Parents and infants: determinants of attachment in a ... - Generation R

Chapter 6
neurological disorders, and 3) Children may develop atypical attachment
relationships due to both experience and child factors. These children may
be more susceptible for the influence of contextual factors due to neurodevelopmental
predispositions.
The present study investigated whether disorganized attachment has a
neurobiological component. We hypothesized that early structural differences
in the gangliothalamic ovoid are related to later attachment disorganization.
In contrast, we expected that early differences in general indicators
of brain development, such as the volume of the lateral ventricles (Roza,
Govaert, Vrooman, Lequin, Hofman, Steegers et al., 2008b) do not predict
disorganized attachment. In addition, we examined the role of contextual
risk factors for disorganized attachment to test whether the gangliothalamic
ovoid diameter predicts attachment disorganization independent of a set of
contextual risk factors.
Method
Study population
This research was conducted within Generation R, a population-based
cohort from fetal life onwards in the Netherlands (Jaddoe, Van Duijn, Van
der Heijden, Mackenbach, Moll, et al., 2008). The study was conducted
in accordance with the guidelines of the World Medical Association
Declaration of Helsinki and was approved by the Medical Ethics Committee
of Erasmus Medical Center. Written informed consent was obtained from
all adult participants. The study population consisted of 900 infants and
their parents who participated in the visit at the research center scheduled
six weeks postpartum. This cohort was ethnically homogeneous (indigenous
Dutch) to reduce confounding and effect modification. All children
were born between February 2003 and August 2005. During the 6-week
visit, diameter of the gangliothalamic ovoid was successfully measured in
793 children. Nineteen children were excluded because they were twins
and another 31 children because of lacking measures of head circumference.
Attachment classification at 14 months was available for 629 of the
remaining children (88% with the mother, 12% with the father). This group
included no children with known neurological illnesses. Data on the volume
of the lateral ventricles was available 596 of these children.
The group of included children (n = 629) differed from the children
who could not be included due to missing data (n = 271) on the following
measures: Mothers of included children were somewhat older (M = 32.0,
108