Attachment theory, with its core concepts, perspectives, and insights developed over the past five decades, is influential for professionals working with young children. However, practitioners face challenges translating attachment theory and research into practical applications. This manifests in attachment myths, theoretical misinterpretations, and inconsistency of application. This state-of-the-art review is authored by 47 attachment researchers and practitioners and examines key insights from attachment theory to facilitate attachment-aware practice for professionals working with children and their caregivers. Following the ongoing debate on practical relevance in attachment theory, we present both 'strict' and 'expansive' translational perspectives on applications for addressing preventative or clinical attachment concerns. We first review core attachment propositions, based on replicated research of attachment and caregiving. We next address common misconceptions that hinder adequate practical applications. We present measures of attachment and sensitive parenting that might be helpful for practitioners. We also review evidence-based and promising attachment interventions, discussing core components of (preventative) support for parents or caregivers and the children in their care. We emphasize that attachment theory's clinical value lies not in assigning attachment classifications, but rather in understanding crucial insights into caregiving and early socioemotional development (e.g., secure base phenomena; the value of safe, stable, and shared good-enough care), developed in attachment research over the past 50 years, that may inform policy and clinical reasoning and areas for prevention and intervention.

Cornerstones in attachment research is a landmark history of five major research groups that have helped establish the empirical foundations of the Bowlby-Ainsworth attachment tradition. This essay highlights Duschinsky's use of historical methodology rather than the narrative-style review more familiar to psychologists. We then turn to a recurring theme in the book, the inconsistent use of language and theoretical misunderstandings, especially as they arise at the interface between attachment study and more applied disciplines. We discuss Duschinsky's sociological analysis of how these difficulties arose and are maintained and our own perspective, which emphasizes more difficulties attending communication across declining and emerging paradigms. We expect Cornerstones will be a significant asset as we try to establish new modes of collaboration and communication with educators, clinicians and other practitioners who work not with abstractions and populations but with individuals presenting complex histories and living complex lives.

Presents an obituary for Seymour (Sy) Epstein, who passed away in Amherst on May 20, 2016. Epstein was a significant voice in personality psychology for more than six decades. His wide-ranging, programmatic research addressed cognitive mediation of classical conditioning, stress and coping, the self-concept, drive, conflict, and psychopathology. His research on aggregation strongly influenced the person-situation debate. His most important contribution was his decades-long development of an integrated personality theory, culminating in his magnum opus, Cognitive-Experiential Theory (Oxford University Press, 2014). (PsycINFO Database Record

Disorganized/Disoriented (D) attachment has seen widespread interest from policy makers, practitioners, and clinicians in recent years. However, some of this interest seems to have been based on some false assumptions that (1) attachment measures can be used as definitive assessments of the individual in forensic/child protection settings and that disorganized attachment (2) reliably indicates child maltreatment, (3) is a strong predictor of pathology, and (4) represents a fixed or static "trait" of the child, impervious to development or help. This paper summarizes the evidence showing that these four assumptions are false and misleading. The paper reviews what is known about disorganized infant attachment and clarifies the implications of the classification for clinical and welfare practice with children. In particular, the difference between disorganized attachment and attachment disorder is examined, and a strong case is made for the value of attachment theory for supportive work with families and for the development and evaluation of evidence-based caregiving interventions.

Humans possess a strong innate predisposition to emotionally attach to familiar people around them who provide physical or emotional security. Attachment Theory describes and explains diverse phenomena related to this predisposition, including: infants using their carers as secure-bases from which to explore, and havens of safety to return to when tired or anxious, the development of attachment patterns over ontogenetic and phylogenetic development, and emotional responses to separation and loss throughout the lifespan. This paper proposes that one way for computational modelling to integrate these phenomena is to organise them within temporally nested scenarios, with moment to moment phenomena organised within ontogenetic and phylogenetic sequences. A number of existing agent-based models and robotic attachment simulations capture attachment behaviour, but individual simulations created with different tools and modelling approaches typically do not integrate easily with each other. Two ways to better integrate attachment model are proposed. First, a number of simulations are described that have been created with the same agent-based modelling toolkit, so showing that moment to moment secure base behaviour and the development of individual differences in attachment security can be simulated with closely related architectural designs. Secondly, an integrative modelling approach is proposed where the evaluation of, and comparison between attachment models is guided by reference to a shared conceptual framework for architectures provided by the CogAff schema. This approach can integrate a broad range of emotional processes including: the formation of a set of richer internal representations; and loss of control that can occur in emotional episodes.

