The Mother-Child Attachment Partnership in Early Childhood Secure Base Behavioral and Representational Processes

This monograph examines the interplay between behavioral and cognitive representations of attachmet during early childhood. We track the continued development of secure base support and use while assessing maternal co-construction processes and thier joint impact on children's secure base behavior and attachment representations. First, our investigation establishes that smoothly interacting dyads have mothers who continue to provide secure base support and children who use them as secure base across early childhood (mother sensitivity-child security links). Furthermore, the patterning of children's secure base behavior when interacting with the mother is related to the structure of children's knowledge about secure base relationships. Second, we introduce mother co-construction skills and evaluate their impact on the mother child relationship. Using two different co-construction tasks, we scored maternal co-construction in terms of skills that promote secure base script knowledge. Both tasks were related to maternal AAI coherence and attachment script knowledge. In addition, studies showed that maternal co-construction skills make unique contributions to both child secure base behvior and child script knowledge. Findings support the hypothesis that mothers' cognitive/verbal co-constructive skills during conversations about attachment and emotion-laden situations play a key role in organization of children's attachment behavior and representations. Finally, we demonstrate that maternal script knowledge not only impacts children's script knowledge (intergenerational transmission), but guides mothers' expectations and judgements of mother-child interactions. Throughout this monograph, we stress the importance of an interpersonal approach when investigating attachment relationships during early childhood, where mother-child interactions and communication about attachment-related issues are considered key to unveil co-constructive processes involved in the child's behavioral and cognitive organization of attachment relationships.

Dr. Germán E. Posada's (Ph.D.) current research focuses on the behavioral and representational development of parent-child secure base relationships during childhood and the relations between the quality of those relationships and characteristics of the context. His work includes the study of those issues from a cross-cultural perspective and the use of observational methodologies in naturalistic settings.

Dr. Harriet S. Waters's (Ph.D.) current research focuses on applying basic research in cognitive psychology to problems in early social cognition. She has applied her knowledge of narrative organization and production to the problem of assessing individual differences in representations of early social experience. In addition, she has been studying parental socialization influences on children’s hypotheses about the workings of social relationships.

Brian E. Vaughn is developmental scientist who has been involved with attachment research and scholarship for over four decades. He has been instrumental in providing validation data for several widely used measures of attachment (e.g., the Attachment Q-Sort) and has been actively involved in research demonstrating the validity and utility of the Attachment Script Assessment for adults and adolescents. He is currently pursuing research to identify the links between mental representations of attachment and both social engagement and executive function in early childhood.

Elaine Reese is a Professor of Psychology at the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand. She received her M.A. and Ph.D. in Developmental Psychology from Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. Elaine conducts longitudinal studies of memory development and parent-child interactions. Her book for parents, Tell Me a Story: Sharing Stories to Enrich Your Child's World, was published by Oxford University Press in 2013.

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