TEMPERAMENT FIT, ATTACHMENT, AND DEPRESSED MOTHERS

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Recent advances in our understanding of temperament, attachment, contextual risk, and maternal psychopathology provide the basis for the proposed research. Temperament research in our laboratory has developed accurate direct observational measures of infant temperament that are not confounded with subjective parent characteristics, as well as interview assessments of parents' appraisals of goodness-of-fit that are independent of the direct observations of child temperament behavior. There have also been many recent developments that have increased our understanding of parent-child attachment, measured in the home, laboratory, and by interview, which also contribute to our ability to more fully understand the status of families on this important developmental achievement. In the social context domain, we have developed in our laboratory powerful multiple-contextual-risk measures of developmental contexts that enhance our ability to understand specific family processes in relation to the broader contexts in which development occurs. The primary way of identifying multiple risk families will be via symptoms of maternal psychopathology. Such examination and understanding of early interim developmental outcomes provides an important set of knowledge to aid in more accurate identification of (and ultimately prevention of illness in) those children most at risk for development of significant psychopathology. There will be 225 families participating in this study. Half will be selected by elevated levels (greater than or equal to 16) on the Beck Depression Inventory. Assessments will be conducted at births 2 months, 8 months, 14 months, and 30 months. The major questions to be examined in this research are the degree to which stability and change in infant temperament behavior, infant attachment behavior, parental goodness-of-fit models, and parental attachment working models contribute to understanding variability in developmental outcomes, all examined in relation to multiple risks in the children's developmental contexts.