The Adult Attachment Interview and self-reports of attachment style: An empirical rapprochement.

Abstract

Although 10 studies have been published on the empirical overlap of the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI) and measures of self-reported attachment style, results in this literature have been inconsistently interpreted in narrative reviews. This report was designed as a rapprochement of the AAI and attachment style literatures and includes 3 studies. Study 1 (combined N = 961) is a meta-analytic review showing that by J. Cohen's (1992) criteria (mean r = .09), the association between AAI security and attachment style dimensions is trivial to small. Study 2 (N = 160) confirms meta-analytic results with state-of-the-art assessments of attachment security and also examines attachment dimensions in relation to the Big 5 personality traits. Finally, Study 3 is an investigation of 50 engaged couples that shows that developmental and social psychological measures of attachment security predict somewhat distinct--though theoretically anticipated--aspects of functioning in adult relationships.

Struggling with one’s own parenting after an upbringing with substance abusing parents

“…The ASQ was designed to capture common themes in attachment theory such as trust, dependence and self-reliance in relationships in general (Feeney et al, 1994), as well as measuring basic personality factors such as the ability to have intimate and romantic relationships (Roisman et al, 2007). …”

Affect dysregulation, psychoform dissociation, and adult relational fears mediate the relationship between childhood trauma and complex posttraumatic stress disorder independent of the symptoms of borderline personality disorder

“…fear of closeness) and anxiety (i.e. fear of abandonment) (Roisman et al, 2007). Attachment-related avoidance and anxiety were selected to represent adult relational impairment rather than the childhood-based categories of insecure attachment because they were shown to be trait-like risk factors for self-reported psychiatric symptoms (i.e.…”

Adult attachment and parenting stress among parents of toddlers

“…The Relationship Scale Questionnaire (RSQ; Griffin & Bartholomew, 1994b) was used in the current study. To our knowledge, RSQ has only been validated on samples consisting of students (Bäckström & Holmes, 2001;Griffin & Bartholomew, 1994b;Roisman et al, 2007), couples where a majority were noncohabiting young adults probably without children (Stein et al, 2002), or older adults without small children (Kurdek, 2002). Originally, the RSQ was designed to capture the two attachment-related dimensions 'Model of Other' and 'Model of Self'.…”