"My pet has passed": Relations of adult attachment styles and current feelings of grief and trauma after the event.

This study examined attachment relationships and emotional distress after the passing of a pet. Participants were 73 university students 17-26 years of age who had lost a family pet within the past 5 years. They completed measures of attachment styles toward people and their pet, as well as complicated grief, depression, and trauma.

Development of an attachment-informed measure of sexual behavior in late adolescence.

There is considerable interest in relations between sexual behavior and romantic attachment styles in adolescence as attachment needs are increasingly met through intimate partners rather than parents. The objectives of this research were to organize a measure of sexual behavior within an attachment theory framework, and then show that this new measure uniquely predicted sexual approach styles and invasive sexual experiences. 190 18- and 19-year-old university students in late adolescence completed sexual behavior items that were provided ambivalent (anxious) and avoidant dimensions.

Representations of attachment relationships, the self, and significant others in middle childhood.

Introduction: This research examines the interrelations of attachment security, feelings towards the self, and attributions about others in middle childhood.

Methods: Five-to nine-year-old children (n=176) completed the Separation Anxiety Test, which provided a measure of attachment security and a puppet interview was used to assess feelings towards the self. A subset of 89 participants received vignettes of social situations with ambiguous outcomes to assess the emotional valence of children's attributions.

Attachment dimensions and young children's response to pain.

Background/objective: The present study examined the relationship between attachment dimensions and child pain behaviour following both an everyday pain incident (eg, bumps and scrapes) and acute pain incident (eg, immunization) in 66 five-year-old children.

Methods: Secure, avoidant, ambivalent and controlling attachment dimensions were assessed using aggregates of laboratory-based reunion behaviour, performance on representational measures of attachment and the measure of emotion regulation. Child pain behaviour, during immunization and everyday pain incidents, was rated in terms of reactivity, anger and calming time.

Relations between young children's responses to the depiction of separation and pain experiences.

This study examined relations between young children's representations of separation and pain experiences in 60, 4- and 5-year-old children. Separation representations were assessed with the Separation Anxiety Test (SAT) and pain representations were assessed by examining responses to pictures of children about to experience pain in the presence of parent figures. Results showed that representations of separation and pain experience were systematically related and the patterns were not accounted for by the child's ability to differentiate emotional states, language ability, or reports of emotional regulation.