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
A. Seganti et al., 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, INT J PSYCH, 81, 2000, pp. 529-551
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.