Secure Base Representations in Middle Childhood Across Two Western Cultures: Associations with Parental Attachment Representations and Maternal Reports of Behavior Problems

摘要

Recent work examining the content and organization of attachment representations suggests that one way in which we represent the attachment relationship is in the form of a cognitive script. That said, this work has largely focused on early childhood or adolescence/adulthood, leaving a large gap in our understanding of script-like attachment representations in the middle childhood period. We present two studies and provide three critical pieces of evidence regarding the presence of a script-like representation of the attachment relationship in middle childhood. We present evidence that a middle childhood attachment script assessment tapped a stable underlying script using samples drawn from two western cultures, the United States (Study 1) and Belgium (Study 2). We also found evidence suggestive of the intergenerational transmission of secure base script knowledge (Study 1) and relations between secure base script knowledge and symptoms of psychopathology in middle childhood (Study 2). The results from this investigation represent an important downward extension of the secure base script construct.