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Script-like attachment representations and behavior in families and across

cultures: Studies of parental secure base narratives

Article in Attachment & Human Development · October 2006

DOI: 10.1080/14616730600856008 · Source: PubMed

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Attachment & Human Development,
September 2006; 8(3): 179 – 184

Script-like attachment representations and behavior

in families and across cultures: Studies of parental
secure base narratives

BRIAN E. VAUGHN1, HARRIET S. WATERS2, GABRIELLE COPPOLA3,

JUDE CASSIDY4, KELLY K. BOST5, & MANUELA VERÍSSIMO6
1
Auburn University, Alabama, USA, 2State University of New York, Stony Brook, USA, 3Università
di Chieti, Italy, 4University of Maryland, USA, 5University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, USA, and
6
Instituto Superior de Psicologia Aplicada, Lisbon, Portugal

Abstract
The articles included in this Special Issue of Attachment and Human Development were originally
presented as contributions to symposia at the Society for Research in Child Development (Atlanta,
Georgia, April 2005) and at the European Developmental Psychology Conference (Laguna, Canary
Islands, August 2005). The articles represent efforts of independent research teams studying the
emergence, maintenance, and implications of attachment representations. In each study, a central
measure of attachment representation was a recently described measure of the secure base script
(Waters & Rodrigues-Doolabh, 2004). This measure assesses the ‘‘scriptedness’’ of secure base
content in stories told in response to a set of word-prompts. Each paper included in this special issue
addresses a specific issue relevant to the reliability, validity, or broader utility of the attachment script
representation measure as an indicator of the respondent’s awareness of and access to a secure base
script. The first paper provides a précis of the measure itself, including its conceptual underpinnings
and the notion of ‘‘scriptedness’’ as it relates to the secure base construct. In the second article, the
cross-time stability of the scriptedness scores is tested. The third and fourth articles present relations
between the scriptedness score from the new measure and indices of state of mind about attachment
from the Adult Attachment Interview (one sample of Italian mothers, the other in a sample of
adolescents). The fifth article describes relations between the attachment script representation score
and mother – child interaction during a memory reminiscence task. The final article in this set is a
report on associations between the maternal attachment script representations and child attachment
security for a sample of adopting mothers and adopted children. Taken together, these studies provide
broad support for this new procedure and scoring system to capture important aspects of secure base
knowledge for adults and also provide evidence for the relevance of secure base scripts in the
socialization of child secure base behavior.

Keywords: Representation of attachment, attachment script, validation studies

Introduction
Central to the Bowlby/Ainsworth model of attachment development is the notion that the
attached child first represents the attachment relationship as a sensorimotor pattern of
behavior and interaction and that, in the context of continued interaction as well as

Correspondence: Brian E. Vaughn, 203 Spidle Hall, HDFS, Auburn University, Auburn, AL 36849, USA.
E-mail: [email protected]

ISSN 1461-6734 print/ISSN 1469-2988 online Ó 2006 Taylor & Francis

DOI: 10.1080/14616730600856008
180 B. E. Vaughn et al.

achievements in motor, cognitive, and language domains, attachments become internalized

