From sixty-two interviews on 'the worst and the best episode of your life'- Relationships between internal working models and a grammatical scale ofsubject-object affective connections

The authors address the issue of infer ring unconscious internal working mo dels of interaction through language. After reviewing Main's seminal work o f linguistic assessment through the 'adult attachment interview', they stre ss the idea of adults' internal working models (IWMs) as information-proces sing devices, which give moment-to-moment sensory orientation in the face o f any past or present, animate or inanimate object. They propose that a sel ective perception of the objects could match expected with actual influence of objects on the subject's self through very simple 'parallel-processed' categories of internal objects. They further hypothesise that the isomorphi sm between internal working models of interaction and grammatical connectio ns between subjects and objects within a clause could be a key to tracking positive and negative images of self and other during discourse. An experim ent is reported applying the authors' 'scale of subject/object affective co nnection' to the narratives of sixty-two subjects asked to write about the 'worst' and 'best' episodes of their lives. Participants had previously bee n classified using Hazan & Shatter's self-reported 'attachment types' (avoi dant, anxious and secure) categorising individuals' general expectations in relation to others. The findings were that the subject/object distribution of positive and negative experience, through verbs defined for this purpos e as either performative or state verbs, did significantly differ between g roups. In addition, different groups tended during the best episodes, signi ficantly, to invert the trend of positive/negative subject/object distribut ion shown during the worst episode. Results are discussed in terms of a psy choanalytic theory of improvement through co-operative elaboration of negat ive relational issues.