Simpson Lab Awarded “Paper of the Year” by Self & Identity

Ethan Young, PhD, an advisee of Jeff Simpson’s and a 2019 PIB area PhD, was the lead author on the Self & Identity Paper of the Year, “Childhood attachment and adult personality: A life history perspective.” Co-authors include Jeff Simpson, PhD; Vlad Griskevicius, PhD, and two social area graduate students, Chloe Huelsnitz and Cory Fleck.


Using prospective data, Young et al. examined a major tenet of attachment theory: Is the quality of attachment relationships early in life-related to adult personality? To date, no study has investigated this hypothesis using longitudinal data. Their conclusion? “The current study offers the first prospective evidence that attachment security early in life is reliably and meaningfully related to the meta-trait of stability across a 30-year span.”

Ethan Young’s recent dissertation was titled “The Cognitive Consequences of Childhood Adversity: An Investigation of Feedback Learning Strategies and the Sensitized-Specialization Hypothesis” (2019, Book of PhDs # 1697)