Attachment in Middle Childhood: Theoretical Advances and New Directions in an Emerging Field by Guy Bosmans & Kathryn A. Kerns

Author:Guy Bosmans & Kathryn A. Kerns [Bosmans, Guy & Kerns, Kathryn A.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781119120353
Published: 2015-06-12T00:00:00+00:00

Attachment and Memory

There already is some evidence for effects of infant attachment on memory processes for social stimuli in early childhood (Belsky, Spitz, & Crnic, 1996; Kirsh & Cassidy, 1997), although there also are studies showing no longitudinal effects (Ziv et al., 2004). Dykas and Cassidy (2011) explained inconsistent findings by different research designs and memory tasks. Dujardin, Bosmans, Braet, and Goossens (2014) assessed trust in maternal support during middle childhood as an indicator of attachment security at an explicit-declarative level. They tested memory for adjectives describing the child's emotions in interaction with mother in a modification of the levels of processing task (LOP; Rudolph, Hammen, & Burge, 1995) in a sample of children aged 10 to 12. Results showed a negative mother-related memory bias for children with lower trust scores. Thus, children with a more insecure attachment representation of mother remembered more mother-related negative words. Lynch and Cicchetti (1998) also used a modification of the LOP task with traumatized children (maltreatment and community violence). Relationship quality to mother was assessed at the explicit-evaluative level by means of self-report. An optimal pattern of relatedness with high levels of positive emotions and low levels of need for more proximity served as an attachment indicator. Results showed that maltreated children with secure patterns of relatedness recalled a higher proportion of positive words that they had rated before as not describing their mothers compared to maltreated children with insecure relatedness. Surprisingly, children traumatized by experiencing community violence and an insecure pattern of relatedness also recalled more positive attributes that they said did not describe their mothers. Alexander, O'Hara, Bortfeld, Anderson, Newton, and Kraft (2010) assessed attachment security on an explicit-evaluative level and found that 7- to 12-year-olds with higher attachment security scores had better memory for negative attachment-related information (e.g., separation). Interestingly, attachment security did not influence memory for positive attachment-related information.

Taken together, although diverging, the findings show that for all these explicit measures of attachment or relationship quality, felt security to mother influences memory processes. However, the studies did not differentiate between the insecure-avoidant and the insecure-resistant attachment pattern. It may well be the case that the positive association between attachment insecurity and the negative mother-related memory bias might be more typical for an underlying insecure-resistant attachment organization, where negative emotions are easy elicited when thinking about the relationship to mother. In contrast, the poor memory for negative attachment-related information (e.g., separation) might be an indicator of an underlying avoidant pattern, where defensive exclusion (i.e., not remembering hurtful events) would be a marker of the insecure-avoidant emotion regulation strategy of minimizing the engagement with attachment-relevant information. This finding might be highly relevant for autobiographical events (Bosmans, Dujardin, Raes, & Braet, 2013). We see three lacunas: (1) a lack of research using attachment assessments on the implicit-procedural level, (2) a lack of differentiation of the insecure attachment patterns, and (3) a need for more research on memory of autobiographical or family interactions.

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