ArticleAttachment & human development2013
Molecular-genetic correlates of infant attachment: a cautionary tale.
Article in Attachment & human development, 2013. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 13 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
13 citing papers in PubMed, 40 citations in OpenAlex.
- Trial
- The Cognitive Architecture of Infant Attachment.Perspectives on psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science · 2025Review
- Neurobiology of Disorganized Attachment: A Review of Primary Studies on Human Beings.Neuroscience insights · 2023Review
- Development and change in attachment: A multiwave assessment of attachment and its correlates across childhood and adolescence.Journal of personality and social psychology · 2020Article
- Relations between early maternal sensitivity and toddler self-regulation: Exploring variation by oxytocin and dopamine D2 receptor genes.Developmental psychobiology · 2018Article
- Further evidence of the limited role of candidate genes in relation to infant-mother attachment outcomes.Attachment & human development · 2017Article
- Epigenetic marks as the link between environment and development: examination of the associations between attachment, socioeconomic status, and methylation of the SLC6A4 gene.Brain and behavior · 2016Article
- Disorganization, COMT, and Children's Social Behavior: The Norwegian Hypothesis of Legacy of Disorganized Attachment.Frontiers in psychology · 2016Article
- Genetic moderation of stability in attachment security from early childhood to age 18 years: A replication study.Developmental psychology · 2015Article
- Continuities and changes in infant attachment patterns across two generations.Attachment & human development · 2015Article
- I. Introduction.Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development · 2014Article
- VIII. General discussion.Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development · 2014Article
- Attachment and Temperament Revisited: Infant Distress, Attachment Disorganization, and the Serotonin Transporter Polymorphism.Journal of reproductive and infant psychologyArticle
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
5 authors at 5 institutions in 3 countries.
Funding
Abstract
This paper advises caution in relation to the increasing interest in molecular-genetic association studies in developmental psychology based on a set of empirical examples from the NICHD Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development (SECCYD) that highlight the fragility of effects reported in the literature on the molecular-genetic correlates of infant attachment. Specifically, this paper updates and provides three extensions to results reported in Luijk et al. (2011), which recently failed to replicate evidence from smaller-sample studies that a set of dopaminergic, serotonergic, and oxytonergic markers are significantly associated with infant attachment security or disorganization. First, we report here that the average effect of "usual suspect" polymorphisms on infant attachment security and disorganization in the SECCYD is approximately zero. Second, because Luijk et al. (2011) reported data based exclusively on the White infants in the SECCYD, this paper reveals that the average effect of polymorphisms featured in this literature is also of trivial magnitude in the non-White sub-sample (cf. Chen, Barth, Johnson, Gotlib, & Johnson, 2011). Third, this paper attempts, but fails, to replicate a recent finding by Raby et al. (2012) suggesting that, although molecular-genetic polymorphisms might not be implicated in security versus insecurity, the serotonin transporter gene contributes to variation in emotional distress during the Strange Situation Procedure. Implications for future research on the genetics of developmental phenotypes in general and attachment in particular are discussed, with a focus on statistical power and model-based theory testing.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.