Social Neuroscience of Human Attachment Lab

26/09/2026

Attachment Insights #42: What happens when goes to ? Attachment science in and child decisions

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Attachment concepts are increasingly used in family courts, where they can directly affect decisions about where, and with whom, a child grows up. What can attachment science offer in this setting? Let’s have a closer look!

An international consensus statement (Forslund et al., 2022) proposes three attachment principles for courts. (1) Children need familiar, non-abusive and non-neglecting caregivers. (2) Continuity of good enough care should be valued highly. And (3) a network of attachment relationships is an asset for children.

Attachment measures, however, were developed and validated for research at the group level. The differences they reveal are modest, with many individual exceptions. They cannot tell us with confidence what care an individual child has received or how that child will develop. Their validity under the acute stress of court proceedings is also unknown.

This has several implications. An insecure classification does not indicate a “weak” bond, and almost half of all children are classified as insecure. Disorganised attachment is not an indicator of maltreatment in an individual case, and it is not an attachment disorder. Attachment classifications should not be used to decide time allocation between parents. And a caregiver’s capacity to provide a safe haven should be given more weight than a child’s attachment classification.

A recent practitioner review (Opie et al., 2026) makes very similar points and summarises what vulnerable children need as safe, stable and shared family-based care.

Both papers are also open about disagreements among their authors and about what remains unknown, for example how much time is needed to develop an attachment relationship, or whether overnights affect infants’ attachment. To me, this openness is one of their main strengths. It offers courts and practitioners a small set of well-supported principles, together with a clear account of where the evidence currently ends.

👉🏻 You can read the Attachment Insights #42 post here: https://pvrticka.com/attachment-insights/ #42

👉🏻 The more extensive Substack post on the same topic, including all relevant scientific references, can be found here: https://pvrticka.substack.com/p/what-happens-when-attachment-goes-to-court

Psychology at University of Essex
University of Essex
Society for Emotion and Attachment Studies

12/09/2026

About a week ago, Manuela Kouakou published a very interesting and timely Substack essay on "The Attachment Panic Has Gone Too Far (https://myfertilebrain.substack.com/p/the-attachment-panic-has-gone-too). In her essay, she looks at how gets translated into content online, and at the distance between what the research supports and what is claimed in its name, particularly around separation and day care.

Our SoNeAt Lab PI, Dr Pascal Vrticka, and Manuela Kouakou started talking shortly thereafter, especially about Dr Vrticka's Attachment Insights post on attachment, bonding and caregiving (https://pvrticka.com/attachment-insights/). Based on their discussion, Manuela has come up with a three-part parent FAQ, with the first part now available on "Attunement and ".

👉🏻 https://myfertilebrain.substack.com/p/an-attachment-researcher-speaks-to

Thank you, Manuela, for this opportunity to share our SoNeAt Lab's latest insights from attachment science with .

Stay tuned for Part 2 and Part 3!

Psychology at University of Essex
University of Essex
Society for Emotion and Attachment Studies

A parent FAQ with attachment researcher Dr Pascal Vrtička (PhD)

04/08/2026

#40: Insecure attachment - deficit or strength?

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is increasingly described as a hidden , or even a "superpower". Let's have a closer look!

The argument runs in two steps. Insecure attachment is not a defect. Therefore it must be a strength. The first step is correct. The second does not follow from it.

Once granted, the strength is read off the behaviour. Anxious restated positively becomes attunement. Avoidant restated positively becomes independence. Nothing is added except a change of valence.

The capacities themselves are real. Attachment anxiety is linked with faster detection and with warning others without delay. But when ability was separated from bias, anxiously attached individuals showed no better ability to tell lies from truths, only a bias towards assuming deceit. Where accuracy was found, it came with distress and declining closeness. Attachment anxiety also reduces the social malleability of the space around the body.

Attachment avoidance is well organised and does pay in solitary domains. Yet, deactivating adults show rising skin conductance while describing their childhoods positively, and avoidant infants show elevated while appearing calm. A partner's presence raises rather than lowers their . The composure is not an absence of regulatory work but its relocation.

Social defence theory is often cited in support. But its authors argue that insecurely attached individuals bear a cost from which the group benefits. The early warning and the fast escape are proposed to help everyone else. The individual cost is the premise the theory exists to explain, not an oversight.

