Career: Child-mother secure base relationship processes and social competence in early childhood: A cross-cultural perspective.

Background, Significance, and Rationale Attachment theory is ambitious insofar as it claims to explain broad aspects of personality and social development, with respect to both their normative and individual difference facets, using a very small number of core concepts (attachment and caregiving behavioral systems, the secure base phenomenon, and internal working models). There is, however, a conceptual and empirical gap between a biologically grounded behavioral control system biasing offspring toward proximity to caregivers, as proposed by Bowlby (1973), and mental representations of relationships serving as sources of security in the caregiver¿s absence and biasing the child¿s behaviors and expectations about interactions and relationships with others. Bowlby (1973) recognized this and occasionally invoked the well-established mechanisms of learning (e.g., habituation, observational learning with guided participation) and somewhat less well established notions, at the time, from cognitive psychology such as episodic and autobiographical memory and even the working model concept itself (Bowlby, 1980, 1982, 1988). Although he did not place great emphasis on terms used to describe this issue, Bowlby believed that mental representations of secure base relationships were derived and abstracted from experience; that is, they were learned in the context of dyadic interactions and with the support of attachment figures. He also hypothesized that those representations, although stable, were open to revisions based on input from experiences in close relationships. In this sense, attachment representational models are a product of socialization processes. Secure Base Behavior and Secure Base Support in Early Childhood. Central to the Bowlby-Ainsworth perspective is the idea that the quality (i.e., security) of child-mother attachment relationships arises from interactions and is sensitive to context. The role of the primary caregiver as a secure base from which an infant can organize her/his behavior, derive security, explore, and learn about the environment has frequently been studied, and findings indicate that a caregiver¿s sensitivity to the infant¿s signals and communications is associated with variations in the organization of secure base behavior (de Wolff & van IJzendoorn, 1997). Empirical work on attachment relationships shows a strong initial emphasis on infant research and, subsequently, on adult internal working models with not enough consideration on the elaboration and development of attachment relationships after infancy. This has prompted the critique that attachment could be construed as a theory of infant and adult relationships with a large gap in between left to the imagination (Waters et al., 1991; Waters, Posada, Crowell, & Lay, 1994). Theoretically, researchers have hypothesized that the child mother relationship continues to be shaped throughout childhood, and maternal caregiving has been suggested as central to the maintenance and construction of such relationships (e.g., Ainsworth, Bell, & Stayton, 1974; Bowlby, 1988; Marvin & Britner, 1999; Thompson, 2000; Waters & Cummings, 2000; Waters et al., 1991). Surprisingly, the topic has remained relatively unexplored (see George & Solomon, 1999; George & Solomon, 1989). Empirically demonstrating that attachment relationships continue to be shaped and constructed and that the concurrent quality of caregiving (i.e., sensitivity) is related to and influential on children¿s secure base behavior organization and security in early childhood will substantiate claims about these relationships as relatively open systems that continue to be reworked as children grow up (Pianta, Sroufe, & Egeland, 1989; Sroufe, 1979, 1988; Thompson, 2000; Waters et al., 1991). Also, it would contribute to attributing due weight to interaction experiences after infancy as an important factor in determining attachment relationship outcomes. This would have obvious implications for intervention programs. Although experiences during infancy are important and influential in development (Bowlby, 1969; Sroufe, 2002; Sroufe, Egeland, & Kreutzer, 1990; Vereijken, Riksen-Walraven, & Kondo-Ikemura, 1997), they do not by themselves determine later outcomes. Ultimately, the study of relations between quality of care and attachment security during childhood will help build a developmental framework to better understand relationships. A review of the empirical literature indicates that comparatively few studies have assessed the relations between secure base behavior and caregiving during early childhood. Specifically, maternal interactive behavior observed during relatively short intervals (less than 60 minutes) at home and in laboratory settings (Achermann, Dinneen, & Stevenson-Hinde, 1991; Barnett, Kidwell, & Leung, 1998; Stevenson-Hinde & Shouldice, 1995; Teti & Gelfand, 1997; Teti, Nakagawa, Das-Eiden, & Wirth, 