| This research brings together three different areas of study: attachment, psycholinguistics, as well as foster care and adoption. 73 Adult Attachment Interviews of adopters of hard to place maltreated children will be assessed using the psycholinguistic analysis Linguistic Inquiry Word Count program. This research hopes to contribute to the understanding of people's attachment patterns, deepen our comprehension of the classification system for the Adult Attachment Interview, as well as be able help to distinguish between secure attachment classification and dismissing attachment classification.;This research demonstrates that there are indeed psycholinguistic textual correlates for the way in which people classified as secure and dismissing speak during the Adult Attachment Interview and that they allow for a successful classification of secure and dismissing attachment patterns. All 16 Experience Scales and States of Mind Scales used for coding and classifying the AAI were associated with some configuration of the hypothesized LIWC textual correlates. Both secure attachment and dismissing attachment were reliably predicted 100% of the time. The model needs to be further validated using different subject pools, but these results are very encouraging in their potential future utility to quickly, inexpensively, and reliably assess attachment. |
