Maternal representations of attachment and their relation to patterns of infant affect and maternal availability.
Item
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Title
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Maternal representations of attachment and their relation to patterns of infant affect and maternal availability.
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Identifier
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AAI9207066
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identifier
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9207066
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Creator
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Director, Lisa.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Arietta Slade
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Date
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1991
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Psychology, Clinical | Psychology, Developmental
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Abstract
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This study investigates the idea that differing organizations of attachment entail differing capacities to express and experience affect, communicated between caregiver and child. A parent's own representation of attachment is thought to drive this process of affect mediation, believed to emerge between parent and child at the end of the infant's first year of life.;Mothers and their 10-12-month-old infants were videotaped in a laboratory setting, in interaction with a mechanical toy robot. This stimulus aroused uncertainty and fear in the infants, creating conditions that invited mothers' guidance. The infants' affective responses to the robot, and the mothers' availability to their infants, were both assessed. These measures were examined in the context of maternal attachment. Mothers were classified as secure, dismissing, or preoccupied in relation to attachment, on the basis of the Adult Attachment Interview (George, Kaplan, & Main, 1985).;The findings support the hypothesis that flexible emotional life is a distinguishing feature of secure attachment. Infants of secure mothers produced the most flexible sequence of affective responses to the charged stimulus of this paradigm. The content of the infants' affective responses also revealed important differences. Infants of both secure and dismissing mothers exhibited primarily positive responses to the robot, whereas infants of preoccupied mothers exhibited primarily negative responses. The prominence of anxiety in infants of the preoccupied group underscored the problematic role of negative affect in the dynamics thought to underlie insecure attachment.;On measures of maternal behavior, secure mothers exhibited consistent patterns of high availability in both physical and verbal interaction with their infants. In contrast, various analyses failed to produce findings of uniform behavior that could consistently distinguish the two insecure groups of dismissing and preoccupied mothers. These results suggest that secure attachment is a coherent and stable phenomenon, whereas insecure attachment seems to resist generalization, both as a single phenomenon or as two distinct subgroups, preoccupied and dismissing. The findings indicate the need for closer study of the tie between representation and behavior, in order to further understanding of adult attachment theory.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
