A Study Of The Relationship Among Adult Attachment, Family Expressiveness And Infant Attachment

Attachment is an emotional tie between infant and his caretaker which will keep relatively stable once it takes shape. It plays an important role in the child's socialization and emotional development. Overseas research has shown the existence of the transmission of attachment from parents to their children. It has been proved that infant's disposition, caretaker's sensitivity, responsibility and availability can explain part of this attachment transmission, but there are still other factors which might influence this transmission. Research in this field is still few in China.The main purpose of our study is to find if attachment transmission exists between Chinese parents and their children, and if it does, the possible mechanism of this transmission. On the basis of previous research, we notice that family expressiveness-a pervasive style of verbal and nonverbal expression in the family that is frequently related to emotion-is related to both adult attachment and infant attachment. Therefore, beginning with the family expressiveness, we explore the relationship among adult attachment, family expressiveness and infant attachment in present study. Infant's parents completed Adult Relationship Questionnaire (RQ), Experiences in Close Relationship Questionnaire (ECR), Family Expressiveness Questionnaire (FEQ) and Waters-Deane's Attachment Q-set (Q-set).The results of this study indicate that(1) Attachment transmission exists between parent and child in China. Adult attachment is a predictor of infant attachment. Compares with insecure mother, secure mother's child has higher score of Q-set. The more avoidant and anxious parent, the less secure of their children.(2) Adult avoidance dimension score is negatively correlated with positive expressiveness (including positive submissive expressiveness and positive dominant expressiveness). Adult anxiety dimension score is positively correlated with negative expressiveness (including negative submissive expressiveness and negative dominant expressiveness). The higher score of mother's anxiety, the higher mother's family expressiveness. Father's avoidance dimension score is negatively correlated with family expressiveness. Dismissing attachment mother has the lowest family expressiveness, while preoccupied parent has higher family expressiveness than secure and dismissing parent, and fearful parent has higher negative expressiveness than secure and dismissing parents.(3) Mother's positive submissive expressiveness is positively correlated with infant's Q-set score while parent's negative dominant expressiveness is negatively correlated with infant's Q-set score. That means that the higher mother's positive submissive expressiveness, the poorer child's security and if mother has too much negative dominant expressiveness, it might do great damage to her child's forming of secure attachment.(4) Negative dominant expressiveness is the mediator of the attachment transmission between parent and child. That is, mother's attachment influences infant-mother attachment through negative dominant expressiveness in family expressiveness.