Maternal secure base scripts, children's attachment security, and mother-child narrative styles.

Abstract This paper reports the results of a study examining links between maternal representations of attachment, child attachment security, and mother and child narrative styles assessed in the context of reminiscences about shared experiences. Participants were 90 mother – child dyads. Child attachment security was assessed using the attachment Q-set and maternal attachment representations were measured using a recently designed instrument that assesses the script-like qualities of those representations. Analyses examined dependencies in the mother – child memory talk data and then assessed the overlap between both mother and child reminiscing styles and the attachment variables. Narrative styles of both the mothers and their children were coherent and consistent for each dyad member. Furthermore, maternal narrative style (e.g., specific and elaborative questions, using confirming evaluation comments) was significantly related to child participation in the narrative. Maternal and child attachment varia...