May the Real Adult Attachment Assessment Please Stand Up?
Channel: Dr. Or Dagan
Date: 2020-08-18

In the past 70 years, attachment theory has become one of the most prolific research domains in social-developmental psychology. Despite common conceptual roots, two schools of research have developed in parallel, operationalizing adult attachment measures that have been meta-analytically shown to only trivially link to one another. Whereas the developmental tradition has heavily relied on a semi-structured interview (the Adult Attachment Interview; AAI) to assess attachment ‘patterns,’ the social-personality tradition has used self-reports to assess attachment ‘styles.’ Comparing findings from the two attachment traditions, however, reveals a conundrum: Depending on the methodological tradition, adult insecure avoidant/dismissing attachment may or may not be linked to internalizing symptoms.

VIDEO CHAPTERS
0:00 Introduction
0:55 Attachment avoidance and Internalizing symptoms 
4:43 Attachment avoidance assessed via self-reports
6:33 Attachment avoidance assessed via the AAI
8:02 Trying to solve the Conundrum 
11:29 Future research