Mary Main
Mary Main is a developmental psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley, who added the fourth attachment pattern and built the interview that moved attachment research into adulthood. Both contributions are still load-bearing, and the second one is at the centre of this site's argument about measurement.
Who they are
Ainsworth's original classification had three patterns, and a residue of babies who fitted none of them. Working with Judith Solomon, Main identified what those babies had in common: contradictory or momentarily frozen behaviour at reunion, an approach that breaks off, a stilling, a movement toward the parent with the head turned away. They called it disorganised and published the coding procedure in 1990. It appears in roughly one baby in seven in ordinary samples and in considerably more where families are under serious strain.
Her second contribution is the Adult Attachment Interview. It asks an adult to describe their childhood relationships and then to produce specific memories supporting each description, and it takes about an hour. The scoring is the innovation: what is coded is not what happened, but whether the account holds together. A person who says their mother was loving and cannot produce an instance, and a person pulled back into unresolved grief mid-sentence, are both scored differently from a person who can hold a difficult history and describe it steadily.
That design choice is why the interview and the self-report questionnaires turned out, when Roisman and colleagues compared them in 2007, to be measuring different things. One asks how coherently you can narrate the past. The other asks how you feel about closeness now. There was never a strong reason to expect those to be the same, and for twenty years nobody checked.
Key papers
Key papers
Main, M., & Solomon, J. (1990). In Greenberg, Cicchetti & Cummings (Eds.), Attachment in the Preschool Years, 121-160. University of Chicago Press. The coding procedure for disorganised attachment, the fourth pattern, published with Judith Solomon.
van IJzendoorn, M. H., Schuengel, C., & Bakermans-Kranenburg, M. J. (1999). Development and Psychopathology, 11(2), 225-249. The meta-analysis of the disorganised classification, and the source of the base rates this site uses.
Roisman, G. I., et al. (2007). JPSP, 92(4), 678-697. The comparison that found the Adult Attachment Interview and the self-report questionnaires are measuring different things. Cited here as the load-bearing evidence for the construct split, not as a criticism of the interview.
Article titles are not recorded in the vault for the journal entries above and are not supplied here.
Key ideas
Disorganised attachment, the pattern that is not a strategy but the absence of one.
Coherence as the unit of measurement. What a person can do with their history, rather than what the history was.
The construct split. Her instrument and the questionnaire tradition share a vocabulary and not a referent.
Concepts on this site
Sources
- Main, M., & Solomon, J. (1990). In Greenberg, Cicchetti & Cummings (Eds.), Attachment in the Preschool Years, 121-160. University of Chicago Press.
- van IJzendoorn, M. H., Schuengel, C., & Bakermans-Kranenburg, M. J. (1999). Development and Psychopathology, 11(2), 225-249.
- Roisman, G. I., et al. (2007). JPSP, 92(4), 678-697.