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Data collection was funded by Grant R01 MH58907 from the National Institute of Mental Health (to J.C.). Support for manuscript preparation was provided by Grant 1 F32 HD47072 from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (to S.S.W.), Janet W. Johnson Fellowships (to L.J.S. and B.S.), and Grant R01 DA18647 from the National Institute on Drug Abuse (to C.W.L.). The initial results were presented at the 2009 meetings of the Society for Research in Child Development. We are grateful for the help of the following people: Matthew J. Dykas, Katherine Ehrlich, Brooke Feeney, Sarah Halcrow, Fatima Ramos-Marcuse, Mindy Rodenberg-Cabrera, Kristin Bernard, and Yair Ziv played important roles in initial study design and/or data collection, coding, and management; Mary Boyer, Claudia Bracero, and Diane Hopkins conducted the newborn assessments; Mary Hood, Diane Hopkins, Mindy Rodenberg-Cabrera, and Stephanie Warner served as interveners; Glen Cooper, Kent Hoffman, and Bert Powell developed the Circle of Security-Home Visiting--4 intervention and served as intervention supervisors; and Susan Paris, Bonnie Conley, June Sroufe, and Alan Sroufe assisted with Strange Situation coding. Above all, we are indebted to the families who generously participated in our study.
Van den Boom's (1994) intervention for low socioeconomic status Dutch mothers and their highly irritable infants increased infant attachment security by 300% compared to control group infants. Belsky (1997a, 2005) advanced a differential susceptibility interpretation of these findings, suggesting that the dramatic impact of the intervention may have emerged because, by focusing on highly irritable newborns, van den Boom may have examined only infants who were most susceptible to rearing influences. Belsky's interpretation is reasonable given meta-analytic findings indicating that the effects of attachment-based interventions are typically more moderate (Bakermans-Kranenburg, van IJzendoorn, & Juffer, 2003). Given the importance of infant attachment security to later developmental outcomes (NICHD Early Child Care Research Network, 2006; Sroufe, Egeland, Carlson, & Collins, 2005; for a review, see Thompson, 2008), we sought to determine whether we could again find such dramatic effects with a similarly brief intervention and whether by expanding the irritability criterion we could extend the benefits of intervention to more infants.
We also set out to broaden the conceptual relevance of this work by examining the interaction between infant irritability and...