Frontiers in Psychology (Jul 2016)

Disorganization, COMT, and Children’s Social Behavior: The Norwegian Hypothesis of Legacy of Disorganized Attachment

  • Zhi Li,
  • Beate Wold Hygen,
  • Keith Widaman,
  • Turid Suzanne Berg-Nielsen,
  • Lars Wichstrøm,
  • Lars Wichstrøm,
  • Jay Belsky

DOI
https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.01013
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 7

Abstract

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Why is disorganized attachment associated with punitive-controlling behavior in some, but caregiving-controlling in others? Hygen and associates (2014) proposed that variation in the Catechol-O-methyl transferase(COMT) Val158Met genotype explains this variation, providing preliminary data to this effect. We offer a conceptual replication, analyzing data on 560 children (males: 275) drawn from the NICHD Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development. As predicted, competitive model-fitting indicated that disorganized infants carrying Met alleles engage in more positive behavior and less negative behavior than other children at age 5 and 11, with the reverse true of Val/Val homozygotes, seemingly consistent with caregiving-controlling and punitive-controlling styles, respectively, but only in the case of maternal and not teacher reports, thereby confirmating a relationship-specific hypothesis.

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