Longitudinal associations between self-reported attachment dimensions and neurostructural development from adolescence to early adulthood

ABSTRACT

The existing literature suggests that individual differences in attachment may be associated with differential trajectories of structural brain development. In addition to maturation during infancy and childhood, developmental trajectories are characteristic of adolescence, a period marked by increasingly complex interpersonal relationships and significant neurostructural and functional plasticity. It remains to be examined whether attachment prospectively relates to neurostructural developmental trajectories during adolescence. In this longitudinal study, we investigated whether self-reported attachment dimensions of anxiety (AX) and avoidance (AV) could predict elements of cortical thickness (CT) and subcortical volume (SV) trajectories in 95 typically developing adolescents (12–19 years old at study baseline). Self-reported scores of AX and AV were obtained at study baseline, and neurostructural development was assessed at baseline and three timepoints over the four following years. Self-reported AX and AV were associated with steeper CT decreases in prefrontal cortical and cortical midline structures as well as anterior temporal cortex, particularly in participants younger at study baseline. Regarding SV, preliminary differential associations were observed between developmental trajectories and attachment dimensions. Our study suggests that interindividual differences in attachment contribute to shaping neurodevelopmental trajectories for several cortical and subcortical structures during adolescence and young adulthood.

Acknowledgments

We wish to thank all the participants who kindly volunteered for this study as well as Elodie Toffel, Valentina Dergun, and Deborah Badoud, for their help in data collection. The authors have declared that there are no conflicts of interest in relation to the subject of this study.

Author contributions

M. Debbané initiated and secured all funding for the project. M. Derome processed and prepared and L. Puhlmann analysed the data. M. Debbané, L. Puhlmann, M.Derome, and P. Vrtička drafted and all authors critically revised the manuscript, and approved its final version for publication. All authors contributed to the interpretation of the data.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are available on request from the corresponding author, M. Debbané. The data are not publicly available due to their containing information that could compromise the privacy of research participants.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed https://doi.org/10.1080/14616734.2021.1993628.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by research grants to M. Debbané. from the Swiss National Science Foundation [100019_159440 & 100014_179033] and from the Gertrude Von Meissner Foundation [ME 7871].