The Adult Attachment Projective Picture System: Integrating Attachment Into Clinical Assessment

Abstract

This article summarizes the development and validation of the Adult Attachment Projective System (AAP), a measure we developed from the Bowlby–Ainsworth developmental tradition to assess adult attachment status. The AAP has demonstrated excellent concurrent validity with the Adult Attachment Interview (George, Kaplan, & Main, 1984/1985/1996; Main & Goldwyn, 1985–1994; Main, Goldwyn, & Hesse, 2003), interjudge reliability, and test–retest reliability, with no effects of verbal intelligence or social desirability. The AAP coding and classification system and application in clinical and community samples are summarized. Finally, we introduce the 3 other articles that are part of this Special Section and discuss the use of the AAP in therapeutic assessment and treatment.

Acknowledgments

This study was supported by grants from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Barrett Foundation, and a faculty development grant from Mills College.

Notes

Preliminary validation of the AAP, which included a portion of this sample combined with two development samples, was reported in George and West (2001).

AAI concordance and interjudge relability has also been established in several studies using the AAP in the German language. Reliable blind judges classified AAPs and AAIs from German transcripts and AAPs from English transcripts (see Buchheim & George, 2011). Psychometric validity data from studies independent of collaborative work with the AAP codevelopers is available in other publications (e.g., Aikins, Howes, & Hamilton, 2009; Béliveau & Moss, 2005; Benoit, Bouthillier, Moss, Rousseau, & Brunet, 2010; Van Ecke, 2006).

The original AAI study used a verbal intelligence measure on a Dutch sample that was equated with the 1972 Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS; Wechsler & Matarazzo, 1972). We used the Vocabulary scale in the 1981 version of the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale–Revised (WAIS–R; Wechsler, 1981) in an effort to parallel the original AAI validation study. Social desirability was measured using the Inventory of Desirable Responding (Paulhaus, 1998).

Bowlby (1980) defined the term unconscious as processes occurring out of conscious awareness drawing from theory and research defining the mid-20th-century cognitive revolution in psychology. Bowlby's goal was to describe patterns of unconscious processes that filtered or excluded certain experiences and affects that were directly related to an individual's experience with attachment figures. These processes became the attachment approach to defense. Unlike the cognitive information processing models from which he drew, however, Bowlby's view emphasized affect (Bowlby, 1973, 1980). Bowlby's approach to the unconscious is only one of the attachment theory postulates derived from redefining psychoanalytic concepts based on empirical research in cognitive and developmental psychology and ethology. Other examples include his reformulation of the child's internal world as a “cognitive-affective” internal working model and his reformulation of the foundation of mother–baby relationships based on Darwinian evolutionary theory and nonhuman primate research.