The Secure‐base Phenomenon Across Cultures: Children's Behavior, Mothers' Preferences, and Experts' Concepts

Is the ideal mother a sensitive mother? Beliefs about early childhood parenting in mothers across the globe

“…The bottom items reflect lack of responsiveness, and negative or flat affect. We further compared the average and range of correlations between maternal beliefs about the ideal mother and attachment theory's notion of the highly sensitive mother (M ¼ .68; range ¼ .46-.76) to the average and range found by Posada et al (1995) with respect to maternal beliefs about the ideal child and attachment theory's notion of the securely attached child (M ¼ .58; range ¼ .47-.67). Results showed that the 84% confidence intervals for our MBQS findings (.66-.72) and for Posada et al's AQS findings (.53-.63) did not overlap, indicating that the mother-criterion agreement on the MBQS is significantly higher than the mother-criterion agreement on the AQS.…”

“…High correlations of the mothers' sorts with the criterion sort would reflect high convergence between mothers' notion of the ideal mother and attachment theory's notion of the highly sensitive mother. Second, to further qualify high convergence, we then compared the average and range of correlations between maternal beliefs about the ideal mother and attachment theory's notion of the highly sensitive mother (MBQS findings in the current study) to the average and range found by Posada et al (1995) with respect to maternal beliefs about the ideal child and attachment theory's notion of the securely attached child, which was reported to be high. We computed the 84% confidence intervals (Goldstein & Healy, 1995;Julious, 2004) for our MBQS findings and for Posada et al's AQS findings.…”

“…The following hypotheses were tested: (1) There is strong convergence between maternal descriptions of the ideal mother and attachment theory's description of the highly sensitive mother across cultural groups, similar to findings regarding the overlap between maternal beliefs about the ideal child and the attachment theory's notion of a securely attached child as described by Posada et al (1995). (2) Convergence between maternal descriptions of the ideal mother and descriptions of the highly sensitive mother are predicted by socio-demographic variables.…”

“…Although the number of cross-cultural studies is still limited, empirical research indeed provides some support for the universality of the major tenets of attachment theory, with evidence for the universality hypothesis that across the world, (virtually) all infants become attached to one or more specific caregivers, and the normativity hypothesis that secure attachment is the most common form of attachment across cultures (Mesman, Van IJzendoorn, & SagiSchwartz, in press). In addition, there is evidence that maternal beliefs about the ideal child overlap considerably with the notion of secure-base behavior and show high agreement across cultures (Posada et al, 1995(Posada et al, , 2013; see also Sternberg & Lamb, 1992). Cross-cultural research on the tenets of attachment theory has mostly focused on child behaviors, and less attention has been paid to the parental side of the attachment coin.…”

Adult Intimate Relationships: Linkages Between Interpersonal Acceptance-Rejection Theory and Adult Attachment Theory

“…Since Ainsworth's (1967) original work with infants in Uganda, attachment theorists have been interested in testing Bowlby's hypothesis that the secure base phenomenon is observed in all cultures. There is now an abundant amount of evidence regarding the secure base behavior in infant-mother relationships in different cultures (Posada et al, 1995). Van IJzendoorn and Kroonenberg (1988) and van IJzendoorn and Sagi-Schwartz (1999 have conducted extensive analyses of the literature and found supportive evidence about the cross-cultural validity of attachment theory's postulates regarding the secure base phenomenon.…”