So what are insecure patterns? Neither defects nor strengths. They are adaptations, and an adaptation is a trade made under constraint. It bought something real, at a price, given the alternatives available at the time. The price is still being paid.

This matters. A "wired-in" strength offers nothing to recalibrate. A costly estimate about others' availability can be revised, and there is good reason to.

👉🏻For references and a more detailed account, see Dr Pascal Vrticka's new post on Substack: https://pvrticka.substack.com/p/the-running-costs-of-attachment

👉🏻 You can also read it here as part of his Attachment Insights series: https://pvrticka.com/attachment-insights/ #40

29/07/2026

Our SoNeAt Lab's fNIRS hyperscannig equipment in action in the community 🔦🧠🤩!

29/07/2026

It has been a while since our PI, Dr Pascal Vrticka, and his colleagues published their functional neuro-anatomical models of human pertaining to organised and ( and ) attachment ( ) as well as disrupted / disorganised attachment ( ), a more detailed neurobiological narrative on the involved systems, and an integrative view linking attachment to bioenergetic energy management, and (for a summary, see here: https://pvrticka.com/attachment/nama_and_namda/).

Dr Pascal Vrticka and his co-author Prof Tsachi Ein-Dor are therefore very excited to share that there now is a new available that goes an important step further by extending these considerations from attachment to , and by providing a detailed account of the most likely neural computations as part of - on both the individual brain level as well as on the level of the dyad. In doing so, they propose that the attachment system is one predictive-allostatic loop, the four NAMA modules are its successive stages, and organised, disrupted, and disorganised attachment are characteristic settings of the precision parameters that govern it.

They furthermore extend this new account to the caregiving system, which shares the same architecture but infers rather than senses both the error that initiates its loop and the signal that terminates it. And they examine how, at the level of the , interpersonal neural and bio-behavioural are read as indices of where regulatory work is invested rather than of bond quality directly. Finally, they address persistent misconceptions in -informed practice and set out a measurement programme.

👉🏻 You can read the preprint here: https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/m29kq_v1.

👉🏻 A summary on Substack is available here: https://pvrticka.substack.com/p/attachment-and-caregiving-as-social-allostatic-inference.

Please do get in touch if you have any questions or comments, also to improve the paper as it goes through peer review.

Psychology at University of Essex
University of Essex
Society for Emotion and Attachment Studies

28/07/2026

Our PI, Dr Pascal Vrticka, was interviewed by Josh Elgin from the BBC News about attachment. Thank you for this opportunity.

Psychology at University of Essex
University of Essex

Attachment theory is everywhere right now, but what is it and how can you use it to improve your relationships?

11/07/2026

#39 - and Attachment Science

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What is , how does it relate to , and is there any scientific evidence on its promises about calmer, happier ? Let's have a closer look!

Gentle parenting centres on , , respect for the child, and firm but non-punitive . The term was introduced around 2015 by parenting author Sarah Ockwell-Smith and grew mainly through social media. It was not developed by scientists; it reads more as a synthesis of existing ideas, close to and , and is often said to draw on attachment-theory principles.

So are there real links to ? Some genuine ones. Gentle parenting’s emphasis on warmth, , and understanding a child's mind maps onto two well-evidenced routes to attachment: (1) (the accurate, timely reading of a child's signals), and (2) (the capacity to hold a child's mind in mind). These two routes are real and evidence-based, but not unique to or derived from gentle parenting.

Does applying gentle parenting benefit children? Here the picture is thin. A first systematic investigation from 2024 of what gentle parenting entails examined what 100 parents mean by the term and how they cope, not its effects on children. Evidence on child outcomes therefore is essentially absent, and gentle parenting’s promises about calmer, happier children remain scientifically untested. Moreover, on standardised measures of Baumrind's four styles (i.e., , indulgent, authoritarian, neglectful), the study didn’t find any significant differences between self-identified gentle and other parents. Finally, while the approach is "extraordinarily gentle" for children, it may carry a unique psychological weight for parents.

In short: Gentle parenting is a popular, and especially social media synthesis of concepts that have been tested in their own right. What it borrows aligns with what supports secure child attachment. Yet, what it adds as a named construct has not (yet) been scientifically shown to help children. It’s thus worth keeping in mind where the science ends and the label begins.

👉🏻For further reading and scientific references, please see: https://pvrticka.com/attachment-insights/ #39.

