The early adolescent's state of mind in the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI) is more closely linked to social interactions with peers, who are unlikely to serve as attachment figures, than it is to (i) qualities of the adolescent's interactions with parents, (ii) the AAI of the adolescent's mother, or (iii) the adolescent's prior Strange Situation behavior. This unexpected finding suggests the value of reconceptualizing AAI autonomy/security as a marker of the adolescent's capacity for emotion regulation in social interactions. Supporting this, we note that the AAI was originally validated not as a marker of attachment experiences or expectations with one's caregivers, but as a predictor of caregiving capacity sufficient to produce secure offspring. As such, the AAI may be fruitfully viewed as primarily assessing social emotion regulation capacities that support both strong caregiving skills and strong skills relating with peers.

The relation of attachment states of mind and self reported attachment relationship styles to romantic partner aggression was examined in a community sample of 93 adolescents. Higher levels of insecure-preoccupied and insecure-dismissing states of mind, as assessed by the Adolescent Attachment Interview at age 14, were predictive, respectively, of perpetration and victimization of psychological aggression in romantic relationships four years later. Partners' romantic attachment anxiety was linked to both psychological and physical aggression perpetration in romantic relationships. Results are interpreted as suggesting the value of assessing aggression in adolescent romantic relationships in the context of broader patterns of regulation of affect and behavior via the attachment system. Keywords insecure attachment; partner aggression; romantic relationships; adolescence; working models As attachment research has developed, two approaches to understanding and assessing attachment-related affect and cognitions have emerged. One approach is generally utilized in the social and personality psychology literature, and places a focus on self-reported thoughts and feelings of self and others in the romantic context (Hazan & Shaver, 1987;Bartholomew & Horowitz, 1991). The other approach is generally emphasized in developmental psychology, and utilizes attachment interviews to assess internal representations of attachment based on the coherence and consistency of their description of early caregiver experiences (Furman, Simon, Shaffer, & Bouchey, 2002;Furman & Wehner, 1994;George, Kaplan & Main, 1996). Although interview techniques that tap mental representations of relationships have shown great value, particularly in beginning to counter social-desirability biases from self-report data, (Furman et al, 2002;Jacobvitz, Curran, & Moller, 2002;Main. Hesse, & Goldwyn, 2008), individuals' explicit and consciously-reportable expectations about intimate relationships are also likely to have important meaning in understanding social behavior.Attachment styles that tap self-reported behaviors and expectations in the romantic context might be more directly related to maladaptive relationship dynamics because these measures are romantic relationship-specific. Recent findings from both a recent meta-analysis and additional study have demonstrated that the empirical overlap between interview based attachment representations and self reported romantic attachment styles is only trivial to Correspondence concerning this study should be sent to the first author at Department of Psychology, University of Virginia, Box 400400, Charlottesville, VA 22904-4400 (erinmiga@virginia.edu).. NIH Public Access Author ManuscriptAttach Hum Dev. Author manuscript; available in PMC 2010 September 1. NIH-PA Author ManuscriptNIH-PA Author Manuscript NIH-PA Author Manuscript small (Fortuna & Roisman, 2008;Roisman et al., 2007), suggesting that each tradition of attachment research captures relatively independent aspects of cognition and affect in a...

Research on marital interaction has focused primarily on couples in conflict contexts to understand better processes associated with concurrent and longitudinal outcomes such as marital stability and quality. Although this work has consistently revealed particular emotions (e.g., contempt) or behavioral sequences (e.g., demand/withdraw) predictive of later marital distress, it largely has neglected to take positive contexts into consideration. The present longitudinal study begins to address this gap in the literature by directly comparing newlywed behaviors from a conflict-resolution interaction with those from a love-paradigm interaction to predict relationship satisfaction and divorce proneness approximately 15 months later. Results showed that actor and partner negative (contempt) and positive (affection) emotions elicited in both positive (i.e., love) and negative (i.e., conflict) interaction contexts emerged as unique predictors of relationship quality and stability for both husbands and wives. Moreover, using a linear growth model, the temporal course of positive emotion during the love context, but not the conflict context, was predictive of later relationship satisfaction. Implications for future marital research and intervention are discussed.

This prospective study used longitudinal, multi-reporter data to examine the influence of parents' marital relationship functioning on subsequent adolescent romantic relationships. Consistent with Bryant and Conger's model for the development of early adult romantic relationships (DEARR; 2002), we found that interactional styles, more specifically paternal aggression and satisfaction, exhibited in parents' marital relationship when their adolescents were age 13, were predictive of qualities of the adolescent's romantic relationships five years later. Continuities were domain specific: paternal satisfaction predicted adolescent satisfaction and paternal aggression predicted adolescent aggression. Attachment security moderated the link between paternal aggression and subsequent adolescent aggression, with continuities between negative conflictual styles across relationships reduced for secure adolescents. Results are interpreted as suggesting that attachment may help attenuated the transmission of destructive conflict strategies across generations.

This study examined the associations between reasoning during interparental conflict and autonomous adolescent conflict negotiation with peers over time. Participants included 133 adolescents and their parents, peers, and romantic partners in a multi-method, multiple reporter, longitudinal study. Interparental reasoning at adolescent age 13 predicted greater autonomy and relatedness in observed adolescent-peer conflict one year later and lower levels of autonomy undermining during observed romantic partner conflict five years later. Interparental reasoning also predicted greater satisfaction and affection in adolescent romantic relationships seven years later. Findings suggest that autonomy promoting behaviors exhibited in the interparental context may influence adolescents’ own more autonomous approaches to subsequent peer and romantic conflict. Possible explanatory models are discussed, including social learning theory and attachment theory.