Inge Bretherton

University of Wisconsin–Madison | UW · Department of Human Development and Family Studies

In our 2008 chapter of this handbook, we included a large selection or verbatim quotes from Bowlby's work in an attempt to capture the essence of his views on the internal working model construct. In this revised chapter, we begin with a much briefer summary of Bowlby's major IWM postulates folowed by a brief discussion of their fit with developmen...

This paper describes the evolution of Ainsworth's construct of maternal sensitivityinsensitivity to infant signals from its beginnings in her research in Uganda to its explicit emergence in the findings from the Baltimore study. It provides an analysis of her bipolar Maternal Care Scales (Sensivity-Insensitivity, Cooperation-Interference, Acceptanc...

Mary Ainsworth's work on the importance of maternal sensitivity for the development of infant attachment security is widely recognized as one of the most revolutionary and influential contributions to developmental psychology in the 20th century. Her longitudinal studies of naturalistic mother-infant interactions in Uganda and Baltimore played a pi...

This is an unpublished English language version of a German chapter titlted "Das Thema Scheidung in den Bindungsgeschichten von Vorschulkindern: Bedeutung für therapeutische Interventionen nach der Scheidung" in K. H. Brisch & T. Hellbrügge (Eds.). Wege zur sicheren Bindungen in Familie und Gesellschaft. Prävention, Begleitung, Beratung,und Psychot...

Preface Excerpt: A preface generally recounts how the idea for a book evolved or how a project developed to the point of requiring a book­ length presentation. The story behind Patterns of Attachment is exceptionally well­ documented (e.g., Ainsworth & Bowlby, 1991; Bretherton, 2013, 1991; Karen, 1998; van Dijken, van der Veer, van IJzendoorn, & Ku...

Introduction to special double issue of Attachment & Human Development in honor of Mary Ainsworth's birthday (1913). The special issue contains, in addition to the introduction, the following 12 articles and an epilogue 1. Mary D. Salter Ainsworth: an autobiographical sketch (reprint of a chapter published in 1983) 2. Bretherton, I. Revisiting Mary...

This paper (1) describes the history of Ainsworth's construct of maternal sensitivity-insensitivity to infant signals from its origins in her infnat-mother research in Uganda to its explicit definition as it emerged from her subsequent Baltimore study; (2) provides a detailed analysis of her behaviorally anchored 4 Maternal Care Scales (Sensitivity...

Three related hypotheses derived from attachment theory were examined in this multi-informant and multi-method study of 71 postdivorce mothers and their preschool children (40 boys, 31 girls): (1) mother-child interactions observed at home will be related to attachment-related representations by children (Attachment Story Completion Task or ASCT) a...

This article gathers diverse attachment specialists in a far reaching conversation about the utility of attachment assessment and theory for complex family law decision making, and reflections on the thorny question, “If I were the judge . . .?” Inge Bretherton, Professor Emerita, Developmental Psychology at Wisconsin University, is one of a few at...

Two studies are presented which describe how mothers talk about internal states with language-learning toddlers during social interaction. In study 1, mothers' internal state language was assessed longitudinally when toddlers were 13, 20 and 28 months of age. In study 2, mothers' internal state language addressed to prelinguistic children with Down...

This commentary has two parts. In the first part I highlight major theoretical issues raised by the two integrative articles, adding my own perspective and interpretations. Next I discuss selected findings from the two intervention programs designed to enhance infant-mother attachment in prison- and jail-diversion nurseries and the multi-informant...

No se necesitan materiales o juguetes costosos para promover el juego dramático y el teatro en los niños. Con cajas de cartón se pueden crear carros y edificios, buques y castillos, y con una tela o una sábana se pueden hacer miles de disfraces. Sólo es necesario estar alertas con toda nuestra imaginación para facilitarles a los niños el espacio ne...

This paper provides a brief history of attachment research on fathers as a backdrop against which the other contributions to this volume can be viewed. Empirical research on child–father attachment progressed in four phases and began before Bowlby in 1969 published the first volume of his attachment trilogy. During each phase a different set of que...

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Development of an enactive story completion task reflecting children’s attachment representations Research on children’s attachment representations began in the mid-1980s. Inspired by Main, Kaplan, and Cassidy’s findings concerning the relation between infant-mother attachment and children’s verbal responses to the Separation Anxiety Test, Brethert...

