Susan Spieker
Biographic Data
| ID | 4608991 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Susan Spieker |
| GIVEN NAMES | Susan |
| FAMILY NAME | Spieker |
| SIGNATURE | SPIEKER S |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Washington |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-4768-0181 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 33 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 194 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 33 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1982 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
The development of the Promoting First Relationships home visiting program and caregivers’ comments about their experiences across four RCT studies
Promoting First Relationships (PFR) is an evidence‐based home‐visiting program for caregivers and their children from birth to age 5 years. It focuses on caregiver–child interaction, attachment, and relationship quality using video feedback of unedited recordings to elicit reflection and provide positive feedback linked to knowledge development. This paper provides a brief history of PFR and reports on a qualitative study of 222 caregivers’ comme…
Retention and turnover of teaching staff in a high-quality early childhood network
What works for whom? Mother's psychological distress as a moderator of the effectiveness of a home visiting intervention
Attachment‐based home visiting programs that serve new mothers experiencing psychological distress may advance health equity by helping families systemically exposed to adversity. This study examined whether one such program (Promoting First Relationships/PFR) had particularly beneficial effects on maternal and child relationship outcomes for mothers reporting the greatest psychological distress. A randomized controlled trial of the PFR program i…
Randomized trial of promoting first relationships for new mothers who received community mental health services in pregnancy
The effectiveness of Promoting First Relationships (PFR), a 10-week home visiting program with video feedback, was tested in a randomized controlled trial involving 252 mothers and their 8- to 12-week-old infants. Mothers were eligible if they initiated treatment after mental health screening (depression, anxiety, posttraumatic stress disorder [PTSD]) at a community or public health primary care center in pregnancy. At baseline, 51% had mild to s…
Caring for healthcare providers in Covid-19
There is concern for the mental health of healthcare providers during the COVID-19 pandemic. In this article, we focus on the protective strategies that all people, but in this case healthcare providers, use when facing danger and how specific preventive responses could reduce the mental health burden to nurses, doctors, and emergency medical personnel working in hospitals. Our primary contributions are to demonstrate that healthcare providers ar…
Family Functional Formulations as Guides to Psychological Treatment
Parental Childhood Adversity, Depressive Symptoms, and Parenting Quality
Parents who are involved with child welfare services (CWSI) often have a history of childhood adversity and depressive symptoms. Both affect parenting quality, which in turn influences child adaptive functioning. We tested a model of the relations between parental depression and child regulatory outcomes first proposed by K. Lyons‐Ruth, R. Wolfe, A. Lyubchik, and R. Steingard (2002). We hypothesized that both parental depression and parenting qua…
Can Attachment Inform Decision‐making in Child Protection and Forensic Settings
The historic publication of the “consensus statement” on not using the “D/disorganized” category in the infant Strange Situation (M. Ainsworth, M. Blehar, E. Waters, & S. Wall, 1978) for case‐specific child protection work (P. Granqvist et al., 2017) opens the door for a broader discussion of different branches of attachment theory and different attachment classificatory systems applied to infants, young children, and their parents. We agree with…
Dynamic‐maturational Model of Attachment and Adaptation Versus Abc+d Assessments of Attachment in Child Protection and Treatment
In this brief response, we commend the commentary authors for joining a dialogue about the future of individual differences in attachment both around person‐specific forensic and clinical issues also around working together to develop theory and coding practices. We point to several areas of explicit and implicit agreement and discuss several misunderstandings. We close with a proposal for future work together, possibly using the only set of vide…
Disorganized attachment in infancy
Disorganized/Disoriented (D) attachment has seen widespread interest from policy makers, practitioners, and clinicians in recent years. However, some of this interest seems to have been based on some false assumptions that (1) attachment measures can be used as definitive assessments of the individual in forensic/child protection settings and that disorganized attachment (2) reliably indicates child maltreatment, (3) is a strong predictor of path…
Ensuring Implementation Fidelity of a 10-Week Home Visiting Program in Two Randomized Clinical Trials
Promoting birth parents' relationships with their toddlers upon reunification
Permanency outcomes for toddlers in child welfare two years after a randomized trial of a parenting intervention
