IASA Board of Directors

IASA Board Members are professionals representing a range of various educational backgrounds, activities, countries. The variety of contributions is intended to promote the application of the dynamic-maturational model of attachment and adaptation (DMM) to helping children, families, couples and individuals in many different contexts (for example health care, social policies, legal systems), to encourage research using DMM theories and assessments, and to help the diffusion, discussion and modification of DMM theory and data in academic, professional and community contexts.

IASA Chair

Patricia M. Crittenden, Ph.D. (USA)
www.patcrittenden.com

Patricia McKinsey Crittenden, Ph.D. is a developmental psychopathologist who developed the Dynamic-Maturational Model (DMM) of attachment and adaptation. She earned a B.A. at American University (1966), a M.Ed. (Mental Retardation and Emotional Disturbance) at the University of Virginia (1969), and a Ph.D. (Psychology) at the University of Virginia (1983), studying under Mary D. S. Ainsworth. Her work with Mary Ainsworth culminated in the DMM. She completed a Senior Post-Doctoral Fellowship on sexual abuse at the University of New Hampshire (1992) with David Finkelhor. She has been on the faculties of the Universities of Virginia, Miami, Helsinki, and Bologna and Edith Cowan University in Australia. She held the Beverley Professorship at the Clark Institute of Psychiatry in Toronto in 1994 and was appointed Distinguished Professor at San Diego State University in California. In 2004, she was given a Career Achievement Award by the European Family Therapy Association.

She pioneered video-feedback intervention for maltreating mothers in the early 1970’s, designed and implemented a family support center for low income families, trained as both a behavioral and family systems therapist, became the Director of the Miami Child Protection Team, and has consulted to family courts in several countries.

Finally, she has developed a life-span series of seven assessments of attachment. Among these is the CARE-Index which was developed under Mary Ainsworth’s guidance and with consultation from John Bowlby. She has published more than 100 empirical papers and chapters, as well as several books: Crittenden (2008), Raising Parents: Attachment, Parenting, and Child Safety; Crittenden & Landini (in press), The Adult Attachment Interview: Looking Behind the Mind’s Curtain; Crittenden & Dallos, Attachment & Family Systems Therapy (McGraw-Hill); Crittenden & Claussen, (Eds., 2000), The Organization of Attachment Relationships: Maturation, Culture, and Context.

Vice-Chair & Secretary

Andrea Landini, M.D. (Italy)

Andrea Landini, M.D., is a Child and Adolescent Psychiatrist. He received his medical training at the University of Modena and his training as a Cognitive-Constructivist Psychotherapist at Centro Studi in Psicoterapia Cognitiva (Firenze). His clinical practice includes psychotherapy with adults and adolescents, work with parents, supervision of staff caring for out-of-home youth, and supervision of psychotherapy students. For two decades, he collaborated with Crittenden in the development of the Dynamic-Maturational Model, translating four books of her writings in Italian, publishing many chapters of his own on both assessment using DMM assessments and also applications of the DMM to intervention and treatment. He has participated in numerous research projects and is an author on publications resulting from them. He teaches the DMM and its assessment methods in Italy and internationally and is on the permanent faculty of Scuola Bolognese di Psicoterapia Cognitiva, and on the visiting faculties of several other Italian schools of cognitive and family systems psychotherapy.

Treasurer

Irmie Nickel, B.O., M.A. (Canada)

Irmie is an Occupational Therapist, a psychotherapist and the executive director of the Aulneau Renewal Centre. Irmie’s career has focussed on hospital and community based crisis and non-crisis mental health services for children and adolescents as well as private practice occupational therapy services. Irmie is currently developing treatment and training programs based on the DMM which are being offered to communities in Manitoba and across Canada.

Membership Chair

Bente Nilsen (Norway)

Bente Nilsen is a clinical child psychologist who received her training at the University of Oslo and at the Institute for Active Psychotherapy. She is currently working at the Child and Adolescent Clinic (BUP Baerum) in Asker and Baerum Hospital. She specializes in working with families from pregnancy through the preschool years. DMM is central in this work. Bente was a presenter at the 2006 World Conference on Prevention in Oslo. Bente previously worked for 12 years at the Aline Center and Clinic in Oslo. During these years she collaborated in organizing the Aline Clinic as an outpatient unit serving both the Aline center and also high risk families in the municipality of Oslo. Bente also consults with the Child Protection offices and courts in forensic work involving families with preschool children.
She has been trained in AAI, PAA, CARE-Index and SAA by Dr. Patricia Crittenden over the past 15 years. She is a reliable coder of several of these assessments and is an authorized trainer of the CARE-Index and the PAA. The DMM is central to her clinical work, in teaching and supervising psychologists and other mental health professionals. She has contributed to several research projects using DMM.

