The Emotional Availability Scales: Methodological refinements of the construct and clinical implications related to gender and at-risk interactions
✍ Scribed by M. Ann Easterbrooks; Zeynep Biringen
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 2005
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 52 KB
- Volume
- 26
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0163-9641
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
In our introduction to a special issue of Attachment and Human Development (Easterbrooks & Biringen, 2000) focusing on attachment and emotional availability (EA), we described EA in early parent -child interactions as the "connective tissue of healthy socioemotional development" (p. 123). The series of empirical articles in that volume linked attachment (behavior and mental representations) in infancy, childhood, and adulthood to EA in mother -child relationships, both concurrently and longitudinally. This set of articles both underscored Bowlby's (1982) and Ainsworth, Blehar, Waters, and Wall's (1978) conceptualization of secure attachments as involving open emotional dialogue between partners, and lent convergent validity to the Emotional Availability Scales (EAS; Biringen, Robinson, & Emde, 1993, 1998) as a measure of the overall quality of the observed emotional interactions between parents and their children. Ainsworth et al. (1978) and Van IJzendoorn (1995) demonstrated that maternal interactive sensitivity was a precursor of individual differences in attachment. Measurement of EA (using the EAS) includes parental sensitivity, and also goes beyond it to specifically assess three ways in which parents control behavior -namely, adult hostility (both covert form such as sarcasm and overt forms such as yelling), structuring (appropriately guiding and suggesting to the child), and nonintrusiveness (being available for interaction without imposing it) -as well as the child's side of the relationship, including child responsiveness and involvement (as aspects of child EA). Particular measurement of the child's behavior recognizes the mutual interactive influence of both partners in a dyad, and the transactional nature of a relationship (Sameroff & Fiese, 2000).