Developmental trajectories of the mother-infant attachment bond and their behavioural and (neuro)physiological correlates: a research in progress.

A growing interest has been devoted to the definition of integrated approaches for the study of behavioural and neuro-bio-physiological correlates of affective-relational development, in terms of precursors and basis of the organization of attachment. The research can be divided as follow: a) studies that investigated the infant’s early interactive competences and their role on the development of attachment at 12 months through stressful observational situations and the analysis of behavioral indicators. These studies highlighted inter-individual differences in affect, attention, touch and spatial orientation during the infant-caregiver interactions that seem then to be predictive of later attachment; b) studies which used classical experimental paradigm of cognitive and affective neuroscience (pc-monitor stimuli) and stressed that in the 1st year, infants are already able to process face and eye gaze and to perceive others’ emotions and actions; c) studies focused on emotion regulation strategies integrating interactive abilities with neural and physiological correlates in 12 and 18 month-old infants which contributed to highlight the main role of the prefrontal cortex in the emotion processing. Anyway, at our knowledge no research about the early forerunners of infant attachment and their behavioral and neuro-bio-physiological correlates measured during “in vivo” interactions are currently available. Starting from this perspective the present work is to describe an original research project that through a longitudinal design and stressful separation-reunion paradigm proposes to investigate behavioral (self-regulation strategies), physiological (cortisol and vagal tone) and neural (cerebral hemodynamic flux) correlates of infant-caregiver interactions at 3, 6, 9, and infant attachment at 12 months.