studies & articles

The Blog

One of the many pleasures of being a professor was feeling the need to stay on top of the research in psychology. When I first learned about the half-life of knowledge, the literature typically said it was 3-5 years in technical fields. As a retired professor, I am still a member of the American Psychological Association and subscribe to a service that delivers abstracts and open-source articles from a large number of journals. As an alumna of Harvard, I also get information from them and I have the time to peruse multiple sources. This is a pleasure most professionals don’t have, especially if they value
work-life balance.

I still love research and, when I was asked to write the blog, I enthusiastically agreed. I try to select articles based on their relevance to practitioners, but also to capture both emerging themes and important corrections. I am hopeful that, moving forward, we will have ways to enable readers to easily engage in conversations with me and each other.

-Dr. Karen Nelson

Karen Nelson Karen Nelson

Mothers’ parenting self-efficacy, attachment, and parenting

I have indicated before that I like research on attachment. This is an important paper. Cao, Zhou & Leerkes (2023) published “Primiparous Mothers’ Parenting Self-Efficacy in Managing Toddler Distress: Childhood nonsupportive emotion socialization, adult attachment style, and toddler temperament as antecedents” in Emotion.

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Karen Nelson Karen Nelson

 Attachment through the lifespan

I am going to present four longitudinal studies of attachment with research addressing parental experience before becoming parents, attachment history and friendships, parent-adolescent relationships and successful peer and romantic relationships, and insecure attachment and personality pathology. Each study is nuanced and complex but well worth examining.

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Karen Nelson Karen Nelson

Three studies of Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD)

Fleck, et al. (2022) published “Child Versus Adolescent Borderline Personality Disorder Traits: Frequency, psychosocial correlates, and observed mother–child interactions” in Personality Disorders: Theory, Research, and Treatment. This study is helpful in examining child behavior. Here’s the abstract:

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