Adult Attachment Representations , Parental Responsiveness , and Infant Attachment : A Meta-Analysis on the Predictive Validity of the Adult Attachment Interview

About a decade ago, the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI; C. George, N. Kaplan, & M. Main, 1985 ) was developed to explore parents' mental representations of attachment as manifested in language during discourse of childhood experiences. The AAI was intended to predict the quality of the infant—parent attachment relationship, as observed in the Ainsworth Strange Situation, and to predict parents' responsiveness to their infants' attachment signals. The current meta-analysis examined the available evidence with respect to these predictive validity issues. In regard to the 1st issue, the 18 available samples ( N = 854) showed a combined effect size of 1.06 in the expected direction for the secure vs. insecure split. For a portion of the studies, the percentage of correspondence between parents' mental representation of attachment and infants' attachment security could be computed (the resulting percentage was 75%; κ = .49, n = 661). Concerning the 2nd issue, the 10 samples ( N = 389) that were retrieved showed a combined effect size of .72 in the expected direction. According to conventional criteria, the effect sizes are large. It was concluded that although the predictive validity of the AAI is a replicated fact, there is only partial knowledge of how attachment representations are transmitted (the transmission gap). Parts of this article were presented at the PAOS/RUL symposium Personality, Developmental Psychology, and Psychopathology, Leiden, The Netherlands, June 1993. This study was supported by a PIONEER award from the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (PGS 59-256). I am grateful to the authors of the studies included in this meta-analysis for their kind cooperation in making the details of their results available and to Mary Main and Erik Hesse for their ideas and comments. I thank Marianne de Wolff, Marian Bakermans-Kranenburg, Hylda Zwart-Woudstra, Marcel de Haas, and Carlo Schuengel for their comments on earlier drafts of this article. Correspondence may be addressed to Marinus H. van IJzendoorn, Center for Child and Family Studies, Leiden University, NL-2300 RB, Leiden, The Netherlands, Received: July 23, 1993 Revised: May 26, 1994 Accepted: June 22, 1994 The theory of attachment was developed by John Bowlby (1973) to explain the nature of a child's tie to his or her parent in terms of its biological function and to account for the disturbing behavioral responses observed in infants subjected to prolonged separations from significant attachment figures. Recently, a central hypothesis within attachment theory has emerged that suggests that parents' mental representation of childhood attachment experiences–as manifested in language–strongly influences the quality of their child's attachment to them. It is hypothesized that an adult's evaluation of childhood experiences and their influence on current functioning becomes organized into a relatively stable "state of mind" with respect to attachment ( Main, Kaplan, & Cassidy, 1985, p. 68 ). This state of mind, or mental representation, is defined as a set of rules "for the organization of information relevant to attachment and for obtaining or limiting access to that information" ( Main et al., 1985, p. 67 ). Individual differences in the parents' mental representation of attachment are thought to determine their responsiveness to the child's attachment signals and, therefore, to direct the child's socioemotional development, particularly the attachment relationship with the parent. This move to the level of mental representations in attachment theory and research ( Main et al., 1985 ) implies an emphasis on the cognitive organization and reconstruction of childhood attachment experiences in line with work on mental representations in the cognitive sciences ( Mandler, 1983 ; Schank & Abelson, 1977 ). The representational approach avoids some of the problems inherent in the traditional clinical and retrospective studies on the influence of childhood experiences on adult functioning. Clinical and retrospective data suggest, for example, that abused children are more likely to become abusive parents than children who have not been abused and that, in general, many emotionally troubled adults experienced childhoods with insecure or disrupted attachment relationships. Estimates of the strength of the association between early experiences and later functioning, however, differ widely ( Belsky, 1993 ; Kaufman & Zigler, 1987 ). The self-report measures used in most of these studies are based on an overly optimistic view of the autobiographical memory capabilities of the respondents to describe their "objective" experiences ( van IJzendoorn, 1992 ; Wagenaar, 1986 ), and the studies strongly emphasize the continuity of development across the lifespan. Bowlby (1988) suggested, however, that the link between early attachment experiences and adult attachment relationships