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Developmental Psychology 1998, Vol.

34, No" 5, 925-933

Copyright 1998 by the American Psychological Association, Inc. 0012-1649/98/S3.00

Maternal Attachment Representations, Maternal Sensitivity, and the Infant-Mother Attachment Relationship
David R. Pederson, Karin E. Gleason, Greg Moran, and Sandi Bento
University of Western Ontario

The role of maternal sensitivity as a mediator accounting for the robust association between maternal attachment representations and the quality of the infant-mother attachment relationship was examined. Sixty mother-infant dyads were observed at home and in the Strange Situation at 13 months, and mothers participated in the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI) within the next 6 months. A strong association was found between AAI and Strange Situation classifications, and autonomous mothers were more sensitive at home than were nonautonomous mothers. Mothers in secure relationships were more sensitive at home than mothers in nonsecure relationships. Likewise, infants in secure relationships were more secure as assessed by the Waters' Attachment Q sort than infants in nonsecure relationships. A test of the mediational model revealed that maternal sensitivity accounted for 17% of the relation between AAI and Strange Situation classifications.

A central element of current attachment theory (Cassidy, 1994; Main, Kaplan, & Cassidy, 1985) is that a parent's cognitive representations of relationships is an important determinant of the patterning and quality of interactions with his or her infant and thus of their developing relationship. A number of studies have found evidence for a strong association between a parent's attachment representations as assessed through the Adult Attachment Interview (George, Kaplan, & Main, 1985) and the infantparent relationship as reflected in the Ainsworth, Blehar, Waters, and Wall (1978) Strange Situation (e.g., Ainsworth & Eichberg, 1991; Benoit & Parker, 1994; Fonagy, Steele, & Steele, 1991; Grossmann, Fremmer-Bombik, Rudolph, & Grossmann, 1988; Main et a]., 1985; Ward & Carlson, 1995). This conclusion has been strengthened by a meta-analytic review in which van IJzendoorn (1995) found evidence for a robust association between Adult Attachment Interview classifications and the parent-infant attachment relationship. In this review, involving 661 dyads, 82% of parents classified as autonomous were in secure relationships with their infants, 65% of dismissing parents were in avoidant relationships, and 35% of preoccupied parents were in ambivalent relationships, thus providing support for the specific predicted associations especially for the association between autonomy and security. Interviews conducted prenatally effectively predict relationships at 1 year of age (Benoit &

This research was supported by grants from the Ontario Mental Health Foundation and from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. We are grateful to the mothers and infants who participated in this research; to Patricia Delmore-Ko, Kirstie Fisher, and Andrea Noonan for assisting with home observations; and to Anne Krupka and George Tarabulsy for Strange Situation coding. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to David R. Pederson, Karin E. Gleason, Greg Moran, or Sandi Bento, Department of Psychology, University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, Canada N6A 5C2. Electronic mail may be sent to pederson julian.uwo.ca, kegleaso@julian.uwo.ca, gmoran2@julian.uwo.ca, orbento@julian.uwo.ca. 925

Parker, 1994; Fonagy, Steele, & Steele, 1991; Ward & Carlson, 1995), supporting the argument that the parent's attachmentrelated cognitions are developmental determinants of the attachment relationship. Because an infant has no direct access to his or her parent's cognitions, attachment theory postulates that the link between a parent's attachment representations and the parent-infant relationship must be mediated through their interactions. In a second meta-analysis, van IJzendoorn (1995) examined the existing literature relating Adult Attachment Interview classifications to a variety of measures of parental responsiveness. He concluded that this association was reliable but somewhat weaker than the correspondence between Adult Attachment Interview classifications and relationships measured in the Strange Situation. In the same report, van IJzendoorn (1995) evaluated the hypothesis that parental sensitivity mediates the relation between a parent's internal working model of attachment and the attachment relationship. The results of his two meta-analyses provided estimates of the statistical association between autonomy in the Adult Attachment Interview and security in the Strange Situation and between autonomy and parental sensitivity. Goldsmith and Alansky's (1987) meta-analysis of the relation between parental sensitivity and attachment security provided an estimate of the final link in the model, van IJzendoorn found that 23% of the direct association between parental attachment representations and the attachment relationship was mediated by parental sensitivity. He concluded that the larger part of the association between parents' representations of attachment and the quality of the attachment relationship must be attributed to something other than sensitivity as this variable is currently conceptualized and assessed. The results of van IJzendoorn's (1995) analyses are particularly credible because they stem from the results of a large number and variety of studies. However, only three of the studies included in his analyses involved assessments of all three variables in his model, and in each of these the results included a complication or anomaly. In the first study, involving a sample