The Longitudinal Link Between Parenting and Child Aggression
Randomized trial of Promoting First Relationships
Intervention Effects on Morning and Stimulated Cortisol Responses among Toddlers in Foster Care
Toddlers in child welfare often have a dysregulated stress response. We tested whether toddlers with caregivers randomized to a 10‐week attachment‐based intervention, Promoting First Relationships (PFR; J.F. Kelly, D. Sandoval, T.G. Zuckerman, & K. Buehlman, 2008) would show postintervention change in stimulated salivary cortisol patterns during a research home visit involving a separation–reunion procedure, as compared to a condition including c…
Relational Aggression in Middle Childhood
This study examined gender differences in the level and developmental course of relational aggression in middle childhood, as well as early predictors and outcomes of relational aggression, after controlling for concurrent physical aggression. Relational (RAgg) and Physical aggression (PAgg) scores for 558 boys and 545 girls at ages 8-11 in the NICHD Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development (SECCYD) were created by combining the highest ra…
The Developmental Significance of Adolescent Romantic Relationships
From a longitudinal sample (n = 957; 49.9% male; 77.3% White/non-Hispanic) of participants studied from infancy through age 15, adolescents' depth of engagement in, and quality of romantic relationships were predicted from early and contemporaneous parent-child interactive quality and peer social competence. High quality maternal parenting and peer experiences prior to and during adolescence tended to be negatively associated with the depth of en…
Trajectories of aggression from toddlerhood to age 9 predict academic and social functioning through age 12
Background: Using longitudinal data from the NICHD Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development, we examined behavior problems and social and academic outcomes from ages 9 through 12 in children classified into five trajectories of physical aggression, on the basis of maternal ratings obtained from 24 months through 9 years ( N = 1195). Methods: Outcome data were obtained from teacher reports, observations of children's behavior, and children'…
Life Course Heterogeneity in the Transition from Adolescence to Adulthood Among Adolescent Mothers
Longitudinal data were used to examine pathways taken by 227 adolescent mothers during the transition from adolescence into adulthood. Latent profile analysis identified three sub‐groups of adolescent mothers from 6 months to 6 years postpartum: a problem‐prone profile (15%), a psychologically vulnerable profile (42%), and a normative profile (43%). Group membership was related to long‐term adult outcomes (adult status markers, health‐risk and de…
Are infant attachment patterns continuously or categorically distributed? A taxometric analysis of strange situation behavior
Contemporary attachment research is based on the assumption that at least three types of infant attachment patterns exist: secure, avoidant, and resistant. It is not known, however, whether individual differences in attachment organization are more consistent with a continuous or a categorical model. The authors addressed this issue by applying P. E. Meehl's (1973, 1992) taxometric techniques for distinguishing latent types (i.e., classes, natura…
What are the differences between dimensional and categorical models of individual differences in attachment? Reply to Cassidy (2003), Cummings (2003), Sroufe (2003), and Waters and Beauchaine (2003)
Multigenerational Coresidence and Childrearing Conflict
We examine the associations among multigenerational coresidence, intrafamilial conflict over childrearing, and parenting stress in 190 young adolescent mothers at 6, 12, and 24 months postpartum. Analyses assessed the association between coresidence and conflict on parenting stress in 2 ways. To investigate associations between coresidence and conflict at specific points postpartum, 3 cross-sectional analyses were conducted. To assess the associa…
Psychological Distress and Substance Use by Adolescent Mothers
This study examines associations between psychological distress and alcohol and drug use across the first five years of raising a child and parenting quality at child age six for 185 adolescent mothers. Overall, alcohol and other drug use in this sample was relatively low, but drug use was associated with more mother-reported unrealistic expectations of child behavior and more attributions of child intent to annoy parent by misbehaving. Maternal …
Infants of depressed and nondepressed mothers exhibit differences in frontal brain electrical activity during the expression of negative emotions
Studies have shown that infants of depressed mothers express negative emotions more frequently than infants of nondepressed mothers. The present study examined electrical brain activity during expression of negative and positive emotions in infants of depressed and nondepressed mothers. Infants, 11 to 17 months of age, were exposed to conditions designed to elicit positive and negative emotions while electroencephalographic (EEG) activity was mea…
Are infant attachment patterns continuously or categorically distributed? A taxometric analysis of strange situation behavior
