PPT Slide
When Do Attachment Representations matter?
Relations Among the AAI, CRI and Behavior in the Development of Adult Partnerships
J. Crowell, Yuan Gao, Tricia Lawrence-Savane, Gina Abbott,
Maureen Olmsted, Chiyoko Lord
Through secure base interactions with parents, children develop mental representations of attachment that are hypothesized to guide their behaviors, cognitions and feelings in adult-adult attachment relationships (Bowlby, 1969/ 1982). In thinking of an adult partnership as an attachment relationship, we hypothesized that attachment representations based on childhood experience could influence the adult partnership in a variety of ways. In a previous study, we examined whether the partners selected one another based on their attachment status. The concordance for AAI status between partners is significant in this sample and in others, however AAI status is not a dominant factor in partner selection (Owens, et al., 1995; van IJzendoorn & Bakermans-Kranenburg, 1996).
Hence in adult relationships, the partners frequently come from different attachment backgrounds and each partner must integrate the current relationship into the attachment representation based on early experiences, or co-construct a new representation based on adult relationship experiences. In previous work to examine this issue, we used the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI) to assess generalized attachment representations based on early experience and the Current Relationship Interview (CRI) to assess representations of adult attachment relationships. We found significant correspondence between the two types of representations, but with evidence for co-construction as well.