-up (ABC), an evidence-based parenting program, monitors intervention fidelity and provides fidelity-focused supervision to providers, or “parent coaches,” across one year of training. Recently, ABC dissemination has grown internationally, providing the opportunity for the ABC developer team to consider how to supp...
Infants born to mothers who are dependent on opioids often have difficulty regulating behavior and physiology at birth. Without sensitive maternal care, these infants are at risk for ongoing problems with self-regulation. Mothers who are dependent on opioids may experience challenges related to their substance use (e.g., unsupportive and/or risky e...
A variety of childhood experiences can lead to anxious/depressed (A/D) symptoms. The aim of the present study was to explore the brain morphological (cortical thickness and surface area) correlates of A/D symptoms and the extent to which these phenotypes vary depending on the quality of the parenting context in which children develop. Structural ma...
Background. States, territories, non-profits, and tribes are eligible to obtain federal funding to implement federally-endorsed evidence-based home visiting programs. This represents a massive success in translational science, with $400 million a year allocated to these implementation efforts. This legislation also requires that 3% of this annual f...
Attachment security has been linked to healthy socioemotional development, but less is known about how secure attachment in infancy relates to emotional functioning in middle childhood, particularly across multiple contexts. The present study examined associations between secure attachment in infancy and children's context-dependent emotion express...
Background
Prenatal opioid exposure has been linked to adverse birth outcomes and delays in infant development. Existing literature is limited by a simple group-differences approach as well as inadequate controls for sociodemographic factors and polysubstance exposure co-occurring with prenatal opioid use.
Method
The current study assessed cumulat...
Children who have been adopted internationally often exhibit persistent behavior problems. The current study assessed the efficacy of the Attachment and Biobehavioral Catch-up intervention (ABC; Dozier & Bernard, 2019) for reducing behavior problems in 122 children adopted internationally. Behavior problems were measured via parent-report using the...
The quality of the early caregiving context sets the stage for the developing child's long term developmental trajectory. Infants are born highly dependent on parents and other caregivers for critical input for developing brain and behavioral systems. When infants experience early adversity, they are at risk for difficulties regulating behavior, em...
Public policy and early intervention advocates recognize evidence-based home visiting programs as valuable for promoting early childhood mental health. Federal and state-wide initiatives recognize the importance of supporting programs with a strong evidence base and methods for implementation effectiveness. To avoid diminished effectiveness of prog...
This study evaluated whether Attachment and Biobehavioral Catch-up (ABC), a parenting intervention, altered the attachment representations of parents (average age of 34.2 years) who had been referred to Child Protective Services (CPS) due to risk for child maltreatment when their children were infants. Approximately 7 years after completing the int...
Attachment theory and research are drawn upon in many applied settings, including family courts, but misunderstandings are widespread and sometimes result in misapplications. The aim of this consensus statement is, therefore, to enhance understanding, counter misinformation, and steer family-court utilisation of attachment theory in a supportive, e...
Therapists’ active learning increases treatment fidelity, but research is needed on supervisory strategies to engage therapists in active learning. This study used sequential analysis to examine consultant behaviors associated with increased and decreased probability of eliciting therapists’ active learning. The study included 162 consultation sess...
Foster children are at risk for dysregulated hypothalamic pituitary adrenal (HPA) axis functioning, conferring risk for negative health outcomes. Responsive parenting may support young children's HPA axis regulation; however, few studies have examined the association between responsive parenting and cortisol production among children in foster care...
Young children in institutional care experience conditions that are incompatible with their needs for attachment relationships. As a result, early institutionalization is expected to have lasting effects on the regulation of the hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenocortical (HPA) axis. The current study tested whether early institutionalization has persist...
Children who have been adopted internationally commonly experience institutional care and other forms of adversity prior to adoption that can alter the functioning of the hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal (HPA) axis. In particular, internationally adopted children tend to have blunted diurnal declines compared to children raised in their birth familie...
Children at risk for neglect or abuse are vulnerable to delays in inhibitory control development. Prior findings suggest that early parenting interventions that target parental sensitivity and responsiveness during infancy can improve executive func- tion outcomes of high-risk children during preschool years; however, little is known about how pers...
Objective:
Early adversity is correlated with increased risk for negative outcomes, including psychopathology and atypical neurodevelopment. The authors aimed to test the causal impact of an early parenting intervention (the Attachment and Biobehavioral Catch-Up; ABC) on children's neural processing of parent cues and on psychosocial functioning i...
Children adopted internationally experience adverse conditions prior to adoption, placing them at risk for problematic social–emotional development. The Attachment and Biobehavioral Catch-up (ABC) intervention was designed to help internationally adoptive parents behave in ways that promote young children's social–emotional competence. Participants...
