Biomedical subjects

Brian E Vaughn

Publications and source records attributed to Brian E Vaughn.

5 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2006

Script-like attachment representations and behavior in families and across cultures: studies of parental secure base narratives.

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.

Adult↗

PubMed2006

Maternal attachment script representations: longitudinal stability and associations with stylistic features of maternal narratives.

To evaluate the temporal stability of maternal attachment representations obtained using a word-prompt task, a sample of mothers (N = 55) was assessed on two occasions, 12 - 15 months apart. Each mother responded to six word-prompt sets on each assessment occasion (4 word-prompt sets were designed to prime secure base themes, 2 word-prompt sets were designed to prime different themes), and the resulting stories were scored in terms of the presence and quality of the secure base scripts evident in each story. The story scriptedness scores (average across four stories) were internally consistent at each assessment (alphas >.85) and the mean difference in scores was not significant across assessments. The cross-time correlation for the composites (aggregates of scores at each age) was positive and significant, r53 = .54. Other aspects of maternal stories were also stable (e.g., number of words used, number of sentences per story, use of words from the prompt list). Controlling for stable stylistic features of the stories did not reduce the magnitude of association for scriptedness scores across time. These results suggest that the presence and quality of secure base scripts is a stable aspect of maternal representations of attachment and that the word-prompt task is useful for prompting the script in narrative production.

Adult↗

PubMed2006

The attachment script representation procedure in an Italian sample: associations with adult attachment interview scales and with maternal sensitivity.

This study provides data supporting the reliability and validity of an Italian version of the adult attachment script representation task, designed by Waters & Rodrigues-Doolabh (2004). Specifically, we tested hypotheses concerning positive relations between attachment scriptedness scores and two other representational measures, derived from the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI). In addition, we tested the hypothesis that secure base script scores should predict maternal sensitivity in the context of mother - infant interaction. Thirty-one mothers completed narrative protocols and received scriptedness scores using the Waters & Rodrigues-Doolabh (2004) criteria. Prior to the attachment script assessment, mothers had been assessed using the AAI and had been observed in the context of infant - mother interactions to assess maternal sensitivity. Assessment of instrument reliability was satisfactory (Cronbach's alpha >.70) and both hypotheses were supported; the attachment scriptedness score (based on 4 attachment narratives) was positively and significantly associated with the AAI coherence score, the continuous security score derived from the AAI State of Mind scales, and with maternal sensitivity. These data extend to another socio-cultural milieu, previous findings supporting reliability, convergent, and predictive validity of the attachment script representation task as a measure of adult attachment.

Educational Status↗

PubMed2006

Maternal secure base scripts, children's attachment security, and mother-child narrative styles.

This paper reports the results of a study examining links between maternal representations of attachment, child attachment security, and mother and child narrative styles assessed in the context of reminiscences about shared experiences. Participants were 90 mother - child dyads. Child attachment security was assessed using the attachment Q-set and maternal attachment representations were measured using a recently designed instrument that assesses the script-like qualities of those representations. Analyses examined dependencies in the mother - child memory talk data and then assessed the overlap between both mother and child reminiscing styles and the attachment variables. Narrative styles of both the mothers and their children were coherent and consistent for each dyad member. Furthermore, maternal narrative style (e.g., specific and elaborative questions, using confirming evaluation comments) was significantly related to child participation in the narrative. Maternal and child attachment variables were positively and significantly correlated, and child security was positively associated with maternal narrative style. Maternal secure base scripts were also found to be significantly related to the number of references to emotions in both mother and child narratives as well as to children's overall participation in the memory talk. The pattern of results suggests that attachment representations serve as one influence on the manner(s) in which mother - child dyads think about and discuss emotion-laden content relevant to the child's personal autobiography. Furthermore, the results are consistent with the notion that the manner in which children organize their thoughts about emotion are (at least potentially) shaped by the narrative styles of their parents.

Adult↗

PubMed2005

Discovering pattern in developing lives: reflections on the Minnesota study of risk and adaptation from birth to adulthood.

The Minnesota Study of Risk and Adaptation was initiated in the mid-1970s as a short-term longitudinal study of infants at elevated risk for abuse and neglect. At the outset, the project leaders intended to characterize the infant, the caregiving environment, and the larger social milieu of the family in as comprehensive a manner as possible so as to test explicitly posed hypotheses about pathways leading from the child, the caregiving environment, and the social milieu to abuse or neglect. Paradoxically, only a minority of infants recruited to the study were ultimately abused or neglected over the 36-month period for which funding had been provided, but it proved possible to identify several antecedent indicators that predicted their outcome. It was also evident from the data that developmental casualty was elevated in this sample and the frequencies of suboptimal outcomes in social, emotional, and behavioral domains were greater than expected for less stressed samples. The study had yielded a wealth of information about infants and families from this at-risk sample and it was clear that the sample must be followed into childhood so as to describe the trajectories of developmental successes and casualties that were already apparent in the first 24 months of data. Alan Sroufe joined the project leaders in this endeavor and the childhood data supported the study of the sample into adolescence and now into adulthood. At this point, children of the original sample of infants are now being assessed using many of the protocols and procedures used with their parents. The study has produced hundreds of published reports about risk and its consequences, as well as about positive adjustment to life in a socio-cultural milieu that frequently can be non-supportive or even dangerous. This essay is a reflection on some accomplishments of the Minnesota study as these have helped shape how developmental scientists think about social and emotional development and more generally about how theory has guided the conceptual, empirical, and measurement plans for the study from its beginning.

Adaptation, Psychological↗