Adult Attachment Interview

Investigations are carried out to observe the correlation between the parent’s attachment and their children’s attachment to them.


Three major factors affecting the caregiver’s characteristics of responsiveness are identified, namely:


 The parent’s early childhood experience of attachment and their internal working model.


 The risk factors experienced by the parents such as mental illness, depression, or substance abuse.


 The availability of help from other caregivers in raising children


An assessment called Adult Attachment Interview is carried out to elicit information about parents’ working models of attachment. They are required to recall and describe their past and current relationship with their parents. Eventually, the reports are analysed together with the attachment classification of their children. There is a strong positive correlation of their attachment and the attachment of their children (Bretherton & Munholland, 2008, p. 118; see also, Riggs & Jacobvitz, 2002).


Characteristic of Secure Adults

Based on the Adult Attachment Interview, the parents who were identified as having secure working models had five primary characteristics, they:

 place great value on attachment relationship;


 have faith that their attachment relationship serve as a major influence on their personality;


 describe their relationships in objective and balanced manner;


 are at ease in recalling and discussing attachment due to good reflection on their experience;


 have a realistic perspective of their parents and own attachment experiences instead of idealistic ones (Main et al., 1985).


Many secure adults reported good early experience and relationship with their own parents, while some of them described their traumatic history. What differentiates between secure and insecure adults was not the actual incident itself but on how they understood and integrated those positive and negative experience easily and openly.


Characteristic of Insecure Adults

Insecurely attached adults are generally feeling pessimistic about attachment relationship, not being objective in describing experiences, and being in denial on how attachment experiences could influence their personality. Insecure parents can be classified into three main patterns, listed in the following.


Dismissive Adults

This type of parents who dismissed the importance of attachment was discovered to have avoidant infants. Children turn away from parents and tend to rely on themselves rather than seeking attachment.


Preoccupied Adults

Preoccupied adults blame themselves for the uncaring and inconsistent responses from their parents, struggle to please their parents and develop the self-image of unlovable or undeserving (Bowlby, 1980; Bretherton & Munholland, 2008). Their infants are usually classified as ambivalent,

Unresolved Adults

Some parents experienced traumatic incidences in their childhood such as physical and sexual abuse. There are also other parents who, in a disordered manner, mourned the death of their parents when they were young.  

They have the irrational tendency to blame themselves for being the cause of abuse as well as the parents’ death (Main and Hess, 1990).

If they are asked to describe their negative experiences, they will unknowingly demonstrate incoherent flow of thought and abruptly changed topics (Hess & Main, 2006). Their children will be most likely disoriented.