The present paper concerns itself with the various aspects of the mother‐infant interaction. While amount and variety of stimulation are recognized as important parameters influencing development, the argument is made that a contingency relationship resulting in a generalized expectancy on the part of the infant is, by far, more important. Briefly, if the mother responds consistently and with short latencies she helps develop within the infant an expectation that his action can be effective in influencing his environment. This expectation, as a generalized expectancy, provides the motivation for additional environmental interaction and cognitive development. Data from a study of mother‐infant interaction and tests of cognitive development at three months support this hypothesis.

The origins of current attachment constructs are reviewed. Whereas J. Bowlby's (1969Bowlby's ( /1982 original theory focused on a biobehavioral safety-regulating system with the parent as the child's primary protector, current usage often encompasses much more, if not all, of the parent-child relationship. As a result, some of J. Bowlby's central ideas have not been adequately tested, and the unique contributions of the theory have been obscured. The authors argue that differentiating protection from general responsivity or good parenting has many advantages. Most important, it will enable researchers to test J. Bowlby's notion that parental protection has a singular role to play in socioemotional development and has implications for attachment assessment and interventions in clinical work with families.

. In this meta-analysis of 34 clinical studies on attachment the hypothesis is tested that maternal problems such äs mental illness lead to more deviating attachment classification distributions than child Problems such äs deafness. A correspondence analysis on 21 North American studies with normal subjects produced a baseline against which the clinical samples could be evaluated. Separate analyses were carried out on studies containing the traditional A, B, C classifications and on studies that also included the recently discovered D or A/C category. Results show that groups with a primary identification of maternal problems show attachment classiflcation distributions highly divergent from the normal distributions, whereas groups with a primary identification of child problems show distributions that are similar to the distributions of normal samples. The introduction of the D or A/C classifications (about 15% in normal samples) reveals an overrepresentation of D or A/C in the child problem groups, but the resulting distribution still is much closer to the normal distributions compared to the samples with maternal problems. In clinical samples, the mother appears to play a more important role than the child in shaping the quality of the infant-mother attachment relationship.The Strange Situation and its associated classification scheme (Ainsworth, Blehar, Waters, & Wall, 1978;Ainsworth & Wittig, 1969) have been the basis of a major body of research on parent-infant relationships. While there are many approaches to the study of parent-infant relationships, the studies relevant for the present paper are those based on the attachment construct äs described by Ainsworth (Ainsworth et al., 1978) and derived from Bowlby's more general concepts of attachment (Bowlby, 1971). A large number of studies of the antecedents and sequelae of attachment classified on the basis of behavior in the Strange Situation (see Bretherton, 1985, for a review) lend credibility to this procedure äs a standardized validated paradigm for assessing infant-mother attachment in this conceptual framework.This study was supported in part by a PIONEER grant from the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) to Marinus H. van IJzendoorn, who is grateful to David G. P. van IJzendoorn for his (non-)verbal comments on earlier drafts of this paper. The idea of a metaanalysis on clinical samples originated with Oded Frenkel and Susan Goldberg. The contributions of Susan Goldberg and Marinus van IJzendoorn are equal. We are grateful to the anonymous reviewers for their comments on an earlier draft of this paper. Requests for reprints should be sent to Marinus H. van

Assessments of developmental status, attachment, and behaviour problems were conducted for 56 Romanian orphans adopted in Ontario. The group as a whole was functioning in the normal range and was considered well adjusted, but children who had experienced less than six months of institutional care had better outcomes than the rest on developmental measures. The adoptees showed an unusual distribution of attachment patterns: Secure attachment was less frequent than normally expected and avoidant attachment was not observed. Unexpectedly, neither age at adoption nor length of institutionalisation was related to attachment outcomes and it was suggested that the present preschool attachment system does not adequately capture attachment phenomena in this sample. Children who had more institution experience, those who were developmentally less competent, and those who were insecurely attached had more parent-reported behaviour problems.

Compared responses of parents of infants with cystic fibrosis, those with congenital heart disease, and those with healthy babies on the Parenting Stress Index. Diagnostic group differences were found mainly in the Child Domain with parents of ill infants reporting greater stress. Differences between mothers and fathers were found mainly in the Parent Domain. The groups did not differ in reports of stress arising from life events other than the target child's illness.

The data for 197 mother–infant pairs from two longitudinal studies were analyzed to assess relations between maternal attachment representations; atypical maternal behavior, coded with a new tool, Atypical Maternal Behavior Instrument for Assessment and Classification (AMBIANCE), and infant attachment. Both maternal and infant attachment were systematically related to atypical maternal behavior: mothers who were Unresolved on the Adult Attachment Interview and those whose infants were disorganized in the Strange Situation Procedure engaged in more atypical behaviors than those who were not Unresolved and whose infants showed organized patterns of attachment, respectively. Regression analyses indicated that when tested as a mediator, atypical maternal behavior as measured on the AMBIANCE did not reduce the association between maternal Unresolved status and infant disorganized attachment. This may, in part, reflect the fact that our low-risk sample did not include enough cases in the risk categories. These data provide preliminary empirical validation for the AMBIANCE and strengthen the evidence for links between atypical maternal behavior and disorganized attachment but indicate that in addition to maternal attachment representations, other factors must contribute to atypical maternal behavior.

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