Contemporary attachment research is based on the assumption that at least three types of infant attachment patterns exist: secure, avoidant, and resistant. It is not known, however, whether individual differences in attachment organization are more consistent with a continuous or a categorical model. The authors addressed this issue by applying P. E. Meehl's (1973, 1992) taxometric techniques for distinguishing latent types (i.e., classes, natura…
Roles of living arrangements and grandmother social support in adolescent mothering and infant attachment
We examined the roles of social support from adolescents' mothers and living arrangements in 197 adolescent mother-infant pairs. Major observational measures were teaching interactions, Home Observation for Measurement of the Environment (HOME) scores, and infant attachment security. Adolescents living with neither mothers nor partners had better teaching interactions but lower HOME scores compared with those living with mothers. High mother supp…
The Developmental Significance of Adolescent Romantic Relationships
From a longitudinal sample (n = 957; 49.9% male; 77.3% White/non-Hispanic) of participants studied from infancy through age 15, adolescents' depth of engagement in, and quality of romantic relationships were predicted from early and contemporaneous parent-child interactive quality and peer social competence. High quality maternal parenting and peer experiences prior to and during adolescence tended to be negatively associated with the depth of en…
Development of maternal social skills in multiproblem families
Life Course Heterogeneity in the Transition from Adolescence to Adulthood Among Adolescent Mothers
Longitudinal data were used to examine pathways taken by 227 adolescent mothers during the transition from adolescence into adulthood. Latent profile analysis identified three sub‐groups of adolescent mothers from 6 months to 6 years postpartum: a problem‐prone profile (15%), a psychologically vulnerable profile (42%), and a normative profile (43%). Group membership was related to long‐term adult outcomes (adult status markers, health‐risk and de…
Intonation contours as signals in maternal speech to prelinguistic infants
Retention and turnover of teaching staff in a high-quality early childhood network
What are the differences between dimensional and categorical models of individual differences in attachment? Reply to Cassidy (2003), Cummings (2003), Sroufe (2003), and Waters and Beauchaine (2003)
Infants of depressed and nondepressed mothers exhibit differences in frontal brain electrical activity during the expression of negative emotions
Studies have shown that infants of depressed mothers express negative emotions more frequently than infants of nondepressed mothers. The present study examined electrical brain activity during expression of negative and positive emotions in infants of depressed and nondepressed mothers. Infants, 11 to 17 months of age, were exposed to conditions designed to elicit positive and negative emotions while electroencephalographic (EEG) activity was mea…
Relational Aggression in Middle Childhood
This study examined gender differences in the level and developmental course of relational aggression in middle childhood, as well as early predictors and outcomes of relational aggression, after controlling for concurrent physical aggression. Relational (RAgg) and Physical aggression (PAgg) scores for 558 boys and 545 girls at ages 8-11 in the NICHD Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development (SECCYD) were created by combining the highest ra…
Promoting birth parents' relationships with their toddlers upon reunification
Can Attachment Inform Decision‐making in Child Protection and Forensic Settings
The historic publication of the “consensus statement” on not using the “D/disorganized” category in the infant Strange Situation (M. Ainsworth, M. Blehar, E. Waters, & S. Wall, 1978) for case‐specific child protection work (P. Granqvist et al., 2017) opens the door for a broader discussion of different branches of attachment theory and different attachment classificatory systems applied to infants, young children, and their parents. We agree with…
Permanency outcomes for toddlers in child welfare two years after a randomized trial of a parenting intervention
Randomized trial of promoting first relationships for new mothers who received community mental health services in pregnancy
The effectiveness of Promoting First Relationships (PFR), a 10-week home visiting program with video feedback, was tested in a randomized controlled trial involving 252 mothers and their 8- to 12-week-old infants. Mothers were eligible if they initiated treatment after mental health screening (depression, anxiety, posttraumatic stress disorder [PTSD]) at a community or public health primary care center in pregnancy. At baseline, 51% had mild to s…
Parental Childhood Adversity, Depressive Symptoms, and Parenting Quality
Parents who are involved with child welfare services (CWSI) often have a history of childhood adversity and depressive symptoms. Both affect parenting quality, which in turn influences child adaptive functioning. We tested a model of the relations between parental depression and child regulatory outcomes first proposed by K. Lyons‐Ruth, R. Wolfe, A. Lyubchik, and R. Steingard (2002). We hypothesized that both parental depression and parenting qua…
Dynamic‐maturational Model of Attachment and Adaptation Versus Abc+d Assessments of Attachment in Child Protection and Treatment
