Maternal coherence in the Adult Attachment Interview is linked to maternal reminiscing and to children's self concept

Abstract

The role of maternal attachment representations in mother–child reminiscing and children's self concept was assessed in a sample of 31 New Zealand mothers and their 5.5-year-old children. Mothers participated in the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI; Main, Goldwyn, & Hesse, 2002) and reminisced about everyday past events with their children. Children participated in the Children's Self View Questionnaire (Eder, 1990) to measure interpersonal and intrapersonal aspects of their self concept. Maternal coherence on the AAI was positively correlated with mothers' elaborative reminiscing and with interpersonal aspects of children's self concept. Mothers' states of mind with respect to attachment may enable open and elaborative reminiscing with their children, and may also indirectly lead to children's self-concept development.

Keywords:

• adult attachment
• autobiographical memory
• self concept
• middle childhood
• mother–child interaction

Acknowledgements

The Marsden Fund of the Royal Society of New Zealand funded this research (co-PI Tamar Murachver). I'm grateful to Talia Gifford for conducting and transcribing the Adult Attachment interviews and to Jill Carlivati and Gloria Whaley for coding. Thank you also to the Language and Memory team for collecting and coding the mother–child reminiscing data. Special thanks go to the families who continue to participate in this longitudinal study.

Notes

1. In the larger study, mothers completed the Attachment Q-Set (Waters, 1987) when their children were 19 months old. These mother-sorted AQS scores were positively correlated to mother–child elaborative reminiscing at earlier time points, especially to mothers' and children's emotion talk (Newcombe & Reese, 2004; Reese & Farrant, 2003), and were marginally correlated in the present sample with mothers' elaborative reminiscing style at 65 months (r = .31, p < .10). Children's AQS scores were not correlated, however, with maternal AAI coherence or security scores or with children's CSVQ scores (overall positive, interpersonal, or intrapersonal).