Bindung von Kindern in familienrechtlichen Fragestellungen bei Gericht: Erkenntnisse und Missverständnisse

Psychological judicial expert reports for family law cases can include errors in the assessment of children’s attachments, their origins, their consequences, and the subsequent recommendation for the court. The article specifies potential sources of such errors and reviews several topics that are relevant for the evaluation and use of attachment assessments in psychological family law expert reports. These topics include attachment to mother and father, attachment hierarchy, the role of quantity and quality of contact to caregivers for attachment development and the use of results from attachment research on developmental consequences of attachment security and insecurity for psychological family law expert reports.

Erfassung von Merkmalen kindlicher Bindung in familienrechtlichen Verfahren: Methodische Überlegungen

Child attachment characteristics are important for family court decisions. This article provides a description of relevant attachment characteristics and their assessment criteria (presence of attachment, differences in attachment quality, attachment disturbances). In addition, potential problems and pitfalls of attachment assessments in psychological court expert reports are addressed, including the topics of deficits in knowledge of basic attachment concepts and behavioural criteria, poor internal validity of easy accessible diagnostic attachment or relationship tools, and the limits of transferring valid and sound attachment research methods to the psychological assessments in expert court reports. We recommend an eclectic approach informed by attachment theory, of aggregating and integrate several attachment indicators, including characteristics of attachment figures and different levels of attachment assessment (behaviour and representation). Finally, discuss the use of attachment characteristics for giving a professional opinion on the impact of child rearing experiences, a child’s resilience in face of current adversities, and for predicting potential developmental trajectories. Implications for education and training of experts are mentioned.

An Empirical Model for Assessing the Impact of Air Quality on Urban Residents’ Loyalty to Place of Residence

There has been a growing interest in the impact of environmental awareness on ‘green’ or ‘environmentally friendly’ consumption patterns, and this has been the subject of much research by environmental psychologists. However, the effect of environmental awareness on residents and their attachment to their homes and their environment has received little attention and is worthy of closer examination. Outdoor air quality can be considered one of the most critical environmental factors impacting the value of a residential location. This research investigates how air pollution-related environmental factors influence residents’ attachment to the place of residence and their willingness to move. It defines the structural relationship between air pollution awareness parameters, which are later employed in the proposed structural equation model (SEM), to explain ‘district loyalty’. A survey was carried out in Almaty, Kazakhstan, one of the most populated and polluted cities in Central Asia. A total of 550 respondents responded. Based on the overall model’s test results, the factors relating to district loyalty explained the 17.5% variation in the samples, which suggests that the perception of residents to their district air quality has a low-level impact on loyalty to their place of residence. The power of perceived environmental risks appears to have little relation to district loyalty. The most influential factor on the model is environmental behaviour parameter, which is about adopting attitudes and behaviours aimed at minimizing negative impacts on the environment. When the perceived environmental risk increased, their place attachment levels only slightly decreased. However, the obtained results do not confirm that district loyalty significantly correlates with their readiness/unreadiness to move to another residence in order to enjoy improved air quality. To sum up, environmental awareness of local air quality seems not to directly affect residents’ attachment to place. Nevertheless, indirect effects can be presented in research relating to urban residents’ place attachment. Research, policy and sectoral implications of the findings are addressed and discussed in detail.

The School Attachment Monitor—A novel computational tool for assessment of attachment in middle childhood

Background Attachment research has been limited by the lack of quick and easy measures. We report development and validation of the School Attachment Monitor (SAM), a novel measure for largescale assessment of attachment in children aged 5–9, in the general population. SAM offers automatic presentation, on computer, of story-stems based on the Manchester Child Attachment Story Task (MCAST), without the need for trained administrators. SAM is delivered by novel software which interacts with child participants, starting with warm-up activities to familiarise them with the task. Children’s story completion is video recorded and augmented by ‘smart dolls’ that the child can hold and manipulate, with movement sensors for data collection. The design of SAM was informed by children of users’ age range to establish their task understanding and incorporate their innovative ideas for improving SAM software. Methods 130 5–9 year old children were recruited from mainstream primary schools. In Phase 1, sixty-one children completed both SAM and MCAST. Inter-rater reliability and rating concordance was compared between SAM and MCAST. In Phase 2, a further 44 children completed SAM complete and, including those children completing SAM in Phase 1 (total n = 105), a machine learning algorithm was developed using a “majority vote” procedure where, for each child, 500 non-overlapping video frames contribute to the decision. Results Using manual rating, SAM-MCAST concordance was excellent (89% secure versus insecure; 97% organised versus disorganised; 86% four-way). Comparison of human ratings of SAM versus the machine learning algorithm showed over 80% concordance. Conclusions We have developed a new tool for measuring attachment at the population level, which has good reliability compared to a validated attachment measure and has the potential for automatic rating–opening the door to measurement of attachment in large populations.

