3.6 The Sub-scales.
'Coherence'.
The results reported provide preliminary evidence that the F&F interview might be an effective measure for assessing emotional literacy. O f particular interest is the way that the ‘coherence’ score in this measure seems to capture so many of the aspects o f the interview thought to relate to emotional intelligence. Even more pleasing is the way that it correlates significantly with established and respected measures of functioning on components o f emotional intelligence, such as empathy and perspective taking (Bryant, 1982, Davis, 1980) and prosocial behaviour (Goodman, 1997). Related to verbal IQ, the ‘overall coherence’ is predictive o f aspects of emotional literacy, while verbal IQ was not. All indications are that it will provide an excellent tool for future analysis. Other subsections are not redundant in the interview, however, and warrant further investigation for correlates with other specific aspects o f emotional functioning. Importantly, consideration o f all these dimensions in the coding is essential for arriving at an informed rating o f ‘overall coherence’.
‘Secure verses Insecure ’.
A related but distinct score, also o f special interest is that o f ‘secure verses insecure’. This categorisation is formed by consideration o f the young person’s discussion of their important relationships. If their approach was thoughtful, accurate and considered without unease, a secure classification was given. If, however, the child avoided discussion on these topics, was overly confident without justification about their relationships or flippant, or if they displayed concern about their relationships.
either expressedly or by labouring with these topics and finding if difficult to move on, they were considered insecure. This categorisation correlated very highly with the children’s attachment security assessed with mother in the strange situation at 12 months. It was also associated with a number o f aspects o f emotional intelligence in the interview. In terms o f its correlation with other validated measures, it is interesting that it correlated with prosocial behaviour, and emotional concern rather than understanding. It has been mentioned that a number o f studies have been surprised to find that while children classified as avoidant often fail to recognise and anticipate emotions so well, that ambivalently classified children do not differ from those thought secure (Bohlin et al, 2000, Flicker et al, 1992). It may well be that it is in responding to those emotions with an appropriate level o f concern that differentiates those groups more clearly. Security across the years was more stable for those children classied as secure at 12 months, than those classified as insecure. This finding has been made by other longitudinal attachment studies.
The ‘empathetic concern’ o f the 11 year olds is also an outcome measure o f interest, because it was more closely associated with their mother’s AAI, than with the coherence o f their own narrative (unlike the total empathy scores which was associated with ‘overall coherence’ but not earlier security measures). This might suggest that the m other’s better verbal discussion had influenced the child’s understanding o f and responses to distress, but that some children did not yet have the communicative skills to mirror that emotional competence communicatively. Alternatively it may be that the m other’s response to distress had influenced the children’s empathetic concern, and that defense-mechanisms had been constructed by some children and which are reflected in their narratives and responses to, if not recognition of, distress in others.
3.7 The F& F interview - reflecting back on earlier attachment.
It is impressive that a security classification following completion o f the F&F interview coding at 11 years is highly related to the assessment o f the child’s security at 12 months. Even more startling is that the social competence o f the 11 year old child, and the way that they organise their thoughts about relationship experiences, is
strongly associated with the way that their expectant mother’s responded to questions about their own attachment relationships 11 years previously. Analysis o f these data confirms that this is not simply due to the transmission o f verbal IQ. Given the intercorrelations between security o f mother and o f her child, coherence o f narrative, and social competence, we might begin to speculate on a pattern of influence where all o f these factors are dynamically inter-related.
Patterns o f influence.
While much emphasis has been placed on examining the influence o f the mother-child interactional behaviour (assessed by the SS) on later emotion understanding, social competence in the current investigation was found to relate more strongly to the m other’s AAI than to SS assessment. It may be that, as Steele et al (2002) suggest, maternal attachment interview responses are likely to be more stable over time than infant-mother attachment patterns. Indeed, this leads to consideration about how a m other’s verbal interaction with her child is likely to have as much o f and an inter related impact on their child’s feelings o f security as behavioural interaction. The mother-child conversations about emotions as the child develops are likely to exert a continuing influence on the child’s understanding and response to emotion and corresponding feelings o f self worth, which may have begun their formation through behavioural interaction in pre-verbal infancy. It makes intuitive sense that the way that a mother speaks to a child about emotions, as well as the way she responds to the child’s own emotions, are likely to mutually influence the child’s later understanding o f emotions, and dictate their responses to emotions in others.
