Recollections of parental care and quality of intimate relationships: the role of re-evaluating past attachment experiences

Abstract

Attachment theory predicts that lack of parental care in childhood may affect the ability to relate in adulthood. While original attachment formulations have primarily focused on actual parenting experiences, more recently attachment writers increasingly emphasize the role of individual differences in the way people think about their experiences in attachment relationships in retrospect, i.e. styles of autobiographic reconstruction. In this study the expectation was tested that both recalled parental care and styles of reconstructing parenting experiences are related to the quality of adult intimate relationships. The hypotheses were tested in a sample of 52 couples from the general community. Results indicated that recollections of parental care were not directly related to the quality of the current intimate relationship in this sample, whereas style of reconstructing parenting experiences was. Moreover, an interaction effect between the two parenting variables suggests that autobiographic reconstruction styles are likely to attenuate associations between recalled parenting and adult relationship functioning. Findings are discussed with a focus on questions of continuity and change in working models of attachment and relational functioning. Copyright (C) 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.