|
Poster Symposium Script-like Representations
of Secure Base Experience: Introduction One of Freud's most daring hypotheses about development and close relationships was the notion that the infant-mother bond serves as a prototype for all later love relationships. For early experience to play such an important role, it must lay down a more or less persistent representa-tion that can influence affect, cognition, and behavior throughout the course of development. In Freud's theory, the early experience is represented as mental structures that both consume and direct mental energy. One of Bowlby's key insights was to replace Freud's approach with one grounded in modern cognitive psychology. The underlying metaphor in Freud's theory of mental representation was hydraulic; in Bowlby's the underlying metaphor is information processing. One of the major advances in attachment study was Mary Main's work on the Adult Attachment Interview. Although difficult to use, the AAI affords insights into the coherence of an adult's attachment representations. Although widely discussed as a measure of the attachment working model, the AAI does not directly assess a person's representation of early experience. Instead, it is a sample of verbal behavior from which one makes inferences about the coherence of an underlying representation. Such assessments of the "goodness" of a person's attachment representation have proven extremely useful in understanding individual differences, predicting parental and marital behavior, and proving that infant attachment security is indeed related to adult attachment representations. As attachment theory and research advance, the fact that the AAI does not provide specific information about the architecture of underlying attachment representations is proving to be a major limitation. Cognitive psychologists have studied many different modes of representation (images, lists, networks, scripts, etc.) and the ways in which they affect (and are affected by) mechanisms of learning and memory. Identifying the rather loose concept of an "attachment working model" with specific modes of representation can be very helpful for research on early experience, attachment development, stability and change. It can also help make sense of Bowlby's concept of multiple attachment representations. Understanding the architecture of attachment representations can also help us understand why the AAI works so well. Our first step toward understanding the architecture of attachment representations was for Dr. Harriet Waters to look a set of AAI transcripts. Having trained in adult cognitive psychology before working on cognitive development with John Flavell, she was familiar with the full range of representational structures that might be in play. Nonetheless, she found the transcripts too lengthy, too wide ranging, and too idiosyncratic to suggest any particular cognitive architecture. Accordingly, she suggested that we start by explaining to her, as best we could, what in a person's experience leads to the representations that shape AAI responses? Presumably it has something to do with the experience of your primary caregiver being sensitive, cooperative, available, and accepting. Ok - but that is not specific enough. What is it like? What happens? Well, you're looking for your mom and she's there or she's not. You need help (or time) and she's there or not. And the help works or it doesn't. Fine - the structure you're looking for is a "script". A script is a cognitive structure that summarizes recurring temporal-causal sequences in often repeated experiences. Roger Shank, Katherine Nelson, and others have shown that scriptedness has very strong effects on learning memory, and behavior. Inge Bretherton (Minn. Symp., 1991) was probably the first to recognize the relevance of script-like representations to attachment theory. This is not to say that script-like structures are the only mode in which early experience is represented - only that they are well suited to representing infant- and child-parent interactions, have well known operating characteristics, and are empirically accessible. Once we focused on a specific mode of representation, it was rather simple to work out the details. We developed a formal definition of a secure base script consisting of 6 major elements. Then using methods developed for research on children's prose production skills, we developed several sets of 10-12 prompt words that suggested (to someone who knows the secure base script) stories organized around the script. Initially these were two mother-infant and two adult-adult prompt word sets. We also constructed prompt word sets suggesting stories based on other scripts (e.g., going to the store). These were used to assess discriminant validity vis a vis "general story telling coherence". We then developed a manual for scoring the extent to which subject's stories were organized around the secure base script. Stories were scored on a 7 point scale ranging from "clear knowledge and access to the secure base script" to "no evidence that the subject knows or has access to a secure base script". At SRCD 2001, Harriet Waters & Lisa Rodrigues-Doohlabh reported a first study testing the hypothesis that one of most important representations to arise from early attachment experience is a "secure base script". In the 2001 paper, Waters & Rodrigues-Doohlabh showed that they could reliably assess adult's knowledge or and access to a secure base script. They also showed that adults' understanding of infant-adult and adult-adult relationships is represented as a single generalized secure base script - not separate representations for different types of relationships. They also showed that an adult's knowledge of the secure base script is correlated .50 - .60 with AAI Coherence. This is quite close to the reliability of AAI coding. Accordingly, knowledge and access to a secure base script is a key difference among secure and insecure adults. Moreover, it may well account for many of the correlates of secure vs. insecure AAI status. The papers in this symposium continue our work on script-like representations
of early secure base experience. |