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PEDERSON, GLEASON, MORAN, AND BENTO procedures designed to increase the power of home observations to distinguish crucial nuances of maternal and infant behavior. First, the observations are designed to simulate a busy household in which the mother's attention is divided between her infant's signals and other tasks. Second, maternal sensitivity is assessed using the Maternal Behavior Q set (Pederson & Moran, 1995b; Pederson et al., 1990), a set of 90 items descriptive of maternal interactive behaviors that are ranked to reflect the observed interactions of a particular dyad. Among other advantages, the Q-set procedures orient the observers to attachment-relevant maternal behaviors. Third, the observers take extensive notes that are used as the basis for a debriefing interview following the visit. The debriefing interview is designed to highlight the infant's signals for proximity, affective communication, and comfort and the mother's responses to these signals. Using these procedures, Pederson and Moran (1996) provided empirical support for attachment theory's central prediction of a robust association between a mother's sensitivity at home and her attachment relationship with her infant. In this study, the correlation between maternal sensitivity Q-sort scores derived from home observations at 12 months and attachment security assessed in the Strange Situation at 18 months was .60, which is a substantially stronger relation than the average correlation of .24 reported in de Wolff and van IJzendoorn's (1997) review. A psychometrically sound assessment of parental sensitivity is a prerequisite to the evaluation of a model in which sensitivity mediates the association between adult representations of attachment and the parent-infant relationship. Any error in the measurement of sensitivity will attenuate the statistical strength of the mediated path (Baron & Kenny, 1986). Considerable efforts have been made to promote the accuracy and standardization of assessing both attachment cognitions with the Adult Attachment Interview and the attachment relationship with the Strange Situation. In both cases, coders are expected to receive training and certification to assure uniform coding standards, and coding is based on permanent records (i.e., transcripts for the Adult Attachment Interview and videotapes for the Strange Situation) that allow the repeated review of puzzling or ambiguous aspects. It is reasonable to assume that these efforts to assure standardized coding have enhanced the psychometric characteristics of these measures and contributed to the robustness of the association between Adult Attachment Interview autonomy and Strange Situation security. In sharp contrast, measures of parental sensitivity, including those used in van IJzendoorn's (1995) analyses, are diverse and have not been subject to a similar rigorous process of standardization. The mediating path is a product of the correlations between autonomy and sensitivity and between sensitivity and security (Pedhazur, 1982). Thus, correlations greater than .7 for each pair would be required for this mediating route to account for a share of the variance comparable with that attributed to the direct path between autonomy and security (estimated by van IJzendoorn, 1995, to be .47). These various considerations suggest that the results of van IJzendoorn's (1995) meta-analysis should not be taken as conclusive evidence of the inadequacy of a developmental model that proposes that maternal sensitivity is the principal route linking a parent's attachment-related cognitions and the quality of the relationships with their infant. The primary goal of the current study is to examine this issue directly using a research

of only 20 dyads and an early version of the Adult Attachment Interview coding system, Grossmann et al. (1988) found an association between maternal sensitivity during the first year and the mother's attachment representations 5 years later. Maternal sensitivity at 6 months was associated with Strange Situation classifications, but no such association was present at the 10month assessment of maternal sensitivity, and at 2 months the differences were significant only between secure and ambivalent dyads (Grossmann, Grossmann, Spangler, Suess, & LJnzner, 1985). In the second of these studies, van IJzendoorn, Kranenburg, Zwart-Woudstra, van Busschbach, and Lambermon (1991) found an association between a mother's attachment representations and her sensitivity in interaction with her infant during free pfay but found no such association for fathers. Furthermore, although the expected relation between sensitivity measures and Strange Situation classifications was found for fathers and mothers with their daughters, unexpectedly and anomalously, mothers of secure sons were found to be less sensitive than mothers of insecure sons. Finally, Ward and Carlson (1995) demonstrated that mothers classified as autonomous in a prenatal interview were more sensitive in an unstructured laboratory play session al 3 and 9 months of age than nonautonomous mothers; however, these measures of sensitivity were unrelated to Strange Situation attachment classifications at 12 months. The anomalies in the results of these three studies are particularly troublesome because, of all the studies reviewed, only these incorporated all three of the variables comprising the mediational model under evaluation. Therefore, van IJzendoorn's (1995) provocative conclusion that maternal sensitivity plays only a modest role in mediating between maternal cognition and the attachment relationship should be complemented by an analysis of observations of a single study in which assessments of maternal cognitions, mother-infant interaction, and the attachment relationship arise from the same set of participants. van IJzendoorn's (1995) conclusion is qualified further by a consideration of the difficulty of establishing a robust empirical link between sensitivity and attachment security (see de Wolff & van IJzendoorn, 1997; Goldsmith & Alansky, 1987, for reviews). Even those studies that have reported a significant association between maternal sensitivity and infant attachment security (e.g., Egeland & Farber, 1984; Grossmann, et al., 1985) have failed to replicate the magnitude of the effects reported by Ainsworth, Bell, and Stayton (1971). Other research has failed to find the expected association (e.g., Mangelsdorf, Gunnar, Kestenbaum, Lang, & Andreas, 1990; Rosen & Rothbaum, 1993; Seifer, Schiller, Sameroff, Resnick, & Riordan, 1996; Ward & Carlson, 1995). It has been suggested (e.g., Ainsworth & Marvin, 1995; Pederson & Moran, 1995a; Pederson, et al., 1990) that much of this difficulty in providing empirical confirmation of the central role of maternal sensitivity may be related to the substantial challenge involved in the valid description of infantmother interactions, rather than indicating that maternal sensitivity is less important to the development of attachment relationships than postulated by attachment theory. Brief observations in the relatively stress-free environment of the home or in laboratory play sessions may not provide observers with an adequate basis for distinguishing the subtle variations in maternal behavior that are associated with variations in maternal sensitivity. Pederson and Moran (1995a) described three aspects of their

