Maternal secure base scripts predict child attachment security in an at-risk sample.

Accumulating evidence indicates that individuals possess attachment, or secure base, scripts based on experiences with attachment figures, and these attachment scripts predict important outcomes such as caregiving behaviors and offspring social-emotional adjustment. However, less is known about the association between parents' secure base scripts and child attachment security within at-risk samples, i.e., those known to be at greater risk for insecurity. The current study examined the relation between maternal secure base script representations and child attachment security by extending the use of the Attachment Script Assessment (ASA; Waters & Rodrigues-Doolabh, 2004) to an at-risk sample. One-hundred mother-child pairs from a larger longitudinal study participated; the larger study focused on psychosocial risks related to parenting in a primarily low-income sample. In the present study, overall ASA script scores were first compared with two independent middle-class samples, one from a U.S. study, the other an international study. Scores and statistical patterns were comparable across all samples, indicating that the ASA was successful in tapping into maternal secure base script knowledge in our at-risk sample. The relation between maternal script scores and children's Attachment Q-Set (AQS; Waters, 1995) security scores were examined at ages 1 and 2 years. Dependency scores from the AQS were also included to establish discriminant validity for the script scores. Results indicated that maternal script knowledge predicted child security, while showing no relation to dependency scores. Findings indicate that the ASA can be an important and viable measure for assessing attachment representations in at-risk samples of caregivers.

Commentary: the link between attachment and social competence in early childhood.

The relationship between attachment and social competence in early childhood has been established by the broader literature, but has fallen short of providing specificity of developmental mechanisms bridging the two. This special issue proposes that secure base script knowledge built upon infant-caregiver experiences is the key link. The empirical articles provide support of this hypothesis across cultures sampled from four continents. All reproduce significant relations between children's secure base scripts and social competence, as well as other related social/cognitive variables. None of this would be possible if the authors had not developed new efficient scoring systems for assessing young children's script knowledge. They have not only provided a more sophisticated cognitive-based analysis of the relation between attachment and social competence, but new methodological tools to explore the relation in greater detail as well opening up the possibility of longitudinal studies and adapting the narrative techniques to assess peer-based scripts.

VII. MATERNAL SECURE BASE SCRIPT KNOWLEDGE AND JUDGMENTS OF MOTHER-CHILD INTERACTIONS.

Previous studies have shown that mothers with high script scores are better at providing secure base support in naturalistic settings. In the current study, we examine whether maternal script knowledge guides mothers' expectations and judgments of mother-child interactions, providing a bridge between their knowledge and behavior. Forty mothers were asked to use a new Parental Secure Base Q-set designed to characterize a typical mother-child play day at a park. Furthermore, video clips from mother-child joint storytelling sessions, already scored for maternal co-construction skills (from Chapter IV), were presented. The mothers rated the videotaped mothers' interaction skills on several quality of interaction scales (sensitivity to signals, cooperation vs. inference, affect regulation). Results indicated that mothers with high script scores showed greater understanding of secure base support (Q-sort data) and an observant "eye" for skillful mother-child interaction, particularly with respect to noting less effective mother-child interactions. These findings support the hypothesis that secure base script knowledge is linked to broad-based understanding of secure base support across contexts.

VI. INTERGENERATIONAL TRANSMISSION OF SECURE BASE SCRIPT KNOWLEDGE: THE ROLE OF MATERNAL CO-CONSTRUCTION SKILLS.

This study examined the link between mothers' and children's script-like representations of attachment and the role of maternal co-construction skills in facilitating script knowledge in their children. Fifty-nine children recruited from preschools in Bucharest, Romania (age range 4 to 5 years) completed a shortened version of the Attachment Story Completion Task (ASCT) to assess their secure base script knowledge whereas their mother's script knowledge was assessed with the Attachment Script Assessment (ASA). In addition, the mother-child pairs completed the Affect Discussion Task (see Chapter II) to assess mothers' co-construction skills. Mother and child secure base script knowledge was significantly related, as were maternal co-construction skills and child script knowledge. Regression analyses indicated that maternal co-construction skills impacted children's script knowledge above and beyond the effects of maternal script scores.

II. MEASURES: SECURE BASE BEHAVIOR, CO-CONSTRUCTION, AND ATTACHMENT SCRIPTS.

In order to examine the interplay between behavioral and cognitive representations of attachment during early childhood, we compiled both behavior-based and more cognitive-based attachment measures for this age range. The behavior-based measures were observational Q-set methodologies already established in the literature. Measures of attachment representations for the children and mothers were narrative-based procedures, that is, established storytelling tasks for obtaining attachment narratives from children and adults. For assessing maternal co-construction processes, we developed two new co-construction tasks that required joint storytelling of attachment relevant storylines in one case, and joint conversations about emotion-laden situations in the other. All of these measures are based on the central secure base construct of attachment theory. Behavioral measures assess secure base use and support. Attachment narratives collected from both children and parents are scored for secure base script knowledge. Maternal co-construction is assessed in terms of cognitive processes that enhance and promote attachment script knowledge.

