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The study addresses some gaps in the current understanding of adolescents’ Problematic Social Network Site Use (PSNSU) by exploring the role of parenting as a precursor, and dysregulation and self-esteem as possible mediators. The sample... more
The study addresses some gaps in the current understanding of adolescents’ Problematic Social Network Site Use (PSNSU) by exploring the role of parenting as a precursor, and dysregulation and self-esteem as possible mediators. The sample includes 148 parents (15% fathers) and their adolescent offspring (23% male, age ranging from 14 to 18 years old, M = 15.96, SD = 1.36). Parent-reported dysregulation and positive/negative parenting style and adolescent-reported PSNSU and self-esteem were collected. As to positive parenting, simple parallel mediations were fully supported: positive parenting was associated with less dysregulation and higher self-esteem and both conditions independently predicted adolescents’ PSNSU. Additionally, a serial mediation model was confirmed, suggesting that positive parenting is associated with less PSNSU by means of the sequential effect of dysregulation on self-esteem. As to negative parenting, results only support one simple mediation: negative parentin...
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The study investigates the perspective on distance learning (DL) of a sample of students with disability. Participants (N= 198; 62% females) completed an online questionnaire. The results highlight that students perceive both advantages... more
The study investigates the perspective on distance learning (DL) of a sample of students with disability. Participants (N= 198; 62% females) completed an online questionnaire. The results highlight that students perceive both advantages and barriers, which vary as a function of the type of disability. This seems to suggest that DL potentials should be evaluated in relation to the specific vulnerabilities and educational needs associated with each type of disability, which might be accomplished by adopting the Universal Design for Learning framework. Also, it may be that the impact of DL depends on the discipline as well as on the teachers’ digital competences, which can make a great difference in the quality of the online lesson and in the overall didactic experience of students with SEN.
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University psychological counseling (UPC) is receiving growing attention as a means to promote mental health and academic success among young adults and prevent irregular attendance and dropout. However, thus far, little effort has been... more
University psychological counseling (UPC) is receiving growing attention as a means to promote mental health and academic success among young adults and prevent irregular attendance and dropout. However, thus far, little effort has been directed towards the implementation of services attuned to students’ expectations and needs. This work intends to contribute to the existing literature on this topic, by exploring the perceptions of UPC among a population of 39,277 students attending one of the largest universities in the South of Italy. Almost half of the total population correctly identified the UPC target population as university students, and about one third correctly expected personal distress to be the main need that UPC should target. However, a large percentage did not have a clear idea about UPC target needs, activities, and population. When two specific student subsamples were analyzed using a person-centered analysis, namely (i) those who expressed their intention to use t...
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ABSTRACT Previous studies reported an inconsistency between verbal extracts and emotional physiological activation in dismissing individuals when narrating their early caregiving experience at the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI). This... more
ABSTRACT Previous studies reported an inconsistency between verbal extracts and emotional physiological activation in dismissing individuals when narrating their early caregiving experience at the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI). This study aimed to explore this discrepancy by analyzing the degree of concordance between verbal content and prosodic characteristics, index of physiological activation, when dismissing and secure individuals discuss negative childhood memories during the AAI. Results showed that secure participants presented a high coherence between verbal content and emotional activation, as expressed by prosody, revealing a reprocess of negative experiences that is the core feature of the development of secure working models. In contrast, dismissing participants’ prosodic characteristics were discrepant with the verbal content. These individuals downplayed the nature and impact of negative experiences and emotions, but used a prosody that revealed a high emotional arousal. The difference between the two groups was more evident for participants who had experienced more rejecting parents.
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This study contributes to the literature on the parental correlates of children’s narcissism. It addresses whether parental overvaluation may drive the putative link between parents’ narcissism and children’s narcissism and self-esteem.... more
This study contributes to the literature on the parental correlates of children’s narcissism. It addresses whether parental overvaluation may drive the putative link between parents’ narcissism and children’s narcissism and self-esteem. The cross-sectional design involved a community sample of 519 school-age children (age ranging from 9 to 11 years old) and their parents from an Italian urban context. Child-reported measures included narcissistic traits and self-esteem, while parent-reported measures included narcissistic traits and overvaluation, as well as parenting styles. A series of structural equation models, run separately for mothers and fathers, showed that both parents’ narcissism was directly and positively related to overvaluation and the children’s narcissistic traits; overvaluation partially mediated the indirect link between the fathers’ and children’s narcissistic traits. None of the parenting-style dimensions were related to the children’s outcomes, with the excepti...
