The latest evidence in support of early attachment and adult medical outcomes comes from a new paper in PNAS by the scientists Michael Murphy, Sheldon Cohen, Denise Janicki-Deverts and William Doyle. But these researchers didn’t look at wartime evacuations – they looked at divorce. While parental divorce during childhood has been statistically linked to an increased risk for various physical ailments, from asthma to cancer, these studies have tended to rely on self-reports. As a result, it’s been difficult to determine the underlying cause of the correlations.

To explore this practical mystery, Murphy et al. came up with a clever experimental design. They quarantined 201 healthy adults and gave them nasal drops containing rhinovirus 39, a virus that causes the common cold. They carefully monitored the health of the subjects over the next five days, tracking their symptoms, weighing their mucus, and collecting various markers of immune response and inflammation.

The first thing the scientists found is that not all divorces are created equal. This accords with a growing body of evidence showing that the quality of the parents’ relationship with each other after separation may be more important in predicting the adjustment of their children than the separation itself. This led the scientists to ask their subjects whose parents lived apart if their parents spoke to each other after the separation. As the scientists note, “having parents who are separated and not on speaking terms suggests high levels of acrimony in the childhood family environment.” Such conflict can be extremely stressful for children.

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