The Adult Attachment Interview

The Adult Attachment Interview (AAI) is a semi-structured protocol designed to elicit a subject's recollections about relationships with parents and other attachment figures during childhood. The interviewer asks about childhood experiences with parents, significant separations and losses during childhood, and the current state of the child-parent relationship.

Scoring of the interview is based on: (i) descriptions of childhood experiences; (ii) the language used to describe past experiences; and (iii) the ability to give an integrated, coherent, believable account of experiences and their meaning. The interview is scored from a verbatim transcript using scales which measure whether, in the coder's opinion, attachment figures were: loving, rejecting, neglecting, involving, pressurising. A second set of scales is used to assess the interviewee's state of mind and discourse style: overall coherence of transcript and of thought, idealisation, insistence on lack of recall, active anger, derogation, fear of loss, metacognitive monitoring, passivity of speech. The scale scores are used to assign the adult to one of three major attachment classifications: dismissing (Ds), preoccupied (E), autonomous (F). As with the strange situation categories, there are also sub-categories as follows: Ds1, Ds2, Ds3, Ds4, F1, F2, F3, F4, F5, E1, E2, E3.

The AAI begins with the interviewer introducing the general research area, e.g.:

There are 18 questions in total, and questions each have various related probes. The first question is an integrative one: Could you start by orienting me to your early family situation, where you lived, and so on? If you could start with where you were born, whether you moved around much, what your family did for a living at various times.

The remaining questions are as follows:

2. I'd like you to try to describe your relationships with your parents as a young child. If you could start from as far back as you can remember.

3. I'd like you to choose five adjectives that reflect your childhood relationship with your mother. This might take some time, and then I'm going to ask you why you chose them.

4. Question 3 repeated for father.

5. To which parent did you feel closest and why? Why isn't there this feeling with the other parent?

6. When you were upset as a child, what would you do?

7. What is the first time you remember being separated from your parents? How did you and they respond? Are there any other separations that stand out in your mind?

8. Did you ever feel rejected as a young child? Of course, looking back on it now, you may realise that is wasn't really rejection, but what I'm trying to ask about here is whether you remember ever having felt rejected in childhood.

9. Were your parents ever threatening with you in any way - maybe for discipline, or maybe just jokingly?

10. How do you think these experiences with your parents have affected your adult personality? Are there any aspects of your early experiences that you feel were a set-back in your development?

11. Why do you think your parents behaved as they did during your childhood?

12. Were there any other adults with whom you were close as a child, or any other adults who were especially important to you?

13. Did you experience the loss of a parent or other close loved one while you were a young child?

14. Have there been many changes in your relationship with your parents since childhood? I mean from childhood through until the present?

15. What is your relationship with your parents like for you now as an adult?

16. How do you respond now, in terms of feelings, when you separate from your child?

17. If you had three wishes for your child twenty years from now, what would they be? I'm thinking partly of the kind of future you would like to see for your child.

18. Is there any particular thing which you feel you learned above all from your own childhood experiences? What would you hope your child might learn from his/her experiences of being parented?

This category is assigned to individuals whose state of mind as assessed in the interview indicates a current attempt to limit the influence of attachment relationships and experiences in thought, feeling or daily life. For individuals in all but sub-category Ds4, there is an implicit claim to strength, normalcy, and/or independence. This is implied in the dismissal of the import of attachment relationships or experiences, through dismissing possible imperfections in the parent in the face of contradictory or unsupportive evidence (Ds1/Ds3), dismissing any potential negative effects of parenting or other untoward experiences upon the self (Ds3/Ds1), or contemptuously derogating and dismissing attachment figures or attachment-related phenomena, often while laying claim to personal strength (Ds2).

These individuals value attachment relationships and regard attachment-related experiences as influential, but they are relatively independent and objective regarding any particular experience or relationship.