A number of research questions arise from an encounter between the elements of 4e cognition and Attachment Theory. These include: (1) whether the Attachment Theory concept of Internal Working Models should be understood in terms of analogue representations more in line with embodied cognition, in addition to traditional cognitivist representations like linguistically mediated narrative measures of attachment meaning?; (2) are infant-carer dyads best thought of as environments of contextual embedding for infant cognition or as an arrangement where the carer can actually extend the infant mind?; and (3) are attachment phenomena best thought of in traditional representational terms or should the attachment control system be reframed in enactive terms where traditional cognitivist representations are: (3i) substituted for sensorimotor skill-focused mediating representations, (3ii) viewed as arising from autopoietic living organism and/or (3iii) mostly composed from the non-contentful mechanisms of basic minds?; A theme that cross-cuts these research questions is how representations for capturing meaning, and structures for adaptive control, are both required to explain the full range of behaviour of interest to Attachment Theory researchers. Implications are considered for future empirical and computational modelling research, and clinical interventions.

John Bowlby introduced the ‘Internal Working Model’ construct into Attachment Theory to explain attachment phenomena such as an individual making plans and predictions about how attachment set-goals can be achieved. For example, when an attached individual in an anxious state considers different ways to gain proximity (and hence security) to their attachment figure before acting. According to Bowlby, an individual can possess multiple Internal Working Models, which can differ in many respects, such as representational format or how much the individual is aware of them. Existing agent based attachment simulations have implemented Internal Working Models but these are greatly simplified in comparison with Bowlby’s rich and diverse conceptualisation. This paper proposes that computational attachment models can be enriched by: (i) incorporating and adapting the idea from the psychoanalytic tradition that experience can be recorded in terms of how structures of mental energy and defence are built rather than representing key attachment experiences in memory. So the particular architectural formations that develop are the residue of experience that can bias and filter future processing; and (ii) viewing cognitive architectures as more contingent and ephemeral in their structure than typically conceived. So that architectures are viewed as not just switching between configurations quickly, like the attractor states in a dynamical system, but doing so in a way that captures and brings to bear coherent biases and filters in processing laid down over long term development.

This study explores links between adults' attachment representations and the task of caring for elderly parents with dementia. Participants were 87 adults serving as primary caregivers of a parent or parent-in-law with dementia. Waters and Waters' ( 2006 ) Attachment Script Assessment was adapted to assess script-like attachment representation in the context of caring for their elderly parent. The quality of adult-elderly parent interactions was assessed using the Level of Expressed Emotions Scale (Cole & Kazarian, 1988 ) and self-report measures of caregivers' perception of caregiving as difficult. Caregivers' secure base script knowledge predicted lower levels of negative expressed emotion. This effect was moderated by the extent to which participants experienced caring for elderly parents as difficult. Attachment representations played a greater role in caregiving when caregiving tasks were perceived as more difficult. These results support the hypothesis that attachment representations influence the quality of care that adults provide their elderly parents. Clinical implications are discussed.

This special double issue of Attachment & Human Development celebrates and honors Mary D. Salter Ainsworth and her lifetime achievements on the 100th anniversary of her birth. The papers we have in...