Inheriting Mary Ainsworth and the Strange Situation: Questions of Legacy, Authority, and Methodology for Contemporary Developmental Attachment Researchers

Mary Ainsworth’s legacy continues to shape the social and developmental sciences well after her death. The Ainsworth Strange Situation Procedure has, for decades, not only provided the underpinning methodology of attachment research, but also the frame of reference for theory. This has produced conditions where, as in psychoanalysis, debates about the future of the paradigm also entail a struggle to claim and negotiate the legacy of a founding figure. To date, historians have only looked at attachment research up to the 1980s. Interviews with 15 leading contemporary attachment researchers revealed Ainsworth’s importance to later research, but also laid bare the challenges of claiming her inheritance in responding to the current challenges facing this area of research.

Attachment Manifestations in Daily Interpersonal Interactions

The predominant focus in attachment research on trait-like individual differences has overshadowed investigation of the ways in which working models of attachment represent dynamic, interpersonally responsive socio-affective systems. Intensive longitudinal designs extend previous work by evaluating to what extent attachment varies over social interactions and the functional processes that underlie its fluctuation. We examined momentary activation of attachment orientations in the stream of peoples’ daily lives and how those patterns were linked to interpersonal behavior. Based on an event-contingent, ambulatory 7-day assessment protocol (N=263; 3971 interactions) operationalized using Contemporary Integrative Interpersonal Theory, we examined whether contextually activated working models accounted for patterns of interpersonal complementarity. Our analyses revealed that the situational activation of working models varied as a function of interpersonal perceptions of warmth, which were linked to greater state security and lower levels of anxious or avoidant expectations. These reactivity patterns, in turn, accounted for interpersonal complementarity. Avoidant attachment was linked to diminished and secure attachment to enhanced expressions of warmth. The analyses were robust even when controlling for momentary negative affect and closeness of the relationship. Attachment expectations wax and wane across daily social interactions, and such fluctuations are reflective primarily of a process in which perceptions of others’ warmth activate secure attachment expectations and lower insecure ones.

Adaptation and mental health

In the 1990s, Jeremy Holmes and Otto Kernberg alleged that, despite significant strengths, the theory of mentalization has risked becoming a disempowering, deficit-focused model of mental ill health. One resource available to Fonagy and colleagues in responding to this concern was attachment research, which had developed a model of attachment strategies as evolutionarily-primed responses to adverse conditions. We will survey the reflections of Fonagy and colleagues regarding three attachment theorists: Mary Main, Pat Crittenden, and Jay Belsky. The synthesis proposed by Fonagy and colleagues will then be described, as well as their related reflections on vigilance, trust, learning, and the structure of mental health symptoms.

Reconceptualizing attachment-related differences: From Proximity-seeking to Epistemic trust

Theoretical models of personality and interpersonal relationships often concern themselves with the impact of early relational experiences on later development. Research inspired by attachment theory has addressed this question by focusing on how early experiences of being soothed when distressed give rise to attachment-related differences of lifelong significance. However, though most psychological researchers and practitioners are familiar with attachment-related differences, we currently do not understand how they influence the breadth of later outcomes with which they are associated. This knowledge gap is increasingly felt by researchers as threatening the validity of the theory. To support the continued vitality of attachment research, we propose a reconceptualization of attachment-related differences as broader differences in epistemic trust, which we define as the expectation that overtly communicated information is relevant to oneself. Our reconceptualization weaves together research on how infants learn from testimony, research in linguistic pragmatics (in particular, Relevance Theory), and attachment research. Specifically, we put forward four related theses: 1) that infant attachment patterns reflect differences in epistemic trust vis-à-vis the caregiver; 2) that these differences contribute to biases in interpreting and producing communication after infancy 3) that the so-called measures of “attachment” after infancy, such as the Adult Attachment Interview, capture a special case of these generalized biases; and finally, 4) that the inter-generational transmission of attachment-related differences can be viewed as resulting from infants adapting their own communication style to the communication style of the caregiver.