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Maternal mind-mindedness has been shown to be a powerful predictor of many developmental outcomes and to buffer the impact of psychosocial risk conditions, but no study has investigated whether this parental feature might support child... more
Maternal mind-mindedness has been shown to be a powerful predictor of many developmental outcomes and to buffer the impact of psychosocial risk conditions, but no study has investigated whether this parental feature might support child development in the presence of biological risk, such as preterm birth. The present study addresses this gap, by investigating whether early maternal mind-mindedness contributes to the growth of a child's linguistic abilities in the following two years of life, and if the contribution of this maternal feature might be stronger in the presence of preterm birth. Forty mother-child dyads (twenty with a preterm infant) were followed longitudinally, with maternal mind-mindedness assessed at 14 months of age and child's expressive linguistic abilities at 24 and 36 months through observational measures. Multilevel models showed that linguistic abilities increased from 24 to 36 months of age, but that this increase was stronger in full-term infants. Ma...
Research Interests: Cognitive Science, Developmental Psychology, Child Development, Language Development, Linguistics, and 15 moreMedicine, Humans, Female, Male, Infant, Mothers, Clinical Sciences, Newborn Infant, Longitudinal Studies, Expressive Language, Observational Study, Child Language, Object Attachment, Mother child relations, and Infant Premature
Emotional activation can be detected by the prosodic properties of the voice. This study aimed to explore the match between the valence of the words used by secure and dismissing women in describing the relationship with their parents... more
Emotional activation can be detected by the prosodic properties of the voice. This study aimed to explore the match between the valence of the words used by secure and dismissing women in describing the relationship with their parents during the Adult Attachment Interview and their emotional activation as expressed through the prosody of the voice. Contrary to what observed for secure women, a discrepancy emerged in dismissing individuals between the content of their verbal reports during the interview and the emotional activation of their voice while speaking. Negative experiences, usually cognitively minimised and normalised, were expressed with high emotional arousal, while positive descriptors, often exaggerated semantically, were expressed with neutral arousal. Therefore, the defensive inhibition strategy seems to control the content but not the prosody of narratives and prosody has the potential to allow a better understanding of the emotion regulation strategies used by indiv...
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... Rosalinda Cassibba (Università di Bari) Gabrielle Coppola (Università «G. D'Annunzio» di Chieti-Pescara) Silvia Godelli (Università di Bari) ... sono videoripresi a casa loro, in situazioni di vita quotidiana quali il gioco con e... more
... Rosalinda Cassibba (Università di Bari) Gabrielle Coppola (Università «G. D'Annunzio» di Chieti-Pescara) Silvia Godelli (Università di Bari) ... sono videoripresi a casa loro, in situazioni di vita quotidiana quali il gioco con e senza oggetti, un momento di coccole, il momento del ...
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The study aims at identifying patterns of mother-toddler emotion regulation and testing whether they are related to mothers' attachment. An Italian community sample (N = 38; 66% males) was followed longitudinally, with mothers'... more
The study aims at identifying patterns of mother-toddler emotion regulation and testing whether they are related to mothers' attachment. An Italian community sample (N = 38; 66% males) was followed longitudinally, with mothers' attachment collected through the Adult Attachment Interview at 14 months of child's age and mothers' and children's emotion regulation behaviors assessed through a fear-eliciting lab procedure when the child turned two years old. Two dyadic regulatory patterns were identified through a two-phased cluster analytic plan. Children characterized by one pattern approached, explored and played with the threatening stimulus, whereas children characterized by the other pattern tended to become frightened by this stimulus and avoided the object. The majority of children whose mothers were classified as secure displayed the first regulatory pattern. This finding contributes to extending understanding of how parental factors can influence the develop...
