Harriet Waters

Harriet Waters is a Professor of Social and Health Psychology at Stony Brook University. Her research examines cognitive development, mental representations of early social experiences, and parent-child attachment dynamics across the lifespan.

She co-developed the secure base script methodology to assess attachment representations and investigates how early experiences shape social cognition. Her work explores intergenerational transmission of attachment patterns, co-construction processes in dyadic interactions, and links between narrative representations and behavioral outcomes.

Recent publications focus on maternal script knowledge, representational models of attachment, and social competence development. She collaborates extensively on longitudinal studies of attachment from infancy through adulthood.