Bowlby's proposals about the formation, development, function, and intergenerational transmission of internal working models of self and attachment figures are scattered across the three volumes of his seminal trilogy Attachment and Loss (1969/1982, 1973, 1980) and his book A Secure Base (1988). To make these ideas more accessible as a whole, we...

In the course of daily transactions, caregivers and children construct internal working models of self and other in the attachment relationship (Bowlby, 1969). The function of such working models is to guide an individual's own behavior toward the attachment partner and to interpret and forecast the partner's behavior. So far, however, research on...

We examine intergenerational parenting representations of 49 highly educated, married fathers from dual career families who shared childrearing with their wives. Responding to the Parent Attachment Interview, the men discussed similarities and differences between their remembered childhood relationships with mother and father and their current rela...

Studies of infant-father attachment and other aspects of father-child relationships burgeoned during the 1980s and 90s, in step with new expectations for greater father participation in childrearing, but less is known about how involved fathers experience themselves as attachment figures, socialization agents, and playmates/companions of their youn...

My chapter differs from those by other contributors to this volume because I discuss the origins and development of an idea rather than findings from a longitudinal study. I begin by highlighting aspects of Bowlby's (1969, 1973, 1980) working model construct that are frequently misunderstood. I then switch to empirical work on working models, but w...

In the present article on intergenerational transmission of attachment representations, we use mothers' and fathers' Adult Attachment Interview classifications to predict a 3-year-old's responses to the Attachment Story Completion Task (ASCT). We present a Q-sort coding procedure for the ASCT, which was developed for children as young as three. The...

Marvin and Stewart and Byng-Hall proposed that effective family collaboration requires family members to construct "shared family working models," and that the renegotiation of these working models during family transitions is facilitated by family members' "interactional awareness" (ability to be perceptive observers of family relationships). We a...

Themes of violence and caring in the spontaneous play of preschool-aged children in response to a revised version of the Attachment Story Completion Task (Bretherton, Ridgeway, & Cassidy, 1990) were analyzed in relation to their social behavior in child-care settings. All children (n = 66, 39 boys) lived in post-divorce families, primarily in the c...

Typically, we make sense of our experiences and interactions in a way that is guided by emotion and that takes the form of a narrative or a story. Using narratives, we can tell others about our experience, share common meanings, imagine possibilities, and co-construct new meanings. It is thus a momentous development when, at around age three, a chi...

This study used the Attachment Story Completion Task-Revised (ASCT-R) (Bretherton, Ridgeway, & Cassidy, 1990), a representational measure of attachment security, to examine characteristics of preschool-aged girls' narratives associated with portrayals of attachment to the father. The children's (n = 27) parents had been divorced or legally separate...

The unpublished version of The MacArthur Story Stem Battery The MacArthur Story Stem Battery developed by I. Bretherton, D. Oppenheim, H. Buchsbaum, R.N. Emde, and the MarArthur Narrative Work Group has been in use since 1990. The script and instructions were published only in 2003 in the volume "Revealing the inner worlds of young children: The Ma...

Mary Ainsworth's pioneering work has changed conceptions of infant-mother relationships, and by extension, conceptions of human relationships more generally. As John Bowlby's major collaborator in the development of attachment theory, she is commonly credited with providing supporting empirical evidence for the theory while Bowlby is regarded as cr...

Comments on the article by H. Steele and M. Steele (see record 1998-00879-007), and contends that a reunion between psychoanalysis and attachment theory is already in progress, if there ever was a genuine separation. The author classifies attachment theory within the psychoanalytic family of theories, and concentrates on J. Bowlby's similarities a...

From introduction: To provide detailed illustrations of the way in which postdivorce preschoolers portrayed their affective reality through story completions we undertook an in-depth analysis of their responses to one particular story stem that elicited especially poignant evidence of divorce-related concerns or fears about loss of or separation fr...

Based on Bowlby's claim that 'internal working models' of self-with-parent influence the way a child approaches relationships with others, this study examined attachment representations of 66 pre-schoolers (39 boys, 27 girls) in relation to teachers' or child-care providers' perceptions of their social competence. The study goes beyond previous rel...