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Previous studies have suggested that the reunion episode of the still-face procedure has the potential to reveal the regulatory resources of the mother–infant dyad that appear to be predictive of future adaptation. Nevertheless,... more
Previous studies have suggested that the reunion episode of the still-face procedure has the potential to reveal the regulatory resources of the mother–infant dyad that appear to be predictive of future adaptation. Nevertheless, differences across dyads with respect to these resources have received little attention, as also have the factors that are responsible for such differences. This study addresses this gap in the literature by testing whether the dyad reunion patterns can be predicted by the mothers' sensitivity assessed 3 months earlier, and by the contingent degree of the matched states in the play episode. Three dyadic patterns were identified through cluster analysis, which were characterized by playful, neutrally matched, and disrupted interactions. Multinomial logistic regression shows that the mothers' sensitivity predicts membership to the playful group, and the matched states in the play episode predict membership to the neutrally matched and disrupted groups. These findings show that the vulnerability to disrupt an ongoing interaction after a temporary perturbation is seen for only some dyads; moreover, they support the view of early regulatory development as a multidetermined achievement. Overall, these findings have important theoretical implications related to the identification of early regulatory difficulties as precursors of later developmental outcomes.
Research Interests: Psychology and Infancy
Achieving consensus on the definition and measurement of social competence (SC) for preschool children has proven difficult in the developmental sciences. We tested a hierarchical model in which SC is assumed to be a second-order latent... more
Achieving consensus on the definition and measurement of social competence (SC) for preschool children has proven difficult in the developmental sciences. We tested a hierarchical model in which SC is assumed to be a second-order latent variable by using longitudinal data (N = 345). We also tested the degree to which peer SC at Time 1 predicted changes in positive adjustment from Time 1 to Time 2, based on teacher and peer ratings. Using a multiple-method data-collection strategy, information for three subdomains of SC (social engagement/motivation, profiles of social interaction and personality assets assessed with Q-sorts, peer acceptance) were collected across consecutive years in preschool programs. Longitudinal confirmatory factor analyses (CFAs) demonstrated invariance of both the measurement and the structural models across age levels and yielded a cross-time path weight of .74 for the second-order factor. Analyses of latent means suggested significant increases in SC scores ...
Research Interests: Developmental Psychology, Personality, Child Development, Prediction, Interaction, and 15 moreInterpersonal Relationship, Factor analysis, Models, Age, Latent variable, Correlation, Confirmatory factor analysis, Interpersonal Relations, Longitudinal Studies, Bayesian hierarchical model, Longitudinal Study, Longitudinal data, First Year, Confirmatory factor analyses, and Hierarchical Model
The paper reviews the body of research testing the intergenerational transmission of attachment and the theoretical shift from the linear or mediation model (van IJzendoorn, 1995), according to which parental sensitivity is the main... more
The paper reviews the body of research testing the intergenerational transmission of attachment and the theoretical shift from the linear or mediation model (van IJzendoorn, 1995), according to which parental sensitivity is the main factor responsible for the correspondence between maternal and infant's attachment, to the ecological model of the transmission of attachment (van IJzendoorn & Bakermans-Kranenburg, 1997). This latter model has prompted researchers, over time, to identify potential mediators, other than caregiver's sensitivity, of the established association between parental representations regarding attachment and infant's attachment, as well as the potential moderators of the transmission process. Each of these two research domains will be carefully explored; lastly new perspectives on the intergenerational transmission of attachment and relevant areas of research needing more investigation are highlighted.
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There is increasing evidence that attachment representations abstracted from childhood experiences with primary caregivers are organized as a cognitive script describing secure base use and support (i.e., the secure base script). To date,... more
There is increasing evidence that attachment representations abstracted from childhood experiences with primary caregivers are organized as a cognitive script describing secure base use and support (i.e., the secure base script). To date, however, the latent structure of secure base script knowledge has gone unexamined-this despite that such basic information about the factor structure and distributional properties of these individual differences has important conceptual implications for our understanding of how representations of early experience are organized and generalized, as well as methodological significance in relation to maximizing statistical power and precision. In this study, we report factor and taxometric analyses that examined the latent structure of secure base script knowledge in 2 large samples. Results suggested that variation in secure base script knowledge-as measured by both the adolescent (N = 674) and adult (N = 714) versions of the Attachment Script Assessm...