and represented in the mind (see Marvin & Britner, 1999, for a review and integration of
findings concerning the development of attachment). Bowlby (1973, 1969/1982) suggested
that the child and caregiver co-construct this mental representation (or internal working
model) of their relationship over the infancy and childhood years and that this internal
representation provides a means for making the caregiver ‘‘portable’’ to contexts in which
she is not physically present, thus affording the possibility of exploration away from the
caregiver for longer and longer periods of time without the interference associated with
separation distress. Bowlby also believed that the mental representation of attachment
informs evaluative and expectancy models of the self (e.g., as worthy of love and acceptance;
as capable), of the caregiver (e.g., as loving and supportive; as willing to provide assistance as
needed), and, with increasing age, of others who may participate in close relationships with
the child (e.g, siblings, romantic partners) (see Bretherton & Munholland, 1999, for a more
extensive review of the internal working model construct). Of course, the quality and utility
of the mental representation of attachment was assumed to be critically contingent on the
actual interaction history of the dyad and Bowlby (e.g., 1973, 1980, 1969/1982) expected
that the full range of secure and insecure attachment histories would be apparent in the
working models of children, adolescents, and adults.
Bowlby (e.g., 1973, 1988) believed that the internal representations of attachment
relationships were real, specifiable products of the operation of the attachment behavioral
system in the context of a history of dyadic exchange but he did not, at least when the
working model concept was first articulated, have access to a validated conceptual
framework from cognitive psychology or neuroscience that might be used to instantiate these
representations as psychological or physical phenomena (see Bretherton & Munholland,
1999; Thompson & Raikes, 2003). Even so, he read widely in the literatures of cognitive
psychology and behavioral biology and he was not shy about appropriating the best ideas he
found there in support of his own theoretical framework. Initially, Bowlby adopted Craik’s
(1943) notions about representation as mental model building or use to justify his own
internal working model concept and he framed his developmental account of the (co-)
construction of working models so as to be consistent with Piaget’s description of cognitive
growth from infancy through early childhood (Bretherton & Munholland, 1999; Marvin &
Britner, 1999). Later he adopted information processing constructs to bolster his account of
how internal working models would operate in the service of managing affect in close
interpersonal relationships for older children and adults (Bowlby, 1980).
The working model construct has been criticized on several fronts for being vague to the
point of being metaphorical (e.g., Dunn, 1993; Thompson & Raikes, 2003), and for being
overly extensive (Belsky & Cassidy, 1994; Hinde, 1988; Rutter & O’Connor, 1999) in terms
of its purported explanatory range but, in our opinion, these criticisms miss the central point
of Bowlby’s argument and ignore maturation in the cognitive sciences over the past 35 years.
That is to say, Bowlby claimed that attachments become represented mentally and
these representations are crucial for understanding the impact of attachment for personality
development and psychosocial adjustment across the lifespan. He could not say for certain
how the representations were structured or what the cognitive mechanisms and processes
underlying these structures might be because the relevant cognitive constructs were
themselves still being invented, but he was certain that representation of content was
required. Bowlby took what was available and made the best of it. It remained for the
community of attachment researchers to clarify the nature, structure, and processes
connecting those mental representations to the individual’s actions and relationships in the
external world.
 Script-like attachment representations 181