MATERNAL ATTACHMENT REPRESENTATIONS design that involves the assessment of all three factors with the same participants and using observational measures that have been demonstrated in previous research to provide a valid and reliable assessment of meaningful variation in maternal sensitivity. In addition to this primary objective, we also designed the present study to provide more information about the relation between attachment behavior in the home and the attachment relationship as assessed in the Strange Situation. Home-based attachment behavior was assessed by the Waters (1995) Attachment Q set and the Pederson and Moran (1995a) system for classifying attachment relationships on the basis of home observations. The Attachment Q set consists of 90 short descriptions of infant behavior that are sorted to characterize the observed behavior. Seifer et al. (1996), Vaughn and Waters (1990), and Pederson and Moran (1996) reported that infants in secure relationships in the Strange Situation had higher Attachment Q-sort security scores compared with infants in nonsecure relationships (see van IJzendoorn, Vereijken, & Riksen-Walraven, in press, for a review). Using attachment theory and research, Pederson and Moran (1995a) developed descriptive criteria for classifying attachment relationships from home observations. Pederson and Moran (1996) reported an overall congruence of 7 1 % between these classifications and Strange Situation attachment classifications.

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knowledge of the dyad. In this debriefing interview, the observers were asked to describe the visit using both their notes and recollections to clarify and consolidate the experiences of the visit. During the interview, the observers were careful not to reveal any identifying information such as names or physical characteristics of the participants. The role of the naive interviewer was to reflect his or her understanding gained from the observers' accounts of the infant, the mother, and the relationship until the observers and interviewer were satisfied with the accuracy of the portrayal of the home visit. Finally, infant-mother dyads were classified by consensus as secure, avoidant, or ambivalent according to the descriptions of attachment relationships in the home developed by Pederson and Moran (1995a). In the Pederson and Moran (1995a) system, mothers in relationships classified as secure monitor their infants and respond promptly and effectively to their infants' signals for contact and reassurance. Infants in secure relationships clearly show differential attachment behavior to their mothers in comparison to the visitors, are comforted by their mothers' responses, and engage in secure base behaviors. There are three subclassifications of secure (B) relationships that parallel the B l , B3, and B4 Strange Situation classifications. In Bl relationships, the infants are sociable with both mother and visitors; however, they are more responsive to mother. Both mother and infant engage in distal affective sharing. Secure base behavior is conspicuous for B3 infants; mothers are responsive and delight in their infants. B4 infants and their mothers enjoy physical contact and are more attentive to each other than to the visitorsMothers in avoidant relationships are unresponsive to signals for comfort: however, they may be intrusive in assisting on cognitive tasks. Infants in avoidant relationships may be more sociable with visitors than with their mothers, seldom seek contact with and attempt to be emotionally independent of their mothers, especially when distressed. In A1-ignoring relationships, both mothers and infants are independent of each other. The mothers' attention is focused on tasks or on interactions with the visitors. Likewise, infants are engaged with the visitors or in exploration and play away from their mothers. In Al-teaching relationships, the interactions are focused on cognitive tasks, but there is surprisingly little affective sharing around achievements on these tasks. Mothers often respond to negative affect by distraction with food or toys. Mothers and infants in A2 relationships show mixed strategies during the home observations. Although the mothers often ignore their infants, especially when involved with tasks, they are available to their infants at other times in the visit. Infants may approach their mothers more frequently than infants in other forms of avoidant relationships; however, they, like other avoidant infants, attempt to soothe themselves when upset. Negative affect dominates the interactions for ambivalent (C) relationships. Mothers in ambivalent relationships are unpredictable; sometimes they may be responsive and at other times seemingly oblivious to their infants' signals for comfort. They may restrict their infants' exploration and appear to be overprotective. Infants in ambivalent relationships are irritable and seek extensive contact with their mothers, but the contact does not appear to be satisfying. They engage in limited exploration away from their mothers. Like the Strange Situation classifications, Cl infants appear to be angry and C2 infants appear helpless. (See the Appendix to Pederson and Moran, 1995a, for more details about the classification procedures.) In the present study, each observer was debriefed by a different interviewer on 21 of the 60 home visits; interrater classification agreement for these dyads was 86% (K = .74, z = 4.63, p < .001). Following the debriefing meeting, each observer independently completed the Attachment Q sort, Maternal Behavior Q sort, and the Ainsworth et al. (1971) ratings of maternal acceptance, accessibility, cooperation, and sensitivity. The Attachment Q set, Version 3.0 (Waters, 1995) was used to describe infant attachment behavior. An infant's security score was the correlation between the sort summarizing his or her behavior and the criterion sort

Method Participants
Mothers of 60 physically healthy 12-month-old infants were recruited from a registry of mothers who during their postpartum hospital stay had expressed interest in participating in child development studies. All infants (33 female and 27 male) were observed at home with their mothers between 12 and 16 months of age (M = 13 months). All of the mothers were Caucasian; their ages ranged from 21 to 44 years (M = 31.7 years). Mothers' and fathers' highest level of education ranged from 9 to 27 years in school, averaging 15.2 years for fathers and 15.0 years for mothers. Family income was approximately $45,000 Canadian dollars per year, which is slightly higher than the average family income in London, Ontario.

