The emotional integration of childhood experience: physiological, facial expressive, and self-reported emotional response during the adult attachment interview.
Attachment researchers claim that individual differences in how adults talk about their early memories reflect qualitatively distinct organizations of emotion regarding childhood experiences with caregivers. Testing this assumption, the present study examined the relationship between attachment dimensions and physiological, facial expressive, as well as self-reported emotional responses during the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI). Consistent with theoretical predictions, more prototypically secure adults behaviorally expressed and reported experiencing emotion consistent with the valence of the childhood events they described. Insecure adults also showed distinctive and theoretically anticipated forms of emotional response: Dismissing participants evidenced increased electrodermal activity during the interview, a sign of emotional suppression, whereas preoccupied adults showed reliable discrepancies between the valence of their inferred childhood experiences and their facial expressive as well as reported emotion during the AAI. Results substantiate a case that the AAI reflects individual differences in emotion regulation that conceptually parallel observations of attachment relationships in infancy.
Roisman
Glenn I
GI
Department of Psychology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Champaign, IL 61820, USA. roisman@uiuc.edu
Tsai
Jeanne L
JL
Chiang
Kuan-Hiong Sylvia
KH
D000223:Adaptation, Psychological; D001143:Arousal; D001213:Asian / Q000523:psychology; D001794:Blood Pressure; D002648:Child; D002675:Child, Preschool; D003431:Cross-Cultural Comparison; D003674:Defense Mechanisms; D004644:Emotions; D005149:Facial Expression; D005260:Female; D005712:Galvanic Skin Response; D006801:Humans; D007206:Individuality; D007223:Infant; D007389:Internal-External Control; D007406:Interview, Psychological; D008016:Life Change Events; D008297:Male; D011939:Mental Recall; D009769:Object Attachment; D010552:Personality Assessment / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D011594:Psychometrics / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D013223:Statistics as Topic; D013334:Students / Q000523:psychology; D044465:White People / Q000523:psychology