Resilience in Development: A Synthesis of Research across Five Decades

This article reveals the grounds on which individuals form perceptions of disorder. Integrating ideas about implicit bias and statistical discrimination with a theoretical framework on neighborhood racial stigma, our empirical test brings together personal interviews, census data, police records, and systematic social observations situated within some 500 block groups in Chicago. Observed disorder predicts perceived disorder, but racial and economic context matter more. As the concentration of minority groups and poverty increases, residents of all races perceive heightened disorder even after we account for an extensive array of personal characteristics and independently observed neighborhood conditions. Seeing disorder appears to be imbued with social meanings that go well beyond what essentialist theories imply, generating self-reinforcing processes that may help account for the perpetuation of urban racial inequality.

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Seeing Disorder: Neighborhood Stigma and the Social Construction of Broken Windows

Variations in phenotype reflect the influence of environmental conditions during development on cellular functions, including that of the genome. The recent integration of epigenetics into developmental psychobiology illustrates the processes by which environmental conditions in early life structurally alter DNA, providing a physical basis for the influence of the perinatal environmental signals on phenotype over the life of the individual. This review focuses on the enduring effects of naturally occurring variations in maternal care on gene expression and phenotype to provide an example of environmentally driven plasticity at the level of the DNA, revealing the interdependence of gene and environmental in the regulation of phenotype.

Epigenetics and the biological definition of gene x environment interactions.

This chapter reviews advances in our understanding of socialization of children in the family context. Both historical and contemporary perspectives on socialization are outlined. The chapter is guided by a family systems approach to socialization which recognizes the parent-child subsystem, the co-parental, marital and sibling subsystems as well as the family unit as contributors to children's socialization. The effects of each of these subsystems on children's socialization are explored. Next, a variety of determinants of family socialization strategies are discussed, including child characteristics, parental personal resources, community-based social capital and socioeconomic status. In another section, the impact of social change on family socialization practices is considered. Changes in women's and men's employment patterns and job characteristics as well as job loss and unemployment are used as illustrations of how social changes alter socialization strategies. The importance of considering how multiple social changes act together in achieving their effects on socialization is stressed. Another major determinant of socialization patterns is the ethnicity and cultural background of the family. The chapter discusses variations in socialization practices among Latinos, African-American, American Indians, and Asian-American families and the importance of immigration and acculturation in determining socialization patterns. In a final section, a variety of issues that require more attention, including variations in family forms, monitoring of secular changes, the influence of social and physical contexts on socialization, and the importance of locating families in a network of socializations influenced are considered.


Keywords:

co-parenting;
culture;
ethnicity;
family systems;
family-work links;
fathers;
marital relationships;
mothers;
siblings;
social capital;
social class;
socialization

Socialization in the Family: Ethnic and Ecological Perspectives

Without exception, sadomasochistic subjects (n =48), unlike controls (n =35), are found to have developed insecure internal models of personal attachment, as a result of childhoods which were all problematic in one way or another. Their capacity for metacognition and their coherence of mind are found to be, on average, less than that of controls.

The Adult Attachment Interview

A central question in the study of atypical attachment relationships in infancy is whether interactive processes between caregiver and infant are associated with the infant’s display of disorganized strategies (Main & Hesse, 1990). Attachment theory locates one central influence on the infant’s attachment strategies in the interplay between parent and infant over the 1st year, especially in the degree of sensitive responsiveness to the entire range of the infant’s affectively charged communications (Ainsworth, Blehar, Waters & Wall, 1978). Linkages between appropriate parental responsiveness and secure infant attachment strategies have been supported in a number of empirical studies (Ainsworth et al., 1978; Belsky, Rovine, & Taylor, 1984; Grossmann, Grossmann, Spangler, Seuss, & Unzner, 1985; Londerville & Main, 1981; van IJzendoorn, 1995). These earlier studies, however, were undertaken prior to the discovery of the disorganized/disoriented infant attachment pattern. They explored the relation between maternal behavior and the three organized infant attachment strategies only (ambivalent/avoidant/ secure). With the increasing recognition that a sizable proportion of infants from families with serious social risk factors display disorganized forms of attachment strategies, the question of whether disorganized behaviors emerge in the context of particular patterns of parent-infant interaction also must be addressed. The issues of whether and how mother-infant interactive processes are related to disorganization of infant attachment patterns gains additional importance from recent findings that early disorganized or controlling

https://www.jstor.org/stable/info/3181559

Atypical attachment in infancy and early childhood among children at developmental risk. IV. Maternal frightened, frightening, or atypical behavior and disorganized infant attachment patterns.

This study examined how maternal distress mediates the link between exposure to community violence (CV) and the development of early child behavior problems. Research was conducted among 160 children, 3,0 to 5,11 in age, who resided in high-crime neighborhoods. Using structural equation modeling, latent variables were constructed to identify model components: maternal socioeconomic status (SES) and public assistance status, exposure to CV (maternal perceptions of local violence, social disorder, and fear of crime; and frequency of child cowitnessing violent events), family aggression (partner aggression toward mother and partner aggression toward child), maternal distress (global distress and posttraumatic stress disorder symptoms), and early child behavior problems (internalizing and externalizing). Bivariate correlations indicated that CV, maternal distress, and early child behavior problems were significantly intercorrelated. A series of structural equation models was specified to estimate the direct and indirect effect of CV on early child behavior problems. A direct model indicated a significant path from CV to early child behavior problems, after controlling for maternal SES and family aggression. The direct CV-early child behavior problems path diminished, however, when maternal distress was included in the model, after controlling for maternal SES and family aggression. Results are consistent with a mediation model of the impact of maternal distress symptoms on the link between CV and early child behavior problems.

A Mediational Model for the Impact of Exposure to Community Violence on Early Child Behavior Problems

A relational diathesis model of hostile-helpless states of mind: Expressions in mother–infant interaction.

Parental depression and child attachment: Hostile and helpless profiles of parent and child behavior among families at risk.

Disorganized attachment is an early predictor of the development of psychopathology in childhood and adolescence. Lyons-Ruth et al. (1999) developed the AMBIANCE coding scheme to assess disrupted communication between mother and infant, and reported the link between maternal behavior and disorganized attachment. The Hungarian group found an association between a polymorphism of the DRD4 gene and disorganized attachment (Lakatos et al., 2000; 2002; Gervai et al., 2005). The present collaborative work investigated the interplay between genetic and caregiving contributions to disorganized attachment. 138 mother-infant dyads, 96 from a Hungarian low-social-risk sample and 42 from a US high-social-risk sample, were assessed for infant disorganized attachment behavior, for DRD4 gene polymorphisms, and for disrupted forms of maternal affective communication with the infant. In accord with literature reports, we found a robust main effect of maternal AMBIANCE scores on infant disorganization. However, this relation held only for the majority of infants who carried the short form of the DRD4 allele. Among carriers of the 7-repeat DRD4 allele, there was no relation between quality of maternal communication and infant disorganization. This interaction effect was independent of degree of social risk and maternal DRD4 genotype.

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Elisa Bronfman

Papers

Atypical attachment in infancy and early childhood among children at developmental risk. IV. Maternal frightened, frightening, or atypical behavior and disorganized infant attachment patterns.

A Mediational Model for the Impact of Exposure to Community Violence on Early Child Behavior Problems

A relational diathesis model of hostile-helpless states of mind: Expressions in mother–infant interaction.

Parental depression and child attachment: Hostile and helpless profiles of parent and child behavior among families at risk.

Infant genotype may moderate sensitivity to maternal affective communications: Attachment disorganization, quality of care, and the DRD4 polymorphism