What's in a word? Linguistic characteristics of Adult Attachment Interviews

Abstract

In the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI; George, Kaplan, & Main, 1984), state of mind with respect to attachment is assessed not on the basis of the content of the participant's narrative, but rather on the basis of the narrative's linguistic properties. The present study is the first to further explore linguistic characteristics of attachment state of mind in AAI narratives by examining participants' frequency of word usage within the categories of the Linguistic Inquiry Word Count text analysis program (LIWC; Pennebaker, Booth, & Francis, 2007). LIWC uses an internal dictionary to count words in conceptual categories and creates proportion scores for each category based on the total word count. Results from an examination of the AAI transcripts of 136 first-time mothers of infants indicated that (a) participants with secure, dismissing, and preoccupied AAI classifications significantly differed in their use of 14 of the 44 LIWC categories examined; (b) 10 LIWC categories were significantly correlated with AAI coherence of mind; and (c) AAI group assignment based on LIWC linguistic profiles yielded 71% agreement with AAI coders. We drew from existing AAI and LIWC research to interpret and discuss these intriguing findings.

Keywords:

• Adult Attachment Interview
• attachment
• representations
• language
• LIWC

Acknowledgements

This research was supported by Grant R01 MH58907 from the National Institute of Mental Health to Jude Cassidy. Preliminary findings were presented at the 2011 Biennial Meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. The authors are grateful for the help of James Pennebaker and Kevin O'Grady.

Notes

1. A matrix of correlations between the 44 LIWC categories and all continuous AAI scales is available from the first author.