ADULT ATTACHMENT REPRESENTATIONS, PARENTAL RESPONSIVENESS, AND INFANTATTACHMENT - A METAANALYSIS ON THE PREDICTIVE-VALIDITY OF THE ADULT ATTACHMENT INTERVIEW

bout a decade ago, the Adult Attachment interview (AAI; C. George, N. Kaplan, & M. Main, 1985) was developed to explore parents' mental repr esentations of attachment as manifested in language during discourse o f childhood experiences. The AAI was intended to predict the quality o f the infant-parent attachment relationship, as observed in the Ainswo rth Strange Situation, and to predict parents' responsiveness to their infants' attachment signals. The current meta-analysis examined the a vailable evidence with respect to these predictive validity issues. In regard to the 1st issue, the 18 available samples(N=854) showed a com bined effect size of 1.06 in the expected direction for the secure vs. insecure split. For a portion of the studies, the percentage of corre spondence between parents' mental representation of attachment and inf ants' attachment security could be computed (the resulting percentage was 75%; kappa = .49, n = 661). Concerning the 2nd issue, the 10 sampl es (N=389) that were retrieved showed a combined effect size of .72 in the expected direction. According to conventional criteria, the effec t sizes are large. It was concluded that although the predictive valid ity of the AAI is a replicated fact, there is only partial knowledge o f how attachment representations are transmitted (the transmission gap ).