This perspective, emphasising the crucial role o f mother’s responses to and talk about emotion, has been well established in other areas of social development research, notably in Judy Dunn’s research examining children’s spontaneous talk. Dunn, Bretherton and Munn (1987) noted that an enormous amount o f conversation between children and their mothers concerns feeling states, often emerging in emotionally charged contexts. The more that m other’s talked about feelings, the more their children talked about them. The amount of feeling state discussion between mother and child was associated with later outcome. Brown and Dunn (1991) found that the ability to talk about inner states has implications for children’s capabilities in social
interactions as comforters, teasers and excuse makers. Even more illuminating, in terms o f recognising the interaction o f communication and attachment security aspects based on acknowledgment and reaction to negative emotion, are studies by Gottman and his colleagues (Hooven, Gottman, & Katz, 1995). Parents were interviewed about their attitudes to emotion, and coded for ‘self-awareness’ (awareness and tolerance o f their own negative emotions) and ‘acceptance’ (in relation to their children’s expression o f negative emotions). As Bowlby’s 1956 theory would predict (see above) parental self-awareness corresponded to acceptance o f children’s own negative emotions, and was related to children’s social skills assessed three years later.
The current study suggests that a mother able to speak about and respond to emotions appropriately, is one who during pregnancy was able to give a coherent account o f her own parenting. Later parts o f this study will intend to explore whether this inter generational transmission can be influenced by teaching the parents how to communicate effectively with their children by following the baby-talk programme.
Thus the study has clearly demonstrated the lasting influence o f a mother’s verbal communicative style on a child’s security and own coherence o f verbal narrative. Equally the analysis here has revealed the importance o f behavioural interactive style, as measured by the SS. Strange situation classification at 12 months was related to many o f the emotional intelligence variables such as coherence o f narrative, empathy and prosocial skills which are also associated with the mother’s AAI. Significantly, however, whether children acted ’actively’ of ’passively’ when upset o f distressed was related to SS at 12 months but not mother’s AAI. Thus it is clear that behavioural or non-verbal aspects o f parent-child interaction, while often related to the influence of verbal communicative style, may at time offer its own unique influence on later development. In chapter 5, response to distress is explored further in the context of acknowledging it as 'non-verbal behaviour and emotional expression’. In this chapter the implication o f considering these two attachment influences, "verbal” and ’’non verbal", as related but separate entities, is explored at length.
3.8 Attachment and Emotional Intelligence - cognitively, communicatively and behaviourally influenced.
Consideration o f the importance o f both o f these aspects is not novel in the literature. In thinking about the role o f early relationships in psychopathology, Greenberg et al, even in 1991, were commenting on “how affect, cognition, language, and behaviour are integrated in an increasingly complex fashion at progressive phases of development” (p.21). Understanding social competence, in their conceptualisation, depended on understanding affect and emotion language, cognitive understanding and expectancies, and linguistic and communication skills. They suggest that two primary and inter-related components in the behaviour o f parents contribute to optimal development o f social awareness. The first o f these is sensitive and responsive early parenting leading to a secure internal working model (Bowlby, 1982), and the second, the parents’ appropriate use o f language in relation to internal states and particularly affect. (They also note that use o f joint planning between child and caregiver, negotiation, and anticipatory guidance, are essential for social cognitive information processing.) It is not, then, that the influences o f these aspects o f interaction have not been recognised. Particularly due to the tendency to rely on the SS assessment when examining the influence of early relationships, however, the focus o f research has been on behavioural interaction at the expense o f considering communicative components. It seems clear that this imbalance needs to be redressed, and parent- child communicative and attachment style, and relatedly children's’ linguistic competence, need to be explored for their critical influence on emotional intelligence.
Attachment stability.
Despite concerns about the stability o f infant-mother interaction patterns, the intercorrelations between SS behaviour at 12 months and ‘secure verses insecure’ categorisation 11 years later are impressive. This is especially the case as this age- group are about to embark on adolescence and the strive for autonomy and rejection o f past attachment relationships as they once were, reforming the ‘goal corrected partnership (Bowlby, 1969). Indeed some o f the interviews suggested that for some 11 year-olds, expressing a reliance on or interest in relationships with their parents
was not ‘de rigeur’. Children sometimes displayed a genuinely close relationship with their mothers, confiding in her and enjoying their relationships, but did not mention turning to their mothers at times o f distress. It seemed that dealing with upset by spending time alone or turning to friends was a more ‘socially acceptable’ response. It may also be that working mothers are not physically available to their children all the time, but do give optimal support when they are with the child. Often if prompted as to whether they would turn to someone at home. M other’s were then mentioned with confidence. The interview coding reflected the concern that children’s reports about parental availability might not be reflective o f the parent- child relationship at this age group (Grossmann & Grossmann, 1991). Scores for ‘m other’s availability’ from the F&F interview were not correlated with SS with mother at 12 months or mothers AAI. The ‘secure vs insecure’ catagorisation was associated with ‘mothers availability’, however, and this may account for some o f the differences between security classifications at these time points.