Psychology at University of Essex
University of Essex
Society for Emotion and Attachment Studies

11/07/2026

The SoNeAt Lab at the International Attachment Conference (IAC2026) in Leuven, Belgium.

11/07/2026

Our SoNeAt Lab (Psychology at University of Essex / University of Essex) had a fantastic time at this year's International Attachment Conference ( ) at KU Leuven organised by Guy Bosmans, Pasco Fearon et al. within the Society for Emotion and Attachment Studies.

It all started with our one-day Special Interest Research Group on the Social Neuroscience of Human Attachment (SIRG - https://pvrticka.com/sirg-soneat/) Pre-Conference with brilliant keynotes by Omri Gillath, Jana Runze and Paula Oliveira, PhD, a roundtable discussion (moderated by Anne Rifkin-Graboi) and many oral and poster presentations, including by Laura Mtewele, Melike Kıymaz & Nadia Curtis and Lucas Sebastián Canga.

What followed were three brilliant days of attachment science across domains and methods during which we were able to showcase the breadth, width and depth of SoNeAt research as part of three symposia.

The first symposium on " and Bio-Behavioural : The Latest Insights from Relational " centred around our research as part of our Studies (https://www.essex.ac.uk/research-projects/trio) in collaboration with East Suffolk and North Essex NHS Foundation Trust (Ben Marlow) with presentations by Anıl Karabulut, Inês Rodrigues and Laura Mtewele.

The second symposium on "An Interdisciplinary Perspective on Attachment Integrating Contributions from Developmental and Social Psychology with Social Neuroscience" took a journey across behavioural, brain activation, brain structure and interpersonal neural synchrony data in association with attachment with talks by Mathilde Gallistl, Johanna Hamann, Anıl Karabulut and Inês Rodrigues.

And the third symposium, dedicated to our SIRG SoNeAt ("Exploring the latest Insights into the Social Neuroscience of Human Attachment") again demonstrated the multi-method approach from to brain activity and structure to synchrony with talks by Lars White, Hannah Drew, Grace Burns and Melanie Kungl.

Finally, there were also poster presentations by Laura Mtewele, Melike Kıymaz & Nadia Curtis, Lucas Sebastián Canga as well as yours truly and Jonathan Wolf-Phillips (the latter on our Attachment-Informed [ ] framework: https://attachmentinformedleadership.substack.com/).

Thank you very much to the organisers and presenters - it was a blast!

Please get in touch if you wish to learn more about our SoNeAt Lab's research, our SIRG SoNeAt, AIL, or anything else related to attachment science. Thank you.

09/06/2026

38: Does the body really "keep the score"?

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In their new paper “The body does not keep the score: trauma, predictive coding, and the restoration of metastability”, Kotler et al. (2026) revisit van der Kolk’s book as part of an “updated reframing”. Let’s have a closer look!

Kotler et al. agree that is a deeply embodied experience rather than merely "in the head”, and that physical somatic states are central to the traumatic process. They side with the book's focus on concepts like , embodied , and the dynamic functional interactions between different neural networks mediating them. They also support the book's use of the Somatic Marker Hypothesis that explains how emotions are fundamentally tied to bodily states. Finally, Kotler et al. agree that traumatic is qualitatively different from ordinary memory and that it can emerge after years of being forgotten.

That said, Kotler et al. contend that the literal interpretation of trauma being "stored" in physical tissues is biologically inaccurate. Trauma isn’t a memory lodged in non-innervated flesh but a disruption of and dynamic flexibility, specifically a loss of (i.e., the brain's ability to fluidly switch between different states). Consequently, the "score" felt in the body is an artifact of circular inference: the brain predicts danger, senses physical arousal, and then misinterprets that arousal as proof of an ongoing threat. Their account reframes the body as a messenger of the brain's current predictions rather than a physical archive of past events.

The authors also argue that the book unintentionally reinforces the view that parts of the body are not connected to or governed by neural processes. Similarly, they challenge the book's separation of rational and emotional memory systems, maintaining that these processes are fully integrated and that all “somatic markers” always originate in neural processes rather than independent bodily storage.

Ultimately, Kotler et al.’s shift from a "storage model” to a "prediction model” moves the focus of away from "releasing" buried emotions and toward retraining the brain's predictive flexibility to restore agency and movement.

👉🏻 https://pvrticka.com/attachment-insights/ #38

Psychology at University of Essex
University of Essex
Society for Emotion and Attachment Studies