Article1989

Attachment: The parental perspective

Inge Bretherton · Zeynep C. Biringen · Doreen Ridgeway · Christine Maslin-Cole

179 citations0/0 files storedInfant Mental Health Journal

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

No open-access location is known for this record yet.

Literature note Cite in a project Citation map

Attachment and Relationship Dynamics Psychoanalysis and Psychopathology Research Child and Adolescent Psychosocial and Emotional Development

Abstract

In the course of daily transactions, caregivers and children construct internal working models of self and other in the attachment relationship (Bowlby, 1969). The function of such working models is to guide an individual's own behavior toward the attachment partner and to interpret and forecast the partner's behavior. So far, however, research on internal working models has largely focused on attachment from the filial rather than the parental perspective even when adults were studied. To remedy this situation, 36 middle-class mothers were interviewed regarding their attachment relationship with their 25-month-old children. Attachment-relevant interview questions were open-ended, allowing the mothers to produce their own descriptive categories. The interview took about an hour. Two analyses were performed on the interview transcripts: a content analysis of specific attachment themes and a global evaluation of attachment quality as conveyed by the interview text as a whole. The content analysis provided interesting findings regarding mother-child affect communication, mother-child separation, and autonomy negotiations. For the global analysis a sensitivity/insight scale was applied to the interview text. This scale was significantly correlated with other attachment measures for the same children at 18 months (Strange Situation), 25 months (Waters &Deane Q-sort), and 37 months (Separation-Reunion Procedure, Attachment Story Completion Task). The sensitivity/insight scale was also significantly and meaningfully correlated with maternal and questionnaire data regarding infant temperament, maternal personality and family climate. In sum, the Parent Attachment Interview provides new insights into parental experiences of the attachment relationship and can also serve as an alternative or additional measure of attachment quality.

Paper brief

Loading…

Cite this work

Citation unavailable for this work.

BibTeX RIS CSL-JSON

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Citations in this library

Citation map →

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 179 citations exist upstream.

References

1961An Inventory for Measuring Depression 1969Attachment and Loss 1978Patterns of Attachment: A Psychological Study of the Strange Situation 1976Measuring Dyadic Adjustment: New Scales for Assessing the Quality of Marriage and Similar Dyads 1985Security in Infancy, Childhood, and Adulthood: A Move to the Level of Representation 1985Attachment Theory: Retrospect and Prospect 1985Growing points of attachment theory and research 1962The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator: Manual (1962).

Cited by

2008Parasympathetic and sympathetic responses to the strange situation in infants and mothers from avoidant and securely attached dyads 2000General Versus Specific Mental Models of Attachment: Are They Associated with Different Outcomes?2010The child as held in the mind of the mother: The influence of prenatal maternal representations on parenting behaviors 2009Widening the View on Teacher–Child Relationships: Teachers' Narratives Concerning Disruptive Versus Nondisruptive Children 1997“Working model of the child interview”: Infant clinical status related to maternal perceptions

Explore the map →

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.

Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.