Adult Attachment Interview.
The minor finding that educational status seems to relate to Insecurity (but not Security) of attachment is a curious one. On looking at the 40 interviews classified Insecure, dismissal of attachment appears to be less likely and preoccupation with attachment appears to be more likely if one has advanced from secondary to university studies. As neither Insecure group differed significantly in terms of Experience ratings (with the exception of the higher incidence of role reversal with father in the Preoccupied group), we may posit that both Insecure groups are coping with the same attachment-related difficulties, but in different ways: one by a strategy of avoidance (D) , the other by a strategy of anger and preoccupation (E) . It may be that a certain level of intellectual ability and exploration, such as that indicated by possession of a university degree, renders an avoidant/dismissing strategy less serviceable.
The significant correlations between the Experience Scales of the Adult Attachment Interview indexing the extent to which parents were likely to have been loving, rejecting and neglecting, and the acceptance-rejection dimension of the Mother-Father-Peer Scale, provide evidence for the convergent validity of these measures. That is, subjects' self-report of how loving or rejecting each
parent was during their childhood agrees to a large extent with independent ratings of this construct by a trained judge, based on subjects' interview-responses. It is perhaps surprising that the correlations were not higher still, as only 40% of the variance between these assessments of attachment history is shared. Interestingly, reports about degree of acceptance from both parents on the Mother-Father-Peer Scale correlated significantly with the Adult Attachment Interview State of Mind scale indexing idealisation of mother and father respectively? this suggests that subjects' self-reports were substantially biased in favour of what they would like to have recalled rather than what is likely to have actually occurred.
Fundamental to the rating and classifying system that accompanies the Adult Attachment Interview (Main and Goldwyn, in press) is the view that attachment history should be distinguished from current state of mind with respect to attachment. This axiom is confirmed by the general absence of association between the Mother-Father- Peer Scale and the State of Mind Scales of the Adult Attachment Interview. In particular the Mother-Father-Peer Scale was not congruent with the interview-based scales assessing coherence and inability to recall. Also, subjects' self-reports of how accepting their mothers were during their childhood did not distinguish Secure from Insecure attachment groups. However, subjects' own ratings of how accepting their father was did distinguish Secure
from Insecure groups: the Secure-Autonomous (F) group reported levels of father-acceptance higher than that of the Insecure-Dismissing (D) group, who reported higher levels than the Insecure-Preoccupied (E) group. Interview- based Experience scales of how loving both mother and father were likely to have been effectively distinguished between attachment classifications-, with Autonomous adults having been more likely to have experienced supportive or loving parents. This is in keeping with the literature indicating that qualitative differences in parental behaviour are predictive of infant security of attachment (Ainsworth et al., 1978? Grossmann, 1989). But it is important to stress that the current findings also indicate that the experience of having had an unsupportive or rejecting mother and/or father did not necessarily lead to an Insecure interview-classification. If the adult demonstrated an ability to coherently and affectively discuss painful experiences, without defensively excluding information from awareness, or without growing angrily preoccupied and confused, then they were likely to have impressed the rater as secure within themselves and, also, likely to be able to provide a secure base for their child. More than half of the 60 interviews classified Secure- Autonomous (F) in the present sample described an attachment history which included difficult experiences (e.g. moderate rejection or neglect from one or both parents, separations from one or both parents, loss of a parent in childhood' or adulthood).
The adults in this latter mentioned group are likely to have been anxiously attached infants. However it is well-established that between childhood and adulthood many experiences can occur which might lessen or increase the likelihood of infant attachment patterns persisting (e.g. Egeland, Jacobovitz & Sroufe, 1988). The Adult Attachment Interview seems particularly well designed to assess the extent to which infant patterns have persisted across development. This is because the interview yields a measure of the overall fabric of attachment history, and the pattern of how this history has become mentally represented in the individual.
A strength of the interview-based assessment procedure is its capability of inferring not only the quality of mental representations concerning attachment, but also the relative impact of different qualities of experience upon the development and maintenance of mental models, and overall security, of attachment. Examining the association between interview-based Experience Scales and the overall classifications indicates that interviews classified Autonomous were indeed associated with parenting behaviour that was more loving, less rejecting, less neglecting and less role reversing than interviews classified either Dismissing or Preoccupied. Interestingly however, when parenting behaviour was rated in terms of Pressure to Achieve or Overprotection, it did not distinguish Secure
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