Attachment and physical health: introduction to the special issue

ABSTRACT

Over the last 40 years, researchers have made considerable progress identifying the ways in which attachment security shapes individuals’ social and emotional functioning. In recent years, new investigations have shed light on connections between attachment and physiological systems in the body. The goal of this special issue is to focus attention on how attachment may be related to biological markers that relate to physical health, including inflammation, cortisol, and cardiometabolic risk. The papers in this special issue, highlighted in this introduction, demonstrate that these links may exist across the lifespan. We conclude with several examples of extensions of this work might emerge in the years to come.

KEYWORDS:

• Attachment
• physical health
• inflammation
• cortisol

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to many people who made this special issue possible. First, we would like to thank the authors who contributed novel and important papers. In addition, we thank Kristin Bernard, Christopher Fagundes, Allison Farrell, Jean-Phillipe Gouin, Michael Harvey, Camelia Hostinar, Heidi Kane, Kharah Ross, Richard Slatcher, Jessica Stern, and Theodore Waters for their helpful reviews. We also thank Michael Murphy, who acted as Action Editor for our own paper, and two anonymous reviewers. We are especially grateful to Howard Steele, who encouraged us to pursue this special issue and provided us with guidance and flexibility along the way.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.