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...

Nell Manning [Doctoral student in psychology] University of Virginia, CharlottesvilleThe extraordinary intricacy of all the factors to be taken into consideration leaves only one way of presenting them open to us. We must select first one and then another point of view, and follow it up through the material as long as the application of it seems to yield results.Sigmund Freud (1915) John Bowlby (1969Bowlby ( /1982 opens the first book of his classic Attachment trilogy with this quotation from Sigmund Freud in a chapter titled "Point of View." Bowlby then goes on to carefully outline his own paradigm-altering point of view, building from extensive observations of young children separated from their parents. Bowlby's selection of this quotation suggests his recognition that viewing attachment from the perspective of the young child, although remarkably productive and generative, should ultimately be just one of a number of vantage points from which we view attachment phenomena. This chapter suggests one such additional point of view.We begin with a thought experiment. What if the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI; George, Kaplan, & Main, 1996; Main, Goldwyn, & Hesse, 2002) had come first? What if we started not with the study of infants but of adolescents? And what if the AAI originated not from attachment theory and data from the Strange Situation (a measure designed to assess the quality of the infant's attachment to his or her caregiver), but from other perspectives on human behavior? Looking afresh at the AAI and its classification system from this vantage point, we might first simply observe that we had a measure that asked adolescents and adults about childhood relationships and then coded the degree of coherence with which the resulting emotion-laden memories emerged.Although childhood relationships are clearly the focus of the interview, the primary emphasis in coding the interviews would not be on the quality of those relationships-even people with horrific childhood relationships can be rated high in "autonomy" and "coherence"-but on how those relationships were discussed. Nor would the AAI, at least on its face, appear to be primarily assessing a "safety regulating system" as Bowlby (1969/1982) describes infant attachment. Rather, what we might notice is that some individuals in the AAI appear to shy away from discussing strong emotional experiences from childhood. Others appear to get easily lost in such discussions. And still others are able to coherently balance recountings of intensive emotional experiences with thoughtful evaluations of those experiences.Interestingly, even without any attachment context, the AAI remains a useful and intriguing measure. We might readily conclude that it captures an adolescent's or adult's ability to manage strong affect in recounting emotionally charged memories. Most (although not all) of these memories are solicited around childhood experiences with attachment figures, but whether this focus is critical would not at first glance be apparent. If the infant Strange...

The frequently observed link between maternal depressive symptoms and heightened maternal reporting of adolescent externalizing behavior was examined from an integrative, systems perspective using a community sample of 180 adolescents, their mothers, fathers, and close peers, assessed twice over a three-year period. Consistent with this perspective, the maternal depression-adolescent externalizing link was found to reflect not simply maternal reporting biases, but heightened maternal sensitivity to independently observable teen misbehavior as well as long-term, predictive links between maternal symptoms and teen behavior. Maternal depressive symptoms predicted relative increases over time in teen externalizing behavior. Child effects were also found, however, in which teen externalizing behavior predicted future relative increases in maternal depressive symptoms. Findings are interpreted as revealing a tightly-linked behavioral-affective system in families with mothers experiencing depressive symptoms and teens engaged in externalizing behavior, and further suggest that research on depressive symptoms in women with adolescent offspring should now consider offspring externalizing behaviors as a significant risk factor.