Maternal representations of the self as parent were assessed via the Parent Attachment and Peer Relationship Interviews (Bretherton, Biringen, Ridgeway, Maslin-Cole, & Sherman, 1989; Biringen & Bretherton, 1988) when children were 39 months of age. Maternal sensitivity and maternal structuring during mother-child interactions were assessed at 18, 2...

Abstract: Hundreds of studies have used the Strange Situation to assess patterns of infant–parent attachment, and a rapidly growing number of studies document concordances between these infancy patterns and parental ‘states of mind’ based on analyses of the Adult Attachment Interview (van IJzendoorn,1995). Yet, surprisingly, there have been few at...

Memorializes Mary D. S. Ainsworth, one of the preeminent developmental psychologists of the 20th century. Her conceptual and empirical contributions to attachment theory have led to groundbreaking changes in how psychologists think about the connection between an infant and its caregivers and, by extension, about close human relationships at all ag...

Memorializes Mary D. S. Ainsworth, one of the preeminent developmental psychologists of the 20th century. Her conceptual and empirical contributions to attachment theory have led to groundbreaking changes in how psychologists think about the connection between an infant and its caregivers and, by extension, about close human relationships at all ag...

INGE BRETHERTON When John Bowlby chose a terminology" for attachment theory he did so with great care, considering both a word's denotations and connotations (Ainsworth, personal communication; U. Bowlby, personal communication). The label 'internal working model' which Bowlby adopted for his own version of what other psychoanalysts called the repr...

In this chapter, we re-examine ideas about the formation, development, function, and intergenerational transmission of internal working models of self and attachment figures. We begin with a brief historical exposition linking attachment theory and psychoanalysis, followed by a summary of Bowlby’s ideas on the topic, as laid out in his seminal tril...

In formulating attachment theory, Bowlby made a number of important conceptual contributions to our understanding of human development. Discussed here are the balance (rather than the conflict) between attachment and exploration, the concept of internal working models; and the parent as a psychological secure base. In addition, Bowlby's "theory of...

(Excerpt from introduction) In this chapter, we will present an attachment perspective on internalization, discussing how the quality of parent-child communication becomes reflected in a child’s internal working models (representations) of secure and insecure attachment relations. We will also consider the parental and parenting values underlying t...

Excerpt from introduction: In our study of social support as experienced by mothers in post-divorce families we combined ideas from the literatures on attachment and social support. Much has been written about how emotionally open or defensive communication patterns in attachment situations affect an individual's representation or working model of...

To retain its vitality, a theory must be translated into assessments. The publication of several new instruments for assessing patterns of attachment in Growing Points of Attachment Theory and Research. (Bretherton & Waters, 1985) was therefore an important milestone. In that Monograph, Waters and Deane (1985) presented the first version of their A...

Extract from conclusion: Developmental psychology, represented here, attachment theory and the ecological theory of human development, appropriately make their major contirbutions to family theories by focusing on the importance of psychological phenomena in family communication and therefore in family functioning. Attachment theory emphasizes the...

This chapter reports results from a short-term longitudinal study examining the influence on toddler mastery motivation and competence of three aspects of the early social environment: infant-mother attachment security, maternal scaffolding behavior, and family climate. The study extends previous research, first, by introducing multiple measures of...

This chapter represents an attempt to integrate several theoretical and research strands. After a brief review of the psychoanalytic perspective on representation as a person's inner world, I summarize Bowlby's reformulation of these ideas, inspired by the conscept of representation as "internal working models" of self and parent as they originate...

Attachment theory is based on the joint work of J. Bowlby (1907–1991) and M. S. Ainsworth (1913–    ). Its developmental history begins in the 1930s, with Bowlby's growing interest in the link between maternal loss or deprivation and later personality development and with Ainsworth's interest in security theory. Although Bowlby's and Ainsworth's co...

Like psychology at large, developmental psychology does not offer an explicit theory about family structure or functioning. Nevertheless, it has much to say about family relationships, especially about parent-child relationships. The focus on parent-child relationships is hardly surprising because the development of young children cannot be underst...

Description (from "Future Directions". p. 71): The many intriguing findings concerning infants' ability to interface minds through intentional communication are consonant with and strongly support the social cognitive interpretation of social referening offered by Feinman (1982) and Campos (1983): namely, that infants can seek and understand anothe...

