Attachment representations and emerging borderline personality features in school-aged children under youth protective care, consulting psychologists or child psychiatrists, and from the general population
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background The development of borderline personality disorder (BPD) is characterized by failures in the relationships between the child and their attachment figures, including maltreatment. The relationship between attachment and BPD in adulthood is empirically established. Fonagy and his colleagues theoretically describe the role of attachment in the development of the borderline functioning. Although studies show that maltreated children are more likely to exhibit emerging borderline personality features (EBPF), no research has investigated the relationship between attachment and EBPF during childhood. Objective This correlational study aims to verify the relationship between the attachment representations and EBPF during childhood. Participants One hundred and sixteen children aged 7 to 12 were interviewed, including 35 under protective care, 42 consulting psychologists or child psychiatrists, and 39 from the general population. Methods The Child Attachment Interview, a semi-structured interview about relationships with care figures, and the Attachment Story Stems, a semi-structured play activity, assessed attachment representations. A self-administered questionnaire measured EBPF. Results As noted in studies involving adults with BPD, the results indicate that children with insecure attachment representations, both towards the mother and the father, present a higher EBPF score. Increased EBPF is significantly associated with decreased supportive maternal and paternal behaviours, increased rejecting maternal behaviours and dysregulated behaviours in semi-structured play. Conclusions This study is the first to empirically establish the relationship between attachment and EBPF during childhood. The results support the importance of early identification of EBPF in children under protective care to intervene and prevent the disorder in adulthood.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".