Importance:
Parenting interventions have been found to normalize cortisol regulation among high-risk children early in development; it is important to investigate the sustainability of these effects and their mechanisms, given the maladaptive outcomes associated with cortisol dysregulation.
Objective:
To determine whether the Attachment and Biob...
Children involved with Child Protective Services (CPS) often show worse emotion regulation than non-involved children, with downstream effects on adaptive functioning. The current study uses two randomized control trials, one conducted with foster caregivers and one conducted with birth parents, to investigate the longitudinal effects of caregiver...
Background
Previous studies have established links between poor sleep and negative developmental outcomes. However, it remains unclear whether young maltreated children demonstrate atypical sleep patterns and whether sleep duration is associated with emotional and behavioral problems.
Objective
Explore trajectories of sleep among Child Protective...
Physiological regulation may interact with early experiences such as maltreatment to increase risk for behavior problems. In the current study, we investigate the role of parasympathetic nervous system regulation (respiratory sinus arrhythmia [RSA] at rest and in response to a frustration task) as a moderator of the association between early risk f...
Children with histories of secure attachments during infancy are expected to develop healthier patterns of physiological activity at rest and in response to a stressor than children with insecure attachments. The present study examined longitudinal associations between infant attachment security and children’s respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) at...
The roots of psychopathology frequently take shape during infancy in the context of parent-infant interactions and adversity. Yet, neurobiological mechanisms linking these processes during infancy remain elusive. Here, using responses to attachment figures among infants who experienced adversity as a benchmark, we assessed rat pup cortical local fi...
Maltreatment during development is associated with epigenetic changes to the genome. Enhancing caregiving may mitigate these effects. Attachment and Biobehavioral Catch-Up (ABC) is an intervention that has been shown to improve parent–child relationships and a variety of biological and behavioral outcomes among children that are involved in Child P...
The roots of psychopathology frequently take shape during infancy in the context of parent-infant interactions and adversity. Yet, neurobiological mechanisms linking these processes during infancy remain elusive. Here, using responses to attachment figures among infants who experienced adversity as a benchmark, we assessed rat pup cortical Local Fi...
Background
Interventions have been developed to promote the development of secure and organized attachments during early childhood among children who have experienced early adversity, yet little is known about whether the effects of these early interventions are sustained beyond 12 months postintervention. The current study examined whether receivi...
Young children who experience maltreatment are at increased risk for disruptive behavior problems. In high-risk environments, children’s difficulties regulating negative emotions and behavior may be an important precursor to later disruptive behavior problems. This longitudinal study examined associations between early home risk factors and traject...
This randomized controlled trial investigated the efficacy of Attachment and Biobehavioral Catch-up (ABC; Dozier, Bick, & Bernard, 2011) in reducing disrupted parenting behavior (affective communication errors, role/boundary confusion, fearful/disoriented, intrusive/negativity, and withdrawal) and its association with disorganized attachment. Parti...
Identification of effective consultation models could inform implementation efforts. This study examined the effects of a fidelity-focused consultation model among community-based clinicians implementing Attachment and Biobehavioral Catch-up. Fidelity data from 1217 sessions from 7 clinicians were examined in a multiple baseline design. In fidelity...
Monitoring fidelity to evidence-based interventions is a critical component of successful dissemination. Attachment and Biobehavioral Catch-Up is a nationally and internationally disseminated evidence-based early intervention that uses observational methods (e.g., video review and content coding) to monitor fidelity as well as video conferencing to...
Young children living in institutional settings often show a range of deficits in social, physical, and cognitive functioning. Whereas the diurnal production of cortisol has been examined among post-institutionalized children in a number of investigations, studies of children continuing to live in institutions are limited. In this study, we assesse...
Early experiences of maltreatment have long-term negative effects on children's compliance. This randomized clinical trial examined whether a brief preventative intervention (Attachment and Biobehavioral Catch-up; ABC) was effective in enhancing compliance in children who had been referred to Child Protective Services. Participants included 101 par...
The present study used a longitudinal randomized clinical trial to test whether an early intervention has causal effects on children's autonomic nervous system regulation. When children were infants, parents involved with Child Protective Services received Attachment and Biobehavioral Catch-up (ABC; N = 43), an intervention that promotes sensitive...
Background
Children who experience early adversity are at risk for obesity; secure attachment may be a protective factor as it has been linked to reduced obesity risk.
Objective
To evaluate whether (1) participation in a parenting intervention and (2) secure attachment were associated with body mass index (BMI) among young children with histories...
Children adopted internationally are often dysregulated biologically and behaviorally due to prior experiences of institutional care or caregiving changes and thus are in need of enhanced parental care. The present study assessed whether parents randomized to receive Attachment and Biobehavioral Catch-up (ABC) demonstrated significant improvements...