Associations between young adults' recollections of their childhood experiences with parents and observations of their interaction behavior with best friends

Abstract

Forty-eight introductory psychology students (28 females, 20 males) and their same-sex best friends participated in this study. Based upon a question from the Adult Attachment Interview (George, Kaplan, & Main, 1996), participants wrote five adjectives that described their childhood relationships with each parent. For the four most descriptive adjectives (two for mothers and two for fathers), they wrote about childhood incidents that illustrated those adjectives. Adjectives were evaluated for how positively participants described their relationships with mothers and with fathers; incidents were evaluated for how loving, rejecting, and neglectful mothers and fathers appeared to have been during childhood. Next, best friend pairs participated in a series of videotaped conversation tasks where they discussed unresolved problems. Those who recalled more loving mothers were better able to disclose intimate personal information to their friends and to clearly express their feelings about their problems.Those who recalled more neglectful mothers, on the other hand, were more likely to exhibit heightened emotionality when discussing their problems. Implications for future research are discussed.