Home Visit Procedure


Two female observers conducted semistructured home visits lasting approximately 2 hr. Cognitive and motor development of the infant was assessed by one observer using the Bayley Scales of Infant Development (Bayley, 1969), while the mother completed the Attachment Q set (Waters, 1995) under the supervision of the second observer. Following these procedures, the mother was interviewed to obtain information about the family's demographic background and the infant's health and developmental history. During the interview, the infant was free to play, allowing observation of how both the mother and infant functioned while the mother's attention was divided between the interviewer's questions and attending to her infant. Both observers kept running notes during the visit, describing infant and maternal behavior and interactions, devoting particular attention to the infant's secure base behavior, affective sharing, fussiness, and resistance to interaction with the mother and to the mother's availability, her responses to the infant's signals, and her monitoring the infant while occupied with the Q set and interview. Upon completion of the home visit, the observers were interviewed by another researcher who had no

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PEDERSON, GLEASON, MORAN, AND BENTO nificantly associated with the Adult Attachment Interview classifications, Strange Situation classifications, or the Q-sort sensitivity scores. Thus, there was no statistical reason to use these variables as covariates in the subsequent analyses.

for a prototypically secure infant. Items indicative of security described the infant's secure base behavior; enjoyment of physical contact, and affective sharing and the absence of fussy or angry behaviors. The Maternal Behavior Q set, Version 2.0 (Pederson & Moran, 1995b) was used to describe mothers' sensitivity during the home visits. The Maternal Behavior Q set consists of 90 items that are sorted in a manner analogous to the Attachment Q set. A mother's sensitivity score was the correlation between this sort and a sort describing a prototypically sensitive mother. Items indicative of sensitivity refer to the mother monitoring the infant's behavior and state, consistency and timing of her responses, and appropriateness of her interventions.

Adult Attachment Interview and Strange Situation Co rrespondence


The distribution of mothers classified as dismissing, autonomous, and preoccupied in the Adult Attachment Interview and the corresponding Strange Situation relationship classifications of avoidant, secure, and ambivalent is presented in Table 1. The predicted association between mothers' Adult Attachment Interview classifications and the dyads' Strange Situation classifications was tested using Cohen's kappa (Cohen, 1960) because this statistic controls for chance agreement based on the distribution of participants across categories. For 44 of the 60 infantmother dyads, Adult Attachment Interview and Strange Situation classifications corresponded as predicted (73%; K = .56, z 5.89, p < .001). By using the autonomous-nonautonomous versus secure-nonsecure groupings, 48 of 60 infant-mother dyads were placed in concordant attachment categories (80%; K = .60, z = 4.63, p < .001).

Strange Situation Procedure


The infant-mother dyads were observed in the Ainsworth Strange Situation within 2 weeks of the home visit. By using criteria described in Ainsworth et al., (1978), the infant-mother attachment relationships were classified as secure, avoidant, or ambivalent by coders who had attained reliability with the Carlson and Sroufe (1993) Strange Situation reliability videotapes. In brief, secure infants greeted or approached their mothers in the reunion episodes and returned to play. Avoidant infants were not overtly distressed by separations and ignored mother in the beginning of the reunion episodes. Ambivalent infants did not engage in exploratory play, were distressed during separation, and were angry and petulant in the reunion episodes. Seventeen Strange Situations were coded by a second coder with a 94% agreement with the first coder (K = .91, z = 5.19, p < .001). None of the coders participated in the home observations for the dyads they coded. The disorganizeddisoriented classification was not used because insensitivity is theoretically not predictive of this form of nonsecure relationship (Main & Hesse, 1990).

Adult Attachment Interview and Home Observations


A r test was used to test the hypothesis that autonomous mothers were more sensitive than nonautonomous mothers. Consistent with this hypothesis, Q-sort sensitivity scores for autonomous mothers (M = 0.57, SD - 0.39) were significantly higher than for nonautonomous mothers (M = 0.27, SD = 0.63), r(44) = 2.24, p < .05, using an unequal variance test. For descriptive purposes, sensitivity scores were also analyzed as a function of the three Adult Attachment Interview classifications and were significantly related to these classifications, F(2, 57) = 5.08, p < .01. Duncan's multiple range post hoc tests (p < .05) revealed that dismissing mothers (M = 0.11, SD - 0.67) were significantly less sensitive than autonomous (M = 0.57, SD = 0.39) and preoccupied mothers (M 0.56, SD = 0.49). The sensitivity of autonomous and preoccupied mothers did not differ significantly. Similar results were found in parallel analyses using the Ainsworth ratings of sensitivity. The security scores derived from the Attachment Q sort were not significantly related to the Adult Attachment Interview classifications, r(58) = 1.72, p > .05.