can be disrupted. For example, positive attachment experiences with a partner or therapist might bring about the reconstruction of an originally insecure attachment representation. Nature of the Adult Attachment Interview The introduction of the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI; George, Kaplan, & Main, 1985 ) can be considered a simple but revolutionary shift in attention from the objective description of childhood experiences to the current mental representation of these experiences and from the contents of autobiographical memories to the form in which this autobiography is presented. The AAI is based on two assumptions: (a) Autobiographical memory is the ongoing reconstruction of one's own past, in light of new experiences, and (b) idealization of the past, particularly negative childhood experiences, can be traced by studying the form and content of the autobiographical narrative separately. The AAI is a semistructured interview that probes alternately for general descriptions of relationships, specific supportive or contradicting memories, and descriptions of current relationships with parents. Parents are asked to provide attachment-related memories from early childhood and to evaluate these memories from their current perspective ( George et al., 1985 ). After a warm-up question about the composition of the family of origin, participants are asked for five adjectives that describe their childhood relationship to each parent and why they chose these adjectives. Also, they are asked to which parent they felt closest; what they did when (as a child) they were upset, hurt, or ill; what they remember about separations from their parents; and whether they ever felt rejected by their parents. Furthermore, they are asked how they think their adult personalities have been affected by these experiences; why, in their view, their parents behaved as they did; and how the relationship with their parents has changed in the course of time. Finally, a portion of the interview focuses on experiences of abuse and of loss of important figures through death, both as a child and as an adult. The 15 questions are asked in a set order, and probes are standardized. The coding of AAI transcripts is based not on the participants' description of childhood experiences per se but on the way in which these experiences and their effects on current functioning are reflected on and evaluated. The participants' presentation of their experiences is considered relevant only as it is judged to adhere to or violate coherent discourse. (Note, for example, that a participant's autobiographical memories may either support or contradict the adjectives selected to describe the relationship with his or her parents.) The nature of an adult's attachment representation is considered to become manifest in the coherence of his or her discourse during the AAI. Grice (1975) identified four maxims of a coherent discourse: quality ("Be truthful and have evidence for what you say"), quantity ("Be succinct, and yet complete"), relation ("Be relevant"), and manner ("Be clear and orderly"). The coding manual of the AAI presents several scoring systems to evaluate participants' coherence in the use of language ( Main & Goldwyn, 1993 ). The coding system of the AAI yields three major adult attachment classifications that represent three distinct forms of discourse related to attachment experiences. Participants are classified as autonomous or secure when their presentation and evaluation of attachment-related experiences is coherent and consistent and their responses are clear, relevant, and reasonably succinct. Not only individuals with supportive childhood experiences, but also those with apparently difficult backgrounds, can be classified as autonomous if they are coherent in discussing and evaluating these (negative or positive) experiences ( Main & Goldwyn, in press ). Participants are classified as dismissing when they describe their parents in highly positive terms that are unsupported or that are contradicted later in the interview (e.g., "She was loving" and, later, "I went outside when I hurt myself because I knew she would get angry with me"; Main & Goldwyn, 1993 ). These contradictions–violations of the maxim of quality–appear to go unnoticed. Also, dismissing participants often insist that they are unable to remember childhood attachment experiences, but recent studies indicate that they do not lack autobiographical memory for childhood events not related to attachment ( Bakermans-Kranenburg & van IJzendoorn, 1993 ; Sagi et al., 1994 ). Main (1990) suggested that dismissing participants tend to minimize their attention to attachment-related experiences. Participants are classified as preoccupied when they show a confused, angry, or passive preoccupation with attachment figures. The interview transcripts of preoccupied participants often display violations of manner such as the use of jargon and nonsense words and often contain long, grammatically entangled sentences that violate the maxim of quantity. For these individuals,