The influence of temperament and mothering on attachment and exploration: An experimental manipulation of sensitive responsiveness among lower class mothers with irritable infants

selected on irritability shortly after birth and their mothers were randomly assigned to 2 interven-tion and 2 control groups to test the hypothesis that enhancing maternal sensitive responsiveness will improve quality of mother-infant interaction, infant exploration, and attachment. The inter-vention lasted 3 months and ended when the child was 9 months of age. When infants were 9 months of age, intervention group mothers were significantly more responsive, stimulating, visu-ally attentive, and controlling of their infant's behavior than control group mothers. Intervention infants had higher scores than control infants on sociability, self-soothing, and exploration, and they cried less. Quality of exploration also improved, with intervention infants engaged in cogni-tively sophisticated kinds of exploration more than control infants. At 12 months of age, signifi-cantly more intervention group dyads were securely attached than control group dyads. Over the last 15 years, researchers have attachments have been identified. The pres-demonstiated that insecurely attached in- ent study is an intervention study conceptu-fants function less well than their securely ally linked to attachment theory, attached peers on a variety of tasks during their toddler, preschool, and beginning According to attachment theory, differ