The Contents And Mechanisms Of The Intergenerational Attachment Transmission

Attachment is a kind of special emotional connection between children and their caregivers.Once the relationship formed, it will become steady and very important for the children's socialization and emotion development. The result reveals the attachment transmission between parents and their child, it means parents'attachment is predictable to their child's attachment. It is generally said that the caregivers' sensitivity, responsiveness and emotional expressiveness are all important factors for the development of children's attachment, but not the only reason. At present there are still very few studies in this field in China. This study focuses on the whole family, including the parents and their child, and tries to find the contents of attachment transmission within a family and the transmission mechanisms according to Bowlby's attachment theory and George's adult attachment theory. In the contents of attachment transmission, we will compare the similarities and the differences of attachment between parents and their child, at the same time we will also consider some other influential factors such as gender, parents'education level, culture, etc. In the other research, we will address the study of transmission mechanism. In this study, we consider both the parents'family emotional expressiveness and the child's emotional autonomy, in order to structure the attachment transmission model. There are two studies in this research:Study 1 measures 128 families from three different regions-Dalian, some other towns and the countryside according to The Adult Attachment Questionnaire, in order to explore their differences and similarity regarding their attachment. The result turns to be that there are many similarities and also some differences between parents'and child's attachment, especially the differences between mothers and their children. Furthermore, the attachment transmission can easily happen on the secure attachment. At the same time, gender, parents'education level, region, and family structure also play a role in the process of attachment transmission.Study 2 firstly focuses on the relationship among family emotion expressiveness, parents'attachment and their child's attachment, then we explore how do the intensity and consistency of emotion expressiveness and child's emotional autonomy work during the attachment transmission, in order to structure the model of attachment transmission. It turns to be that the dismissing attachment adults reveal lower family expressiveness scores, while the preoccupied attachment adults reveal higher family expressiveness scores. At the same time, the security of child's attachment and positive expressiveness show a close correlation.The intergenerational transmission of attachment can be divided into two types-strong type and weak type. The strong pass type is characterized by both parents'consistent family expressiveness and their child's obedience on their emotional autonomy, on the other side, the weak transmission type shows the inconsistent family expressiveness and parents-child contradiction. The results show that different degrees of attachment transmission take place in both strong transmission type and parent-child contradictive type, whereas there is little transmission happened in the type of parents'inconsistent family expressiveness. Ultimately, we build a two-way dynamic model of attachment transmission, which provides a new way for the future study of intergenerational transmission of attachment.