From Proximity-Seeking to Epistemic Trust: Investigating the Transmission of Attachment Classifications

• Applicant: Dr. Alessandro Talia
• Subject Area: Developmental and Educational Psychology
• Term: since 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 506141746

The quality of infant attachment is one of the key factors of children's mental health. Many studies have shown that infant attachment can be predicted from the coherence with which infants’ parents speak in the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI), an interview about early experiences with parents. However, little is known about the mechanisms underlying this association: What are the psychological mechanisms underlying narrative coherence? What are the actual parenting behaviors that mediate the relationship between parents’ narrative coherence and children’s attachment behavior? And what other predictors of attachment explain the unexplained variance in infant attachment? Even though the intergenerational "transmission of attachment" is one of the best replicated findings in psychology, it would be too much to say that we fully understand it. With the current project, we want to answer these long-standing questions of attachment research with the concept of epistemic trust, i.e. trust in the relevance of interpersonal communication. We propose to test whether individual differences in the AAI reflect generalized differences in generating epistemic trust, and whether epistemic trust that arises during interaction between parents and infants acts as a mediator of the relationship between parent and infant attachment. These innovations will be possible by combining our expertise in microanalysis of communication in attachment research and in large-scale cohort studies.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• Co-Investigator: Professorin Dr. Svenja Taubner