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No description available.

The current study identified attachment injuries in couples and developed a preliminary model for the resolution of attachment injuries using Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT). An attachment injury occurred when one partner betrayed or broke the trust of the other in a specific incident and that incident became a clinically recurring theme or stuck-point of task resolution. Couples with attachment injuries were identified by an expert clinician and the researcher. Subjects were couples with moderate to mild distress. The attachment injuries were resolved using EFT, an empirically validated approach to couples therapy. The model (N = 3) was developed using task analysis. Audiotaped segments of "best sessions" of marker events were reviewed by raters to determine change events throughout the therapy process. A rational, conceptual map of expected change was compared to an empirically developed map. The marker events emerged at the assessment, de-escalation, and resolution phases of treatment. Pre- and post-tests measured overall resolution of the attachment injury and process measures identified in-session changes. The results of this study yield a proposed theoretical model of change for couples who sustain an attachment injury. / Ph. D.

While extensive research has been done examining stress in families using the Double ABCX model and examining stress management using attachment theory, there is no research combining the model to understand how they might be integrated in understanding stress and coping. The current study uses the Double ABCX model and research on attachment to suggest that attachment relationships will be the primary resource to adjust for military families during deployment. Two extreme case studies were selected to explore the interplay of these two models. The in-depth interviews of the women with a deployed spouse and with children in the home were examined. Exploration of the experiences of the two women informed a model in understanding the synthesis of stress and attachment and understanding the influence of meaning making and adjustment. Therapeutic implications and suggestions for future research are also discussed. / Master of Science

The purpose of this study was to evaluate attachment of people to their pets as compared to their human relationships. Specifically, this research was meant to discover if pet attachment was a more secure attachment than human-human attachment. One hundred and ninety-four students from an Introductory Psychology class at the University of Central Florida completed a survey regarding pet and human attachment. The results are discussed.

published_or_final_version / Psychology / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

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Attachment theory addresses the young child’s biological and psychological need to elicit their mother’s protection and care, and seeks to explain the emotional bond that forms between them in the early years of life. Several researchers have pointed out that the Western concept of attachment might be less relevant for Japanese parent-child dyads because Japanese child-rearing ideals are based on the concept of ‘amae’ (emotional one-ness between mother and child), whereas attachment theory emphasises the link between attachment and independence/autonomy. Research to date, however, has not yet directly addressed the possible association between maternal amae attitudes and attachment patterns in Japanese mother-child dyads. This is, in part, due to the current lack of any assessment tool to measure mothers’ responses to their child’s amae behaviours. Japanese attachment patterns have also not yet been investigated using the Manchester Child Attachment Story Task (MCAST: Green et al., 2000), a doll-play attachment measurement for children aged between 4 and 8 years old which has been used in Western contexts. This doctoral thesis consists of three cross-cultural empirical studies which address this gap in the current literature. In the first study, a 39-item prototype amae attitude scale (AAS) was constructed based on responses from Japanese focus groups and an earlier study of amae behaviours (Vereijken et al., 1997). The scale was subsequently completed by Japanese and British mothers. Japanese mothers were found to be more tolerant in general than British mothers of their child’s amae behaviours, in all 4 sub-categories explored (pure, asking, frustrated, and anxious amae), with cultural differences most marked in maternal attitudes towards their children’s anxious-amae behaviour. The second study addressed two questions: whether attachment behaviours differ in Japanese and British 4-5 year olds (measured with the MCAST) and whether there is a relationship between children’s MCAST attachment classifications and maternal attitudes towards children’s amae behaviours (measured with the AAS) in Japanese and British dyads. Contrary to what has been found in some of the previous Japanese Strange Situation studies, the distribution of MCAST attachment classifications was similar in the two countries. As predicted from the results of study 1, the AAS scores of Japanese mothers also indicated that they were significantly more tolerant of their child’s amae behaviours than their British counterparts. This was true for both mothers of securely and insecurely attached children. A tendency for mothers of securely attached children to have less tolerant attitudes towards children’s amae behaviours than those of insecurely attached children was found in both countries. A cultural difference also emerged in the way children expressed the maternal needs of the child doll during the mildly stressful scenarios in the MCAST. The third study examined actual mother-child interaction in both countries, measuring the mother’s emotional availability to the child (using the Emotional Availability Scale: Biringen, 2000) and relating this to both maternal AAS and child MCAST data. The results showed that emotional availability scores and attachment classification patterns did not differ across cultures. Analysis of the home observations also indicated that children from both cultures who were classified as insecurely attached (ambivalent and disorganised type) in the MCAST tended to show more amae behaviours towards their mothers than children classified as securely attached. Together, these three studies suggest that children in both counties show similar attachment patterns and that it is not only Japanese children who express amae behaviours towards their mothers. In fact, amae relates to attachment security in both cultures, although the way it is expressed and maternal attitudes towards such behaviours differ across cultures.

