Links about Attachment/Relationships

Winslow Homer, Dad's Coming!, 1873, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., USA

Attachment & Trauma Network, USA  The Attachment & Trauma Network (ATN) is the nation’s oldest parent-led organization supporting families of traumatized children. Formed in 1995 by three adoptive moms who were struggling to raise children with attachment disorders, ATN has grown into an international organization that provides training at regional and national adoption conferences, operates six on-line support communities, maintains a database of worldwide therapists and resources, and is the premier support, education and advocacy system for those raising traumatized and attachment-disordered children. 

Attachment Disorder Support Group   ADSG is a division of Trauma Headquarters.   It is a division of Trauma Headquarters because if you have a child who suffers from Reactive Attachment Disorder (RAD), then most likely your child also suffers from early childhood trauma. Actually, the trauma is probably what caused your child to develop RAD.  To treat RAD you must also treat and understand the trauma.Here you will find information on attachment disorder, bonding, special needs children, real life testimonials, people, and much more!   You will find families that have adopted children, foster children, step children, and biological children. 

The Association of Treatment & Training in the Attachment of Children    ATTACh is an international coalition of professionals and families dedicated to helping those with attachment difficulties by sharing our knowledge, talents and resources.Our vision is to be an international leader in creating public awareness and education regarding attachment and the critical role it plays in human development. We provide an annual conference, membership directory, and other benefits to our members and the public. We invite you to join us as we continue our mission to promote healthy attachment and its critical importance to human development.Many children throughout the world do not benefit from adequate parenting during their early years. Their foundation for healthy development is damaged so they have difficulty in forming loving, lasting, intimate relationships.This condition, known as attachment disorder, can be triggered by abuse, neglect, abandonment, separation from birth parents, birth trauma, maternal depression, chronic illness, frequent moves and placements, and even divorce.

International Association for Relationship Research  The International Association for Relationship Research (IARR) is a scientific and professional organization including hundreds of scholars and practitioners focused on stimulating and supporting the scientific study of personal and social relationships. 

The Center for Attachment Research, The New School, New York, USA   The center is engaged in the application of attachment theory to clinical and developmental research questions concerning child, parent, and family development. The Center for Attachment Research is currently engaged in a range of projects. The primary project, supported by funding from—and affiliation with—colleague Anne Murphy at the Early Child Care Center at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, is an examination of the effectiveness of a Group Attachment Based Intervention (GABI) provided to vulnerable parents. A third area of interest is the “Body and Attachment” group, which brings together senior clinicians from a range of interests to investigate intergenerational transmission of body representations from mothers to daughters. Another area of work at CAR is the study and assessment of children’s understanding of emotion and their theory of mind. 

Attachment Theory & Research @ Stony Brook, The State University of New York @ Stony Brook, USA   Reports and commentary on attachment theory and research from Everett Waters, Judy Crowell, and colleagues at SUNY Stony Brook and the New York Attachment Consortium. A library of researchers’ publication lists and on-line articles. Attachment measures for infant- mother, childhood, parenting, and marriage research. Course materials. Announcements and summaries of special events. Links to attachment related sites. Special Bowlby and Ainsworth sections. And a gallery of attachment artifacts and observations in the Bowlby- Ainsworth tradition.

The New York Attachment Consortium, USA  The New York Attachment Consortium is an association of New York metropolitan area developmental and clinical psychologists and psychiatrists working to advance attachment theory and research in the Bowlby-Ainsworth tradition.Consortium participants include faculty from Adelphi University’s Derner Institute for Advanced Psychological Studies, The City University of New York, The State University of New York at Stony Brook, and the Yale Child Study Center.

Infancy & Early Childhood Studies Lab, Child Study Center, Yale University, USA  The portfolio of research programs in the early childhood programs and associated laboratories focuses on the impact of perinatal events including toxin exposure, of emotional and attentional regulatory processes, the psychology and neurobiology of early attachment relationships, and the efficacy of attachment based interventions for infants and for parents.

Circle of Security International  The Circle of Security is an relationship based early intervention program designed to enhance attachment security between parents and children. Decades of university-based research have confirmed that secure children exhibit increased empathy, greater self-esteem, better relationships with parents and peers, enhanced school readiness, and an increased capacity to handle emotions more effectively when compared with children who are not secure.

The Baby Bond

Attachment Across Cultures, Canada  This web-site was developed by St. Joseph’s Women’s Health Centre for the use of service providers to support them in promoting positive cross-cultural attachment practices in their programming. It came out of the findings of the project:Sharing Attachment Practices Across Cultures: Learning from Immigrants and Refugees

Minnesota Longitudinal Study of Risk & Adaptation, Institute of Child Development, University of Minnesota, USA The Minnesota Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children began in 1975 and is currently in its 36th year. We are focusing on social relationship experiences: how people think about their experiences, risk and protective factors, and issues of continuity and change. The overarching goal of the project has been to trace the course of individual development and to understand factors that guide it toward good outcomes or poor outcomes. Therefore, we have studied how people develop at different points in their lives and across diverse setting (e.g., school, home, social relationships).

