Attachment security and narrative elaboration

Abstract

A key means of getting to know someone is through the sharing of personal experience narratives, an ability that shows considerable individual variation. Past research has documented a relationship between narration in conversations between children and their mothers and attachment security. However, children's narrative contributions are often embedded in an ongoing conversation which may be structured differently by mothers who also have assessed the extent to which their children use them as a secure base. In the present project, these two measurements were independent. Children's narration to an attentive, but non-scaffolding, stranger was investigated to see whether that, too, would correlate with security as assessed by mothers. Participants were 32 4-year-old children and their mothers. The security of children's attachment to their mother was assessed using the revised parent-reported 90-item Q-Sort and correlated with two measures of narration. One was simple length in words of the three longest narratives told to a friendly stranger, and the other was a composite formed from specific scored narrative variables. Both narrative measures were significantly correlated with attachment security, even after partialling out the effects of gender, age, and receptive vocabulary.These results suggest that securely-attached children have internalized the inclination to disclose themselves by means of relating narratives of some length and have begun to generalize this to adults outside their family.