Mary Main

Security in infancy, childhood, and adulthood: A move to the level of representation.

We are grateful to the Institute of Human Development, Berkeley, and to the Society for Research in Child Development for funding that made the study of our sample at 6 years possible. In its earlier phases, the Social Development Project was supported by the William T. Grant Foundation, by the Alvin Nye Main Foundation, and by Bio-Medical Support Grants 1-444036-32024 and 1-444036-32025 for studies in the behavioral sciences. The Child Study Center at the University of California was invaluable in its provision of subjects and in the training provided for our observers and examiners. The National Center for Clinical Infancy Programs provided support and assistance to Nancy Kaplan. This project would not have been possible without the direction and assistance provided by Donna Weston and by Bonnie Powers, Jackie Stadtman, and Stewart Wakeling in its first phases. For the initial identification of infants who should be left unclassified-an identification critical to the present study-we gratefully acknowledge both Judith Solomon and Donna Weston. Carol George participated in the designing of the sixth-year project; Ruth Goldwyn served as adult interviewer; and Ellen Richardson served as the childs examiner. The videotapes and transcripts of the sixth-year study were analyzed by Jude Cassidy, Anitra DeMoss, Ruth Goldwyn, Nancy Kaplan, Todd Hirsch, Lorraine Littlejohn, Amy Strage, and Reggie Tiedemann. Mary Ainsworth, John Bowlby, Harriet Oster, and Amy Strage provided useful criticism of earlier versions of this chapter. The overall conceptualization was substantially enriched by suggestions made by Erik Hesse.

The quality of the toddler's relationship to mother and to father: Related to conflict behavior and the readiness to establish new relationships.

MAIN, MARY, and WESTON, DONNA R. The Quality of the Toddlers Relationship to Mother and to Father: Related to Conflict Behavior and the Readiness to Establish New Relationships. CHILD DEVELOPMENT, 1981, 52, 932-940. The aims of this study were (1) to test for independence in the quality of the infants attachment to each parent, (2) to test the concept of security by viewing infants judged secure versus insecure with mother in a situation designed to arouse mild apprehension, (3) to examine the effects of existing infant-parent relationships upon positive social responsiveness to new persons, and (4) to identify characteristics of infants judged unclassifiable within the Ainsworth system. In the first part of the study 61 infants were seen with different parents in the Ainsworth strange situation at 12 and 18 months. Classifications with mother and with father were independent; father as well as mother categories were stable over an 8-month period. 44 infants were additionally seen with mother at 12 months in a play session in which an adult actor attempted to establish a friendly relationship. Conflict behavior occurred in infants judged nonsecure with mother. The relationship to father as well as to mother appeared to affect friendly responsiveness to the adult actor. Infants unclassifiable within the Ainsworth system (12.5%) showed conflict and little positive responsiveness to the adult actor.

Cross-Cultural Studies of Attachment Organization: Recent Studies, Changing Methodologies, and the Concept of Conditional Strategies

Recent cross-cultural studies of individual differences in attachment organization are reviewed, and attention is drawn to new methods of assessment. In a speculative essay, the concept of the conditi

Disorganized Infant, Child, and Adult Attachment: Collapse in Behavioral and Attentional Strategies:

This presentation focuses on the disorganized/disoriented (Group D) categories of infant, child, and adult attachment. The infant D category is assigned on the basis of interruptions and anomalies in organization and orientation observed during Ainsworths strange situation procedure. In neurologically normal low-risk samples, D attachment is not substantially related to descriptions of infant temperament, and usually appears with respect to only one parent. At six, former D infants are often found to be role-inverting (D-Controlling) towards the parent, while drawings and separation-related narratives (D-Fearful) suggest continuing states of fear and disorganization. In adults, marked lapses in reasoning and discourse surrounding the discussion of loss or abuse during the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI) causes a transcript to be assigned to Unresolved/disorganized (U/d) adult attachment status, which predicts infant D attachment. Bowlbys theory is extended, with the proposal that certain forms of frightening parental behavior will arouse contradictory biologically channeled propensities to approach and to take flight from the parent. Maltreated infants are therefore highly likely to be disorganized. Also identified are subtler forms of frightening parental behavior (including dissociative behavior and anomalous forms of frightened behavior) that appear to lead to infant disorganization. This suggests that infant D attachment may at times represent a second-generation effect of the parents own continuing unresolved responses to trauma. Infant D attachment predicts disruptive/aggressive and dissociative disorders in childhood and adolescence, while U/d adult attachment appears frequently in psychiatric and criminal populations. Clinical implications are discussed.