In many cases, however, the discrepancies between classification at 12 months and 11 years represented a change from insecurity to security. It may be that these are cases that would indeed be deemed ‘earned secure’ if they later undertook the AAI. Attachment theory does of course allow for change in response to the changing relationship experiences o f the individual. It is perhaps important to re-emphasise the difference between creating a measure that can predict accurately to the past, and thinking about an individual's current approach to important relationships. The findings suggest that in thinking about these relationships at the current time, emotional functioning, as identified in the F&F interview, gives a very good insight.
It is important to acknowledge that M other’s AAI before the child’s birth, and not the SS at 12 months, is independently predictive o f the child’s ‘coherence’ o f narrative in the F&F interview at 11 years. This finding is suggestive that ongoing maternal influences, rather than a critical period o f early parent-child interaction, are influencing children’s later functioning. The implication for attachment research is that maternal AAI responses are likely to be more stable over time than the SS, infant- mother interaction patterns. The importance o f language in shaping attachment relationships is also emphasised by these findings.
The Self.
The ability to talk about and reflect on the self was earlier identified as an important component o f emotional literacy. Work by Easterbrooks & Abeles (2000) with 8 year-olds was cited, in the context o f which the Ease o f Access to Self-Evaluations (EASE) scale was devised. In their study this was found to correlate with concurrent security assessments. In responses to the F&F interview, evidence o f the ability to show understanding of positive and negative feelings towards the self, did correlate with ‘overall coherence’ and ‘security verses insecurity’. In her work with the LPCP for her undergraduate dissertation, Sarah Potter (2001) found that there was no association between EASE scores and earlier attachment classifications. As a result, and because EASE score was found to correlate highly with ‘overall coherence’, it was not thought that this measure captured anything in addition to the F&F interview coding, and was not included in the analysis reported.
3.9 Shortcomings o f the current study.
A significant limitation o f the current study is that the child’s attachment with the father has not been studied. This was justified in the current study, as this measure is being validated for use with the BabyTalk sample. The intervention was conducted with mothers and therefore no data is available on the child-father relationship. In the context o f using this measure in wider attachment research, it would be interesting to explore the relationship between the F&F interview scores and father AAI and SS with father at 18 months. Preliminary investigations suggest that both o f these are significantly associated with ‘secure verses insecure’ and ‘overall coherence’. Further examination of this data might indicate the interaction o f mother and fathers AAI with their child’s later ‘overall coherence’ in relating to and discussing friends and family.
Another area o f concern is raised by Johnson’s (1997) work with 10 year olds which found a marked difference in outcome for boys and girls who were high in reflective self-other functioning. Girls with this quality were rated by their teacher as being more socially skilled than their peers. In contrast, boys who were rated high in reflective self-other functioning were seen as socially rejected and less socially
competent by their teachers than were boys rated lower on this variable. This has clear implications for the validity o f the F&F interview with boys, and warrants further investigation.
In an ideal world, the validity o f the F&F interview would be examined in relation to detailed assessments o f the child’s interactions at home and with peers, which demonstrate their capacities for perspective taking, empathy and empathie concern, and the influence o f these on their interactions and view o f themselves. Such an approach represents a rather insurmountable task. A more achievable validity investigation would be to examine how children’s parents, peers and teacher would rate them on these capacities. It is not ideal, but made necessary by the available data, that all o f the 11-year measures used in the current study were self-report. It would further be interesting to directly investigate whether children’s narratives in relation to the attachment related topics raised by the F&F interview elicits levels o f ‘coherence’ different from those that would emerge from children’s discussion o f less emotionally sensitive topics. This has been demonstrated to be the case in adult responses to the AAI (Waters et a/,1996), and the fact that ‘coherence’ is unrelated to verbal IQ suggests that this might be the case here also.