Posted by Kristen French

https://nautil.us/childhood-friends-not-moms-shape-attachment-styles-most-1247316/

https://nautil.us/?p=1247316

Humans are social animals. We depend on our friends, partners, and family members to steer through troubled waters and cheer us on when we shine. One popular school of psychology known as attachment theory suggests that these close relationships tend to follow established patterns that differ from one person to the next: Some of us feel secure in our relationships, while others are more anxious about abandonment, less willing to trust even those we hold most dear.

Now a large, new, 30-year study has found that our earliest friendships may have the biggest impact on how well we “attach” to friends and romantic partners in adulthood. If true this finding would upend conventional wisdom that our relationships with our parents leave the biggest mark on our attachment styles later in life. The team of researchers found that, in fact, mothers come second, and fathers, at least in the cohort studied, had little influence. The study, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, followed 705 people and their families over three decades, starting in the 1990s.

British psychiatrist and psychoanalyst John Bowlby developed attachment theory in the 1970s and early ’80s, and it entered into the popular discourse in the intervening decades. The theory evolved, with subsequent research suggesting that our attachment styles are shaped across our lifetimes by multiple relationships, not just those with our parents, as Bowlby had initially proposed.

But until now, few studies had experimentally tested, over a person’s lifetime, the fundamental assumptions underlying attachment theory. To do this, Keely Dugan, an assistant professor of social personality psychology at the University of Missouri and her colleagues, analyzed data from one landmark longitudinal study of 1,364 children and their families that started in 1991 and stretched over 15 years. They then followed up with 705 of the original study participants, who were now 26 to 31 years of age.

Read more: “Love Is Biological Bribery”

The data for the original study came from a variety of sources: The authors periodically videotaped mothers and fathers interacting with their young children and made notes about their sensitivity to their children’s needs. They analyzed parent-child conflicts and closeness through reports from the parents and measured parents’ warmth and hostility through reports from the children. They also examined how the children rated their friendship quality and collected teacher and parent reports about their social competence with peers.

In the follow up, Dugan and her team evaluated the attachment styles and relationship quality of the now-adult participants, with their romantic partners, friends, and family members. They controlled for family income-to-needs ratio, maternal education, race and ethnicity, and sex assigned at birth.

Dugan and her colleagues found that a person’s relationship with their mother does shape their general attachment style and their specific individual relationships with friends, romantic partners, and fathers, accounting for 2 to 3 percent of differences in anxiety and avoidance. So, for example, people whose mothers were less warm and fuzzy during their younger years tended to feel more insecure in their adult relationships. The more recent the interaction with the mother, the more influence it potentially seemed to have. But early friendship bonds played an even bigger part than maternal relationships in the ways people navigated adult friendships and romantic partnerships, accounting for 4 percent of the variance in adults’ romantic partner- and best friend-specific attachment anxiety, and 10 to 11 percent in their partner- and best friend-specific avoidance.

“In general, if you had high-quality friendships and felt connected to your friends in childhood, then you felt more secure in romantic relationships and friendships at age 30,” Dugani told Scientific American. “When you have those first friendships at school, that’s when you practice give-and-take dynamics,” she added. “Relationships in adulthood then mirror those dynamics.”

Even more reason to choose your schoolyard friends wisely.

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Lead image: Ihnatovich Maryia / Shutterstock

https://nautil.us/childhood-friends-not-moms-shape-attachment-styles-most-1247316/

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Posted by Devin Reese

https://nautil.us/from-deep-blue-mud-unexpected-life-emerges-1247288/

https://nautil.us/?p=1247288

The deep sea is a foreboding, almost impenetrable, place for us surface dwellers; darkness prevents photosynthesis, and animals at great depths must withstand extremely low temperatures, high pressures, and scarce nutrients. Yet, ecosystems just beneath the seafloor contain an estimated 15 percent of Earth’s living biomass—in the form of wildly resourceful microbes that make do in the abyss.

Hardy communities of microbes inhabit the ocean’s crust, clustered around hydrothermal vents, which spew life-giving minerals in superheated streams of water. Now, a study in Communications Earth & Environment announces marine microbial life that even further pushes the limits of environmental tolerance.

University of Bremen researchers and colleagues searched for evidence of microbes in two sediment cores extracted from mud volcanoes near the Mariana Trench. The cores, which were drilled from seafloor more than 9,800 feet down, contained mud from up to 5.4 feet below the seafloor, down into what’s called serpentinite, a sediment layer that is tinged a bright blue.

In that blue mud, the pH is a startlingly alkaline 12, the same as some household bleaches, oven cleaners, and hair relaxers. But the scientists, using lipid analysis, detected, in that punishing mud, fat molecules that could only have resulted from biological activity.

Read more: “The Bacteria That Revolutionized the World”

The conditions are more alkaline than is known for any other ecosystem on Earth. “What is fascinating about these findings is that life under these extreme conditions, such as high pH and low organic carbon concentrations is even possible,” said organic geochemist at the University of Bremen’s Center for Marine Environmental Sciences and co-author Florence Shubotz in a statement.

Add to those challenges the virtual lack of oxygen at such depths, and life has to find unique ways of making it. Known deep-sea microbes gain their energy through chemosynthesis, exploiting minerals in rocks and gaseous hydrocarbons from vents. The same appears to be true of these newly discovered organisms.

The lipid molecules detected in the study are from the cell membranes of either bacteria or archaea, an ancient domain of organisms that resemble bacteria. In the cell membranes of those microbes, fats provide a barrier against the alkaline conditions. Their condition indicates whether the microbes are living or long-dead. Intact lipid molecules indicate a living community, whereas degraded lipid molecules could be from fossil organisms. The results showed both types of lipids in the sediment cores—a community of contemporary microbes and evidence of ancient microbial populations.

These extremophile organisms could also provide a window to how life first started on Earth. “We suspect that primordial life could have originated at precisely such sites,” Shubotz added. Furthermore, the core samples just scratched the surface of a habitat that could extend much farther below the seafloor, harboring even deeper insights into the earliest life here on Earth—and potentially beyond.

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Lead image: Ethan Daniels / Shutterstock

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