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The current article presents results from a twin study of genetic and environmental components of maternal sensitivity and infant attachment and their association. The sample consisted of 136 twin pairs from 2 sites: Leiden, the Netherlands, and London, UK. Maternal sensitivity was assessed in the home at 9-10 months, and infant attachment security was observed in the laboratory at 12 months. The study yielded little evidence that genetic factors are involved in variations between twins in maternal sensitivity ratings but did find that shared variance in maternal sensitivity was able to account for some of the similarity between twins in attachment security. Weak nonshared associations between sensitivity and attachment appeared to suppress the magnitude of the correlation between attachment and sensitivity in twin children. The results could indicate that the attachment security of one twin may depend on the relationship the parent has with the other twin. The results are brought to bear on the validity of attachment theory as a theory of primarily shared environmental effects in children's development and the continuing challenge posed to attachment theory by within-family differences in socioemotional processes.

The present era of major cutbacks in intensive treatment programs throughout Europe stresses the importance of evaluating the outcomes of such programs for adolescents with severe personality pathology and comorbidity. Personality pathology has proven to be a valid concept in adolescents, with relatively high prevalence, that needs to be targeted by evidence-based interventions. The present study focused on the evaluation of outcomes of a 12-month mentalization-based treatment for adolescents (MBT-A) program in 118 inpatient adolescents with personality pathology symptoms, using a multi-informant multidomain design. The results showed that during treatment, adolescents improved on general psychiatric symptoms, personality pathology dimensions, and health-related and generic quality of life. Improvement was not only statistically significant, but also clinically important, especially for internalizing domains. Implications for clinical practice and research are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article describes a series of studies involving 2,730 participants on the development and validity testing of the Severity Indices of Personality Problems (SIPP), a self-report questionnaire covering important core components of (mal)adaptive personality functioning. Results show that the 16 facets constituted homogeneous item clusters (i.e., unidimensional and internally consistent parcels) that fit well into 5 clinically interpretable, higher order domains: self-control, identity integration, relational capacities, social concordance, and responsibility. These domains appeared to have good concurrent validity across various populations, good convergent validity in terms of associations with interview ratings of the severity of personality pathology, and good discriminant validity in terms of associations with trait-based personality disorder dimensions. Furthermore, results suggest that the domain scores are stable over a time interval of 14-21 days in a student sample but are sensitive to change over a 2-year follow-up interval in a treated patient population. Taken together, the final instrument, the SIPP-118, provides a set of 5 reliable, valid, and efficient indices of the core components of (mal)adaptive personality functioning.

In a sample of 157 monozygotic and dizygotic twins, genetic and environmental influences on infant attachment and temperament were quantified. Only unique environmental or error components could explain the variance in disorganized versus organized attachment as assessed in the Ainsworth Strange Situation Procedure. For secure versus nonsecure attachment, 52% of the variance in attachment security was explained by shared environment, and 48% of the variance was explained by unique environmental factors and measurement error. The role of genetic factors in attachment disorganization and attachment security was negligible. Genetic factors explained 77% of the variance in temperamental reactivity, and unique environmental factors and measurement error explained 23%. Differences in temperamental reactivity were not associated with attachment concordance.