When "new" meets "old": configurations of adult attachment representations and their implications for marital functioning

Two studies addressed the implications of concordance versus discrepancy of attachment representations in individuals at 2 stages in their marital relationships. Engaged (n = 157) and dating (n = 101) couples participated in a multimethod 6-year longitudinal study of adult attachment. Individuals completed the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI), the Current Relationship Interview (CRI), and various questionnaires and were observed in interactions with partners. On the basis of AAI and CRI classifications, participants were placed in one of four groups: Secure-sub(AAI)/Secure-sub(CRI), Secure-sub(AAI)/Insecure-sub(CRI), Insecure-sub(AAI)/Secure-sub(CRI), or Insecure-sub(AAI)/Insecure-sub(CRI). Each of the configurations showed a particular pattern of behavior, feelings about relationships and the self, and likelihood of relationship breakup. The findings of the studies address important points about the protective effects of attachment security and have interesting implications for the extension of attachment theory into adulthood.     

A dimensional approach to maternal attachment state of mind: relations to maternal sensitivity and maternal autonomy support

The aim of this study was to examine the developmental significance of the newly developed dimensional approach to attachment state of mind by investigating its capacity to predict individual differences in the quality of two caregiving behaviors-maternal sensitivity and maternal autonomy support-that are linked to numerous important child outcomes. Seventy-one upper-middle-class, predominantly French-speaking and Caucasian dyads participated in 3 home visits (34 girls). The Adult Attachment Interview (AAI) was administered when the infants were 8 months old, maternal sensitivity was assessed when they were 12 months old, and maternal autonomy support was assessed at 15 months. The results revealed that, above and beyond SES, maternal sensitivity was negatively related to the dismissing dimension of the AAI, whereas maternal autonomy support was negatively linked to the preoccupied/unresolved dimension. In contrast, the traditional AAI categories were not significantly linked to parenting. These results speak to the relevance of using a continuous approach to attachment state of mind when predicting individual differences in specific caregiving behaviors.     

Mothers' attachment status as determined by the Adult Attachment Interview predicts their 6-year-olds' reunion responses: a study conducted in Japan

Following a 1986 study reporting a predominance of ambivalent attachment among insecure Sapporo infants, the generalizability of attachment theory and methodologies to Japanese samples has been questioned. In this 2nd study of Sapporo mother-child dyads (N=43), the authors examined attachment distributions for both (a) child, based on M. Main and J. Cassidy's (1988) 6th-year reunion, and (b) adult, via the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI). In contrast to the previous Sapporo study, children's 3-way or "organized" distribution did not differ from the global distribution. However, when the disorganized-controlling (D) and cannot classify (CC) categories were applied to the analyses, a high proportion of D/CC children was found. Comparable analyses for Japanese mothers, including the unresolved/disorganized (U) and CC categories, were found to deviate slightly from the global norm. However, turning from global distributions to mothers' AAI classification as related to their child's reunion classification, all matches were surprisingly close to those established worldwide. When, as is customary, mothers' U and CC classifications were combined (U/CC) and compared with the child's D and CC classifications (also customarily combined as D/CC), mothers' U/CC status strongly predicted child D/CC status (r=.60, d=1.50). Additionally, mothers' AAI subclassifications predicted child subclassifications.     

Attachment and Autism: Parental Attachment Representations and Relational Behaviors in the Parent-Child Dyad

While attachment research has demonstrated that parents’ internal working models of attachment relationships tend to be transmitted to their children, affecting children’s developmental trajectories, this study specifically examines associations between adult attachment status and observable parent, child, and dyadic behaviors among children with autism and associated neurodevelopmental disorders of relating and communicating. The Adult Attachment Interview (AAI) was employed to derive parental working models of attachment relationships. The Functional Emotional Assessment Scale (FEAS) was used to determine the quality of relational and functional behaviors in parents and their children. The sample included parents and their 4- to 16-year-old children with autism and associated neurodevelopmental disorders. Hypothesized relationships between AAI classifications and FEAS scores were supported. Significant correlations were found between AAI classification and FEAS scores, indicating that children with autism spectrum disorders whose parents demonstrated secure attachment representations were better able to initiate and respond in two-way pre-symbolic gestural communication; organize two-way social problem-solving communication; and engage in imaginative thinking, symbolic play, and verbal communication. These findings lend support to the relevance of the parent’s state of mind pertaining to attachment status to child and parent relational behavior in cases wherein the child has been diagnosed with autism or an associated neurodevelopmental disorder of relating and communicating. A model emerges from these findings of conceptualizing relationships between parental internal models of attachment relationships and parent-child relational and functional levels that may aid in differentiating interventions.     

