Official websites use. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites. E-mail: feldman. For commercial re-use, please contact journals. Attachment theory is built on the assumption of consistency; the mother—infant bond is thought to underpin the life-long representations individuals construct of attachment relationships.
In adulthood, participants underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging while exposed to videos of own mother—child interactions Self vs unfamiliar interactions Other. Self-stimuli elicited greater activations across preregistered nodes of the human attachment network, including thalamus-to-brainstem, amygdala, hippocampus, anterior cingulate cortex ACC , insula and temporal cortex.
Critically, self-stimuli were age-invariant in most regions of interest despite large variability in social behavior, and Bayesian analysis showed strong evidence for lack of age-related differences. Psycho—physiological interaction analysis indicated that self-stimuli elicited tighter connectivity between ACC and anterior insula, consolidating an interface associating information from exteroceptive and interceptive sources to sustain attachment representations.
Child social engagement behavior was individually stable from infancy to adulthood and linked with greater ACC and insula response to self-stimuli. Findings demonstrate overlap in circuits sustaining parental and child attachment and accord with perspectives on the continuity of attachment across human development.
Among the central propositions of attachment theory is the consistency of attachment across development; the nature of the bond formed between mother and infant defines the trajectory of their relationship and predicts a host of child social, emotional, cognitive and physiological outcomes Sroufe et al. In parallel, disruptions to the mother—infant attachment carry long-term negative consequences that are moderated, at least in part, by the consistency of attachment over time Sroufe, The consistency hypothesis has been described not only throughout development but also across attachment relationships.