Adult Attachment Interview Procedure


Mothers were interviewed using the Adult Attachment Interview (George et al., 1985) in a third session conducted eidier at the university or in the mother's home within 6 months of the Strange Situation. The transcripts were rated on the 18 scales described by Main and Goldwyn (1994). These ratings together with Main and Goldwyn's descriptions of autonomous, dismissing, or preoccupied attachment representations were used to classify each transcript. Transcripts classified as autonomous were rated as moderately or highly coherent in that general descriptions of childhood relationships with parents were convincingly supported by episodic memories and the narrative was internally consistent. Dismissing transcripts were characterized by a positive depiction of childhood parental relationships that were either not supported or contradicted by episodic memories. Transcripts classified as preoccupied included passages indicating current anger when describing parental behavior or vague and unfocused discussion. Each Adult Attachment Interview transcript was independently coded by at least two raters (for all transcripts, at least one of these initial coders had achieved reliability with Mary Main and Erik Hesse). In the case of interrater disagreements, transcripts were coded by a third rater, and a final classification was derived by consensus. The initial two coders agreed on 80% of the three-category classifications (K = .66, z = 7.00, p < .001). Given the multiple measures used in this study, care was exercised to ensure the independence of each assessment. All names, occupations, and any other potentially identifying information were removed from Adult Attachment Interview transcripts. Transcripts and Strange Situation tapes of the same dyads were assigned different identification codes and were coded in different orders months apart. Results The demographic background variables of paternal education, maternal age and education, and family income were not sig-

Table 1 Adult Attachment Interview and Strange Situation Classification Correspondence Adult Attachment Interview Dismissing Autonomous Preoccupied Total Note, Strange Situation classification Avoidant 11 4 1 16 Secure 4 26 2 32 Ambivalent 3 2 7 12 Total 18 32 10 60

K = .56 (z = 5.89, p < .001).

MATERNAL ATTACHMENT REPRESENTATIONS

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The frequency distribution of mothers' Adult Attachment Interview classifications and the Pederson and Moran (1995a) home attachment classifications are shown in Table 2. Thirtysix of 60 infant-mother pairs were placed in matching home attachment classifications (60%; K = .30, z = 3.23, p < .01). Thus, mothers' adult attachment classifications are related to infant-mother attachment relationships assessed in both the Strange Situation and at home.

Table 3 Home Classification and Strange Situation Classification Agreement


Strange Situation classification Home classification Avoidant Secure Ambivalent Total Note, Avoidant 9 5 2 16 Secure 1 28 3 32 Ambivalent 1 6 5 12 Total 11 39 10 60

Home Observations and Strange Situation Classifications


Q-sort sensitivity scores of mothers in secure relationships (M = 0.68, SD = 0.27) were significantly higher than sensitivity scores of mothers in nonsecure relationships (M = 0.14, SD = 0.27), ?(36) = 4.27, p < .001, using an unequal variance test, thus providing support for the basic hypothesis that sensitivity is related to attachment security as assessed in the Strange Situation. As with the Adult Attachment Interview classifications, sensitivity scores were also analyzed as a function of the three attachment groups for descriptive purposes. These scores were significantly related to classifications in the Strange Situation, F(2, 57) = 20.35, p < .001. Follow-up tests determined that mothers classified as being in avoidant relationships in the Strange Situation were significantly less sensitive (M = -0.13, SD = 0.65) than mothers in secure (M = 0.67, SD = 0.27) or ambivalent (M = 0.50, SD = 0.37) relationships; the ambivalent and secure groups were not significantly different. Additional analyses using the Ainsworth ratings yielded comparable results. Security scores from the Attachment Q sorts (Waters, 1995) were significantly higher for infants classified as secure (M = 0.47, SD = 0.30) than as nonsecure (M = 0.05, SD = 0.34) in the Strange Situation, /(58) = 5.12,/? < .001. For descriptive purposes, the security scores were analyzed as a function of the three Strange Situation classifications, F(2, 57) = 13.29, p < .001. Post hoc tests revealed that infants in secure relationships interacted with their mothers in the home in a fashion that reflected a higher level of security (M = 0.47, SD = 0.30) than did infants in avoidant (M = 0.02, SD = 0.38) or ambivalent (M - 0.08, SD = 0.30) relationships. There were no significant differences in the security scores of infants in avoidant and ambivalent relationships. As indicated in Table 3, 42 of the 60 dyads were classified in the corresponding home and Strange Situation attachment classifications (70%; K .47, z 5.12, p < .001).

K = .47 (z = 5.12, p < .001).

Transmission of Attachment
We evaluated van Uzendoorn's (1995) mediational model by examining the relations among Adult Attachment Interview classifications, maternal sensitivity, and the attachment relationship in the Strange Situation. For the purposes of this analysis, individuals classified as nonautonomous on the Adult Attachment Interview were grouped together; nonsecure dyads in the Strange Situation were also grouped together to produce the dichotomous variables of autonomy and security, respectively. The path diagram and the correlations among these variables are presented in Figure 1. The model was evaluated by first calculating the beta weight from the regression predicting maternal sensitivity from autonomy to estimate the path between these two variables. This path was significant, 0 = .28, f(58) = 2.24, p < .05. A second regression analysis using autonomy and maternal sensitivity as predictors of security was conducted to determine the path coefficients that describe the direct relations between autonomy and security and between maternal sensitivity and security. Significant direct paths were found between maternal sensitivity and security, 0 - .37, f(57) = 3.70, p < .001, when controlling for autonomy and between autonomy and security, 0 = .49, t(57) - 4.98, p < .001, when controlling for sensitivity, van IJzendoorn (1995) postulated that the influence of parental attachment representations on attachment security is mediated by maternal sensitivity. Applying this mediational model to the path analysis presented in Figure 1, the mediated effects of autonomy on security by way of maternal sensitivity is the product of the direct effects of autonomy on maternal sensitivity and of maternal sensitivity on security (Pedhazur, 1982). The influence of autonomy on security mediated by maternal sensitivity is .10 (i.e., .28 times .37). Thus, the direct path between autonomy and security (i.e., 0 = .49) accounts for approximately five times the variance accounted for by the mediated path. Discussion