Fathers' and mothers' attachment representations as predictors of preadolescents' attachment security: A ten‐year follow‐up of Finnish families

The question of how mothers' and fathers' representations of attachment correlate ten years later with children's perceptions of attachment relationships was examined in a longitudinal study on Finnish families (N = 42). The parents completed the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI) during the child's first year of life. At 11 years, the children filled out three scales on how secure they perceive the relationship with each parent. Parents' AAI classifications and AAI dimensions based on continuous scales were used as predictors of the preadolescents' attachment security. Regression analyses demonstrated that fathers' but not mothers' State‐of‐Mind and Experience dimensions predicted preadolescents' security of attachment to father. The discussion focuses on the predictive validity of the classical categorical versus the recently proposed continuous approach and the different roles of parents in transmitting security from one generation to another.     

The emotional integration of childhood experience: physiological, facial expressive, and self-reported emotional response during the adult attachment interview

Attachment researchers claim that individual differences in how adults talk about their early memories reflect qualitatively distinct organizations of emotion regarding childhood experiences with caregivers. Testing this assumption, the present study examined the relationship between attachment dimensions and physiological, facial expressive, as well as self-reported emotional responses during the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI). Consistent with theoretical predictions, more prototypically secure adults behaviorally expressed and reported experiencing emotion consistent with the valence of the childhood events they described. Insecure adults also showed distinctive and theoretically anticipated forms of emotional response: Dismissing participants evidenced increased electrodermal activity during the interview, a sign of emotional suppression, whereas preoccupied adults showed reliable discrepancies between the valence of their inferred childhood experiences and their facial expressive as well as reported emotion during the AAI. Results substantiate a case that the AAI reflects individual differences in emotion regulation that conceptually parallel observations of attachment relationships in infancy.     

Mothers' representations of their relationships with their toddlers: links to adult attachment and observed mothering.

Mothers (N = 125) and their firstborn sons were studied over an 11-month period to examine relations between mothers' representations of their relationships with their children (measured at 15 months by using the Parent Development Interview [PDI]), adult representations of attachment (measured at 12 months by using the Adult Attachment Interview [AAI]), and observed mothering (measured at 15 and 21 months). Results indicate (a) that mothers classified as autonomous on the AAI scored highest on the joy-pleasure/coherence dimension of the PDI and mothers classified as dismissing on the AAI scored highest on the anger dimension of the PDI and (b) that mothers scoring higher on the joy-pleasure/coherence dimension of the PDI engaged in less negative and more positive mothering.     

The Adolescent Unresolved Attachment Questionnaire: the assessment of perceptions of parental abdication of caregiving behavior

This article reports on the Adolescent Unresolved Attachment Questionnaire (AUAQ), a brief questionnaire that assesses the caregiving experiences of unresolved adolescents (as recipients of caregiving). The AUAQ was developed and validated in a large normative sample (n = 691) and a sample of 133 adolescents in psychiatric treatment. It is a self-report questionnaire consisting of 3 scales with Likert-type responses ranging from strongly disagree to strongly agree. The Aloneness/Failed Protection Scale assesses the adolescent's perception of the care provided by the attachment figure. The Fear Scale taps the fear generated by the adolescent's appraisal of failed attachment figure care. The Anger/Dysregulation Scale assesses negative affective responses to the perceived lack of care from the attachment figure. All scales demonstrated satisfactory internal reliability and agreement between scores for adolescents (n = 91) from the normative sample who completed the AUAQ twice. Adolescents in the clinical sample also completed the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI; C. George, N. Kaplan, & M. Main, 1984/1985/1996); the AUAQ demonstrated high convergent validity with the AAI.     

Predictive Validity of Adult Attachment Measures in Relation to Emotion Regulation Behaviors in Marital Interactions

This study examined the predictive validity of 2 assessment approaches to adult attachment in relation to emotion regulation behaviors during marital conflict interactions. Both partners of 40 couples completed the Adult Attachment Style self-report (AAS; C. Hazan & P. Shaver, 1987), the Adult Attachment Questionnaire (AAQ; J. A. Simpson, 1990), the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI; C. George, N. Kaplan, & M. Main, 1985), and a videotaped interaction during which the partners engaged in a problem-solving discussion. The discussions were coded by means of the Interactional Dimensions Coding System (IDCS; D. Julien, H. J. Markman, & K. M. Lindhal, 1989). Results showed that AAI classification predicted proactive emotion regulation behaviors, whereas the AAS and the AAQ did not. Issues concerning the predictive validity of current measures of adult attachment are discussed.     

