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

Abstract

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.

Keywords:

• Attachment
• secure base
• scripts
• Adult Attachment Interview
• romantic attachment
• narratives

Acknowledgements

This research was supported by Grant HD36635 from the National Institute for Child Health and Human Development to Jude Cassidy. Portions of this research were presented at the biennial meetings of the Society for Research in Child Development, Atlanta, 2005.

We thank the students who participated in this research. We also thank Steven Bottjer, Jeremy Rachlin, Elizabeth Mizerek, and Jessica Smith for their assistance with data collection, and Mindy Rodenberg Cabrera for supervising data collection. We are grateful to Inbal Kivenson Bar-On, Mindy Rodenberg Cabrera, June Sroufe, Sue Watson, and Marina Zelenko for coding the attachment interviews used in this study, and to Sarah Steinberg (along with Harriet Salatas Waters) for coding the narratives. We are also grateful to Phillip Shaver for reading an earlier draft of this manuscript and for making many thoughtful comments.