Table 2 Adult Attachment Interview and Home Classification Agreement


Adult Attachment Interview Dismissing Autonomous Preoccupied Total Note, Home classification Avoidant 8 3 0 Secure 9 24 6 39 Ambivalent 1 5 4 10 Total 18 32 10 60

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K = .30 (z = 3.23, p < .01).

In the present study, mothers in secure relationships as assessed in the Strange Situation were more sensitive during interactions in the home than mothers in nonsecure relationships, thereby affirming attachment theory's identification of maternal sensitivity as a central determinant of attachment security (Ainsworth, 1982; Ainsworth etal., 1971). This result, in combination with the results of earlier studies (see Pederson & Moran, 1995a,

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PEDERSON, GLEASON, MORAN, AND BENTO

Maternal Sensitivity
Figure I. Path diagram for the relationship between Adult Attachment Interview and Strange Situation classifications mediated by sensitivity.

1996), firmly establishes the validity of our home observation procedures and the associated measures of maternal sensitivity, and suggests that they form a credible basis for the evaluation of the role of maternal sensitivity as a mediator between adult attachment cognitions and the attachment relationship. A primary purpose of the present study was to examine the hypothesis that maternal sensitivity is a mediator that would statistically explain the association between maternal attachment representations and the attachment relationship. We found a substantially higher relationship between maternal sensitivity and attachment security in the Strange Situation than van Llzendoorn (1995) used in his assessment of the model. Still, in both van IJzendoorn's analysis and in the present study, the magnitude of the mediational path was virtually identical and accounted for less than 25% of the association between representational autonomy and attachment security. Although the results of this study failed to provide strong support for the mediational role of maternal sensitivity, a general developmental model that hypothesizes that the infant's interactional experience with the parent mediates the association between the parent's attachment representations and the attachment relationship remains compelling. It is difficult to imagine developmental processes in which the association between parental representations and the manifest relationship between parent and infant is not mediated by some aspect of their interactions. An explanation of the weakness of the statistical support for the mediational model should first consider the adequacy of the assessment of maternal sensitivity. In the present study, the magnitude of the mediating path was no greater than that estimated by van IJzendoorn (1995), even though the relation between maternal sensitivity and attachment security was substantially stronger than the estimate used by van IJzendoom, Thus, a more robust measure of maternal sensitivity failed to increase the statistical strength of the mediated path relative to the direct path. It is still possible that maternal sensitivity does mediate the influence of maternal attachment representations on attachment security, but empirical substantiation would require home visits repeated over the first year (Ainsworth et al., 1971; Ainsworth & Marvin, 1995). Isabella (1993) found that assessments of maternal behavior early in the first year were more clearly related to Strange Situation classifications than later assessments. He argued that measures of sensitivity taken before the infant has

had opportunity to accommodate to the mother provide a more accurate reflection of the mother's initial caregiving strategies. A plausible extension of this analysis is that these early assessments may also be more strongly related to maternal attachment representations. Our failure to fully support a mediational role for maternal sensitivity might be accounted for by considering that maternal sensitivity, as traditionally conceptualized in attachment theory, is but one of many aspects of the infant-mother interaction potentially influenced by the mother's representations of attachment. It may be more fruitful to broaden our conceptualization of the mediator variables in van IJzendoorn's (1995) model rather than pursuing more refined measures of maternal sensitivity or rejecting the model itself. This approach calls for recasting the model to include multiple aspects of infant-mother interaction while retaining the model's essential structure. Maternal sensitivity, conceptualized as the mother's ability to recognize and respond effectively to the child's needs and communicative signals, is retained as an important aspect of these interactions; however, other domains of mother-infant interactive behavior could be added to the mediational model. To function as mediators, these variables must be related to the mother's attachment representations and to attachment security and be conceptually distinct from measures of sensitivity. A useful criterion for selecting likely variables for such exploration might be their relation to the conceptual link between maternal cognitions and the attachment relationship. Cassidy (1994) considered emotion regulation to be one such link. Writers from a variety of theoretical perspectives agree that the infant-mother relationship provides a context for the socialization of emotions (e.g., Calkins, 1994; Cassidy, 1994; Cole, Michel, & Teti, 1994; Cummings & Davies, 1996; Gergely & Watson, 1996; Goldberg, MacKay-Soroka, & Rochester, 1994; Malatesta & Haviland, 1985; Stern, 1985), although there is lack of consensus on the particular socialization process. For example, Stern (1985) underscored the role of interactional synchrony, Malatesta and Haviland (1985) argued for the role of the mother's mirroring of the infant's affective states, and Gergely and Watson (1996) merged these two ideas and proposed a biofeedback model in which infants learn to identify their affective states because they detect the contingency between their state and the mother's exaggerated facial expression of that state. The mother's role is presumably influenced by the accuracy of her perceptions (e.g., Emde, Osofsky, & Butterfield, 1993), her socialization goals (e.g., Gottman, Katz, & Hooven, 1996; Malatesta & Haviland, 1985), and her own chronic emotional state (Field, 1992; Zahn-Waxler & Wagner, 1993). It is reasonable to expect that at least some of these maternal factors may also be related to her attachment representations (Cowan, 1996). Cassidy (1994) explicitly described the relation between Adult Attachment Interview classifications and the socialization of emotions. She suggested that autonomous parents attend to and accept their infants' emotional expressions, thus facilitating the communicative aspects of affect. Bell and Ainsworth (1972) observed that infants whose mothers were responsive to their crying in the first 6 months had higher ratings of communicative competence by 12 months. In our home observations at 12 months, crying is relatively rare. Several items in the Maternal