IV. CO-CONSTRUCTION OF ATTACHMENT REPRESENTATIONS AND AFFECT-REGULATING COGNITIONS: THE ROLE OF MATERNAL ATTACHMENT SECURITY.

This study focused on the role of maternal co-construction skills in building attachment relevant representations in early childhood. Thirty-four mothers and their 4- to 5-year-old children were presented with two co-construction tasks, one an attachment storytelling task, the other an affect discussion task about emotion-laden situations. Maternal co-construction skills were assessed with several scales that scored the quality of the co-construction partnership, the mother's skill in prompting elaboration, and helping build an explanatory framework. Mothers completed the Attachment Script Assessment (ASA) and the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI) as well. Results indicated that mothers' secure base script knowledge (ASA) was significantly related to communication effectiveness, encouraging elaboration of storylines, and using open-ended and why questions. Maternal AAI coherence showed similar relations to co-construction support.

VIII. CONCLUSION: CO-CONSTRUCTING A SECURE BASE PARTNERSHIP: MOTHER-CHILD INTERACTIONS, COMMUNICATION, AND SCRIPT REPRESENTATIONS.

Using the secure base construct, the evidence presented indicates that interactional experience continues to be a central factor in the organization of mother-child attachment relationships. The parent-child codetermination process that establishes their relationship in infancy expands during the preschool years. Furthermore, with the increasingly relevant role of language, parent-child verbal communication during this time plays an important part in structuring children's attachment behavior and knowledge. Parents help their children construe attachment-related information, control and regulate emotional experience, and guide behavior during attachment-related experiences. That is, during early childhood, parent and child continue the process of constructing a secure base partnership through their gradually more complex interactions that take advantage of children's behavioral, emotional, representational, and language advances. Although the studies are interrelated and contribute to a coherent understanding of attachment relationships during this time period, they represent small-scale studies. Further, some of the effect sizes presented are small. Thus, future research should include tests of replication as well as explorations of links to early and later development and parallel findings in more diverse samples.

I. INTRODUCTION: THE CO-CONSTRUCTION OF MOTHER-CHILD ATTACHMENT RELATIONSHIPS IN EARLY CHILDHOOD.

Attachment relationships are formed, organized, and elaborated through interactions between an attachment figure and her/his child. The parent-child codetermination process that establishes their relationship in infancy extends and expands during the preschool years. A child's developing ability to use her/his mother as a secure base requires support, time, and practice during early childhood. Moreover, experiences with attachment figures provide information that children use to build internal representations of their relationship. Thus, the organization of attachment behavior is expected to be related to the structure of a child's attachment representations. Yet, questions about how the structure of those representations develop remain unanswered. In moving into the preschool years, we anticipate that building of mental representations of secure base support and use will be guided by parent-child co-construction processes. The child's improving language and advancing information processing skills increase the opportunities for verbally based interactions between caregiver and child. The mother-child co-construction process of secure base relationships includes now a verbal-representational component, but the nonverbal, behavioral building blocks remain in play as well.

Multiple domains of parental secure base support during childhood and adolescence contribute to adolescents' representations of attachment as a secure base script.

Although attachment theory claims that early attachment representations reflecting the quality of the child's "lived experiences" are maintained across developmental transitions, evidence that has emerged over the last decade suggests that the association between early relationship quality and adolescents' attachment representations is fairly modest in magnitude. We used aspects of parenting beyond sensitivity over childhood and adolescence and early security to predict adolescents' scripted attachment representations. At age 18 years, 673 participants from the NICHD Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development completed the Attachment Script Assessment from which we derived an assessment of secure base script knowledge. Measures of secure base support from childhood through age 15 years (e.g., parental monitoring of child activity, father presence in the home) were selected as predictors and accounted for an additional 8% of the variance in secure base script knowledge scores above and beyond direct observations of sensitivity and early attachment status alone, suggesting that adolescents' scripted attachment representations reflect multiple domains of parenting. Cognitive and demographic variables also significantly increased predicted variance in secure base script knowledge by 2% each.

Secure base representations in middle childhood across two Western cultures: Associations with parental attachment representations and maternal reports of behavior problems.

