Paul Caldo
Paul Caldo is first author of the 2023 paper that asked, with the analysis fixed in advance, how much a baby's Strange Situation classification actually predicts about the adult that baby becomes. The answer is little, and the detail underneath the answer is worse for the theory than the headline.
Who they are
Two American studies have followed children from infancy into adulthood: the Minnesota Longitudinal Study of Risk and Adaptation, which deliberately recruited families under strain, and the much larger NICHD study running across many sites. Between them they are the best evidence the field will ever have on this question.
The problem with analysing data that rich is that there are many ways to do it, and a researcher who tries several and reports the one that worked will find something whatever is there. Caldo and colleagues, with a team including Glenn Roisman and Chris Fraley, wrote down exactly what they would test and how before running any of it.
Infant attachment predicted later socioemotional outcomes, weakly. Once four ordinary demographic differences were accounted for, the associations sat at or below the small range in both samples, the kind of effect that is real across thousands of people and invisible in any one of them.
The finding that should have made more noise is the specificity failure. Infant attachment forecast academic skills about as well as it forecast socioemotional outcomes, and in the Minnesota sample slightly better. Attachment theory does not predict that. A measure supposed to be specifically about emotional and social development, which predicts arithmetic equally well, is probably picking up something broader about a child's circumstances.
The team also checked whether compositing two Strange Situations, at twelve and eighteen months, improved prediction. It did not substantively.
Key papers
Key papers
Caldo is on this site for one paper, and it is a large one.
Caldo, P. D., Magro, S. W., Raby, K. L., Groh, A. M., Vandell, D. L., Booth-LaForce, C., Fraley, R. C., Carlson, E. A., Simpson, J. A., & Roisman, G. I. (2023). Development and Psychopathology, 37(1), 147-163. DOI 10.1017/S0954579423001487. The preregistered reanalysis of the Minnesota Longitudinal Study and the NICHD study. Infant Strange Situation classification predicted adult socioemotional outcomes weakly once ordinary demographic differences were accounted for, and predicted academic outcomes about as well or, in the Minnesota sample, slightly better. Compositing two Strange Situations, at twelve and eighteen months, did not substantively improve prediction.
The article title is not recorded in the vault and is not supplied here.
Key ideas
Register the analysis on the field's own flagship measure. Rare, and it changed the answer.
The specificity failure is the real finding. Predicting the wrong thing as well as the right thing tells you what a measure is picking up.
Two measurements did not help, which fits the instrument's weak agreement with itself.
Concepts on this site
Sources
- Caldo, P. D., Magro, S. W., Raby, K. L., Groh, A. M., Vandell, D. L., Booth-LaForce, C., Fraley, R. C., Carlson, E. A., Simpson, J. A., & Roisman, G. I. (2023). Development and Psychopathology, 37(1), 147-163. DOI 10.1017/S0954579423001487.