MATERNAL ATTACHMENT REPRESENTATIONS Behavior Q set refer to maternal responses to crying, but because of the relatively low frequency of crying in this study, these items make only a minor contribution to the summary score. Other research contexts and assessment procedures are needed to assess the mother's perception of and responses to her infant's crying and other affective states. Other aspects of maternal interactions that are likely to mediate the impact of a parent's attachment representations on the attachment relationship may be those related to the role played by these representations in structuring these interactions. Kaye's (1982) apprenticeship model of infant socialization is readily adapted to a consideration of such interactions and the associated developmental processes. In Kaye's model, the parent constructs an interactional scaffold for the infant's social behavior. Although it was developed some time before the study of attachment cognitions was fully developed, it seems reasonable to extend the model to this area (Moran, Pederson, & Tarabulsy, 1996). As with emotional aspects of interaction, it is possible to construct differential predictions regarding the role of cognitive structuring for parents in different attachment relationships with their infants. Autonomous parents would view their role as supporting their infants' establishment of individuality; early interactions would involve parents' increasing attributions of independent intentions, desires, and beliefs to the infant. As Fonagy (1994; Fonagy, Steele, Steele, Moran, & Higgitt, 1991) and Main (1991) have proposed, parental representations of attachment are likely to generate different attributions regarding their infants' representational processes and consequently influence their early interactions. According to this line of reasoning, our observations and research might profit by a closer examination of such representational aspects of interaction. Although the results of the present study do not entirely support the model originally proposed by van Uzendoorn (1995), they can be taken to suggest that further attempts to bridge the transmission gap should focus on the development of descriptions that are capable of capturing aspects of the infant-mother interaction beyond those encompassed by the traditional notion of sensitivity. Emotion regulation and cognitive scaffolding have been discussed here but are not intended to exhaust all possible mediators. Additional domains of early mother-infant interaction may enhance the statistical adequacy of a mediational model but will not eliminate the difficulties associated with their measurement. Observations of interaction, of necessity, are less structured than either the Adult Attachment Interview or the Strange Situation and thus are inevitably associated with higher levels of measurement error. Moreover, the establishment of an empirical association between attachment cognitions and relationships is facilitated by the fact that both measures are categorical and have the same structure, that is, two parallel categories designed to reflect the same underlying social developmental factors. As an alternative to interactive processes, it could be argued that the concordance of parent attachment representations and parent-infant attachment relationships is a reflection of shared genes. Such a hypothesis is not untenable, given the evidence of genetic correlates of parenting behavior (Braungart, Plomin, & Fulker, 1992; Plomin, Reiss, Hetherington, & Howe, 1994) and of personality, including measures of infant temperament and sociability (Robinson, Kagan, Reznick, & Corley, 1992; Rowe,

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1993). There undoubtedly may be temperamental influences on infant-mother interactions, especially with regard to resistance and distress (Calkins & Fox, 1992; Fox, 1995; Goldsmith & Alansky, 1987; Kagan, 1989; Kagan, Arcus, & Snidman, 1993; Mangelsdorf et al., 1990; Moran & Pederson, in press; Vaughn et al., 1992). However, empirical evidence has been unable to consistently relate infant temperament measures to attachment security in the Strange Situation (Mangelsdorf et al., 1990; Seifer et al., 1996; Sroufe, 1985). Likewise, parental personality measures are seldom directly related to Strange Situation measures of attachment security (Mangelsdorf et al., 1990). Perhaps more important, even a model that emphasized the role of genetic factors would most likely involve mediation through some aspects of infant-mother interaction. That is, it is difficult to imagine a genetic link so direct that it was not manifest in systematic variation in patterns of interaction as well as in the attachment relationship itself. Thus, it seems unlikely that genetically shared temperamental or personality factors would account for a substantial portion of the association between mother and infant working models of attachment. Conceptually, the most challenging finding in the present study is that both autonomy and sensitivity were strongly related to security but only modestly to each other. Thus, rather than autonomy affecting attachment security because autonomous mothers are more sensitive, an appreciable portion of the influence of autonomy on security appears to be independent of the influence of sensitivity. Conversely, there is a substantial portion of the influence of sensitivity on security that is surprisingly independent of the influence of autonomy on security. This pattern can also be seen in other measures derived from home observations in that both the home-based attachment relationship classifications and Q-sort security scores were strongly related to Strange Situation security classifications but weakly, if at all, to autonomy in the Adult Attachment Interview. These findings are difficult if not impossible to reconcile with the traditional explanation that maternal interactive behavior mediates the link between maternal representations of attachment and the attachment relationship; they invite a substantial reconceptualization of the model. We are unable at this point to offer a comprehensive alternative but suggest that any new model must acknowledge that the interrelations of mental representations, the attachment relationship, and mother-infant interaction are fundamentally bidirectional and constitute a true control system. The unidirectional causal model of representations influencing interactions that affect the relationship may simply be inadequate to capture this system. In this study, we also confirmed previous reports (e.g., Pederson & Moran, 1996; Seifer et al., 1996; Vaughn & Waters, 1990) of the association between attachment security measured in the home with the Attachment Q set and in the Strange Situation. Unlike the findings reported by Das Eiden, Teti, and Corns (1995) and by Posada, Waters, Crowell, and Lay (1995) with 3- to 5-year old children, the Q-sort measure of attachment security was not significantly related to maternal attachment representations in the present infant sample, suggesting that there may be developmental shifts in the role of maternal attachment representations in the expression of security at home or in other nonstressful interactions. The significant association between classifications of attachment relationships expressed at