Recent work examining the content and organization of attachment representations suggests that 1 way in which we represent the attachment relationship is in the form of a cognitive script. This work has largely focused on early childhood or adolescence/adulthood, leaving a large gap in our understanding of script-like attachment representations in the middle childhood period. We present 2 studies and provide 3 critical pieces of evidence regarding the presence of a script-like representation of the attachment relationship in middle childhood. We present evidence that a middle childhood attachment script assessment tapped a stable underlying script using samples drawn from 2 western cultures, the United States (Study 1) and Belgium (Study 2). We also found evidence suggestive of the intergenerational transmission of secure base script knowledge (Study 1) and relations between secure base script knowledge and symptoms of psychopathology in middle childhood (Study 2). The results from this investigation represent an important downward extension of the secure base script construct.

Caregiving antecedents of secure base script knowledge: a comparative analysis of young adult attachment representations.

Based on a subsample (N = 673) of the NICHD Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development (SECCYD) cohort, this article reports data from a follow-up assessment at age 18 years on the antecedents of secure base script knowledge, as reflected in the ability to generate narratives in which attachment-related difficulties are recognized, competent help is provided, and the problem is resolved. Secure base script knowledge was (a) modestly to moderately correlated with more well-established assessments of adult attachment, (b) associated with mother-child attachment in the first 3 years of life and with observations of maternal and paternal sensitivity from childhood to adolescence, and (c) partially accounted for associations previously documented in the SECCYD cohort between early caregiving experiences and Adult Attachment Interview states of mind (Booth-LaForce & Roisman, 2014) as well as self-reported attachment styles (Fraley, Roisman, Booth-LaForce, Cox, & Holland, 2013). (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2014 APA, all rights reserved).

Script-like attachment representations and behavior in families and across cultures: studies of parental secure base narratives.

The articles included in this Special Issue of Attachment and Human Development were originally presented as contributions to symposia at the Society for Research in Child Development (Atlanta, Georgia, April 2005) and at the European Developmental Psychology Conference (Laguna, Canary Islands, August 2005). The articles represent efforts of independent research teams studying the emergence, maintenance, and implications of attachment representations. In each study, a central measure of attachment representation was a recently described measure of the secure base script (Waters & Rodrigues-Doolabh, 2004). This measure assesses the "scriptedness" of secure base content in stories told in response to a set of word-prompts. Each paper included in this special issue addresses a specific issue relevant to the reliability, validity, or broader utility of the attachment script representation measure as an indicator of the respondent's awareness of and access to a secure base script. The first paper provides a précis of the measure itself, including its conceptual underpinnings and the notion of "scriptedness" as it relates to the secure base construct. In the second article, the cross-time stability of the scriptedness scores is tested. The third and fourth articles present relations between the scriptedness score from the new measure and indices of state of mind about attachment from the Adult Attachment Interview (one sample of Italian mothers, the other in a sample of adolescents). The fifth article describes relations between the attachment script representation score and mother - child interaction during a memory reminiscence task. The final article in this set is a report on associations between the maternal attachment script representations and child attachment security for a sample of adopting mothers and adopted children. Taken together, these studies provide broad support for this new procedure and scoring system to capture important aspects of secure base knowledge for adults and also provide evidence for the relevance of secure base scripts in the socialization of child secure base behavior.

The attachment working models concept: among other things, we build script-like representations of secure base experiences.

Mental representations are of central importance in attachment theory. Most often conceptualized in terms of working models, ideas about mental representation have helped guide both attachment theory and research. At the same time, the working models concept has been criticized as overly extensible, explaining too much and therefore too little. Once unavoidable, such openness is increasingly unnecessary and a threat to the coherence of attachment theory. Cognitive and developmental understanding of mental representation has advanced markedly since Bowlby's day, allowing us to become increasingly specific about how attachment-related representations evolve, interact, and influence affect, cognition, and behavior. This makes it possible to be increasingly specific about mental representations of attachment and secure base experience. Focusing on script-like representations of secure base experience is a useful first step in this direction. Here we define the concept of a secure base script, outline a method for assessing a person's knowledge/access to a secure base script, and review evidence that script-like representations are an important component of the working models concept.

Narrative assessment of attachment representations: links between secure base scripts and adolescent attachment.

We explored the notion that adolescents possess mental secure base scripts of attachment-related events and examined, for the first time, whether these scripts were linked to adolescent attachment security. Results indicated that adolescents possessed a general script for mother and for father, and that they drew upon these scripts across different contexts. Adolescents' scripts for mother and for father were related, but only the scripts for mother predicted unique variance in adolescents' scripts for nonspecific others. Moreover, greater attachment security (as measured by the Adult Attachment Interview; AAI) was linked to greater access to and knowledge of secure base scripts for mothers, fathers, and nonspecific others. Only mother scripts, however, predicted unique variance in adolescents' AAI coherence of mind scores. Adolescents' romantic-attachment avoidance and anxiety scores (as assessed using the Experiences in Close Relationship Inventory) were linked negatively to scripts for mothers and nonspecific others, respectively.