Experiential connectedness in children’s attachment interviews: An examination of natural word use

Attachment classification derived from narrative analysis is widely used as a marker of psychological organization. In contrast to this top-down approach, bottom-up, word count–based analyses of narratives are also used to measure psychological states. The current study integrates these 2 approaches by examining their overlap in 93 school-aged children. Participants completed the Child Attachment Interview; transcriptions of this interview were subjected to word count–based linguistic analysis. Compared with secure children, dismissing children showed less and preoccupied children showed more signs of experiential connectedness. Disorganized children decreased in experiential connectedness during loss discussions and used more words related to death during nonloss sections of the interview. Results are discussed in terms of their relevance to attachment and relationship research. The internal working model of attachment (IWM; Bowlby, 1980), a person’s characteristic relationship schema that develops from interactions with primary caregivers, is widely studied as a factor underlying relational and mental health (Bakermans-Kranenburg & van IJzendoorn, 2009). The field of attachment has a long history of assessing the IWM via narrative discourse. Among adults, IWMs are typically studied using the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI; George, Kaplan, & Main, 1996), and a large body of evidence suggests that coding patterns of discourse yield Jessica L. Borelli, Department of Psychology, Pomona College; David A. Sbarra, Department of Psychology, University of Arizona; Matthias Mehl, Department of Psychology, University of Arizona; Daryn H. David, Department of Psychiatry, Yale University School of Medicine. Preparation of this article was supported by NIA Grant F-32 AG032310-01, a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, and a grant from the Center for Mental Health Promotion. The authors wish to thank Linda Mayes, Michael Crowley, Rita Law, Erika McCarty, Donald Nathanson, Carly Keidel, and the children and families who participated in this study. Correspondence should be addressed to Jessica L. Borelli, Department of Psychology, Pomona College, 647 N. College Way, Claremont, CA 91711, email: [email protected]. meaningful information about individuals’ psychological adjustment (Fonagy et al., 1996), parenting sensitivity (De Wolff & van IJzendoorn, 1997), romantic relationship quality (Roisman et al., 2007), and emotion regulation (Kobak, Cole, Ferenz-Gillies, Fleming, & Gamble, 1993; Kobak & Sceery, 1988). In addition, the last 5 years have witnessed a surge of interest in assessing the narrative discourse of children’s perceptions of relationships with primary caregivers. Largely owing to the development of the Child Attachment Interview (CAI; Target, Fonagy, & ShmueliGoetz, 2003), researchers can now apply the fundamental elements of AAI scoring to children’s interviews, with emerging evidence suggesting that narrative-based assessments of attachment security have similar validity in childhood and adulthood (Borelli, Crowley, et al., 2010; Borelli, David, Crowley, & Mayes, 2010; Shmueli-Goetz, Target, Fonagy, & Datta, 2008). The mental representation framework is an attractive top-down paradigm for investigating IWMs of attachment, reactions to interpersonal loss, and emotion regulation when people discuss their relationships and