Secure Base Behavior Research Articles

THE ROLE OF PARENTING SENSITIVITY, INFANT TEMPERAMENT, AND DYADIC INTERACTION IN ATTACHMENT THEORY AND ASSESSMENT

What are we trying to index when we make assessments of attachment patterns in early life? How do these quality-of-attachment constructs relate to other constructs that are theoretically important to the description and development of attachment relationships? How do parents and children contribute to these developmental processes? What measurement issues are important for the field to consider when evaluating attachment and related constructs? In addressing these questions, we will concurrently examine the nature and assessment of constructs of maternal sensitivity and temperament, both of which have been significant in attachment research and theory. We begin by describing the core constructs of attachment theory, namely, the attachment system and secure-base behavior. We follow by discussing contextual factors that are thought to be crucial in the development of individual differences in attachment, especially maternal sensitivity. We then consider child characteristics, especially temperament, that may contribute to the operation of the attachment system. In this context, we consider both parental supports for secure-base behavior and the ways by which infants teach their parents about the specific behaviors that are required to provide a secure base for the individual child. Assessment issues associated with each of these constructs, connections (theoretical and empirical) among them, and some views on directions for future research are each discussed in turn.

NARRATIVE PROCESS AND ATTACHMENT REPRESENTATIONS: ISSUES OF DEVELOPMENT AND ASSESSMENT

John Bowlby was a thorough and imaginative scholar. He was also farsighted in his plans for attachment theory. In evolutionary and controlsystems theories, he saw useful alternatives to psychoanalytic motivation models and conceptual foundations that had passed the test of time and could only grow stronger with succeeding generations. Moreover, he perceived how the emerging field of cognitive psychology could play a major role in his efforts to demystify psychoanalytic insights about attachment and adjustment. Most important for current directions in attachment theory, he saw in Craik's (1943) concept of internal working models a way of demystifying and thus preserving psychoanalytic insights about the importance of mental representations in development and adjustment. A great deal of attachment theory and research is based on the controlsystems model and the secure-base concept as developed in the first volume of Attachment and Loss (Bowlby, 1969) and in Ainsworth's empirical and theoretical papers (e.g., Ainsworth, Blehar, Waters, & Wall, 1979). Here the focus is on infancy, and any attachment representations are necessarily sensorimotor in nature. The later volumes of Attachment and Loss, several of Bowlby's later writings (e.g., Bowlby, 1988), and a great deal of recent theory and research have focused on mental representations of attachment, which Bowlby referred to as working models. One of the key differences between attachment theory and psychoanalytic theory is Bowlby's consistent emphasis on real rather than intrapsychic events and on ordinary rather than traumatic experiences as determinants of attachment relationships. Both secure-base behavior and attachment working models are said to emerge through everyday child-parent interactions and, although potentially stable, to be open to change in light of new

EXPANDING THE STUDY OF THE FORMATION OF THE CHILD'S RELATIONSHIPS

As a set, the reports included in this Monograph seek to expand the conceptualization and study of attachment. The editors and authors have indeed done an excellent job of presenting the new growing points within this field. My comments will focus on three of the issues that they raise: (1) How do we continue the study and conceptualization of secure-base behavior? (2) How do we take into account the multiple-relationship context of attachment? (3) How do we expand our conceptualization of attachment to include variations in individual adaptations and the development of relationships? Two statements that John Bowlby made during our many exciting conversations serve as an introduction to these comments. When I expressed discomfort with the reduction of attachment to five behavioral responses, he answered that the scientific study of essential phenomena requires some simplification; later conceptualization and further research involve revision and a better fit. He also often joked with me: Jimmy Robertson, you, Miss Freud, and I can pretty much agree on how children respond to being separated from their mothers. It is when we come to interpret these responses that we get into difficulty.

The development of attachment: from control system to working models.

