Allison Hepworth, PhD, Postdoctoral Fellow, and Lisa Berlin, PhD, Professor, and Brenda Jones Harden, PhD, Alison Richman Professor for Children and Families have a new paper published in Prevention Science.
The manuscript presents results from a randomized trial that examined main and moderated effects of the Attachment and Biobehavioral Catch-up (ABC) intervention on (a) infants’ use of mother- oriented and self-soothing emotion regulation strategies and (b) infant emotion dysregulation. Using data from 186 low-income, predominantly Latino infants, the authors found that the intervention increased infants’ use of mother-oriented emotion regulation strategies during a brief (40-s) novel and potentially fear-inducing procedure. Infant emotional reactivity moderated intervention impacts on mother-oriented emotion regulation strategies and on infant emotion dysregulation: There were stronger effects of the intervention for infants relatively higher in emotional reactivity. These findings add to the literature on the preventive value of attachment-based interventions for supporting early emotion regulation.
More details can be found at http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11121-020-01127-1. Tiffany Martoccio, PhD, Erin Cannon, PhD and Rebecca Berger, PhD were also co-authors on this manuscript.