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Research Interests: Psychology, Cognitive Science, Developmental Psychology, Emotional intelligence, Pleasure, and 15 moreChild Clinical Psychology, Medicine, Social behavior, Humans, Female, Male, Infant, Temperament, Clinical Sciences, Crying, Age Factors, Social Behavior, Object Attachment, Infant Behavior, and Mother child relations
The articles included in this Special Issue of Attachment and Human Development were originally presented as contributions to symposia at the Society for Research in Child Development (Atlanta, Georgia, April 2005) and at the European... more
The articles included in this Special Issue of Attachment and Human Development were originally presented as contributions to symposia at the Society for Research in Child Development (Atlanta, Georgia, April 2005) and at the European Developmental Psychology Conference (Laguna, Canary Islands, August 2005). The articles represent efforts of independent research teams studying the emergence, maintenance, and implications of attachment representations. In each study, a central measure of attachment representation was a recently described measure of the secure base script (Waters & Rodrigues-Doolabh, 2004). This measure assesses the "scriptedness" of secure base content in stories told in response to a set of word-prompts. Each paper included in this special issue addresses a specific issue relevant to the reliability, validity, or broader utility of the attachment script representation measure as an indicator of the respondent's awareness of and access to a secure base script. The first paper provides a précis of the measure itself, including its conceptual underpinnings and the notion of "scriptedness" as it relates to the secure base construct. In the second article, the cross-time stability of the scriptedness scores is tested. The third and fourth articles present relations between the scriptedness score from the new measure and indices of state of mind about attachment from the Adult Attachment Interview (one sample of Italian mothers, the other in a sample of adolescents). The fifth article describes relations between the attachment script representation score and mother - child interaction during a memory reminiscence task. The final article in this set is a report on associations between the maternal attachment script representations and child attachment security for a sample of adopting mothers and adopted children. Taken together, these studies provide broad support for this new procedure and scoring system to capture important aspects of secure base knowledge for adults and also provide evidence for the relevance of secure base scripts in the socialization of child secure base behavior.
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Current developmental studies of affect/emotion emphasize knowledge about and regulation of affective states and/or behaviors. Expressiveness per se is rarely studied independently from knowledge and/or regulation; consequently, recent... more
Current developmental studies of affect/emotion emphasize knowledge about and regulation of affective states and/or behaviors. Expressiveness per se is rarely studied independently from knowledge and/or regulation; consequently, recent studies of young ...
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To investigate social sharing among 40 parents (20 couples) of hospitalized premature newborns, the social network of addressees with whom they shared their experience, the perceived benefits of this activity and the sources of individual... more
To investigate social sharing among 40 parents (20 couples) of hospitalized premature newborns, the social network of addressees with whom they shared their experience, the perceived benefits of this activity and the sources of individual differences. Emotional reaction and attachment status were assessed within 7 days and between 30 and 45 days from birth, respectively. At 3 months of infant's corrected age, parents completed a self-report assessing retrospectively their social sharing. Over 80% of the parents felt the need to share the event and actually did within a week; one's own partner was the most preferred addressee. The extent of father's social sharing was mainly related to the newborn's medical risk, while mother's to her own emotional reaction. Guilt and anger were found to lengthen the latency of sharing in mothers and fathers, respectively. Secure attachment status, compared to insecure ones, was found to be the most effective in promoting social sharing. These findings help to understand why parents differ from each other in their use of social support in the NICU; from a practical standpoint, they highlight important factors which require attention when implementing intervention program in the NICU directed to parents of premature newborns.
