The stability of attachment security from infancy to adolescence and early adulthood: general discussion.

For over three decades, critics of the developmental and psychometric paradigms have argued that individual differences are neither stable, coherent, nor clinically significant. The present studies extend a long line of research demonstrating the coherence of individual development in attachment security. They make it clear that attachment security can be stable from infancy through early adulthood and that change in attachment security is meaningfully related to changes in the family environment. The task now is to better understand the roles of cross-age consistency in caregiver behavior and the structure of mental representations of early experience in stability and change.