Association Between Nonparenting Adult’s Attachment Patterns and Brain Structure and Function

Abstract

Nursing has a long history of attending to the importance of early attachment experiences to later development. Attachment strategies formed in infancy and early childhood can have lifelong effects on an individual's behavior and health. Advances in neuroimaging technology allow us to understand how these early experiences map onto the structure and function of the brain and ultimately behavior and health. Previous reviews have discussed the findings of studies observing correlations between attachment strategy and neural function and structure in romantic partners and parents, but far less has been said about nonparenting adults. This article reviews the relationship between attachment strategies developed in childhood and brain structure and function in nonparenting adults. A total of 14 studies met inclusion criteria. Results showed adult attachment patterns of nonparenting adults are pervasively correlated with brain structure and function, with most associations observed in executive regions, followed by affective and reward processing. Notably, no studies found associations between attachment pattern and stress response, in contrast with studies of mothers. These brain regions are linked to the many behavioral, mood and substance abuse disorders observed in adults with insecure attachment patterns. Nurses can use these findings to help prevent, assess and address these health risks in nonparenting adults, as well as provide the brain-based evidence to support the utility of nursing interventions designed to further promote healthy parent-child relationships and secure parent-child attachment.

Neural bases of social feedback processing and self–other distinction in late childhood: The role of attachment and age

“…Attachment-based interindividual differences in how children process information about the self and others can be investigated through studies of brain structure and function. Some studies have adopted a social neuroscience approach to test links between attachment and the neural correlates of social processing, mainly by using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI; for recent reviews, see Letourneau, Hart, & MacMaster, 2017;Long, Verbeke, Ein-Dor, & Vrtička, 2020;Ran & Zhang, 2018;Swain et al, 2014;Vrtička, 2017;Vrtička & Vuilleumier, 2012). The vast majority of this work, however, has focused on adults, whereas only a handful of neuroimaging studies of attachment that focus on adolescents and children are available (Choi, Taylor, Hong, Kim, & Yi, 2018;Debbané et al, 2017;Leblanc, Degelih, Daneault, Beauchamp, & Bernier, 2017;Takiguchi et al, 2015;Vrtička, et al, 2014).…”