Universal and culturally specific aspects of sensitive responsiveness to young children.

Human newborn infants are evolutionarily predisposed to communicate. Caretakers may interpret their signals, more or less correctly, as meaningful and intentional. Reliable responsiveness is the essence of the attachment system; appropriate and prompt responses to instant's' signals support secure quality of attachment.

Essentials when studying child-father attachment: A fundamental view on safe haven and secure base phenomena.

The most relevant functions of an attachment figure for a child from evolutionary, cultural, and individual perspectives are being a safe haven and secure base for the child. The concepts of behavioral systems and emotional security are delineated. Central to a child's emotional security is her smooth transition between seeking a safe haven when distressed and a secure base when at ease with her attachment figures.

Universal and culturally specific aspects of sensitive responsiveness to young children.

This article describes the earliest processes involved in socializing infants into cultural beings, that are thought to set the stage for the type of interactions described in this special issue. From birth onwards, infants experience and learn whether their signals will be answered, and in what way, by whom, and when. Infants learn about their own culture from the persons around them through the meaning and interpretations these persons give to their behaviors.

[The development of psychological security in attachment--results and conclusions for therapy].

Attachment is a biological propensity of primate infants to form close protective relationships with their mothers. In humans it is the special relationship in which the organization of emotions, empathy and knowledge about oneself and others is combined and represented in inner working models. For this, it is innate to human nature to form joint attention structures in which language develops for learning individual and particularly emotional and cultural meanings by narrative interpretations of various experiences.

Attachment and traumatic stress in female holocaust child survivors and their daughters.

Objective: During the Holocaust, extreme trauma was inflicted on children who experienced it. Two questions were central to the current investigation. First, do survivors of the Holocaust still show marks of their traumatic experiences, even after more than 50 years? Second, was the trauma passed on to the next generation?

Method: Careful matching of Holocaust survivors and comparison subjects was employed to form a research study design with three generations, including 98 families with a grandmother, a mother, and an infant, who engaged in attachment- and trauma-related interviews, questionnaires, and observational procedures.