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The psychological correlates of enuresis are receiving growing attention, coherently with a multi-factorial approach to this problem, but to date the empirical findings are still inconsistent and incomplete. The aim of this study is to... more
The psychological correlates of enuresis are receiving growing attention, coherently with a multi-factorial approach to this problem, but to date the empirical findings are still inconsistent and incomplete. The aim of this study is to contribute to the understanding of the socio-affective functioning of enuretic children by exploring four central dimensions: attachment, self-esteem, self-control, and temperament. Twenty-two enuretic children with their mothers were enrolled in the study and matched, based on gender and age, to a control group of continent healthy children. Measures were collected through mothers' reports and individual administrations to all children. Controlling for socio-demographic variables, we found a significantly lower incidence of secure attachment, lower self-esteem, and higher rates of behavioral problems among the enuretic group, compared with the control group. No differences in the temperamental dimensions were found. These preliminary findings support the view of enuresis as a bio-behavioral problem and, from a practical standpoint, underline the urgency for physicians not to underestimate this disturbance, but, indeed, to treat the problem through medical strategies and to devote attention to the psychological difficulties of these patients.
Research Interests: Clinical Psychology, Family, Medicine, Italy, Humans, and 15 moreChild, Enuresis, Female, Male, Mental Disorders, Pediatric Nephrology, Psychological Tests, Questionnaires, Behavior Problems, Case Control Study, Control Group, Object Attachment, Case Control Studies, Nocturnal enuresis, and Paediatrics and reproductive medicine
The aim of this study was to investigate the individual differences in social behaviours in the NICU of mothers following the premature birth of their babies, and to verify whether these early behaviours predict later sensitivity at 3... more
The aim of this study was to investigate the individual differences in social behaviours in the NICU of mothers following the premature birth of their babies, and to verify whether these early behaviours predict later sensitivity at 3 months of the infant's corrected age. Videos of mothers attending to the newborn in the NICU (at 15, 30 and 45 days
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Research Interests: Depression, Social Support, Medicine, Humans, Female, and 13 moreMale, Infant, Mothers, Beck Depression Inventory, Questionnaires, Pediatric Orthopaedics, Pilot Projects, Psychological Stress, Pediatric Orthopedics, Clubfoot, Case Control Studies, Mother child relations, and Paediatrics and reproductive medicine
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The secure-base phenomenon is central to the Bowlby/Ainsworth theory of attachment and is also central to the assessment of attachment across the lifespan. The present study tested whether mothers' knowledge about the secure-base... more
The secure-base phenomenon is central to the Bowlby/Ainsworth theory of attachment and is also central to the assessment of attachment across the lifespan. The present study tested whether mothers' knowledge about the secure-base phenomenon, as assessed using a recently designed wordlist prompt measure for eliciting attachment-relevant stories, would predict their children's securebase behavior, as assessed by observers in the home and summarized with the Attachment Q-set (AQS). In each of three sociocultural groups (from Colombia, Portugal, and the US), scores characterizing the quality of maternal secure-base narratives elicited using the word-list prompt procedure were internally consistent, as indicated by tests of cross-story reliability, and they were positively and significantly associated with the child's security score from the AQS for each subsample. The correlation in the combined sample was r(129) = .33, p < .001. Subsequent analyses with the combined samp...
Research Interests: Psychology, Cognitive Science, Developmental Psychology, Narrative, Social Interaction, and 14 moreAttachment Theory, Translation, Adult attachment, Sociocultural Evolution, Models, Correlation, Validity, Social Environment, Scripts, Behavioral, Social Group, Behavioral Development, Nino, and Non Native Speaker
We investigated the influence of biological immaturity and attachment security on linguistic development and tested whether maternal language mediated the impact of security on the child’s linguistic abilities. Forty mother–child dyads... more
We investigated the influence of biological immaturity and attachment security on linguistic development and tested whether maternal language mediated the impact of security on the child’s linguistic abilities. Forty mother–child dyads were followed longitudinally, with the child’s attachment security assessed at 24 months of age through trained observers’ Attachment Q-Sorts, and linguistic abilities assessed at 24 and 30 months through observational measures and maternal reports. Both factors were found to contribute, though not independently, to the prediction of the child’s linguistic abilities, and the mediation model was confirmed.
