The Origins of 12-Month Attachment: A Microanalysis of 4-Month Mother-Infant Interaction

摘要

A detailed microanalysis of 4-month mother-infant face-to-face communication revealed a fine-grained specification of essential communication processes that predicted 12-month insecure attachment outcomes, particularly resistant and disorganized classifications. An urban community sample of 84 dyads were videotaped at 4 months during a face-to-face interaction, and at 12 months during the Ainsworth Strange Situation. Four-month mother and infant communication modalities of attention, affect, touch, and spatial orientation were coded from split-screen videotape on a 1s time base; mother and infant facial-visual “engagement” variables were constructed. We used contingency measures (multi-level time-series modeling) to examine the dyadic temporal process over time, and specific rates of qualitative features of behavior to examine the content of behavior. Self-contingency (auto-correlation) measured the degree of stability/lability within an individual’s own rhythms of behavior; interactive contingency (lagged cross-correlation) measured adjustments of the individual’s behavior that were correlated with the partner’s previous behavior.We documented that both self- and interactive contingency, as well as specific qualitative features, of mother and infant behavior were mechanisms of attachment formation by 4 months, distinguishing 12-month insecure, resistant, and disorganized attachment classifications from secure; avoidant were too few to test. All communication modalities made unique contributions. The separate analysis of different communication modalities identified intermodal discrepancies or conflict, both intrapersonal and interpersonal, that characterized insecure dyads. Contrary to dominant theories in the literature on face-to-face interaction, measures of maternal contingent coordination with infant yielded the fewest associations with 12-month attachment, whereas mother and infant self-contingency, and infant contingent coordination with mother, yielded comparable numbers of findings. Rather than the more usual hypothesis that more contingency is “better,” we partially supported our hypothesis that 12-month insecurity is associated with both higher and lower 4-month self- and interactive contingency values than secure, as a function of mother vs. infant and communication modality. Thus, in the origins of attachment security, more contingency is not necessarily better.A remarkable degree of differentiation was identified in the 4-month patterns of “future” C and D infants, classified as resistant and disorganized, respectively, at 12 months. Only future D infants were emotionally distressed, with simultaneous positive and negative discrepant affect; only their mothers showed difficulty in sharing infant affect, particularly distress, and lowered their contingent coordination with infant facial-visual engagement. This lowered contingent coordination makes it more difficult for infants to come to expect that their emotional/attentional states can influence mothers to coordinate with them and thus compromises the infant’s sense of interactive efficacy. Only future C dyads showed the spatial approach/avoid pattern of “chase and dodge;” only mothers of future D infants showed the spatial intrusion pattern of “looming” into the infant’s face. Both future C and D dyads showed patterns of touch dysregulation. Future C infants inhibited their emotional coordination with mothers’ less affectionate touch, as if tuning it out. Future D dyads showed a dyadic touch dysregulation, in which mothers lowered their coordination with infant touch, while infants had a lowered ability to use their own touch. Both mothers of future C and D infants disturbed the stability of the spatial “frame” of the encounter by transitioning among upward, forward and loom orientations in less predictable ways than mothers of future B infants. Only mothers of future D infants disturbed the attentional “frame” as well, by looking and looking away from the infant’s face in less predictable ways than mothers of future B infants. Only mothers of future D infants showed methods of managing their own state which distanced them from their infants, such as extensive looking away and “closing up” their faces.The intact interactive contingency of the mother of the future C infant overall safeguards the infant’s interactive agency, and the infant’s expectation that mother will match the direction of infant affective change, sharing infant states. However, we proposed that the future C infant will have difficulty feeling sensed and known by mother during her spatial/tactile intrusions.The central feature of future D dyads is intrapersonal and interpersonal discordance or conflict in the context of intensely distressed infants. Lowered maternal contingent coordination, and failures of maternal affective correspondence, constitute maternal emotional withdrawal from distressed infants, compromising infant interactive agency and emotional coherence. The level of dysregulation in future D dyads is thus of an entirely different order than that of future C dyads. We proposed that the future D infant represents not being sensed and known by the mother, particularly in states of distress. We proposed that the emerging internal working model of future D infants includes confusion about their own basic emotional organization, about their mothers’ emotional organization, and about their mothers’ response to their distress, setting a trajectory in development which may disturb the fundamental integration of the person.The findings have rich implications for clinical intervention, with remarkable specificity for different kinds of mother and infant distress. The concepts of heightened and lowered self- and interactive contingency, in different modalities, as well as the specific behavioral qualities identified, provide a more differentiated set of concepts to guide clinical intervention.