After two decades of theoretical and descriptive work, we know a great deal about the developmental course of early attachment relationships. We know considerably less about the mechanisms underlying consistency and change. Indeed, the most pressing issue in attachment theory is to explain well-replicated correlations between early care and subsequent patterns of secure base behavior, and between secure base behavior in infancy and subsequent behavior with parents and siblings, social competence, self-esteem, and behavior problems. As a step in this direction, we examine Bowlby's developmental outline, with an eye toward providing greater detail and incorporating traditional learning mechanisms into Bowlby's attachment theory.

Attaching Meaning to Attachment

3. We do not have clear descriptions of attachment behaviors in older children, adolescents, and adults. Hazan and Shaver are probably very wise in confining their focus to proximity seeking, safehaven seeking, and secure-base behavior, but how can these behaviors be recognized and measured in adolescents and adults? And what is the role of the partner in their manifestation? 4. We have many questions regarding the meaning of attachment behavior across the life span and the relation between expressed attachment behavior and emotional, cognitive constructs concerning attachment relationships. For example, what is the association between attachment behaviors and working models of attachment relationships and adults' abilities to comfort themselves or to be attachment figures? Many adults show attachment behaviors toward parents, siblings, and close friends. Must attachment behavior always transfer to an adult love partner? What is the role of culture? Does adult-adult attachment behavior have an ethological or adaptive role in childrearing?

Quality of attachment in the preschool years

AbstractThis is a theoretical paper about differences in quality of attachment in preschool-aged children with emphasis on the development of the goal-corrected partnership. Inferences are made about the processes underlying preschoolers' attachment behavior. Specifically, the notion of quality of attachment is expanded to explicitly include strategy, regulation of affect, negotiation, secure base behavior, and response to maternal behavior. The classificatory system is expanded by adding two additional defended patterns, that is, compulsive caregiving and compulsive compliance, to the infant avoidant pattern. Furthermore, at the preschool age, the infant ambivalent pattern is identified as having a coercive strategy. In addition, the disorganized infant category is reconceptualized in terms of complex organization, reorganization, and disorganization. Finally, the process of generating new theories and hypotheses through a “participant observer” methodology is considered from the perspective of developmental psychopathology.

From an insecure base: Parent‐child relations and internalizing behaviour in the pre‐school

AbstractEighty‐three two‐parent families were recruited via eight pre‐school programmes in order to explore the origins of internalizing behaviour problems of pre‐school children. Children were assessed by their teachers using standard checklists of anxious and prosocial behaviour as well as rank orders of dependency and social competence. Observers contributed measures of solitary activity and interactive play. In the home, mothers and fathers completed a 100‐item Q‐sort on parent‐child attachment. Internalizing and competence measures were predictable from parent‐child relations. Mother‐child variables were more generally and significantly related to pre‐school measures than father‐child variables. In particular, boys who were highly dependent on their mothers were anxious and withdrawn in the pre‐school, overly dependent on their teachers, and low in teacher assessments of prosocial behaviour and social competence. In addition to quantitative differences in the predictive power of maternal and paternal variables, qualitative differences were found indicating secure base behaviour as a more important dimension of mother‐child relations, while affective sharing during play may be a more salient marker of the quality of father‐child relations.

Attachment Behavior at Home and in the Laboratory: Q-Sort Observations and Strange Situation Classifications of One-Year-Olds

This article reports Attachment Q-set data and Strange Situation classifications of 58 1-year-old middle-class infants. Security, dependency, and sociability were scored from Q-sort reports of home observations. The primary analyses involve comparisons between securely attached infants (Group B) and anxiously attached infants (Groups A and C combined). Additional analyses compare anxious-resistant with anxious-avoidant infants. Secure classification in the Strange Situation was associated with quality of secure-base behavior at home (i.e., higher Q-sort security scores) and with sociability, but not with dependency scores. Descriptive analyses of individual Q-set items support the secure-base interpretation of Strange Situation security classifications. Relations between home security scores and interactive behavior scores from the Strange Situation were also examined by multiple regression analysis.