The Relationship between Disrupted Maternal Behavior and Attachment Disorganization in children with Autism Spectrum Disorder

• In Event: 3-190 - Correlates, Mediators, and Consequences of Disrupted Parenting Behavior within Atypical Populations

Integrative Statement

Attachment studies of children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) have shown that, as with typically developing children, mothers of securely attached children are more sensitive than mothers of insecure children. However, much less is known about the specific parenting antecedents of the Disorganized attachment classification in ASD. Research on this issue is important, since many of the behaviors displayed by children with Disorganized attachments are similar to autism-related symptoms. Therefore, it is not clear whether the Disorganized classification in ASD reflects attachment (dis)organization, autism-related symptoms, or a combination of both. One way to validate this classification in ASD is to examine whether it is associated with disrupted maternal behavior (e.g., frightening/ frightened behavior, extreme insensitivity), as has been found with typically developing children. Such maternal behavior is thought to lead to an unresolvable conflict in the child in which the parent, the source of comfort, is also the source of fear, leading to a collapse of the child's attachment strategy.
In order to examine this question forty-five boys diagnosed with ASD were observed in the Strange Situation Procedure (SSP) to assess their attachments to their mothers, and mothers’ disrupted behavior was coded from the SSP using the Atypical Maternal Behavioral Instrument for Assessment and Classification (AMBIANCE). The study’s hypothesis was that mothers who demonstrate higher levels of disrupted behavior will be more likely to have children with a disorganized attachment compared to mothers who demonstrate low levels of disrupted behavior.
This hypothesis received support: Controlling for children's age and level of functioning, the analyses showed a main effect of attachment on mothers' disrupted behavior score (F (3, 39) =2.6, p =0.06): Followup contrasts revealed that mothers of children with a disorganized attachment showed higher levels of disrupted behavior (M = 3.80) compared to mothers of securely attached children (M = 2.84; t = 1.88, p < .04). However, these findings were not unique to the disorganized group: mothers of children with ambivalent attachment (M = 4.29) also showed higher levels of disrupted behavior compared to mothers of securely attached children (M = 2.84; t = 2.75, p < .01), and were not different than mothers of children with a disorganized attachment.
This study is the first to find an association between maternal disrupted behavior and disorganized attachment in children with ASD and as such strengthens the validity of this attachment classification in this population, supporting the claim that at least to some extent, it reflects the (dis)organization of the child's attachment, and not merely the presence of autism-related symptoms. A possible explanation for the lack of difference between mothers of disorganized and ambivalent children may be that the sample on which the AMBIANCE was originally developed did not include children with ambivalent (but not disorganized) attachments. Thus, it did not provide an opportunity to identify maternal behaviors that are related only to disorganization and not to ambivalent attachment. Additional research, using samples of typically developing children that include both children with ambivalent and disorganized attachment is therefore needed.

Authors

• David Oppenheim, University of Haifa
  Presenting Author

• Gabriela Levy, University of Haifa
  Non-Presenting Author

• Smadar Dolev, School of Social Work University of Haifa
  Non-Presenting Author

• Nina Koren-Karie, University of Haifa, School of Social Work
  Non-Presenting Author

• Nurit Yirmiya, Department of Psychology, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
  Non-Presenting Author