An investigation of the relationship between maternal attachment-related characteristics and the aggressive behaviour of four, five or six year-old sons
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The aim of this study was to identify and investigate attachment-related aspects of the mother's internal representational world that may contribute to the prediction of childhood aggressive disorders. Drawing on the theoretical framework of attachment and object relations theory, aggression was presented as a hypothesized consequence of threats to availability of the attachment figure, "frightened/frightening" care giving and defensive distortions associated with unresolved maternal attachment. Twenty, single parent, mother-son dyads participated in the study. The child's score on the Externalizing Problem factor of the Child Behavior Checklist was used to determine levels of aggression. The Family Environment Scale, the Toronto Alexithymia Scale and the Adult Attachment Interview provided measures of the family environment and maternal characteristics. A set of hypotheses linking attachment-related constructs, the family environment and the adaptation of sons were explored. From the regression analyses a three variable model including: (1) unresolved state of mind regarding trauma, (2) the intensity and degree of expressed anger and conflict within the home and, (3) mothers' level of reflective-self function, was predictive of aggression. The unresolved trauma and reflective-self function scores were also significant in differentiating between clinical and non-clinical categorical comparisons of aggressive behaviour. The results of this study indicate that the development of externalizing disorders and childhood aggression may be associated with different maternal histories. In particular, the findings suggest that the impact of unresolved trauma experiences on the organization of the mother's internal world and her capacity to reflect on psychological states in self and other may have serious implications for parent-child interactions and the child's development. Findings provide further evidence of links between maternal attachment-related histories, disruptions in the attachment system and the subsequent adaptation of children. Finally, while the results provide strong empirical evidence for the theoretically predicted risk associated with an unresolved parent-child relationship, they also suggest that "organized" attachment patterns and the capacity to reflect upon psychological states perform a protective function in promoting the adaptive functioning of children. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)
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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 | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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".