The Bowlby Centre, UK  We believe that: mental distress has its origin in failed and inadequate attachment relationships in early life and is best treated in the context of a long-term human relationship.attachment relationships are shaped in the real world and impacted upon by poverty, discrimination and social inequality. The impact of the social world will be part of the therapy.psychotherapy should be available to all, and from an attachment-based psychoanalytic perspective, especially those discriminated against or described as “unsuitable” for therapy.psychotherapy should be provided with respect, warmth, openness, a readiness to interact and relate, and free from discrimination of any kind.those who have been silenced about their experiences and survival strategies must have their reality acknowledged and not pathologised. 

Adult Attachment Lab, UCDavis, USA  The objective of our lab is to advance current understanding of adult attachment dynamics. Currently, research in the Adult Attachment Lab is focused on understanding the conscious and unconscious dynamics of the attachment behavioral system and associations between adult attachment style and other psychological constructs such as self-esteem, personality traits, death anxiety, and compassion and altruism.

Personality, Attachment & Control Laboratory, Cornell University  The overarching goal of Personality, Attachment, and Control (PAC) Lab is to examine the processes – those that are affective and automatic as well as those that are cognitive and controlled – that shape people’s experiences within their closest and most significant relationships. Given that many of these processes are occurring at an automatic and at times unconscious level, ongoing projects in the PAC Lab draw from research and theory from social and personality, cognitive, developmental and most recently cognitive neuroscience.Some of the questions currently being explored are: • How are close relationships mentally represented and how do these mental representations relate to subjective experience? • To what extent are mental representations of relationships in adulthood shaped by early relationship experiences? • How do individual differences in how people mentally represent relationships relate to neurophysiological processes? • How do people shape the situations they encounter in the future, which in turn shapes them?

Family Attachment Lab, University of North Texas, USA  The Family Attachment Lab conducts research that will increase our understanding of the interpersonal processes underlying mental health and illness, particularly family interactions and attachment relationships. Grounded in attachment theory, the program of research incorporates three primary components. Foremost among these is the investigation of family mechanisms and risk factors that contribute to ongoing psychological development throughout the life cycle. A second related theme involves the detrimental effects of relational trauma and loss (i.e., violence, combat, abuse, bereavement, divorce). A third innovative line of research applies attachment theory to the supervisory and therapeutic relationships.

Bartholomew’s Research Lab, Simon Fraser University, Canada  Attachment measures & publications  

UMass Close Relationships, Emotion & Health Lab, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, USA  Our research focuses on how basic psychological processes that arise in the context of people’s attachment relationships such as dating and marital relationships might impact relationship outcomes as well as emotional and physical health over time. We investigate relationship processes using a variety of methods including examining people’s subjective perceptions, the speed of their responses (reaction time), physiological responses (e.g., cortisol reactivity), and behavior (e.g., during interactions with their partners).

Program for Emotion Regulation & Attachment Research in Leiden (PEARL), Leiden University, The Netherlands  In the era of the genome and the brain the influence of parenting on child development is not self-evident anymore. In this research programme we examine the role of parents and other caregivers in children’s development of attachment and emotion regulation, and we study the limits of their influence. 

Attachment, Cognition & Personality Laboratory, University of Illinois @ Chicago, USA  Our lab is devoted to the scientific study of attachment processes, emotions, close relationships, and personality. Our research is broadly focused on attachment dynamics, affect regulation, and personality processes. Here are some of the projects that are currently underway: Attachment and the Defensive Regulation of Memory and Attention; Attachment and Transference Processes; The Evolution of Monogamy: A Comparative and Phylogentic Analysis of Social Relationships; The Sexual Double Standard.

Relationships Research Lab, University of Minnesota, USA  The Relationships Research Laboratory studies the legacy of early relationship experiences as an organizing force in social, cognitive, and biological development across the lifespan. As such, our research focuses on the childhood antecedents of adaptation within the developmentally salient contexts of adolescence and adulthood. This work is multi-method and multi-informant, employing web-based questionnaire, interview, observational, and psychophysiological methods with individuals and couples. In spanning multiple levels of a developmental analysis of individual and dyadic trajectories, our goal is to provide insight into the childhood experiences and resources that scaffold healthy adjustment in the years of maturity.

Laboratory for Personality, Psychopathology, & Psychotherapy Research, Pennsylvania State University  Our research focuses on attachment theory, emotion regulation, personality disorders, and psychotherapy process and outcome. At the most basic level, we examine how mental representations develop, consolidate, and change, especially in the context of close relationships and how they influence personality development. We also examine the role of impaired or distorted representations in regulating affect, and in turn, their influence on the development of psychopathology. To these ends, we study infant-parent relationships, romantic relationships, affect regulation, and psychotherapy process as paradigms for studying how representations develop, perpetuate, and change, as well as influence behavior and psychopathology. 

Care Lab, Pomona College, USA  The mission of the CARE Lab is to investigate the links between close relationships and emotional experience in both adults and children. We are most interested in the specific ways in which parent-child relationships are internalized and influence future patterns of relating and emotionality over the life-span. Using an attachment framework, our work examines the influence of early relationships on physiological indices of emotion. These interests are grounded in a life-span developmental psychopathology perspective.

Infant-Parent Interaction Lab, University of Wisconsin, Waisman Center, USA  We seek to investigate early social and physiological processes involved in the development of self-regulation and its relation to infant-mother attachment and cognitive development in high-risk infants who vary in their level of neonatal medical risk.

ATWS: The Attachment Theory Website  This website, created by Richard Atkins,  brings you lists of authors, books, journals and articles in the area of attachment theory.