Mental representations of attachment in day care providers

Mental representations of attachment of 31 day‐care providers were assessed using the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI), and compared with established observational measures of their behavior with the children under their care. Contrary to expectation, there was no significant association between the caregivers’ mental representations of attachment and their observed behavior. Teacher‐report ratings of aggressive behavior were obtained for 135 children who had been under the care of these providers. Ten of the 13 children who scored in the clinical range for aggressive behavior were known to have been under the care of a provider with a secure mental representation of attachment for an extended period of time (average 14 months), but the average age of first exposure to such a provider in this study was 16 months. For center‐based day‐care providers, standardized observational assessments of caregiving behavior appear to be unrelated to mental representations of attachment. Children who, during the second year of life, were cared for by providers with secure mental representations of attachment were not necessarily protected from abnormally aggressive behavioral outcome.     

Attachment representations and characteristics of friendship relations during adolescence

Attachment theory proposes that experiences with the primary caregivers are an important basis for the development of close social relationships outside the parent-child relationship. This study examined the association between representations of attachment, as assessed with the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI), representations of friendship and peer relations, as assessed with an interview in a sample of 43 adolescents. Secure attachment representations were significantly related to interview-based assessments of close friendships, friendship concept, integration in a peer group, and emotion regulation within close friendships. Attachment experiences reported during the AAI, their integration, and their coherency were related to friendship quality and friendship concept. Results show the close associations between attachment representations and friendship relationships during adolescence. The associations between peer relations and attachment representations differed depending on whether an interview approach or a questionnaire approach was used.     

The Adolescent Unresolved Attachment Questionnaire: The Assessment of Perceptions of Parental Abdication of Caregiving Behavior

This article reports on the Adolescent Unresolved Attachment Questionnaire (AUAQ), a brief questionnaire that assesses the caregiving experiences of unresolved adolescents (as recipients of caregiving). The AUAQ was developed and validated in a large normative sample (n = 691) and a sample of 133 adolescents in psychiatric treatment. It is a self-report questionnaire consisting of 3 scales with Likert-type responses ranging from strongly disagree to strongly agree. The Aloneness/Failed Protection Scale assesses the adolescent's perception of the care provided by the attachment figure. The Fear Scale taps the fear generated by the adolescent's appraisal of failed attachment figure care. The Anger/Dysregulation Scale assesses negative affective responses to the perceived lack of care from the attachment figure. All scales demonstrated satisfactory internal reliability and agreement between scores for adolescents (n = 91) from the normative sample who completed the AUAQ twice. Adolescents in the clinical sample also completed the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI; C. George, N. Kaplan, & M. Main, 1984/1985/1996); the AUAQ demonstrated high convergent validity with the AAI.     

Language use in the Adult Attachment Interview: Evidence for attachment‐specific emotion regulation

Adult attachment classification is traditionally based on qualitative coding of participants' discourse about their attachment history. Word count‐based analyses have proven useful for assessing emotional states from narrative. To expand the understanding of how language is used in emotion regulation processes related to attachment, the authors assess 102 college‐aged adults' language on the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI). Autonomous adults use more emotion words and, in particular, negative emotion words. Preoccupied adults use more anger words. Disorganized adults use more experientially connected language and more death/dying words, but also use more second‐person pronouns when discussing loss. Language use during the AAI explains variability in self‐reported emotional distress above and beyond attachment classifications. Results are discussed in terms of their relevance to emotion and attachment.     

The adult attachment interview and the relationship questionnaire: Relations to reports of mothers and partners

The study asked the following questions: How do interview and self-report assessments of attachment status correspond? What is the relation between attachment status assessed by these methods to self-reports of relationships with mothers and partners? Participants were 53 married white women assessed with the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI), and the Relationship Questionnaire (RQ), and a variety of questionnaires assessing love, trust, and closeness in relationships with mothers and partners. Results indicated a trend toward a relation between AAI and RQ classifications: 81% of women classified as Secure with the AAI identified themselves as Secure with the RQ, but only 42% of AAI-Insecure women identified themselves as Insecure with the RQ. Secure and Insecure AAI groups did not differ in their reports of mothers or partners, whereas Secure and Insecure RQ groups did. Results indicated classifications derived from the measures are not equivalent.     

Individual differences in adult attachment: Disentangling two assessment traditions

The goal of this paper was to disentangle the contributions of type of measurement and relational domain to the lack of concordance between adult attachment measures. Eighty-six college students completed the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI) and self-reported measures of attachment security adapted to their relationships with four different relational partners. Results showed that whereas the AAI main dimensions were unrelated to self-reports relative to any partner, reports of attachment security with different partners were interrelated. Further, very few of the AAI State of Mind scales related to self-reported attachment security, but the AAI Experience scales did relate to self-reports in a theoretically consistent manner. Finally, the AAI scales of Idealization and Lack of Recall correlated positively with self-reported attachment when controlling for experiences reported on the AAI. The results suggest that a fundamental distinction between adult attachment measures could be the degree of automaticity of the constructs tapped, and that attachment self-reports may be biased by defensive information-processing strategies among dismissing individuals.     