Attachment Theory describes how humans possess a strong innate predisposition to emotionally attach to familiar people around them who provide physical or emotional security. When infants learn to trust in intimate and enduring relationships they will tend to use their carers to extend their minds. Such cognitive extension is likely to impact mental health by helping infants reach the upper limit of their cognitive performance. Conversely, a caregiver’s failure to gain ‘epistemic trust’ may act as a contributory risk factor for multiple later psychopathologies 1 ATTACHMENT RELATIONSHIPS AND THE EXTENDED MIND HYPOTHESIS The extended mind thesis in cognitive science suggests that entities in the external environment may interact with internal mental processes in such a way that these entities can be seen as extensions of the mind itself [4, 5]. Cognitive extension is usually cast in terms of extending the mind onto inorganic objects in the environment, such as a mathematician doing their ‘working’ on paper. However, extension onto external agents (such as caregivers, teachers, friends or work colleagues) is not ruled out in this approach. For cognitive extension to involve extension of mental states onto an agent rather than an inorganic object, the agent must be strongly trusted, relied upon and accessible as an information provider [5]. There are many adult occupations where intense social interaction and information transfer occurs between workers jointly undertaking complex information critical tasks. When trust is built up over time or through training in surgical teams, between police partners, or in small military groups, then individuals may use other people to extend their own cognition. However, such adult work related examples of social extension of cognition are not the focus of this paper. Instead this paper will concentrate on considering how examples of social extended cognition may occur when caregivers provide external cognitive support to infants and children (whilst also considering attachment partnerships between caregivers and adolescents and between adult romantic partners). The idea that infants, older children and even adult attachment partners all look to their carers as information sources about the broader world is a familiar one. For example, social referencing and joint attention are both well studied topics in developmental psychology [3]. From the perspective of the socially extended mind, infant social referencing and joint attention between infant and carer may be seen as physical actions that make the infant’s mental computations faster, more reliable or less effortful by actually incorporating the carer’s help within those cognitive operations. Socially extended 1 University of Birmingham, UK, email: d.d.petters@cs.bham.ac.uk 2 SUNY, Stony Brook, USA. cognition in infant-carer dyads are likely to be asymmetric with caregivers providing the extra support and the infant’s cognition being extended. So, if a carer (as part of the environment) is coupled to an infant’s cognitive system in the right way, they become part of the infant’s mind. This approach is therefore treating the infant cognition as occurring ‘outside’ and well as ‘inside the head’. How well can the affordances provided by a carer match the infant’s cognitive requirements? How well can carers support higher performance cognition in infants? How closely coupled can infant computational needs and carer response be? The psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott remarked that: “There is no such thing as a baby, only a baby and a mother” [14, page 39]. Winnicott’s view of a closely integrated mother-infant dyad is consonant with the idea of carers extending the minds of infants they care for. What this means is that if the infant’s ongoing computational needs are met by sensitive and timely support from his or her carer then we might say that the carers cognitive support has become part of the infant’s extended mind. Clark shows how language extends minds: “First, the simple act of labelling the world opens up a variety of new computational opportunities and supports the discovery of abstract patterns in nature. Second, encountering or recalling structured sentences supports the development of otherwise unattainable kinds of expertise. And third, linguistic structures contribute to some of the most important yet conceptually complex of all human capacities: our ability to reflect on our own thoughts and characters and our limited but genuine capacity to control and guide the shape and contents of our own thinking” [4, page 44] From our current perspective of exploring how attachment figures may extend infant minds we can see that they may be viewed as fulfilling the same three roles that Clark ascribes to language. That is, caregivers can also help label and conceptualise, structure, and facilitate self-reflection. In developing a framework to explain the origin of the socially extended mind, this paper draws upon Attachment Theory as an existing well-developed theory which is focused upon long term intimate social and emotional interactions, including how trust is formed and can be lost in close relationships. Attachment Theory is also based upon an information processing foundation which facilitates theorizing in terms of internal and external cognition. Serving as mind extension is clearly part of what attachment theorists mean when they say that an attachment figure enables one to ‘live a bigger life’ than would otherwise be possible. After showing how the information processing foundation for Attachment Theory leaves it well placed to be augmented with inclusion of socially extended mind mechanisms, this paper will assess how an Attachment Theory extended in this way is relevant to mental health issues. 2 INTRODUCTION TO ATTACHMENT THEORY Prior to the second war, medical and social scientists understood very little about the nature of human relationships and the security they can bring to an individual. Then, about the time that Alan Turing was making brilliant contributions to his country’s security and the field of cybernetics was being formed, the child psychiatrist John Bowlby began publishing seminal insights into the nature of the child’s tie to its carers and the origins of interpersonal security. Bowlby’s attachment theory grew to include insights from numerous disciplines including psychoanalysis, ethology, cybernetics, cognitive and developmental psychology, and artificial intelligence [2]. The theoretical framework provided by Bowlby has structured and focused the empirical observations of attachment interactions in diverse contexts. These contexts include interactions between infants and children and their caregivers; between romantic partners in adolescence and adulthood; in typical and pathological populations; and observing attachment relations from a biological and comparative psychology perspective. Together they provide a rich description of attachment related affect, behaviour and cognitions, and information about the contexts in which they occur information essential to building and evaluating computational attachment models and simulations [11]. Bowlby’s initial research focus was towards understanding particular normative attachment related social and emotional phenomena such as: the separation distress exhibited by children when they or their mothers were absent due to the infant’s or mother’s hospitalization; the effect of early maternal deprivation on later development; and grief and mourning in infancy [2]. One of Bowlby’s early goals was to construct a scientifically respectable attachment motivation theory that could account for an infant behaviour’s sensitivity to social context. To accomplish this, he first turned to ethology and developed a framework that described the attachment system as an instinctive behaviour system. However, in his more mature theoretical work, Bowlby drew increasingly on control systems theory and on AI based representations such as internal working models (IWMs) and hierarchical plans. This means that the information processing explanations for attachment phenomena can be integrated with newly proposed information processing structures and mechanisms such at those suggested by the Extended Mind framework [12]. 3 THEORETICAL FOUNDATIONS OF ATTACHMENT THEORY 3.1 Ethological underpinnings Attachment Theory is an evolutionary theory which was founded upon the Behaviour System concept from Ethology. In this framework Behaviour Systems control behaviours such as mating, fighting and feeding. Each Behaviour System carries out a species specific function, and has survived in the genome because its functions contribute to biological fitness. Therefore Behaviour Systems are related to one meaning of the term ‘instinct’ [10]. The Behaviour Systems that Bowlby linked to attachment behaviour in human infants are the attachment, fear, sociability and exploration systems [2]. The behaviour systems most closely related to attachment are inherently motivated [9]. This means that infants will work to experience exploration, socialisation and security. These outcomes are therefore primary drives that are not activated as the by-product of any more fundamental process. Behaviour Systems within the Attachment Control System allow a flexible repertoire of behaviours to be produced when pursuing currently active goals. What defines the attachment control system and its constituent behaviours is the outcomes that reliably follow from activating these behaviours. For example, if an infant is anxious and its current goal is to increase its proximity to a carer the infant may cry (which predictably brings the carer closer), or crawl towards the carer themselves. Of course, crying and crawling may also be activated by other behaviour systems, such as, respectively hunger or exploration. For Bowlby, behaviours resulting from the attachment behaviour system and the fear system have the predictable o