The Organized Categories of Infant, Child, and Adult Attachment: Flexible Vs. Inflexible Attention Under Attachment-Related Stress

From an evolutionary perspective, a central mechanism promoting infant survival is the maintenance of proximity to attachment figures. Consequently attachment figure(s) represent the infants primary solution to experiences of fear. Aspects of the development of the field of attachment are outlined within this context, beginning with Bowlbys ethological/evolutionary theory, and proceeding to Ainsworths early descriptions of infant-mother interaction in Uganda and Baltimore. Using a laboratory procedure called the strange situation, Ainsworth identified three organized patterns of infant response to separation from and reunion with the parent. Narratives derived from videotaped strange situation behavior of infants in each category (secure, avoidant, and resistant/ambivalent) are provided, together with a discussion of the prototypical sequelae of each category (e.g., school behavior, and separation-related narratives and drawings at age six). The Adult Attachment Interview (AAI) and the move to the level of representation are also described. AAI transcripts are presently analyzed according to the speakers capacity to adhere to Grices maxims of rational cooperative discourse, and three organizedAAI categories, or states of mind with respect to attachment, have been identified (secure-autonomous, dismissing, and preoccupied). When the interview is administered to parents who have been seen with their infants in the strange situation, each AAI category has repeatedly been found to predict that infants strange situation response to that parent. Illustrations of the discourse characteristic of each category are provided, and it is noted that individuals with apparently unfavorable life histories are found to have secure offspring, providing that their history is recounted coherently. Like infant strange situation behavior, differences in adult security as identified through discourse patterning are interpreted in terms of attentional flexibility or inflexibility under attachment-related stress.

Introduction to the Special Section on Attachment and Psychopathology: 2. Overview of the Field of Attachment.

J. Bowlby (1969) proposed that the childs insistence on maintainance of proximity to protective (parental) figures was attributable to the activities of an attachment behavioral system which regulates primate safety and survival. M. D. S. Ainsworth, M. C. Blehar, E. Waters, and S. Walls (1978) Strange Situation procedure later delineated 3 categories of 1-year-old response to brief laboratory separations from the parent (secure, avoidant, and resistant), each found systematically related to parent-infant interaction, and predictive of favorable versus unfavorable sequelae in middle childhood. Recently, a fourth, disorganized-disoriented infant Strange Situation category has been identified, and infant attachment has been found to predict child narratives. Additionally, an Adult Attachment Interview (AAI) and corresponding system of discourse analysis has been devised that assesses variations in the ability to maintain coherent, collaborative discourse while discussing early relationships and their influences. Among parents, differences in patterning of AAI response predict corresponding forms of infant Strange Situation behavior, both concurrently and before the birth of the first child. Parents who are coherent-collaborative in discussing even highly unfavorable histories have infants who are secure. A strong majority of clinically distressed individuals are insecure with respect to attachment, and special vulnerabilities are appearing in disorganized-disoriented children. Relations to behavior genetics, family interaction patterns, psychophysiology, and treatment outcome studies are emerging or are anticipated.