In this brief response, we commend the commentary authors for joining a dialogue about the future of individual differences in attachment both around person‐specific forensic and clinical issues also around working together to develop theory and coding practices. We point to several areas of explicit and implicit agreement and discuss several misunderstandings. We close with a proposal for future work together, possibly using the only set of vide…
Randomized trial of Promoting First Relationships
Intervention Effects on Morning and Stimulated Cortisol Responses among Toddlers in Foster Care
Toddlers in child welfare often have a dysregulated stress response. We tested whether toddlers with caregivers randomized to a 10‐week attachment‐based intervention, Promoting First Relationships (PFR; J.F. Kelly, D. Sandoval, T.G. Zuckerman, & K. Buehlman, 2008) would show postintervention change in stimulated salivary cortisol patterns during a research home visit involving a separation–reunion procedure, as compared to a condition including c…
The development of the Promoting First Relationships home visiting program and caregivers’ comments about their experiences across four RCT studies
Promoting First Relationships (PFR) is an evidence‐based home‐visiting program for caregivers and their children from birth to age 5 years. It focuses on caregiver–child interaction, attachment, and relationship quality using video feedback of unedited recordings to elicit reflection and provide positive feedback linked to knowledge development. This paper provides a brief history of PFR and reports on a qualitative study of 222 caregivers’ comme…
Intonation contours as signals in maternal speech to prelinguistic infants
The prosody of maternal speech
The speech of 6 mothers to their healthy infants was examined longitudinally during the neonatal period and at 4, 12, and 24 months in a semi-naturalistic setting. Features of speech analysed were: contour of fundamental frequency, repetitiveness, timing (durations of vocalizations and pauses), tempo and MLU. The neonatal period was characterized by elongated pauses. During the 4-month period the extent of pitch contouring and repetitiveness was …
The natural alliance of psychology and nursing
Successful intervention with multi-problem mothers
A two-step model of intervention for multi-problem mothers was proposed. In order to improve mother-child interaction and later developmental outcomes, the first step is for the practitioner to help the mother change her external competencies (adult social skills) and internal perceptions (support, depression). These changes make the second step possible—the mother then can learn to foster her own child's development. The model was tested in a st…
Development of maternal social skills in multiproblem families
Development of maternal social skills in multiproblem families
The kiddie-infant descriptive instrument for emotional states (Kidies)
An objective instrument is described for measuring several affect states in infants and young children (KIDIES). The scoring system is ethologically based, describing the intensity and the frequency of each affect. It is midway between a fine-grained microanalytic method and a global subjective one. It aims to achieve the balance between quantitative rigor and feasibility needed for large-number clinical research. This report includes a descripti…
Roles of living arrangements and grandmother social support in adolescent mothering and infant attachment
We examined the roles of social support from adolescents' mothers and living arrangements in 197 adolescent mother-infant pairs. Major observational measures were teaching interactions, Home Observation for Measurement of the Environment (HOME) scores, and infant attachment security. Adolescents living with neither mothers nor partners had better teaching interactions but lower HOME scores compared with those living with mothers. High mother supp…
Infants of depressed and nondepressed mothers exhibit differences in frontal brain electrical activity during the expression of negative emotions
Studies have shown that infants of depressed mothers express negative emotions more frequently than infants of nondepressed mothers. The present study examined electrical brain activity during expression of negative and positive emotions in infants of depressed and nondepressed mothers. Infants, 11 to 17 months of age, were exposed to conditions designed to elicit positive and negative emotions while electroencephalographic (EEG) activity was mea…
Psychological Distress and Substance Use by Adolescent Mothers
This study examines associations between psychological distress and alcohol and drug use across the first five years of raising a child and parenting quality at child age six for 185 adolescent mothers. Overall, alcohol and other drug use in this sample was relatively low, but drug use was associated with more mother-reported unrealistic expectations of child behavior and more attributions of child intent to annoy parent by misbehaving. Maternal …
Multigenerational Coresidence and Childrearing Conflict
We examine the associations among multigenerational coresidence, intrafamilial conflict over childrearing, and parenting stress in 190 young adolescent mothers at 6, 12, and 24 months postpartum. Analyses assessed the association between coresidence and conflict on parenting stress in 2 ways. To investigate associations between coresidence and conflict at specific points postpartum, 3 cross-sectional analyses were conducted. To assess the associa…
