The first longitudinal study of intergenerational transmission of attachment security in Japan

• In Event: Poster Session 14
  In Poster Session: PS 14 Topic - Parenting & Parent-Child Relationships

Abstract

Following the first report of intergenerational transmission of attachment, utilizing the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI) and the Strange Situation Procedure (SSP) in Japan (Kondo-Ikemura, Behrens, Umemura, & Nakano, 2018), this study followed up with the data collected at age six. Specifically, 6-year-olds’ reunion behaviors with their mothers after a one-hour laboratory separation were observed and assessed according to Main and Cassidy’s (1988) 6th-year reunion system.
This is the first longitudinal study in Japan to examine the continuity of attachment security over the 5-year period. We also explored whether mothers’ attachment security assessed when children were one year of age would still show the correlates to their children’s attachment security five years later. This is the second 6-year olds’ attachment data collected in Japan, using the Main-Cassidy reunion procedure, more than a decade after the first AAI-6th-year reunion data were reported (Behrens, Hesse, & Main, 2007). This is the first study, however, that tested whether mothers’ states of mind with respect to attachment assessed five years earlier could still be meaningfully related to their now 6-year-olds’ attachment security.
Out of the original 44 Japanese mother-child dyads, 33 dyads were available to participate in this follow-up study. In this sample, the two-way forced distribution of mothers was 22 (67%) secure/F and 11 (33%) insecure/non-F and the distribution of children was 26 (79%) secure/B and 7 (21%) insecure/non-B. No continuity of child attachment security assessed at age one by the SSP and security assessed at age six by the Main-Cassidy reunion procedure was found. However, when a F-nonF vs. B-nonB crosstab analysis was run, mothers’ secure/F status, including U/F, significantly matched to their children’s secure/B patterns, including D/B (k = 4.00, p = .016). Independent-t-tests were also run to examine mothers’ coherence scores between children’s secure/B and insecure/non-B groups. Mothers coherence scores, both coherence of transcript (CoT) and coherence of mind (CoM), revealed significant differences between children judged as secure/B and children judged as insecure/non-B (CoT: t = 2.86, p = .016, CoM: t = 2.65, p = .022). CoT was also significantly correlated with six-year-olds’ security score (r = .429, p = .014) although CoM was only marginally significantly corrected (r = .346, p = .053).
Although the sample size has expectedly reduced over the 5-year period, this study makes important contributions to the field not only because this is the first longitudinal attachment study in Japan but also because results show that mothers’ states of mind with respect to attachment (assessed by the AAI) have maintained their significant correlates to children’s attachment security at age six. This study has demonstrated the continuous effect of mothers’ states of mind in fostering or maintaining the attachment relationship. We will discuss these findings, incorporating cultural considerations.

Authors

• Kazuko Y. Behrens, State University of New York Polytechnic Institue
  Presenting Author

• Kiyomi Kondo-Ikemura, Teikyo University
  Non-Presenting Author