Reminiscing Style During Conversations About Emotion‐laden Events and Effects of Attachment Security Among Italian Mother–Child Dyads

Abstract

Previous research has established that mothers' and children's elaborative/evaluative styles during conversations about emotion‐laden events are associated with a range of social‐cognitive accomplishments, and this has prompted researchers to identify factors that predict stylistic differences in conversation styles. The study explored whether patterns and variations in reminiscing styles reported in other cultures would be observed in an Italian sample (N = 40 dyads). Attachment security, assessed using the Adult Attachment Interview for mothers and the Q‐Sort for children, were tested as possible sources of variation in conversation style. The two reminiscing styles identified through a clustering procedure were consistent with those displayed by dyads from other cultural groups; moreover, these were significantly related to both mothers' and children's attachment security. These results extend knowledge on reminiscing conversations during early childhood to a different cultural context and contribute to an understanding of how individual differences in attachment affect partners' participation in such conversations.

Vi. Intergenerational Transmission of Secure Base Script Knowledge: The Role of Maternal Co‐construction Skills

“…Studies using the Attachment Script Assessment (ASA) to assess adult attachment representations have reproduced the link between parental attachment (secure base script knowledge) and child security as well as having validated the measure against coherence scores from the AAI (Waters & Waters, ). The relation between parental script knowledge and security has been demonstrated with both the Strange Situation Procedure and the AQS, across numerous cross‐cultural samples, and among biologically unrelated caregivers and their adopted children (Bost et al, ; Coppola, Ponzetti, & Vaughn, ; Monteiro, Veríssimo, Vaughn, Santos, & Bost, ; Tini, Corcoran, Rodrigues‐Doolabh, & Waters, ; Vaughn et al, ; Veríssimo & Salvaterra, ; Wong et al, ).…”

V. Maternal Sensitivity and Co‐construction Skills: Concurrent and Longitudinal Associations With Preschoolers’ Secure Base Behavior

“…Parents who are highly elaborative engage their children in the reconstruction of past events by using questions that prompt children to add new information and provide confirming and evaluative feedback, whereas parents who are less elaborative usually ask redundant questions without adding information to support the child's recall (Fivush, Haden, & Reese, 2006). Parents of children classified as secure have been found to be more elaborative during a reminiscing task than those of children classified as insecurely attached (Bost et al, 2006;Coppola, Ponzetti, & Vaughn, 2014;Fivush & Vasudeva, 2002;Reese & Farrant, 2003). In interpreting the association found, researchers have argued that parental elaborative style may reflect parental sensitivity in the context of parent-child reminiscing (Bost, Choi, & Wong, 2010;Fivush et al, 2006).…”

Attachment and Memory Research: Reflecting on a Shared Past and a Collaborative Future

“…For instance, Fivush and Vasudeva (2002) were among the first to show that mothers who were more elaborative when reminiscing about past events had children who were rated as more securely attached (cf. Coppola, Ponzetti, & Vaughn, 2014;Etzion-Carasso & Oppenheim, 2000;Hsiao, Koren-Karie, Bailey, & Moran, 2015;Laible & Thompson, 2000;Reese & Farrant, 2003). We went on to demonstrate that when children were securely attached as toddlers, their mothers reminisced with them in emotionally more open ways into the preschool years (Newcombe & Reese, 2004), and these emotionladen discussions were related to children developing a more consistent representation of self (Bird & Reese, 2006).…”

“…We went on to demonstrate that when children were securely attached as toddlers, their mothers reminisced with them in emotionally more open ways into the preschool years (Newcombe & Reese, 2004), and these emotionladen discussions were related to children developing a more consistent representation of self (Bird & Reese, 2006). A limitation of some of the reminiscing literature with respect to attachment security has been the reliance on maternal sorts or ratings of attachment security rather than observer sorts or ratings (but see Bost et al, 2006;Coppola et al, 2014;Hsiao et al, 2015;Reese, Meins, Fernyhough, & Centifanti, 2018 for exceptions). In contrast, Posada and Waters's current measures of children's attachment behavior rely on observer ratings rather than maternal ratings.…”