The Invalidating Childhood Environment Scale (ICES): psychometric properties and relationship to borderline personality symptomatology.

The objective of this study was to examine the psychometric properties of the Invalidating Childhood Environment Scale (ICES; Mountford, Corstorphine, Tomlinson, & Waller, 2004), a measure designed to retrospectively assess exposure to parental invalidation. The ICES was administered to a sample of female college students along with measures of parental bonding and borderline personality disorder (BPD) symptomatology. In contrast with previous findings, the ICES demonstrated excellent internal consistency within a nonclinical sample.

BIS and BAS interact with perceived parental affectionless control to predict personality disorder symptomatology.

The objective of this study was to examine if and how two basic dimensions of temperament-behavioral inhibition system (BIS) and behavioral approach system (BAS) sensitivity-might interact with exposure to perceived parental affectionless control (AFC) to predict personality disorder (PD) symptomatology. Measures of BIS, BAS, AFC, and PD symptomatology were administered to a large nonclinical sample (n = 318). As predicted, exposure to AFC was positively associated with PD symptoms in general, BIS was positively associated with Cluster A and C symptoms, and BAS was positively associated with Cluster B symptoms.

Early markers of language and attention: mutual contributions and the impact of parent-infant interactions.

This study of was conducted to explore the contribution of attentional skills to early language, and the influence of early language markers on the development of attention, simultaneously examining the impact of parent-child interaction factors (reciprocity/synchrony and sensitivity/responsivity), including their potential moderator effects. All children were between 6 months and 12 months of age, and about equally distributed between genders (33 males, 32 females), with caregivers' ages ranging from 28 years to 45 years (N = 65). Maternal perceptions of infant attentional skills (duration of orienting, or persistence of attention, and perceptual sensitivity-the infant's ability to selectively attend to subtle stimuli) and an early marker of language (vocal reactivity: use of vocalizations across a variety of activities), along with observations of parent-child interactions, provided the basis for the present evaluation.