Transmission of attachment across three generations

A low-risk Finnish sample (N _total = 135) of parents expecting their first child and maternal grandmothers was followed from pregnancy until the child was 3 years old. The Adult Attachment Interview (AAI) was used to assess attachment in mothers during the last trimester of pregnancy, and maternal grandmothers. The Strange Situation Procedure (SSP) was used to assess attachment in infants at 12 months, and the Preschool Assessment of Attachment (PAA) at 3 years. Mothers' AAI classifications (3-category) during pregnancy predicted infants' SSP classifications (3-category) in 76% of cases, and the 3-year-old children's PAA classifications (3-category) in 58% of cases. Grandmothers' AAI classifications predicted infants' SSP classifications in 48% of cases, but the 3-year-old children's PAA classifications in 72% of cases. Using log-linear analysis, it was shown that a simple model accounted for transmission of attachment across three generations when the children were 3 years. Even though the results indicated continuity across generations, the correspondences were slightly weaker than those obtained by Benoit and Parker in their 3-generational study. The results are discussed in terms of the prototype view, the rapid contextual changes seen across 3 generations in Finland, the size of the sample, and the comparability of the DMM to other assessment methods of attachment.     

The Adult Attachment Interview and observed couple interaction: implications for an intergenerational perspective on couple therapy

One of the assumptions of intergenerational family therapy is that how a person thinks and talks about family-of-origin experiences has important implications for current family relationships. The Adult Attachment Interview (AAI) is a measure of attachment security based on how coherently the person can discuss attachment experiences in childhood. This study examined the relationship between attachment security, as measured by the AAI, and couple interaction, as measured by the Georgia Marriage Q-Sort (GMQ), in a sample of 28 couples in therapy for relationship problems. During a conflict resolution discussion, those individuals who were less coherent in discussing their family of origin expressed more negative affect, less respect, less openness, more avoidance, and less willingness to negotiate when interacting with their partner. No evidence of intra-couple effects or "buffering" was found. The findings support a key assumption of intergenerational approaches to family therapy and suggest that applying attachment theory is a promising direction for refining and developing new interventions for couples.     

The adult attachment interview and self‐reports of romantic attachment: Associations across domains and methods

Two lines of research on adult attachment have emerged; both are based on Bowlby and Ainsworth's attachment theory, which in turn relies on evolutionary theory. Investigators in one tradition use the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI) to assess “state of mind with respect to attachment.” The AAI has been validated primarily by its ability to predict the attachment classification of an interviewee's child in Ainsworth's “strange situation.” Investigators in the second tradition use self‐report measures to assess romantic “attachment style.” The self‐report measures have been validated by their ability to predict features of romantic/marital relationships. Although the two constructs. state of mind and romantic attachment, are importantly different and so would not be expected to relate highly, some of their components, especially ability to depend on attachment figures, should be related if both stem from a person's attachment history. We report associations between components, or aspects, of the two measures. Overlap occurs mainly in the areas of comfort depending on attachment figures and comfort serving as an attachment figure for others. Implications of the findings for attachment theory and research, as well as for evolutionary psychology, are discussed.     

The impact of adult attachment style on organizational commitment and adult attachment in the workplace

Adult attachment style has only recently been considered as having a role in explaining work behavior. The present research aimed to explore the impact of adult attachment style, assessed by the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI), on organizational commitment (OC) and on adult attachment in the workplace (AAW). We hypothesized that a secure attachment style would be positively related to affective and normative commitment, while preoccupied and avoidant styles would be negatively related to affective commitment; we also hypothesized that there would be a correspondence between the AAI categories and the AAW dimensions. Using the AAI categories as group variable, analysis of average OC and AAW scores confirmed the hypotheses. Secure workers had a higher mean score for affective commitment than avoidant and preoccupied workers; normative commitment was higher in avoidant than in secure and preoccupied workers; continuance commitment was higher in preoccupied than in secure and avoidant workers. Moreover, AAI categories converged with AAW dimensions: secure workers had higher secure AAW scores than avoidant and preoccupied workers; avoidant workers had higher avoidant AAW scores than secure and preoccupied workers; preoccupied workers had higher preoccupied AAW scores than secure and avoidant workers.