Editor DMM News

Dr. Mike Blows, M.D. (UK)

Dr Mike Blows works in East Anglia, UK, in a general community child psychiatry 'NHS' team. Mike was a Paediatrician before becoming a psychiatrist, and then trained in family therapy. Mike has completed training in most DMM assessment tools, and is a guest trainer in attachment, including at the University of East Anglia. He is interested in combining systemic therapy and attachment ideas in developing services for children who are 'looked after', or in the care system. He is married with two teenage children, and quite a few pets!

Conference Program Committee Chair

Airi Hautamäki, Ph.D. (Finland)

Airi Hautamäki is professor in social psychology and psychology, Swedish School of Social Science, University of Helsinki, as well as docent in educational psychology, University of Helsinki, and docent in the psychology of women, University of Joensuu. 1996 she became Academician, full, foreign member of the Academy of Pedagogical and Social Science of Russia. Prof. Hautamäki is an educational and developmental psychological family and attachment researcher and has led many research projects. Her publications in English, Russian, Japanese, Swedish and Finnish have ranged from educational issues (e.g., PISA) and parenting to war trauma and transmission of attachment across generations, including Hautamäki, A. & Coleman, P.G. (2001; reprinted 2009 in M. Orrell & A. Spector (Eds.), Psychology and aging. International Library of Psychology). Explanation for low prevalence of PTSD among older Finnish war veterans: social solidarity and continued significance given to wartime sufferings. Her forthcoming articles include transmission of attachment across three generations, and silencing the self across generations and gender in Finland (in D.C. Jack & A. Ali (Eds.), Silencing the self across cultures. Depression and gender in the social world. Oxford University Press). She has supervised numerous doctoral dissertations and teaches CARE-Index in Finland.

Other Directors

Lane Strathearn MBBS FRACP Ph.D. (USA / Australia)

Dr Strathearn is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Pediatrics at Baylor College of Medicine and a developmental paediatrician at Texas Children's Hospital, Houston, Texas, USA. His research and clinical work focuses on maternal neglect and the neurobiology of mother-infant attachment. He is also interested in the long-term effects of child maltreatment on cognitive and emotional development, and early childhood factors that may help to protect against abuse or neglect. This includes longitudinal studies of women and infants, examining mothers’ brain and hormonal responses to infant face cues using functional MRI and behavioral observation (see Pediatrics 2008;122(1):40-51). One recent study demonstrated that adult attachment strategies, as determined from the DMM Adult Attachment Interview, were associated with maternal brain and oxytocin responses (Neuropsychopharmacology 2009;34(13):2655-66). His most recent grant will support research into maternal brain responses of cocaine addicted mothers, and the potential role of intranasal oxytocin to enhance maternal caregiving. A native of Brisbane, Australia, he is also the father of 7 children.

Hyperlink references above to: http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/cgi/content/full/122/1/40 and http://www.nature.com/npp/journal/v34/n13/full/npp2009103a.html

Emilia Sasson (Uruguay)

Augusto Zagmutt (Chile)

Augusto Zagmutt qualified as a Psychologist in 1972 at the Universidad de Chile. He was a Visiting Fellow, Psychotherapy Unit, University Diego Portales, a position he now holds in the Master in Clinical Psychology, Universidad de Chile. He is also a Clinical & Supervisor Psychologist and Fellow on the National Commission of Accreditation for Clinical Psychologists. Further, he has held positions on a number of professional boards: Chairman of the Post-rationalistic Cognitive Therapy Society, President, Asociacion Latinoamericana de Terapias Cognitivas , ALAPCO, and Writing Secretary, Journal of the Scholarly Society of Psychology of Chile. He is the Founder and first president of the Chilean Society of Clinical Psychology, Founder and former editor, Journal Psychological Therapy, and Founding Director, Post-rationalistic Cognitive Therapy Society.

He has editorial experience, organization of conferences, contacts throughout Latin America, cognitive psychotherapy, expertise in treating psychological trauma, multi-cultural experience. He has numerous publications regarding behavioral, cognitive-behavioral, and most recently, post-rationalist cognitive psychotherapy.He Works as a Clinical Psychologist in Santiago de Chile.

Shirley Gracias MBCHB DCH MRCPsych (UK)

Shirley is an Infant Child and Adolescent Psychiatry in Wiltshire, United Kingdom. A graduate of Bristol University Medical School, Shirley trained in Psychiatry in Bristol and South Wales, where she was also briefly a Consultant. Since 1995 Shirley has worked in Western Wiltshire, where she has actively lead in the development of a multi-tiered multidisciplinary Infant Mental Health Service, working with parents and their infants generally on attachment related issues. Shirley has been working with the DMM for the past 4 years incorporating the concepts within her clinical service delivery.

Outside of the NHS, Shirley is a founding member and partner of INCITE Training and Consultation. Based in Bath INCITE organises training events around the UK in Infant Mental Health, Attachment and Substance Misuse. Shirley was Chair of the Association for Infant Mental Health UK between July 2006 and July 2009. She is now Chair of the Local Organising Committee for the WAIMH Congress 2014, which is to be held in Edinburgh. Shirley is also on the Perinatal Executive Committee of the Royal College of Psychiatrists.