The relationship of attachment security to narrative structure

A key means of getting to know someone is by telling them about personal experiences. Even as children, some individuals engage others readily by such personal narration, while others seldom do so, remaining aloof in conversation. The present study investigates whether such differences may be traced to the security of children’s attachment to their mothers, usually at one and the same time their primary attachment figures and the individuals who most frequently engage them in personal narrative. If a child’s style of narration to a stranger about mundane, not necessarily familial, events were to relate to security of maternal attachment, this would suggest that personal narration is one vehicle in which one can observe the internal working model of relationships employed by a child in the process of negotiating a new relationship; children might well anticipate responses to narration from unfamiliar audiences that resemble those they have received in the past from their mothers. Furthermore, if narration relates to attachment security, researchers interested in child narration may need to take children’s attachment security into account in future assessments of child narration, assessments that have often been used for very different purposes, including child eyewitness testimony (see Ceci & Bruck, 1993, for review). As Ceci and Bruck (1993) note, children’s ability to testify regarding abuse hinges on many things (e.g., children’s age, length of time since abuse, history of being asked suggestive questions). In fact, recently, some researchers (e.g., Goodman, Quas, BattermanFaunce, Riddlesberger, & Kuhn, 1997) have suggested that this ability may well reflect the children’s security of attachment to their mother, a possibility with many complicated implications for children’s eyewitness testimony. (For a recent review discussing the role of attachment on children’s eyewitness memory, see Alexander, Quas, & Goodman, 2002.) From the first, attachment theorists have drawn our attention to the link between attachment and communication. In the first year of life, infants’ vocalizations often consist of crying episodes, and Bell and Ainsworth (1972) established that mothers who were quickly and frequently responsive to their infants had infants who cried less frequently and for less duration several months later. Bowlby (1969, p. 123) noted that “the language of feeling is an indispensable vehicle for talking about ways in which a situation is appraised and about behavioural systems in a state of activation.” In this paper we will focus considerable attention on the “language of feeling” expressed in narrative, something narrative researchers term evaluation. Main, Kaplan, and Cassidy (1985) published research International Journal of Behavioral Development 2006, 30 (5), 8–19