A Special Issue such as this, celebrating the 100th year since Mary Ainsworth’s birth, reflects unusual fondness and appreciation. For the editors and contributors, and for Mary Ainsworth’s student...

The mentor-protégé relationship is generally described as one in which a more experienced teacher or counselor serves as a trusted friend and nurtures the development of a protégé over an extended period of time, typically preparing them for a special challenge or career and at the same time building ‘good character’. A review of current literature on mentoring and mentor-protégé relationships suggests the need for a conceptual framework within which to organize the extensive and diverse literature on mentoring and mentor-protégé relationships. The goal of this paper is to see whether Bowlby-Ainsworth attachment theory can provide a useful perspective on mentoring. The paper highlights behaviors and processes identified in attachment study that are recognizable in mentor-protégé relationships and where mechanisms studied closely in attachment research can help focus mentoring research and suggest directions for assessment, program design, and evaluation studies. Processes in play in the initiation, maintenance, and outcomes of mentoring relationships are discussed in light of what we have learned from research on attachment development. Implications from viewing mentoring and mentor-protégé relations through the lens of attachment theory are discussed. Herrera-Alcazar (3rd Year Paper) Attachment Perspective on Mentoring 2 toring) is applied in a wide variety of contexts. Three of the most common are workplace mentoring, faculty-student mentoring, and mentoring of disadvantaged youth (Eby, Rhodes, & Allen, 2007). The term is often used inter-changeably with social support relationships in general, e.g., in referring to school advisors, role model, and supervisors of various kinds including coaches. Clearly, these roles and relationships are quite diverse, sharing some important characteristics and differing in