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PEDERSON, GLEASON, MORAN, AND BENTO children's development: Comment on Gottman et al. (1996). Journal of Family Psychology, 10, 277-283. Cummings, M., & Davies, P. (1996). Emotional security as a regulatory process in normal development and the development of psychopathology. Development and Psychopathology, 8, 123-139. Das Eiden, R., Teti, D. M., & Corns, K.M. (1995). Maternal working models of attachment, marital adjustment, and the parent-child relationship. Child Development, 66, 1504-1518. de Wolff, M. S., & van LTzendoorn, M. H. (1997). Sensitivity and attachment: A meta-analysis on parental antecedents of infant attachment. Child Development, 68, 571-591. Egeland, B., & Farber, A. E. (1984). Infant-mother attachment: Factors related to its development and changes over time. Child Development, 55, 753-771. Emde, R. N., Osofsky, J. D., & Butterfield, P. M. (1993). The IFEEL pictures: A new instrument for interpreting emotions. Madison, CT: International Universities Press. Field, T. (1992). Infants of depressed mothers. Development and Psychopathology, 4, 49-66. Fonagy, P. (1994, October). The significance of the development of metacognitive control over mental representations in parenting and infant development. Paper presented at the New %rk Psychoanalytic Society, New "fork. Fonagy, P., Steele, H., & Steele, M. (1991). Maternal representations of attachment during pregnancy predict the organization of infantmother attachment at one year of age. Child Development, 62, 891 905. Fonagy, P.. Steele, M., Steele, H.. Moran, G. S., & Higgitt, A. C. (1991). The capacity for understanding mental states: The reflective self in parent and child and its significance for security of attachment. Infant Mental Health Journal, 13, 200-217. Fox, N. A. (1995). Of the way we were: Adult memories about attachment experiences and their role in determining infant-parent relationships: A commentary on van Uzendoorn (1995). Psychological Bulletin, 117, 404-410. George, C , Kaplan, N., & Main, M. (1985). Adult Attachment Interview. Unpublished manuscript, Department of Psychology, University of California, Berkeley. Gergely, G., & Watson, J. S. (1996). The social biofeedback theory of parent affect mirroring: The development of emotional self-awareness and self-control in infancy. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 77, 1181-1212. Goldberg, S., MacKay-Soroka, S., & Rochester, M. (1994). Affect, attachment, and maternal responsiveness. Infant Behavior and Development, 17, 335-339. Goldsmith, H. H., & Alansky, J. A. (1987). Maternal and infant temperamental predictors of attachment: A meta-analytic review. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 55, 805-816. Gottman, J. M., Katz, L. F., & Hooven, C. (1996). Parental meta-emotion philosophy and the emotional life of families: Theoretical models and preliminary data. Journal of Family Psychology, 10, 243-268. Grossmann, K., Fremmer-Bombik, E., Rudolph, J., & Grossmann, K. E. (1988). Maternal attachment representations as related to patterns of infant-mother attachment and maternal care during the first year. In R. A. Hinde & J. Stevenson-Hinde (Eds.), Relationships within families (pp. 241-260). Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. Grossmann, K., Grossmann, K. E., Spangler, G., Suess, G., & Unzner, L. (1985). Maternal sensitivity and newborns' orientation responses as related to quality of attachment in Northern Germany. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 50(1-2, Serial No. 209), 233-256. Isabella, R. (1993). Origins of attachment: Maternal interactive behavior across the first year. Child Development, 64, 605-624.

home using the Pederson and Moran (1995a) descriptions and in the Strange Situation confirmed the validity of our home classification procedures. These home-based relationship classifications were also modestly related to the mother's attachment representations derived from the Adult Attachment Interview. It is hoped the validity of both the interactional and relationship assessments of attachment in more naturalistic settings will stimulate research in these contexts.

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Received November 22, 1996 Revision received January 15, 1998 Accepted January 15, 1998

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