Mary Main

Mary Main
Queen Margaret University | QMU · Division of Occupational Therapy and Arts Therapies

About

26
Publications
15,916
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Introduction
Skills and Expertise

Publications

Publications (26)
Article
In this short-term longitudinal study, thirty preschool-aged children with autism were first observed in Ainsworth’s Strange Situation procedure and, separately, interacting with the primary caregiver in the home. One year later, each child completed both a developmental assessment and an observational assessment of empathic responding. Behaviors t...
Article
Full-text available
In this short-term longitudinal study, 30 preschool-aged children with autism were first observed in Ainsworth's Strange Situation Procedure and, separately, interacting with the primary caregiver in the home. One year later, each child completed both a developmental assessment and an observational assessment of empathic responding. Behaviors typic...
Article
Full-text available
Disorganized/Disoriented (D) attachment has seen widespread interest from policy makers, practitioners, and clinicians in recent years. However, some of this interest seems to have been based on some false assumptions that (1) attachment measures can be used as definitive assessments of the individual in forensic/child protection settings and that...
Article
Full-text available
This study investigates whether individual differences in attachment status can be detected by electrophysiological responses to loss-themed pictures. The Adult Attachment Interview (AAI) was used to identify discourse/reasoning lapses during the discussion of loss experiences via death that place speakers in the Unresolved/disorganized AAI categor...
Article
We seek to understand why a relatively high percentage (39%; vs the meta-analytic average, 15–18%) of disorganized/disoriented (D) classifications has accrued in the low-risk Uppsala Longitudinal Study (ULS) study, using experienced D coders. Prior research indicates that D behaviours do not always indicate attachment disorganization stemming from...
Article
The term “attachment” is now in common usage and, as the readers of this Special Issue are aware, is referenced in a rapidly increasing variety of contexts involving child custody (McIntosh & Chisholm, 2008). The aim of this article is to provide judges, lawyers, mediators and mental health professionals involved in custody assessment with an overv...
Article
This chapter provides a comprehensive overview of the questions that comprise the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI) protocol, together with its associated scoring and classification system. Familiarity with the interview and the system with which it is analyzed supplies the reader with an essential port of entree into understanding the chapters that...
Article
Full-text available
Following a 1986 study reporting a predominance of ambivalent attachment among insecure Sapporo infants, the generalizability of attachment theory and methodologies to Japanese samples has been questioned. In this 2nd study of Sapporo mother-child dyads (N=43), the authors examined attachment distributions for both (a) child, based on M. Main and J...
Article
In 1990 we advanced the hypothesis that frightened and frightening (FR) parental behavior would prove to be linked to both unresolved (U) adult attachment status as identified in the Adult Attachment Interview and to infant disorganized/disoriented (D) attachment as assessed in the Ainsworth Strange Situation. Here, we present a coding system for i...
Article
From an evolutionary perspective, a central mechanism promoting infant survival is the maintenance of proximity to attachment figures. Consequently attachment figure(s) represent the infant's primary solution to experiences of fear. Aspects of the development of the field of attachment are outlined within this context, beginning with Bowlby's ethol...
Article
This presentation focuses on the disorganized/disoriented (Group D) categories of infant, child, and adult attachment. The infant D category is assigned on the basis of interruptions and anomalies in organization and orientation observed during Ainsworth's strange situation procedure. In neurologically normal low-risk samples, D attachment is not s...
Article
J. Bowlby (1969) proposed that the child's insistence on maintainance of proximity to protective (parental) figures was attributable to the activities of an attachment behavioral system which regulates primate safety and survival. M. D. S. Ainsworth, M. C. Blehar, E. Waters and S. Wall's (1978) Strange Situation procedure later delineated 3 categor...
Article
Full-text available
J. Bowlby (1969) proposed that the child's insistence on maintainance of proximity to protective (parental) figures was attributable to the activities of an attachment behavioral system which regulates primate safety and survival. M. D. S. Ainsworth, M. C. Blehar, E. Waters, and S. Wall's (1978) Strange Situation procedure later delineated 3 catego...
Chapter
The Ainsworth Strange Situation is a brief, structured observational procedure in which one-year-old infants are exposed to two brief separations from the parent in an unfamiliar laboratory environment (Ainsworth and Wittig, 1969). The infant’s response to this moderately stressful experience appears to reflect the history of the caregiving it has...
Article
discuss a significant connecting link between these two central areas of inquiry, that is, an association between unresolved loss of attachment figures (or other attachment-related trauma) as experienced by the parent, and the infant's failure to fit to one of the traditional, organized Strange-Situation response categories / this is in essence the...
Article
Full-text available
Describes the development of a system for classifying attachment organization at age 6 on the basis of study of children's responses to unstructured reunions with parents. In a study of 33 families, 6th-year attachment classifications to mother were highly predictable from infancy attachment classifications to mother (84%), with Ss secure in infanc...
Article
Desde una perspectiva evolucionista, un mecanismo central que promueve la supervivencia del infante es el mantenimiento de la proximidad a las figuras de apego. En consecuencia, la(s) figura(s) de apego representan la solución principal del niño frente a las experiencias de miedo. Algunos aspectos de los avances en el terreno del apego se delinean...

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