Is one secure attachment enough? Infant cortisol reactivity and the security of infant-mother and infant-father attachments at the end of the first year

ABSTRACT

Attachment security is theorized to shape stress reactivity, but extant work has failed to find consistent links between attachment security to mothers and infant cortisol reactivity. We examined family configurations of infant-mother and infant-father attachment security in relation to infant cortisol reactivity. One-year old infants (N = 180) participated in the Strange Situation with mothers and fathers in two counterbalanced lab visits, one month apart (12 and 13 months). Infants with secure attachments only to their fathers and not their mothers had higher cortisol levels than infants with a secure attachment to mother and also exhibited a blunted cortisol response (high at baseline and then a decrease after stress). Results suggest that a secure attachment to father may not be enough to reduce infant stress reactivity when the infant-mother attachment is insecure, and future research is needed to uncover the family dynamics that underlie different family configurations of attachment security.

KEYWORDS:

• Cortisol
• strange situation
• infants
• fathers
• mothers

Acknowledgments

This research was funded by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute for Child Health and Human Development R01HD042607, K02HD047423 (Volling), the University of Michigan Office of Research (Volling), and the University of Michigan Rackham Graduate School to Kuo, Tengelitsch, and Ju-Hyun Song. We are grateful to the participants and research staff of the Family Transitions Study, and to Ju-Hyun Song and Matthew Stevenson for their early assistance in organizing the funding and literature review. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Patty Kuo, Department of Psychology and The William J. Shaw Center for Children and Families, University of Notre Dame, [email protected]

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplementary material

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