1991; Teti, Sakin, Kucera, Corns, & Das Eiden, 1996) has been shown to be associated with children¿s organization of attachment behavior in the expected direction. Overall, these studies provide summary indices (e.g., sensitive responding) of maternal behavior observed in semi-structured situations. These findings suggest that concurrent sensitive caregiving is an important influence on children¿s attachment security during early childhood. Further research is needed to broaden our understanding of the association between sensitivity and security by specifying developmentally appropriate caregiving domains (e.g., secure base support, supervision, and limit setting; see below in preliminary studies, Posada, Richmond, Moreno, & Kaloustian, 2006) beyond the global notion of sensitivity that may help explain the associations found, and assess the constructs in natural contexts where the mother-child relationship is formed. The research proposed here addresses those issues. Representations of the Secure Base Phenomenon. The study of the development of children¿s attachment related representations and their dyadic co-construction process during early childhood is central to our understanding of secure base relationships transition from a sensory-motor to a representational modus operandi. Very little research has been conducted to determine the organization (i.e., structure) of such budding attachment representations. This scarcity of research is in part due to the limited availability of assessment tools. To be clear, there is an extensive literature examining various aspects of relationship representations of children, adolescents, and adults and the range of correlates these representations may have (e.g., Bretherton, Ridgeway, & Cassidy, 1990; Crowell, et al., 1996; George & Solomon; 1999; Fonagy, Steele, & Steele, 1991; Main, Kaplan, & Cassidy, 1985). The availability of the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI) has been central to this research endeavor in that it allows researchers to assess the current state of mind of attachment related representations via narratives the subjects produce (e.g., Main & Goldwyn, 1994). Those narratives are scored with codes designed to determine the degree of security reflected in the content and style of the narrative (e.g., Main & Goldwyn, 1994; Oppenheim & Waters, 1995). Researchers concerned with the role that maternal representations play during child-mother relationships have demonstrated a significant association between maternal security as per the AAI and infant attachment classification in the Strange Situation in middle class samples of Western industrialized countries (e.g., Ainsworth & Eichberg, 1991; Fonagy, Steele, & Steele, 1991; Grossmann, Fremmer-Bombik, Rudolph, & Grossmann, 1988; Main et al., 1985; van IJzendoorn, Kranenburg, Zwart-Woudstra, van Busschbach, & Lamberbon, 1993). Based on those findings, it has been assumed that mothers¿ representations influence their behavior which in turn impacts the organization of a child¿s secure base behavior and representations. Actual research on the links between caregivers¿ representations, their caregiving behavior, and child secure base behavior within a single study is scant and findings are not consistent (e.g., Pederson, Gleason, Moran, Bento, 1998; Ward & Carlson, 1995). Recent conceptual and methodological innovations (Bretherton et al., 1990; Guttmann et al., 2003; Waters, Cunliffe, Guttmann, 2001; Waters et al., 1998) that integrate cognitive psychological (e.g., scripts) and attachment (e.g., the secure base phenomenon) related concepts have made assessments of the organization of secure base knowledge/representations in adults and children readily accessible and have opened a window for the study of how secure base knowledge is mentally organized and represented. This is an important area of inquiry that may allow researchers to begin to detail the structure of attachment representations (a construct that has proven difficult to specify) and tie those representations to specific aspects of experience. We will investigate the association between children¿s secure base behavior and secure base representation Based on Bretherton¿s work (e.g., Bretherton et al., 1990) and on social-cognitive developmental theory (e.g., Nelson 1986; Nelson, 1993; Nelson & Grundel, 1986; Schank & Abelson, 1977), Waters and associates (e.g., Waters, Rodrigues, & Ridgeway, 1998; Waters & Rodrigues, 2001; Guttmann, Elliot, Cunliffe, & Waters, 2003) have suggested that attachment representations could be understood as scripts about secure base relationships. Using the secure base phenomenon concept, Waters and colleagues rated child narratives in response to attachment related events in terms of secure base scriptedness (Waters et al., 1998). Further, they designed a word-prompt list task to obtain narratives and assess scripts in adults, similar to tasks that cognitive psychologists have used. This secure base script has an internal order of events (child is engaged in the environment or t