In an ideal world, the lack of precision with regard to the nature of internal working
models might have prompted members of the attachment research community to form
alliances with cognitive psychologists (or artificial intelligence modelers) working on
problems of mental representation to bring content and structure into alignment. Of course,
the world in which developmental science is conducted is less than ideal and only a few
attachment researchers found the time to become familiar with concepts and methods
from cognitive psychology (e.g., Bretherton, 1990, 1993; Bretherton & Beeghly, 1982;
Bretherton, McNew, Snyder, & Bates, 1983; Bretherton, Ridgeway, & Cassidy, 1990;
Oppenheim & Waters, 1995). The limited collaborations between the attachment and
cognitive development research communities did not, however, constrain the development
of tasks and measures designed to assess internal working models for children, adolescents,
and adults. Indeed, these measures have proliferated over the past 20 years or so and range
from drawing tasks to depth interviews to doll-play story-completions to self-report
questionnaires to naturalistic observation measures in typical contexts. In nearly all cases,
test developers intend that their measures reveal the content of the respondent’s internal
working model of attachment or state of mind concerning attachment relationships. For the
most part, validation of these measures has been in terms of relations between the content
of the novel measure and the sensorimotor representation of attachment security scored
from the Strange Situation (Ainsworth, Blehar, Waters, & Wall, 1978). To the extent
that structure of mental representation was considered, it concerned the degree to
which categorization schemes for the novel measure showed correspondence with the
classificatory scheme used by Ainsworth and associates (Ainsworth et al., 1978), with,
perhaps, the addition of the disorganized attachment category described by Main and
Solomon (1986).
The introduction and promotion of many measures of the content of attachment
representations relevant beyond infancy and toddlerhood was useful insofar as it created a
context in which Bowlby’s vision of attachment as a lifespan phenomenon might be realized.
Certainly one result of the introduction of these measures is the fact that attachment
constructs are now central in the subfields of social, personality, clinical, and developmental
psychopathology as well as developmental psychology (e.g., Cassidy & Shaver, 1999).
However, the conceptual distance maintained between developmental scientists interested
in attachment and those interested in cognitive development obscured several remarkable
advances in the developmental understanding of several cognitive phenomena that have
proven relevant to the development of internal representations of attachment. For example,
recent accounts of episodic memory, especially with reference to autobiographical memory
(e.g., Conway & Pleydell-Pearce, 2000; Fivush, 1998; Howe & Courage, 1997; Nelson &
Fivush, 2004; Tulving, 2002) have established both the reality of neural substrate for
episodic memory and the kinds of influences on autobiographical memory arising from
experiences with parents, from gender, and from the culture itself. Likewise, advances in
understanding the structural organization of information in memory and developmental
changes these structures undergo (e.g., Nelson, 1986, 1996, 2000; Shank & Abelson, 1977,
1995) should be relevant to both the form and content of attachment representations. In
addition, developmental understanding of prose and narrative production and relations
between experience and narrative skills has advanced significantly (e.g., Bamberg, 1987;
Burger & Miller, 1999; Dautenhahn, 2002; Haden, Haine, & Fivush, 1997; Waters, 1981;
Waters & Hou, 1987; Waters, Hou, & Lee, 1993; Wigglesworth, 1997; Ziegler, Mitchell, &
Currie, 2005). Perhaps the most critical message from cognitive development for
attachment researchers is that cognitive content is intricately intertwined with the form or
structure of cognition and, in many ways, structure constrains the content of a narrative.
182 B. E. Vaughn et al.

Organization of the Special Issue

The studies reported in this special issue build on the accomplishments of Waters and
associates in their studies of secure base scripts and their implications for parenting
behavior, for parent – child interactions, and for social-emotional consequences of these
interactions for children. Because each study included in this special issue uses the
attachment script representation task designed by Waters and Rodrigues-Doolabh (2004),
the first article in the set describes the task in detail and provides conceptual and empirical
background that led to the design and development of the measure. To save space,
methodological detail about the word-list prompt task is truncated in each of the subsequent
articles. The second article (Vaughn, Verissimo, Coppola, Bost, McBride, Shin, & Korth)
addresses the longitudinal stability of the secure base scriptedness scores for a sample of
mothers who were assessed on two occasions, between 12 and 15 months apart. The third
paper (Coppola, Vaughn, Cassibba, & Constantini) is an analysis of relations between the
secure base scriptedness score and indices of maternal state of mind from the AAI in a
sample of Italian mothers and maternal sensitivity in interactions. This study constitutes a
replication of results reported by Waters and Rodrigues-Doolabh (2001) in a different
sociocultural milieu and extends predictions from the secure base script to maternal
sensitivity measures. In the fourth article (Dykas, Woodhouse, Cassidy, & Waters), relations
between the scriptedness score and AAI dimensions are reported for a sample of
adolescents. The fifth article (Bost, Shin, McBride, Vaughn, Coppola, Verı́ssimo, et al.)
is a report of mother – child interactions in the context of reminiscing about emotional
events experienced by the child and the interactional correlates of maternal secure base
scriptedness scores. This study directly addresses the socialization implications of maternal
secure base representations and provides insights into the processes contributing to the
transmission of those representations across generations. In the final report (Verı́ssimo &
Salvaterra), maternal secure base representations are assessed in a sample of Portuguese
families with adopted children. The adopted child’s secure base behavior was assessed
independently. Consistent with previously reported findings, maternal attachment
representations and adopted children’s secure base behavior were significantly correlated.
Taken together, the results of these studies suggest that the attachment script representation
procedure will be an important tool for studying attachment in adults.

Acknowledgement
Preparation of this article was supported in part by NSF grants, BCS 0126163 and BCS
0126427.

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