Secure Base Script Knowledge: Antecedents and Sequelae

Project Summary The proposed research examines to what extent the observed quality of childhood and adolescent experiences with maternal and paternal caregivers shape young adults’ basic expectations about the degree to which significant others are likely to be available, responsive, and helpful under challenging circumstances and, in turn, to what extent those expectancies among adults predict both: (a) mental and physical health and (b) interpersonal adjustment in adulthood, as reflected in the quality of adults’ romantic relationships as well as their infants’ attachments in the next generation. There is increasing evidence that these expectations—which are reflected in variation in secure base script knowledge—represent fundamental psychological resources that support healthy adult interpersonal relationships along with mental and physical health in the years of maturity. (Secure base script knowledge is reflected in an individual’s ability to generate autobiographical narratives in which attachment-relevant events are encountered, a clear need for assistance is communicated, competent help is provided, and the problem is resolved). Our proposal seeks to provide more definitive, large sample evidence regarding the origins of secure base script knowledge in interpersonal experiences with primary caregivers from infancy through late adolescence, along with precise estimates of the transmission of such expectancies from parents to their children across risk status, participant sex, and two racial groups (White/non-Hispanic and Black), Aims fundamental to the goals of NIH and the EKS NICHD in particular. Recent re-analyses of the Minnesota Longitudinal Study of Risk and Adaptation (MLSRA; Sroufe et al., 2009) a moderately-sized sample born into poverty, have demonstrated that Adult Attachment Interviews (AAIs; George et al., 1985), coded for secure base script knowledge are more strongly associated with the quality of antecedent caregiving and more predictive of attachment security in the next generation (Waters et al., 2018) than current, widespread scoring methods for the AAI. We intend to take advantage of the 2 largest available databases on the antecedents and intergenerational transmission of attachment, as assessed by the AAI, to replicate and significantly extend analyses based on the MLSRA and, in so doing, potentially move best practices regarding the assessment of adult attachment representations in the field forward significantly. More specifically, the proposed grant will support curation and secondary coding for secure base script knowledge of the two largest AAI corpora in the world pertinent to the caregiving antecedents, adult consequences, and intergenerational transmission of secure base script knowledge: (1) the age 18 year AAI transcripts from the NICHD Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development (N=857) and (2) a large sub-sample of available AAI transcripts (N=~1900) drawn from both higher and normative-risk samples contained within the Collaboration on Attachment Transmission Synthesis commons (CATS), a data resource prepared for individual participant data (IPD) meta-analysis of studies of the intergenerational transmission of attachment security. 1