No description available.

Inledning: Sedan PTSD har blivit en diagnos i den psykiatriska diagnosmanualen DSM har forskningen i detta område ökat mycket. Samtidigt har man kunnat se att tidiga traumatiska upplevelser framför allt med anknytningspersoner ökar prevalensen för utveckling av psykiatriska och somatiska sjukdomar. Detta har lett till hypotesen att ett anknytningstrauma kan vara en predisponerande faktor för utveckling av PTSD eller att en trygg anknytning kan vara en skyddande sådan. Som kollektiv i studier valdes mest veteraner, våldäkts- eller brottsoffer. Denna pilot-studien väljer ett annat patientkollektiv. Frågeställning: Vilka anknytningsmönster som finns hos 10 patienter med exilbakgrund, vilka har varit utsatta för krig och/eller tortyr. Method: Undersökningen görs med hjälp av två skattningsinstrument, PCL-5, som undersöker graden av PTSD-symtom och ASQ, som undersöker anknytningsmönstret. Undersökningen görs med både kvalitativ metod genom att undersöka deltagarnas individuell anknytningsmönster genom utvärderingen och tolkningen av svaren i ASQ-testet och kvantitativ genom att utvärdera korrelationer mellan graden av PTSD-symtom och anknytningsmönstren. Resultat: I den kvalitativa delen visar det sig att nästan alla deltagare visar ett otryggt anknytningsmönster och i den kvantitativa delen ses det några intressanta tendenser, såsom att höga poäng på distansskalan har en stark korrelation till höga PTSD-score och en icke-signifikant negativ korrelation med tillits-skalan. I delgrupperna (män/kvinnor) ses tendenser som är signifikanta trots det låga deltagartalet. Diskussion: Undersökningen bekräftar hypotesen att patienter anknytningssystemet har drabbats hos patienter med PTSD och exilbakgrund. Resultatet ses som underlag till vidare forskning med en större population. / Introduction: Since PTSD has become a distinct diagnosis in the psychiatric manual of diagnoses (DSM) a lot of research has been done in this field. At the same time has research in the field of attachment produced evidence that early traumatic events, especially in relation to children´s attachment figures, rises the prevalence of psychiatric illness. This led to the hypothesis that attachmenttrauma could be a predisposing factor for development of PTSD or that a secure attachment could be a protective one. Most researchers chose veterans or violence/rape or crime-victims. This pilot-study chooses a different studypopulation. Issues: Which attachment patterns show patients with exile-background who became victims of war and/or torture. Method: The study uses two rating-scales for this, the PCL-5 to establish the participants PTSD-symptom-score and the ASQ to show the attachment pattern. In the qualitative part of the study the individual attachment patterns are established by evaluating and interpreting the answers in the ASQ-scale. The quantitative part of the study shows the correlations between the PTSD-totalscore and the attachment pattern. Results: The qualitative part shows that nearly all participants with a high PTSDsymptom-score show an insecure attachment. The quantitative part shows some interesting tendencies like a positive correlation between high PTSD-total-score and high score in the ASQ-dimension “discomfort with closeness” and a nonsignificant negative correlation between high PTSD-total-score and confidence. Discussion: The study confirms the hypothesis that PTSD-patient´s attachmentsystem is troubled. This result takes as a basis for more research with a bigger sample.