During the 1960s and 1970s, ethological concepts came to hold much fascination for theoreticians of human development. Animal studies on dominance hierarchies and on social bonds were especially influential. Field observations of developing parent-offspring bonds in birds (e.g., Lorenz, 1935/1957; Lorenz, 1957; Tinbergen, 1951) and mammals, especia...

Uses ideas derived from attachment theory to take a new look at the concept of the social self / reviews the work of groundbreaking theorists [James, Cooley, Baldwin and Mead], with special emphasis on what they had to say about the development of the social self [in children] / discusses related ideas that arose independently in the branch of psyc...

From introduction of chapter: I make the point that 9- to 12-month-old infants already possess the ability to intentionally recruit and guide a partner's attention through well-times and well-directed gestures. During the second year, language comes to play an increasingly important role in infants' communicative interchanges with others, but meani...

Bowlby postulated that transactional patterns between caregiver and infant become internalized by the infant as “internal working models” of self and other in relationship and that these working models then determine how the infant interprets the caregiver's behavior and responds to it. When parent and infant or child are not reciprocally responsiv...

Originally published in Contemporary Psychology: APA Review of Books , 1990, Vol 35(3), 254-256. Reviews the book, The Beginnings of Social Understanding by Judy Dunn (see record 1988-98627-000 ). This book is the result of a lengthy research odyssey that began with an interest in firstborns and their families in the period preceding and following...

I begin with a brief account regarding the conceptual links between a caregiver's sensitive responsiveness to infant signals, the development of open communication patterns, and the child's ability to construct adequate representations or working models of self and other in the attachment relationship. I then summarize findings from the recent empi...

Examines the cognitive complexity of responses of young children at thirty-seven and fifty-four months of age to the Attachment Story Completion Task (Bretherton and Ridgeway, Appendix to Bretherton, Ridgeway, and Cassidy, 1990). At 37 months children were able to represent many aspects of the parent-child relationship, but at 54 months children al...

Each chapter covers some facet of how children from three to twelve years of age represent the family in general and/or their family in particular. In all of the studies, the children are presented with hypothetical situations, whether through questions, pictures, or story stems that are acted out with family dolls. Approaches used for accessing ch...

In this paper, we will describe some of the work we have conducted investigating the similarities and differences between symbol use in the vocal and gestural modalities by normal hearing children between 13 and 28 months of age. Interest in the relationship between vocal and gestural symbols follows from the hypothesis put forward by Piaget (1962)...

After a brief summary of Bowlby's construct of Internal Working Models in attachment relationships, and review of relevant research, the chapter presents results from a short-term longitudinal study introducing the Attachment Story Completion Task (ASCT; Bretherton and Ridgeway, see Appendix, pp. 300-308 of this chapter). The authors report (1) chi...

This paper proposes that make-believe play expresses the young child's emerging capacity to engage in counterfactual or would-be thinking. Three important developments enable preschoolers to create joint make-believe worlds with others: the ability to (1) manage multiple roles as playwrights and actors, (2) invent novel plots, and (3) deliberately...

From Preface and Introduction (chapter 1): A few years ago, we published a book about the transition from gesture to the first word, trying to show how linguistic and nonlinguistic symbols emerge through the interaction of more primitive cognitive systems (Bates, Benigni, Bretherton, Camaioni, and Volterra, 1979). In this book we have moved a step...

will argue that early pretense can be understood and studied in terms of an emerging ability to create and perform subjunctive and counterfactual event representations, alone and with others / discuss the organizational devices of make-believe play through which children learn to mark the boundary between here-and-now reality and the subjunctive wo...

Bowlby postulated that transactional patterns between caregiver and infant become internalized by the infant as "internal working models" of self and other in relationship and that these working models then determine how the infant interprets the caregiver's behavior and responds to it. When parent and infant or child are not reciprocally responsiv...

The development of children's verbal communication about feeling states was studied by analyzing naturally occurring conversations at home. The data were recorded during two longitudinal studies. In Study 1, 43 second-born children were observed with mother and older sibling at 18 and 24 months. In Study 2, 16 firstborn children were observed with...

