Premium
Mental representations of attachment in day care providers
Author(s) -
Constantino John N.,
Olesh Heather
Publication year - 1999
Publication title -
infant mental health journal
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.693
H-Index - 75
eISSN - 1097-0355
pISSN - 0163-9641
DOI - 10.1002/(sici)1097-0355(199922)20:2<138::aid-imhj2>3.0.co;2-7
Subject(s) - observational study , mental representation , mental health , psychology , day care , attachment theory , clinical psychology , psychiatry , medicine , nursing , cognition , pathology
Mental representations of attachment of 31 day‐care providers were assessed using the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI), and compared with established observational measures of their behavior with the children under their care. Contrary to expectation, there was no significant association between the caregivers’ mental representations of attachment and their observed behavior. Teacher‐report ratings of aggressive behavior were obtained for 135 children who had been under the care of these providers. Ten of the 13 children who scored in the clinical range for aggressive behavior were known to have been under the care of a provider with a secure mental representation of attachment for an extended period of time (average 14 months), but the average age of first exposure to such a provider in this study was 16 months. For center‐based day‐care providers, standardized observational assessments of caregiving behavior appear to be unrelated to mental representations of attachment. Children who, during the second year of life, were cared for by providers with secure mental representations of attachment were not necessarily protected from abnormally aggressive behavioral outcome.