Exploration play and cognitive functioning related to infant mother attachment

Forty infant-mother dyads participated in a short-term longitudinal study relating security of attachment at 12 months of age to exploratory behavior, social behavior, cognitive development, and language at 21 months. Bayley Mental Scale performance favored the securely attached toddlers. Securely-attached toddlers had a larger observed vocabulary than insecurely-attached toddlers, and many more of the securely-attached toddlers issued spontaneous verbal self-directions. Securely-attached toddlers were more playful with both the adult playmate and the Bayley examiner, while insecure toddlers tended to actively avoid the playmate. Secure toddlers took more spontaneous pleasure in their play with objects, and paid more attention to the features of a puzzle toy. During free play securely-attached toddlers were more intensely involved in their bouts of exploration and play than were insecurely-attached toddlers. Insecurely-attached toddlers had shorter attention spans.

Infant Response to Rejection of Physical Contact by the Mother

Abstract Previously unexamined consequences of the ethological theory of attachment suggest that if an attachment figure rejects close body contact with an infant, the infant is placed in a conflict situation in which aggression, conflict behavior and avoidance are expected outcomes. In previous studies we have shown that a mothers rejection of contact with her infant is, as expected, highly associated with avoidance of the mother in stress (separation and reunion) situations. Here we report that a mothers aversion to tactual contact with the infant is stable over the first year of life, and that it is positively associated with rough handling of the infant. It is not associated with carly differences in infant cuddliness. In each of the three samples examined, the mothers aversion to contact with the infant is found positively associated with infant conflict behavior. A mothers aversion to contact between one week and three months of age is related positively to infant angry mood and acts of aggression between 9 and 12 months of age. The conflict situation created by the physically rejecting attachment figure is comparable to but distinguished from the well-known “double bind.”

Disorganization and Disorientation in Infant Strange Situation Behavior

The Ainsworth Strange Situation is a brief, structured observational procedure in which one-year-old infants are exposed to two brief separations from the parent in an unfamiliar laboratory environment (Ainsworth and Wittig, 1969). The infant’s response to this moderately stressful experience appears to reflect the history of the caregiving it has experienced, and three traditional patterns of infant-mother “attachment organization” have been identified, each related to a particular pattern of maternall care (Ainsworth, Blehar, Waters and Wall, 1978). Infants who explore the room and the toys in the parent’s presence, show signs of missing the parent on separation, seek proximity and contact on reunion, and then return to play are termed secure. The mothers of these infants have repeatedly been observed to be relatively “sensitive and responsive” to their signals and communications across the first year of life. Infants who focus almost exclusively on the toys, actively avoiding and ignoritig the parent on reunion, are termed insecure-avoidant, a response linked to the mother’s consistent rejection of infant attachment behavior. Finally, infants who seem distressed, angry, and preoccupied with the mother throughout the procedure, and fail to settle by the end of the final reunion episode are termed insecure-resistant/ambivalent (hereafter, insecure-resistant). This behavior pattern has been found linked to inconsistent and unpredictable maternal responsiveness. Each of these three traditional patterns of attachment are considered to represent organized strategies for dealing with the stress of separation from the parent in a strange environment (Main, 1990), although attachment to the mother has repeatedly been found to predict less favorable outcomes than does secure attachment in later childhood (see Cassidy and Berlin, 1994, and Main, 1995, for an overview of the foregoing studies).

Disorganized attachment in infancy: a review of the phenomenon and its implications for clinicians and policy-makers.

ABSTRACT Disorganized/Disoriented (D) attachment has seen widespread interest from policy makers, practitioners, and clinicians in recent years. However, some of this interest seems to have been based on some false assumptions that (1) attachment measures can be used as definitive assessments of the individual in forensic/child protection settings and that disorganized attachment (2) reliably indicates child maltreatment, (3) is a strong predictor of pathology, and (4) represents a fixed or static “trait” of the child, impervious to development or help. This paper summarizes the evidence showing that these four assumptions are false and misleading. The paper reviews what is known about disorganized infant attachment and clarifies the implications of the classification for clinical and welfare practice with children. In particular, the difference between disorganized attachment and attachment disorder is examined, and a strong case is made for the value of attachment theory for supportive work with families and for the development and evaluation of evidence-based caregiving interventions.