The attempt to understand human infant-mother attachment in terms of evolutionary-ethological theory (Bowlby l958, l969/82) led to a major conceptual breakthrough. Infant behaviors that had previously seemed inexplicable, puzzling, or even irrational, made sense within this new framework: the infant's distress upon separation from the mother, the t...

Although the recent focus on functionalist theories of emotions has led to an upsurge of interest in many aspects of emotional development, not enough attention has been paid to young children's developing ability to talk about emotions. In this paper we attempt to place what is presently known about this topic into a framework that emphasizes the...

BRETHERTON, INGE; FRITZ, JANET; ZAHN-WAXLER, CAROLYN; and RIDGEWAY, DOREEN. Leaming to Talk about Emotions: A Functionalist Perspective. CHILD DEVELOPMENT, 1986, 57, 529-548. Although the recent focus on functionalist theories of emotions has led to an upsurge of interest in many aspects of emotional development, not enough attention has been paid...

Research guided by attachment theory as formulated by Bowlby and Ainsworth is branching out in exciting new directions. The 12 chapters collected together in this Monograph present theoretical and methodological tools that will facilitate further research on attachment across the life span, across generations, and across cultures. The Monograph is...

This chapter has several major aims. The first is to provide an overview of attachment theory as presented by John Bowlby in the three volumes of Attachmenat nd Loss( 1969/1982b, 1973, 1980), giving special emphasis to two major ideas: (1) attachment as grounded in a motivational-behavioral control system that is preferentially responsive to a smal...

This chapter discusses the role of maternal guidance with the help of toddler's play, alone and with mother. The study described in the chapter examines the role of social interaction in structuring knowledge for the child considers the contribution of the child's readiness to this process. Although play in children and animals has long been a topi...

This chapter discusses the effect of contextual variation on symbolic play development from 20 to 28 months. Studies of early symbolic play have singled out four areas of development: (1) the capacity to act as if or perform actions outside their usual context, (2) the capacity to use a placeholder as stand-in for a realistic object, (3) the abilit...

Comments on the views on social referencing and the interfacing of the mind held by S. Feinman (see record 1983-07715-001) and J. J. Campos (see record 1983-20870-001), noting that these 2 authors hold somewhat divergent views of social referencing. Both concur, however, that 10-mo-old infants are capable of using their mothers' emotional express...

Publisher Summary This chapter discusses the representation of the social world in symbolic play. Piaget's theory of representation as interiorized action revolutionized ideas about cognition. Representation began to be seen as a dynamic process instead of a static collection of symbols. However, Piaget did not apply this kind of thinking to the st...

This paper is based on the premise that biological systems are self-regulating and self-organizing and that their functioning is governed by laws which are in principle understandable.

The study focuses on the language abilities of 30 20-month-old children, using data from two sources: a detailed maternal interview and 90 minutes of videotaped observation. Observed language was coded into the categories used for the interview. Production and comprehension at 28 months (MLU, PPVT and morphology comprehension) were also assessed. O...

Summary: There is a dramatic moment in The Miracle Worker (Gibson, 1956) in which young Helen Keller makes the discovery that things have names. The insight is sudden, overwhelming, and creates irrevocable changes in the world of a 8-year-old deaf, blind child. For normal hearing children, the same discovery occurs much earlier and much more gradua...

Hypothesized that a rudimentary capacity to impute internal states to self and to other emerges with the onset of communicative intentions. The ability to speak about mental states begins late in the 2nd yr and burgeons in the 3rd yr. Mothers of 30 28-mo-olds were asked to report child utterances containing 6 categories of internal-state words (per...

This chapter introduces child language research and linguistic theory that forms the base for language development. Researchers in child language look outside linguistic theory for the “causes” of development, seeking both cognitive and social influences on language acquisition and language structure. Of the two affairs, one with cognitive and the...

Investigators have targeted the onset of reference in children at varying points on the developmental continuum. Their viewpoints seem to be related to issues of the contextual flexibility, content and composition of the lexicon in comprehension and production. This study considered all of the variables in the early vocabularies of 32 children with...

Observed 72 infants aged 12, 18, and 24 mo in the presence of their mothers and 2 adult female strangers to assess their willingness to initiate proximal interaction (PI) with unfamiliar adults. Mothers and strangers were asked to be warmly responsive to infant overtures but not to invite interaction from the infant. A majority of the infants at th...