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Contents
- Abstract
- Nature of the Adult Attachment Interview
- Validity of the Adult Attachment Interview
- Method
- Database
- Meta-Analytic Procedures
- Results
- Parents' Attachment Representations and Children's Attachment: Three-Way Classifications
- Parental Attachment and Children's Attachment: Four-Way Classifications
- Parents' Attachment Representation and Parental Responsiveness
- Discussion and Conclusion
Figures and Tables
Abstract
About a decade ago, the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI; C. George, N. Kaplan, & M. Main, 1985) was developed to explore parents' mental representations of attachment as manifested in language during discourse of childhood experiences. The AAI was intended to predict the quality of the infant–parent attachment relationship, as observed in the Ainsworth Strange Situation, and to predict parents' responsiveness to their infants' attachment signals. The current meta-analysis examined the available evidence with respect to these predictive validity issues. In regard to the 1st issue, the 18 available samples (N = 854) showed a combined effect size of 1.06 in the expected direction for the secure vs. insecure split. For a portion of the studies, the percentage of correspondence between parents' mental representation of attachment and infants' attachment security could be computed (the resulting percentage was 75%; κ = .49, n = 661). Concerning the 2nd issue, the 10 samples (N = 389) that were retrieved showed a combined effect size of .72 in the expected direction. According to conventional criteria, the effect sizes are large. It was concluded that although the predictive validity of the AAI is a replicated fact, there is only partial knowledge of how attachment representations are transmitted (the transmission gap).
The theory of attachment was developed by John Bowlby (1973) to explain the nature of a child's tie to his or her parent in terms of its biological function and to account for the disturbing behavioral responses observed in infants subjected to prolonged separations from significant attachment figures. Recently, a central hypothesis within attachment theory has emerged that suggests that parents' mental representation of childhood attachment experiences—as manifested in language—strongly influences the quality of their child's attachment to them. It is hypothesized that an adult's evaluation of childhood experiences and their influence on current functioning becomes organized into a relatively stable “state of...