ArticleAttachment & human development2019
Early maternal sensitivity, attachment security in young adulthood, and cardiometabolic risk at midlife.
Article in Attachment & human development, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 23 papers.
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Who cites it
23 citing papers in PubMed.
- Benefit-cost analysis of Promoting First Relationships®: Implications of victim benefits assumptions for return on investment.Child abuse & neglect · 2020Trial
- The psychosocial matters: a call for attachment theory in kidney health research.Renal failure · 2026Article
- Synthesizing five decades of research on sensitive caregiving: A commentary on Nivison et al. (2026).Journal of child psychology and psychiatry, and allied disciplines · 2026Article
- Attachment-related perceptions of life events.PloS one · 2026Article
- How key family factors influence preschool children's social-emotional competence: threshold effects of parental parenting styles and parent-child interaction quality.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- A healthy start: examining the contribution of caregiving quality to child physical health from birth to 14 years.Current psychology (New Brunswick, N.J.) · 2025Article
- Attachment Style and Emotional Regulation as Protective and Risk Factors in Mutual Dating Violence among Youngsters: A Moderated Mediation Model.Healthcare (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Article
- How Does Trauma Make You Sick? The Role of Attachment in Explaining Somatic Symptoms of Survivors of Childhood Trauma.Healthcare (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Review
- Article
- Emotional and experiential factors that determine civilizational diseases.Health psychology report · 2023Article
- Developmental antecedents of friendship satisfaction in adulthood.Developmental psychology · 2022Article
- Early maternal sensitivity and markers of physical health: Enduring or transient associations from childhood to adulthood?Developmental psychology · 2022Article
- The predictive significance of fluctuations in early maternal sensitivity for secure base script knowledge and relationship effectiveness in adulthood.Journal of social and personal relationships · 2022Article
- Maternal caregiving ameliorates the consequences of prenatal maternal psychological distress on child development.Development and psychopathology · 2022Article
- Understanding links between maternal perinatal posttraumatic stress symptoms and infant socioemotional and physical health.Infant mental health journal · 2022Article
- Can Maternal Prenatal Self-Reported and Physiological Distress Predict Postnatal Caregiving Practices?The Yale journal of biology and medicine · 2022Article
- An Examination of the Components of Toxic Stress in Childhood and Biological Markers of Physical Health in Emerging Adulthood.Journal of child & adolescent trauma · 2022Article
- Does secure base script knowledge mediate associations between observed parental caregiving during childhood and adult romantic relationship quality and health?Attachment & human development · 2021Article
- Targeting Parenting Quality to Reduce Early Life Adversity Impacts on Lifespan Cardiometabolic Risk.Frontiers in psychology · 2021Review
- How does the social world shape health across the lifespan? Insights and new directions.The American psychologist · 2020Article
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7 authors.
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Abstract
Children who experience high-quality early parenting tend to have better physical health, but limited research has tested whether this association extends into adulthood using prospective, observational assessments. Likewise, mechanisms that may explain such links have not yet been illuminated. In this study, we test whether the quality of early maternal sensitivity experienced during the first 3½ years of life predicts cardiometabolic risk at midlife (ages 37 and 39 years) via attachment representations measured in young adulthood (ages 19 and 26 years). We do so by comparing the predictive significance of two different forms of attachment representations coded from the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI): (a) secure base script knowledge and (b) coherence of mind. Using data from the Minnesota Longitudinal Study of Risk and Adaptation, we find that early maternal sensitivity is negatively associated with cardiometabolic risk at midlife. Secure base script knowledge (but not coherence of mind) partially mediated this link. These findings are consistent with the possibility that early parenting has lasting significance for physical health in part by promoting higher levels of secure base script knowledge.
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