Thirty years of Strange Situation Procedure: observation and evaluation of mother-child interactive behaviors.

Background Strange Situation Procedure (SSP, Ainsworth, Blehar, Water, Wall, 1978) is the most important methodology used for the evaluation of attachment relationship in the first year of infant’s life. The procedure was a useful methodology, considering especially pattern of attachment as global classification, however less importance has been attributed to classification based on mother-child interactive behavior. Following this point of view, the aims of the work are: a) evaluation of attachment style in italian children belonging to a non-clinical population; b) comparing the distribution of attachment patterns in our simple with other italian studies (Ammaniti, 1994; Fava Vizziello, 2003) and international studies (Ainsworth, 1789; Van Ijzendoorn, Schuengel, Bakermans-Kranenburg, 1999), in order to understand intra and inter-cultural characteristics of attachment development; c) applying observational scales of interactive behaviors (Ainsworth, 1978) and assessing if they could be useful to distinguish between the different patterns of attachment. Method 56 mother-child dyads observed in the SSP procedure at 12 months of child. Results The results show: a) no statistical differences between patterns observed in different italian studies; b) italian samples show the prevalence of avoidant pattern with respect to international studies; c) all interactive behaviors have specific characteristics useful to distinguish the difference on patterns, except for interaction distance. Conclusions From this point of view, patterns of attachment are typical of each cultures; specifically, our italian sample shows avoidant behaviors as main relational characteristic between mother and twelve-month infant. We hypothesize that the prevalence of an attachment style on another can be considered as adaptive pattern for that specific developmental context.