Adverse early experiences of adopted children tend to entail emotional deprivation, which may have impaired their attachment relationships. Using an adaptation of a projective test specifically devised to assess attachment in teenagers, the relational histories of 70 Spanish adolescent international adoptees were explored and compared to non-adopted peers. A significant association between insecure attachment and difficulties with internal representation of parental figures (birth and adoptive) appeared in young adoptees with adverse pre-placement care and late adoption. With knowledge of internal attachment’s working models, professionals can improve their understanding of the adopted adolescent and go beyond mere classification of attachment patterns.

Abstract. The Attachment Pictures Story (APS) is an adaptation of the Patte Noire thematic projective test to evaluate internal representations of attachment in adolescents. It consists in analyzing the responses to the stories in seven selected pictures, which elicit attachment experiences. The purpose of this study is to describe the development and verification of the reliability and validity parameters of the APS based on a sample of 77 adolescents between the ages of 12 and 18 years ( M = 14.71; SD = 2.07) who were enrolled in schools in Spain. The results show evidence of the instrument’s psychometric properties. Satisfactory content validity through inter-rater agreement of four experts for pictures and items as well as suitable reliability indexes were found. The exploratory factory analysis confirms the five pre-established categories based on theory (secure/insecure avoidant, insecure fearful, insecure resistant, and unresolved). The APS appears to be a psychometrically suitable instrument for evaluating attachment patterns in adolescents in a quantitative and qualitative way. Having a specific projective test that helps us understand adolescents may be useful in facilitating the expression of early and sometimes adverse attachment relationships, which are difficult to externalize.