Compared with individuals in the Dismissing and Preoccupied groups, they seem relatively autonomous with respect to attachment and freely explore their thoughts and feelings during the course of the interview. In general, a reader scoring the likely behaviour of the subject's parents during childhood will come to scores similar to those the subject might have offered, suggesting that the subject is moderately to highly aware of: (i) the nature of his/her experiences with parents and with attachment; and (ii) the effects of those experiences on his/her present state of mind. Discussion of questions is relatively relaxed, since the topic of attachment is a relatively open one.

Variations in approach to the interview occur in accordance with sub-category, such that F2 may seem initially defensive (but ultimately open) regarding attachment; the F1 to have actively and deliberately moved away from the past; the F4 to be sentimental and mildly preoccupied with thoughts of the past; the F5 annoyed with the parents, but humorous, contained, rational, and/or accepting. These are variations in the ways in which the topic of attachment is presented - variations which, although meaningful as habits of mind, seem more matters of style than rigid organisations of thought. The topic of attachment is ultimately open for all autonomous groups, even though each (non F3) sub-group places some potentially conscious limitation wither on the valuing of some aspect of attachment, or upon autonomy.

Confused, unobjective and preoccupied with or by past relationships within the family and/or by past experiences. Passive and vague; fearful and overwhelmed; angry, conflicted and unconvincingly analytical.

Individuals in this category share an inability to move beyond an excessive preoccupation/sense of involvement in particular attachment relationships or attachment-related experiences, while either accepting this state passively (E1), or struggling against it without success (E2). Although in some cases they seem very open in their focus upon their parents and attachment-related experiences, this focus seems ultimately neither fruitful, objective or incisive, despite an often extensive discussion of feelings, experiences and relationships. The sense of personal identity seems confused or weak.

Read through the following and assess whether the answers are coherent, appropriate and open.

Right, um, I was born at a little place X on the west coast of Scotland, and I was born at home in my aunt's house... which was my mother's initial family home. Um, for the first three I lived in, um, a little attic flat that overlooked the sea, in a very small one actually, with just 2 rooms and a kitchen. I was the middle of 3 children. When my sister was born, we moved into a house in the middle of the town and that is still the family home, that is where my parents still are. So... my mother never worked, as far as I can remember. She used to be a secretary or something, but stopped when my sister was born, and my dad, um, worked initially in the county engineer's department, but when I was very young moved into health service management and was... um, a deputy secretary and treasurer, or something, of the health board, or something, so we didn't have any, um, house moves, apart from that first one when I was 3 and a half.

Well I was born in the north east of England and we moved down around the docks in X when I was 2 or 3, or something like that. (Aha. Do you have any memories from those very early years?) Um. I remember seeing my grandmother who was getting on a bit then. She used to.... Quite nice.... (Was that your mother's mother or your father's mother?) My father's mother I think.... Pretty uneventful really. (Pretty uneventful?) Just getting on from day to day really. (What was it like?) Quiet.... Not much happening, just growing up normally.

I was born in X, are you from X? (No, I'm not.) No, em, we lived in the same house for 17 years until I got married, er apart from a 7 month break when I went to... to the adolescent psychiatric unit. Pretty much like this place, only smaller.... Em, right, yeah, so that's where we lived. What else? (Going back to your early years, did you see much of your grandparents?) Yes, yes, an awful lot. Em, they used to come, er, one night a week to our house, and my mother used to take my sister and I, er, to their house one night a week, er, and then from being 2 and a half, er, I stayed with them during the school holidays because my mother put me in a nursery school and went back to work, em because my sister was 5 by then and had started school, so I got dumped in this nursery school, and when and when it was holiday time I had to go and stay with nannan and granddad. (Your sister was older?) Yes, she is 3 years, she's only 3 years older [sigh]. That was quite nice. I liked being with my grandma, em, she was a bit crotchety occasionally you know, but er, I quite liked being with my grandma. I have got very happy memories of sitting in their terraced house with the coal fire, the flames dancing and the clock ticking on the old-fashioned fire range. My grandma, grey-haired and glasses, sat in the arm chair, very quiet, you could just hear the trains in the distance, and imagining things in the flames of the fire. We used to sit hours like that. It was pleasant.