Caregiving Quality Across Development and Secure Base Knowledge among Adolescents with a History of Institutional Care.

Secure base scripts are implicit schemas that guide perceptions, responses, and interactions by encapsulating expectations of support from attachment figures during distress. The current study investigated the impact of early institutional rearing and the causal effects of high-quality foster care following early deprivation on secure base scripts in adolescents who had experienced severe early deprivation. We evaluated whether caregiver quality, assessed 5 times from ages 30 months to 12 years, predicted secure base scripts at age 16 years, assessed with the Secure Base Script Test (SBST). We analyzed data from 121 participants of the Bucharest Early Intervention Project, comprising institutionalized children who were randomized to care as usual (CAUG) or to high-quality foster care (FCG). We also included a group of never-institutionalized comparison children (NIG). The NIG exhibited higher SBST scores compared to children with a history of institutional rearing, highlighting the detrimental effects of early deprivation. Contrary to expectations, no statistically significant group differences emerged between FCG and CAUG on SBST scores. However, individual differences in caregiving quality, regardless of group, predicted SBST scores, with caregiving at ages 8 and 12 years emerging as stronger predictors than earlier assessments. Thus, that while early deprivation can have lasting effects on secure base script development, caregiving quality in middle childhood may play a particularly important role in shaping attachment-related representations in adolescence. Supplementary Information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s42844-025-00183-2.