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Research Interests: Developmental Psychology, Communication, Education, Attachment Theory, Medicine, and 15 moreDistress, Emotions, Attachment Measures, Humans, Chronic Disease, Female, Male, Infant, Newborn Infant, Adult, Atopic Dermatitis, Case Control Studies, Mother child relations, Medical and Health Sciences, and Infant Premature
Research Interests: Cognitive Science, Developmental Psychology, Pediatrics, Child Development, Adolescent, and 15 moreMedicine, Child Behavior, Humans, Child, Female, Male, Child Psychology, Middle Aged, Observer Variation, Adult, Cross Cultural, Naturalistic Observation, Object Attachment, Child preschool, and Mother child relations
Research Interests: Cognitive Science, Developmental Psychology, Child Development, Personality Assessment, Medicine, and 15 moreMotivation, Factor analysis, Humans, Child, Models, Evaluation methods, Female, Confirmatory factor analysis, Male, Netherlands, Peer group, Longitudinal Studies, Generality, Nino, and Child preschool
Research Interests: Cognitive Science, Developmental Psychology, Mental Representation, Culture, Attachment Theory, and 15 moreMedicine, Portugal, Observation, Child Behavior, Narration, Humans, Attachment, Female, Male, Mental Representations, Middle Aged, Adult, Object Attachment, Child preschool, and Mother child relations
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This study provides data supporting the reliability and validity of an Italian version of the adult attachment script representation task, designed by Waters... more
This study provides data supporting the reliability and validity of an Italian version of the adult attachment script representation task, designed by Waters &amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp; Rodrigues-Doolabh (2004). Specifically, we tested hypotheses concerning positive relations between attachment scriptedness scores and two other representational measures, derived from the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI). In addition, we tested the hypothesis that secure base script scores should predict maternal sensitivity in the context of mother - infant interaction. Thirty-one mothers completed narrative protocols and received scriptedness scores using the Waters &amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp; Rodrigues-Doolabh (2004) criteria. Prior to the attachment script assessment, mothers had been assessed using the AAI and had been observed in the context of infant - mother interactions to assess maternal sensitivity. Assessment of instrument reliability was satisfactory (Cronbach&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;#39;s alpha &amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;.70) and both hypotheses were supported; the attachment scriptedness score (based on 4 attachment narratives) was positively and significantly associated with the AAI coherence score, the continuous security score derived from the AAI State of Mind scales, and with maternal sensitivity. These data extend to another socio-cultural milieu, previous findings supporting reliability, convergent, and predictive validity of the attachment script representation task as a measure of adult attachment.
Research Interests: Cognitive Science, Developmental Psychology, Mental Representation, Cognition, Attachment Theory, and 15 moreMedicine, Adult attachment, Italy, Attachment Measures, Humans, Italian, Female, Italiano, Newborn Infant, Educational Status, Maternal Sensitivity, Adult Attachment Interview, Object Attachment, Mother child relations, and Infant Premature
To evaluate the temporal stability of maternal attachment representations obtained using a word-prompt task, a sample of mothers (N = 55) was assessed on two occasions, 12 - 15 months apart. Each mother responded to six word-prompt sets... more
To evaluate the temporal stability of maternal attachment representations obtained using a word-prompt task, a sample of mothers (N = 55) was assessed on two occasions, 12 - 15 months apart. Each mother responded to six word-prompt sets on each assessment occasion (4 word-prompt sets were designed to prime secure base themes, 2 word-prompt sets were designed to prime different themes), and the resulting stories were scored in terms of the presence and quality of the secure base scripts evident in each story. The story scriptedness scores (average across four stories) were internally consistent at each assessment (alphas &amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;.85) and the mean difference in scores was not significant across assessments. The cross-time correlation for the composites (aggregates of scores at each age) was positive and significant, r53 = .54. Other aspects of maternal stories were also stable (e.g., number of words used, number of sentences per story, use of words from the prompt list). Controlling for stable stylistic features of the stories did not reduce the magnitude of association for scriptedness scores across time. These results suggest that the presence and quality of secure base scripts is a stable aspect of maternal representations of attachment and that the word-prompt task is useful for prompting the script in narrative production.