Attachment measures
[2] Some assessments can find additional information about an individual, such as unresolved trauma, depression, history of family triangulation, and lifespan changes in the attachment pattern.
[5] Attachment models are typically generated from the schools of developmental science or social psychology, although both emanate from the Bowlby-Ainsworth framework.
The D classification was thought to represent a breakdown in the attachment-caregiving partnership such that the child does not have an organized behavioral or representational strategy to achieve protection and care from the attachment figure.
It was developed by Mary Ainsworth, a developmental psychologist[7] Originally it was devised to enable children to be classified into the attachment styles known as secure, anxious-avoidant and anxious-ambivalent.
[8][9] In this procedure the child is observed playing for 20 minutes while caregivers and strangers enter and leave the room, recreating the flow of the familiar and unfamiliar presence in most children's lives.
The ICI involves a 3 minute video recording of a typical play interaction between a caregiver and infant, without requiring a separation or other stressor.
Effective training of evaluators is essential, as some items to be assessed require interpretation reliability (e.g., child is "suddenly aggressive toward mother for no reason").
The stories are designed to access how that child interacts with their primary caregiver in five situations: separation, confrontation, fear, reunion, and pain.
The assessment identified five attachment groups - secure, avoidant, ambivalent, and the punitive and caregiving patterns of middle childhood disorganization.
The MCAST[37] is a semi-structured doll play 'story stem' methodology, developed by Jonathan Green, Charlie Stanley, Ruth Goldwyn and Vicky Smith,[38][39] to evaluate and understand the internal (mental) representations of their attachment relationship with a specific primary caregiver in children of 4 to 8.5 years.
The concepts and procedures used have a basis in the Strange Situation Procedure and Adult Attachment Interview, and involves 4 story stem vignettes involving two dolls representing the caregiver-child dyad of interest and a dolls house, presented with affective arousal to mobilise attachment representations in a way that children of this age range find accessible and engaging.
It is based on the Adult Attachment Interview, adapted for children by focusing on representations of relationships with parents and attachment-related events.
[43] It covers 12 items, namely having a discriminated, preferred adult, seeking comfort when distressed, responding to comfort when offered, social and emotional reciprocity, emotional regulation, checking back after venturing away from the care giver, reticence with unfamiliar adults, willingness to go off with relative strangers, self endangering behavior, excessive clinging, vigilance/hypercompliance and role reversal.
Shaver and Fraley, coming from the social psychology perspective, note: "If you are a novice in this research area, what is most important for you to know is that self-report measures of romantic attachment and the AAI were initially developed completely independently and for quite different purposes.
One kind of measure receives its construct validity mostly from studies of romantic relationships, the other from prediction of a person's child's behavior in Ainsworth's Strange Situation.
(Shaver & Fraley, 2004) [5] The AAI, the AAP, and the self-report questionnaires offer distinct, but equally useful, perspectives on adult attachment.
[2]: 467 Developed by Carol George, Nancy Kaplan, and Mary Main in 1984,[44] the AAI is a semi-structured interview which takes about one hour to administer.
The interview taps into adult representation of attachment (i.e. internal working models) by assessing general and specific recollections from their childhood.
The AAI process involves an interview which is analyzed with various time-consuming methodologies, whereas the social psychology model uses a relatively short and quick self-report.
[48][50] Both the DMM-AAI and Berkeley-AAI methods assess information processing, memory system use, reflective integration, and are able to identify issues such as unresolved trauma and depression.
The advantage of using a picture free-response system is that individuals are not asked to describe their own experiences, a method that has been shown to be subject to social desirability and defensive processes especially for assessing attachment trauma.
In this way, the PACS contributes to our knowledge of specific types of communication and behaviors that distinguish patients of different attachment patterns in psychotherapy: The PACS identifies the same adult attachment groups as the AAI or the AAP, as well as yielding dimensional scores for "linguistic behaviors" such as Proximity seeking, Contact Maintaining, Exploring, Avoidance, Resistance.
David Schmitt, together with a large number of colleagues, validated the attachment questionnaire created by Bartholomew and Horowitz in 62 cultures.
The assessment is a shortened version of the Strange Situation Procedure and involves a 5-minute video recorded play interaction between a child and caregiver with a frustration task and post-frustration repair attempt.
[17] As described above, this validated assessment is a slightly modified version of the SSP to cover a wider range of ages 2-5 years old.
This may be a major constraint when applying the procedure in cultures, such as that in Japan (see Miyake et al.,, 1985),[88] where infants are rarely separated from their mothers in ordinary circumstances.
Modified procedures based on the Strange Situation have been developed for older preschool children (see Belsky et al., 1994; Greenberg et al., 1990)[89][90] but it is much more dubious whether the same approach can be used in middle childhood.
[20] With respect to the ecological validity of the Strange Situation, a meta-analysis of 2,000 infant-parent dyads, including several from studies with non-Western language and/or cultural bases found the global distribution of attachment categorizations to be A (21%), B (65%), and C (14%).
Of these two studies, the Japanese findings have sparked the most controversy as to the meaning of individual differences in attachment behavior as originally identified by Ainsworth et al. (1978).
[100][101] The original Richter’s et al. (1998) scale is strongly related to secure versus insecure classifications, correctly predicting about 90% of cases.