Are infant attachment patterns continuously or categorically distributed? A taxometric analysis of strange situation behavior
Contemporary attachment research is based on the assumption that at least three types of infant attachment patterns exist: secure, avoidant, and resistant. It is not known, however, whether individual differences in attachment organization are more consistent with a continuous or a categorical model. The authors addressed this issue by applying P. E. Meehl's (1973, 1992) taxometric techniques for distinguishing latent types (i.e., classes, natura…
What are the differences between dimensional and categorical models of individual differences in attachment? Reply to Cassidy (2003), Cummings (2003), Sroufe (2003), and Waters and Beauchaine (2003)
Life Course Heterogeneity in the Transition from Adolescence to Adulthood Among Adolescent Mothers
Longitudinal data were used to examine pathways taken by 227 adolescent mothers during the transition from adolescence into adulthood. Latent profile analysis identified three sub‐groups of adolescent mothers from 6 months to 6 years postpartum: a problem‐prone profile (15%), a psychologically vulnerable profile (42%), and a normative profile (43%). Group membership was related to long‐term adult outcomes (adult status markers, health‐risk and de…
Trajectories of aggression from toddlerhood to age 9 predict academic and social functioning through age 12
Background: Using longitudinal data from the NICHD Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development, we examined behavior problems and social and academic outcomes from ages 9 through 12 in children classified into five trajectories of physical aggression, on the basis of maternal ratings obtained from 24 months through 9 years ( N = 1195). Methods: Outcome data were obtained from teacher reports, observations of children's behavior, and children'…
The Developmental Significance of Adolescent Romantic Relationships
From a longitudinal sample (n = 957; 49.9% male; 77.3% White/non-Hispanic) of participants studied from infancy through age 15, adolescents' depth of engagement in, and quality of romantic relationships were predicted from early and contemporaneous parent-child interactive quality and peer social competence. High quality maternal parenting and peer experiences prior to and during adolescence tended to be negatively associated with the depth of en…
Relational Aggression in Middle Childhood
This study examined gender differences in the level and developmental course of relational aggression in middle childhood, as well as early predictors and outcomes of relational aggression, after controlling for concurrent physical aggression. Relational (RAgg) and Physical aggression (PAgg) scores for 558 boys and 545 girls at ages 8-11 in the NICHD Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development (SECCYD) were created by combining the highest ra…
The Longitudinal Link Between Parenting and Child Aggression
Randomized trial of Promoting First Relationships
Intervention Effects on Morning and Stimulated Cortisol Responses among Toddlers in Foster Care
Toddlers in child welfare often have a dysregulated stress response. We tested whether toddlers with caregivers randomized to a 10‐week attachment‐based intervention, Promoting First Relationships (PFR; J.F. Kelly, D. Sandoval, T.G. Zuckerman, & K. Buehlman, 2008) would show postintervention change in stimulated salivary cortisol patterns during a research home visit involving a separation–reunion procedure, as compared to a condition including c…
Permanency outcomes for toddlers in child welfare two years after a randomized trial of a parenting intervention
Promoting birth parents' relationships with their toddlers upon reunification
Disorganized attachment in infancy
Disorganized/Disoriented (D) attachment has seen widespread interest from policy makers, practitioners, and clinicians in recent years. However, some of this interest seems to have been based on some false assumptions that (1) attachment measures can be used as definitive assessments of the individual in forensic/child protection settings and that disorganized attachment (2) reliably indicates child maltreatment, (3) is a strong predictor of path…
Ensuring Implementation Fidelity of a 10-Week Home Visiting Program in Two Randomized Clinical Trials
Parental Childhood Adversity, Depressive Symptoms, and Parenting Quality
Parents who are involved with child welfare services (CWSI) often have a history of childhood adversity and depressive symptoms. Both affect parenting quality, which in turn influences child adaptive functioning. We tested a model of the relations between parental depression and child regulatory outcomes first proposed by K. Lyons‐Ruth, R. Wolfe, A. Lyubchik, and R. Steingard (2002). We hypothesized that both parental depression and parenting qua…
Psychology (32 works) · Developmental psychology (29 works) · Child and Adolescent Psychosocial and Emotional Development (18 works) · Medicine (15 works) · Attachment and Relationship Dynamics (11 works) · Child Abuse and Trauma (11 works) · Clinical Psychology (11 works) · Social Psychology (10 works) · Psychiatry (9 works) · Family Dynamics and Relationships (8 works)